I grabbed him as he turned to go. "Stop! Julie is still here!" I prayed that it was true. I hadn't seen her in—how long had it been?
"Where?"
"I don't know. The cells are downstairs."
He looked at his watch, obviously he was running on a tight schedule. I knew the sour expression that would come across his face, but he was too good a soldier to express any hesitation. "Take us there."
I looked around to get my bearings—everything seemed surreal and different through the thermal goggles, and of course I'd been blindfolded every time I'd been brought there. It was what—fifty paces back down the corridor to the staircase I'd gone up, and when we got to the bottom there was a left turn, and another left into the vestibule before the cell section. I turned and led the small group down the corridor, found the exit light, no longer glowing. Through the doors and down the stairs. At the bottom another door, a vestibule, and beyond it a heavy steel door with a small barred window—I remembered that door, the short pause my captors made while the guard jangled keys to open it, the heavy thunk it made as it closed behind me on every trip up and down for interrogation. An armed guard stood by the door, another sat in a small office protected by heavy bars.
"Who's that?" The first guard was peering helplessly into the darkness. Stuller raised his weapon and fired before I realized what he was doing. The weapon's report was a distinctive bangbang, painfully loud in the confined space and the muzzle flash whited out the thermal image for a long two seconds. Absolute shock gripped me for that endless interval, as I envisioned the guard's body lying shattered on the floor, making me an accomplice now to first-degree murder. Before that thought had even settled in my brain the goggles cleared and I saw the guard was writhing on the floor, wrapped in some kind of mesh that enveloped his whole body. He cursed and struggled, not understanding what had happened. I didn't understand either but the results were what counted.
The second guard had drawn his gun at the report and we all crouched by the stairway door in silence, hoping he wasn't foolish enough to fire blindly into the dark. The first one's initial shock and fear gave way to frustration as he struggled, still not understanding what had happened to him, and he called to his companion for help. The second guard holstered his weapon, thank god, and groped his way out of office to help the first. Stuller reloaded and fired again and the second one was caught beside the first.
I remembered the jangling at the door every time I'd been taken through. "We need the keys." I knelt beside the first guard, found them on a ring at his belt. The mesh was sticky and stretchy. Whatever the adhesive was it left no residue on my fingers after I pulled them away, but it stuck the strands of the web together with considerable tenacity wherever they touched. Neither guard was going anywhere until someone cut them loose. I managed to work the keyring through the mesh, gave a thumbs-up to the rescue party and then fumbled to find the right one for the door. It was more difficult than it should have been in the grainy green light of the thermal goggles. I must have spent no more than a minute playing with the lock, but it seemed like hours. Finally a key slid in and I eased the door open, saw a short corridor set with blank metal doors. More fumbling at the lock of the first door, then it too opened.
Empty.
Thankfully the same key opened all the doors. There was an emaciated-looking man in ragged clothes in the third cell, a young woman looking scared in the seventh. Julie was in the twelfth. I left the other cells unlocked, let their occupants take what advantage they could.
"Julie!"
"John?" Her voice was unbelieving.
"We're getting out of here."
Stuller was already on overtime on his no-doubt clockwork attack plan, but I took a moment to hug her tight. Yes, my goal is wealth beyond the wildest dreams of starved avarice and power to mock the very gods, but Julie is my world, and I would trade all I own for her. You would have done the same, if you had someone like her in your life.
There was no set of thermal goggles for her, so I took her arm and guided her out. Stuller took the lead and we went up the stairs. The stairwell was deserted as we threaded our way through the complex. It turned out to have two sub-basements, but even on the first floor it was clear there wasn't enough light filtering through the windows to see by. The few people present were still milling around, fumbling ineffectively. One woman saw us somehow and immediately shrank back into her office in fear. As we passed I saw what could only be a chemical glowstick in her hands, barely luminescent through the goggles, but it must have flooded the corridor with light. She would have had a clear view of our heavily armed group heading for the exit. The first floor was a -standard-issue public building with offices, meeting areas, cubicles with desks and computers, billboards with posters and notices—unreadable blank squares through the thermal goggles. It could have been a hospital, an office building, a police station, anything.
"Get some light for God's sake." A pudgy figure was cursing in the dark—Burbridge. A nasty smile spread over my face—it was too good an opportunity to pass up. Wordlessly I took Stuller's weapon, aimed carefully and fired. The kick bruised my shoulder, but it was worth it to hear Burbridge's yelp of panic as the sticky net wrapped him tight. I gave the gun back to Stuller and we all went over to haul our new trophy away. His screaming grew louder and I took a lot of pleasure in smacking him across the face to shut him up. An eye for an eye, as the Bible says.
In seconds we were in a lobby with another pair of armed guards wrapped in mesh on the floor, surrounded by shattered glass that had once fronted the building. Mark's team had made what the SAS call an explosive entry. The guards had given up struggling and just lay there helplessly. Burbridge was heavy, and we dragged him feet first through the doors and into a darkened parking lot, streetlights off, rain pouring down in buckets. Thunder pealed in the distance. A large commercial van was parked out front, side doors open and engine running, with another of Mark's people behind the wheel. We heaved Burbridge up and piled in, soaked to the skin in our brief exposure to the torrent. The doors slammed shut and we were driving. Even given the time it took to find Julie the entire episode couldn't have taken more than ten minutes from the time the lights went out.
I stripped off the goggles and looked back as we drove away. Our prison had been a nondescript low-rise office complex, glass fronted. The sign at the end of the driveway said simply 2323. As we drove I could vaguely see it was set in a bland commercial strip of similar buildings. All the lights were out, and a few cars were parked haphazardly on the road, hoods up with soaked drivers cursing at unresponsive engines.
"Welcome back." It was a familiar voice.
"Brian!"
"Hi John, Julie!" He was grinning from ear to ear beneath his thermal goggles, like a kid who's pulled off a successful prank.
The urban landscape changed abruptly, from somewhere that could have been any American city to something resembling a war zone. The streetlights here were out because they had been shot out, the only light came from our headlights, on now as they had not been when we left the glass-fronted building. Burned cars were shoved up on rubble-strewn sidewalks in front of the burned-out ruins of houses, empty windows staring like skulls' eyesockets. We passed entire blocks that were simply rubble. I caught a glimpse of a shadowy figure in a doorway, but it was gone before I could turn to get a closer look. Other than that, we were the only things moving in the downpour.
"Brian, where are we?"
"Washington, D.C. Didn't you know?"
I looked out at a side of the capital I'd never seen before, not quite believing him, but minutes later we were pulling on to a highway on-ramp and a sign for Interstate 295 and the Beltway flashed past. Police sirens wailed in the distance, giving me a quick shot of adrenaline, but it was quickly clear they weren't pursuing us. The highway lights were on, and I could see the glow of the vast city beyond through the downpour.
That reminded me of the power surge that had made the rescue possible. "What did you d
o to the power?"
He smiled and pointed to the back of the van. It was crammed with compressed-gas cylinders, ranks of batteries and capacitors, instruments and cables and a large black ring with frost caked onto it. The apparatus was enclosed in the now familiar framework of chicken wire.
"Behold the carbon-cycle fusion drive, mark one."
"You're kidding me."
"Well, really it's only the buckytube superconducting storage ring, the rest of the drive is back at the lab. There was a big field coil on the top of the van, but its gone now. We dumped a few megawatt hours into the ring, then when we got here we pumped it all through the coil. Blew out everything electrical in a four-block radius. It worked perfectly." He was positively gleeful. "We had to shield all our gear, of course. The van engine was the hardest—"
"How did you know where we were?"
Stuller turned around in his seat. "Once I learned from your contact that you'd been snatched we agreed to pay him half a million up front. Of course I never heard from him again—I can only presume his employers were monitoring his phone. Once I knew you'd been taken I knew that must have been the helicopter incident in the news, right before you stopped calling Megan and Boyd. So I called Brian and we got to work on it."
Brian nodded. "The helicopters made it easy. I just got access to the air traffic control data. That let us track the helicopters to the Huntsville airport. Of course the first aircraft to leave Huntsville after you arrived was a government jet bound for Washington—that had to be you. They had a vehicle waiting at the airport for you, and it drove right up to the plane, so we tracked that, which lead us to this building. If they'd delayed in transporting you at any point it would have been harder. They were too efficient."
"What took you so long?"
Stuller paused, composing his words before he spoke. "I really don't know who it is who works in that building. We can assume they're the government; nobody else would have an operation like this, especially in Washington." He paused. "What branch of the government I've been unable to find out. This building doesn't seem to be owned by anyone, it doesn't seem to have been built by anyone, and nobody knows what goes on inside. However they do have quite extensive security, which made it hard to get close enough to find anything out at all. It took a while to learn enough to get the plan together, and then we had to wait for the moon and weather to cooperate. We needed total darkness to have a chance of getting you out."
"And I had to finish building the coil." Brian was still feeling proud of his baby.
"Do you realize we're fugitives now?" Julie's voice had a quaver in it that I didn't like. "Whatever trumped-up case they had against us before, they've got a real one now. Fleeing custody, for God's sake, we'll have to leave the country." I drew her close and held her.
Brian looked at her, shock on his face. He hadn't considered the legal implications. "I thought you guys would straighten that all out once you were free. That's what you're good at isn't it?"
Stuller looked back at Burbridge, unceremoniously dumped on the floor. "What about him?"
The idea that had flashed into my brain when I saw my tormentor in the hallway came back to me. "Just wait. I've got plans for him." I let a little maniacal edge creep into my voice as I said it, and was gratified to see him flinch.
Stuller had a Swiss Army knife on him, and I borrowed it and told the driver to find a quiet corner. I unfolded the spike attachment, and when the van was stopped I leaned over Burbridge with the knife, holding it low so he couldn't see it. I was surprised to find myself reluctant to stab him in cold blood, despite the fact that he had abused me violently and repeatedly. I reminded myself of the demands of power.
He was trembling. "For God's sake let me go—I'll make sure the charges vanish, just don't kill me."
I laughed, and this time the maniacal edge was real—the endless abuse he'd visited on me surging out in something colder than rage. You might think I'm insane to want to rule the world and you'd be right—and sometimes that madness finds its way to the top. "I don't like the way you play the game, Burbridge." I forced my knee into his groin hard enough to be painful, not so hard that it couldn't get a lot worse if I wanted it to. He held rigidly still, which was exactly the response I wanted from him. "I don't like the way you play at all, so I'm going to change the rules."
I drove the point of the spike deep into his bicep. He screamed in pain and struggled helplessly in the net—that stopped when I forced my knee forward hard enough to refocus his attention. I left the point in his arm for a long thirty seconds, then yanked it out. I leaned over and grabbed him by the throat.
"Now you listen to me, you warped son of a bitch." I was literally foaming at the mouth and I had to fight to keep my hand from choking his life out. "What I've just injected in you is the most sophisticated nerve toxin our bioengineering has managed to produce. It binds permanently to the neurons in your brain and it's killing them, right now, slowly. You need the antidote administered every month if you don't want your mind destroyed piece by piece." I let go of his throat and looked at his features, now contorted in fear. "If I'm in a good mood I'll send it to you." I jerked my head at the driver, who pushed the button to slide the door open. "Maybe you should make sure I'm always in a good mood." Without waiting for a reply I shoved him out the door and onto the pavement, pleased to see him land in a puddle.
We drove off and I breathed out, the insanity was gone as quickly as it had come, leaving me shaking with the intensity of the moment. Julie put her hand on my shoulder. There was silence in the van. A nasty little trick, but it had to be done—now we'd find out if it worked. The frightening thing was how much I'd enjoyed it.
The next morning found me feeling much better, my normal world-conquering self restored. I was enjoying a bubble bath with Julie in a luxury suite in the Watergate Hotel. Her story was much the same as mine, right down to bribing a guard to get the word out to Baker Technologies—another one who'd never been heard from again. She had a few bruises from the rubber truncheon too, but nothing that wouldn't heal. After the bath I picked up the phone and dialed the President's private number. POTUS is used to being addressed with respect, but I wasn't in the mood to mince words. Since I'd given him enough money to buy California's vote I had no reason to either. The conversation was sharp and to the point. Was he aware of an anonymous government organization acting in the name of national security? Of course he couldn't tell me that. Was he aware that this organization was using the SEC as cover to conduct covert investigations of American corporations? He couldn't address that either. Did he know they were abusing the rules of FISA and ATA to kidnap private citizens with insane charges? No? Was he aware that in addition they'd nearly done irreparable damage to the nation's commercial relationships just as he was trying to stabilize the situation in the Pacific Rim? No? Did he have any clue how effective nine billion dollars could be in support of a campaign to ruin his presidency and destroy his party before the next election? He understood that part quite clearly.
The events that followed were completely inevitable. The resignation of William McCool from the SEC was a page-twelve item that few noticed and everyone immediately forgot. The glass-fronted office building in Washington is still there, but it now has a sign by the driveway. It's the new home of the Department of Regional Incentive Targets, a vague and bureaucratic organization with a vague and bureaucratic purpose. I'd like to think the nameless agency that occupied it is gone, but of course I know better. The repeal of the Personal Privacy Act was welcomed by liberals and conservatives alike. From my point of view the most important result was the introduction of the Deep Space Commercialization Initiative. It was a surprise from an administration that had strongly favored a purely military national space program, but the papers were full of the spinoff benefits of funneling fifty billion dollars to firms looking to commercialize space beyond earth orbit. Oddly they never mentioned that there was only one firm in the whole country looking to do that, although after the
program was announced a dozen quick startup ventures rushed to get on the bandwagon. The government generously distributed several million dollars of that money to them, which I thought was an eminently fair division of resources.
As for Baker Technologies, our launch program proceeded as fast as we could build it. Any red tape our effort hit dissolved effortlessly at a call to a pudgy man at in some anonymous office in Washington—and every month I faithfully mail him a tiny vial containing saline and some bizarre but harmless extract of primroses that Brian assures me will defy chemical analysis for years. And it was four years later to the day that I watched the carbon-cycle drive ship Freedom make its first manned test flight from our facility in the Mexican desert. In another year it would be on its way to the asteroids, following more than a hundred fast-transit probes launched over the previous two years by the Citlaltepetl launch system. Its rings marched up the mountain in the background as the ship rose past the peak, ready to pump raw materials up to the buckytube factory in the sky Freedom and her sister ships were going to let us build. The engineers thought it would take five years to get the beanstalk up and running, after which the Citlaltepetl system could be devoted entirely to launching probes—not just to find mineable asteroids but to explore Mars and its moons as potential colonies, to Jupiter, and to Saturn. Humanity's future is in space, and I am going to rule all of Sol System.
Cosmic Tales - Adventures in Sol System Page 29