by A. G. Riddle
“Ma’am—”
They were talking to her!
“Ma’am.” The guard pointed to the wide post with the magnetic card reader at the top. Beside her people were swiping and hurrying past.
Kate fought to steady her hand as she ripped her card across the slot. A different beep. A red light.
Beside her two more people swiped. Green lights, no beep, they were off.
The guard cocked his head and took a step toward her.
Her hands were shaking visibly now. Act casual. She got the card in the slot and ran it through, slowly this time. Red Light. Bad Beep.
The guards behind the fence had stopped talking. They were looking at her. The guard in her line looked back at the other guards.
She tried to line up the card for another try, but someone grabbed her hand. “You’re backwards love.”
Kate looked up. The blonde man. She couldn’t think. What had he said? “I work here,” Kate said quickly, looking around. Everyone was looking at them. They were blocking two of the three lines.
“I certainly hope so.” The man took her card. “You must be new,” he said as he perused the card. “Haven’t seen you befo—. Hey, this doesn’t look like you.”
Kate snatched the card. “Don’t— Don’t look at the picture. I’m, uh, new here.” She ran a hand through her hair. She was going to get caught, she knew it. The man was still staring at her. Kate tried to think. “They used an old picture. I’ve lost… some weight.”
“And apparently dyed your hair,” he said skeptically.
“Yes, well…” Kate sucked in a breath. “Hopefully you’ll keep my secret. Blondes have more fun.” She tried to smile, but she imagined she looked more scared than confident.
The man nodded and smiled. “Yes they do.”
From the back of the line someone shouted, “Hey Casanova, work your mojo on your own time.” Laughs rang out across the line.
Kate smiled. “How does it go?” She swiped the card again. Red, the beep. She looked up.
The man grasped her hand, flipped the card, and ran it through. Green. Then he turned to his post and swiped his own card. Green. He glided gingerly past the six scowling guards, and Kate chased after him.
“Thank you Doctor—”
“Prendergast. Barnaby Prendergast.” They turned another corner.
“Barnaby Prendergast. I was actually going to guess that.”
“Well you’re quite cheeky.” He looked over at her. “Quite quick on your feet for someone who couldn’t operate the card reader.”
Did he know? Kate tried to seem embarrassed — it wasn’t a stretch. “Guns make me nervous.”
“Then you’ll truly hate it here. Seems like everyone without a white coat is ‘packin heat,’” he said with an American accent. He swiped his card and pushed open a set of wide doors that might have divided sections of a hospital. “Guess they’ll be ready if the trees ever attack.” He snorted and muttered, “Bloody idiots.”
Ahead of them, several overweight men pushed rolling metal cages across their path. Kate stared. The cages were filled with chimps. When they had passed, Kate realized she was alone in the hall. She jogged down the corridor and caught sight of Barnabus, or whatever his name was. She rushed to catch up with him.
He stopped at the swipe terminal to another set of doors. “Where did you say you were going, Dr. West?”
“I… didn’t.” Kate tried to flutter her eyes at him. She felt like a fool. “Where… are you going?”
“Uh, to my lab in viral. Who are you working with here?” He looked at her, confused. Or was he scrutinizing her?
Kate panicked. It was so much more complicated than she had thought on the train. What did she think, she’d just walk in like it was a day care and say, “I’m here to pick up the two Indonesian kids?” David’s advice, “just tell them it’s above their pay grade,” seemed so simplistic, so off-base now. It was obvious now that he had only said it to put her at ease, to get her off the train and in motion. But her mind was blank. “It’s above your pay grade,” she blurted.
Barnaby was about to swipe his card, but he pulled up short, his card still dangling in the air. “Excuse me?” He looked at her, then glanced around as if trying to figure out which direction a sound was coming from.
Kate had the urge to run as fast as she could away from him, but she had no idea which way to go. She needed to figure out where they kept the children. “I’m doing autism research.”
Barnaby let his card fall to his side as he turned to face Kate. “Really? I’m not aware of any autism research.”
“With Dr. Grey.”
“Dr. Grey?” Barnaby’s eyes rolled back as he thought. “Haven’t heard of him…” His skeptical expression slowly faded as he shuffled toward a white phone on the wall beside the door. He reached back for it. “Maybe I should, ah, get you some help finding your way.”
“No!”
Kate’s outburst stopped him in his tracks.
“Don’t. I’m not lost. I’m working… with two children.”
He drew his hand back to his side. “Oh, so it’s true. We’ve heard some rumors but everyone is so hush-hush about it. So cloak and dagger.”
He didn’t know about the children. What did it mean? Kate needed to buy more time, needed to think. “Uh, yes. I’m sorry I can’t say more.”
“Well I’m sure it’s above my pay grade, as you say.” He mumbled something else, maybe ‘as if you know my bloody pay grade.’ “Honestly though, I have to say, what in the hell would you be doing with kids in a place like this? We’re talking about a zero percent survival rate. Zero percent. Guess your ‘pay grade’ justifies it. Is that it?”
But Kate didn’t hear his last words. A new thought gripped her, a terror she hadn’t considered: zero-percent survival rate. The children could already be dead.
“Did you hear me?”
But Kate couldn’t answer. She just stood there, frozen.
He could see it — the fear in her eyes. He cocked his head to the side. “You know, there is something off about you, something’s not right here.” He reached. He had the phone.
Kate leapt for him, grabbing the phone from his hand.
His eyes grew wide, a look of ‘how dare you.’
Kate looked around. David’s words “they could be listening” echoed in her head. It might already be too late. She hung the phone up and took Barnaby in a hug, whispering in his ear. “Listen to me. Two children are being held here. They’re in danger. I’m here to rescue them.”
He pushed her away from him. “What? Are you mad?!”
He looked exactly the way Kate had two days ago in that van when David had questioned her.
She leaned in again. “Please. You have to trust me. I need your help. I need to find those children.”
He searched her face, then puckered like he had tasted something awful and couldn’t spit it out. “Look, I don’t know what you’re playing at, some security drill or sick game, but I told you I don’t know anything about those children — if there are any. I’ve just heard rumors.”
“Where would they keep them?”
“I have no idea. I’ve never even seen the subjects. I just have access to the labs.”
“Guess. Please, I need your help.”
“I don’t know… the residential wings I assume.”
“Take me there.”
He waved his card at her, “Hello? I don’t have access. I just told you, I can only get into the labs.”
Kate looked down at her card. “I bet I can.”
The security guard watched as the woman accosted the man, took the phone from him, then grabbed him and whispered in his ear — possibly a threat. The man certainly looked scared. They had just had another seminar on sexual harassment, but it was mostly about men making women have sex with them. So this wasn’t that. But it could be something. The guard picked up the phone. “Yeah, this is post seven, I think we may have a problem in Bell Primary.”
Immari Corp. Research Complex
Outside Burang, China
Tibet Autonomous Region
David waited in line as they processed the security guards through. The structure was massive — beyond anything he expected. Three giant vase-shaped cooling towers reached into the sky, billowing white smoke into the clouds. They loomed over the buildings.
The complex must be some kind of combined hospital/medical facility and power plant. Other trains were arriving — from other tracks. All the personnel must be shipped in from off-site — there was a very wide quarantine zone around the site — maybe even a hundred miles. Why? The cost would have been staggering. Building something like this in the middle of nowhere and carting supplies and personnel in every day.
“Sir!”
David looked up. His turn. He swiped the card. A red beep. He looked over. He had it backwards. He quickly flipped the card, got a silent green beep, and proceeded into the building.
Now the hard part: where to go.
Another thought tickled the back of his mind: Kate, she was in way over her head. He had to finish his part and get to her, fast.
He found a map on the wall — the emergency escape route. There was no reactor room on the floor. In fact, based on where the water vapor towers had been, he didn’t think it was even in this building.
He moved out of the main corridor, following the flow of mostly men into an open area with rows of lockers. Most of the guards were either conversing with each other or grabbing weapons and radios and heading off.
He heard a few guards talking about the power plant, and he followed them, grabbing a radio and side arm from the rack before he left. The rear exit to the small security building opened onto a small courtyard, and David got a glimpse of the three buildings beyond: the enormous power plant, a building without many windows, maybe a medical facility, and a smaller building with windows and the Immari Corporate Flag Flying from the roof — probably the administrative center.
The men ahead of him were lost in a conversation about the upcoming World Cup game.
David reached back to feel the backpack, wondering if he would have enough explosives. Probably not. The place was much bigger than he had expected.
At the entrance to the power plant, an obese guard sat on a barstool, inspecting the IDs of each man entering and consulting a printed page on the podium in front of him. He checked off the group of World Cup fans, then extended his sausage fingers to David without a word.
David handed over the ID. In the line outside the train, he had scratched the picture mostly off, just as a precaution. Hopefully it would work.
“What the hell happened to your badge?”
“My dog.”
The man half snorted and began searching the list. His face slowly contorted, as if the list had turned to a language he couldn’t read. “I don’t have you down for today.”
“That’s what I said when they woke me up this morning. Now if you’re saying I can go, I’m out of here.” David reached for the ID.
The list master threw up a sausage hand. “No, hold on now.” He buried his head in the list again and took a pen from behind his ear. He glanced from the ID back to the list every few seconds, scrawling “Conner Anderson” at the bottom of the page in childish block letters. He handed the ID back to David and sausage waved the next guy in line.
The next room was some kind of lobby with a receptionist at a desk and two guards talking. They eyed him as he walked past, then resumed talking. David found another emergency evacuation route poster and began making his way to the reactor section.
To his relief, his card worked on every door he came to. He was almost to the reactor room.
“Hey, stop.”
David turned around. It was one of the guards from the lobby.
“Who are you?”
“Conner Anderson.”
The guard looked confused, then drew his gun. “No you’re not. Don’t move.”
CHAPTER 53
Barnaby looked as scared as Kate felt. Somehow it made her feel more confident: being the leader of the conspiracy.
Her confidence waned slightly when she saw the skinny Asian guard reading a comic book outside the double doors to the residential wing. When he saw them, he tossed the thin staple of pages on the table and watched them approach the card reader on the wall.
Kate scanned her card. Green.
She pushed the door open and took a step inside. Barnaby followed, close on her heels.
“No! You— You scan too!” The guard pointed at Barnaby, whose eyes grew wide as he stepped back, like he was about to be shot.
“You scan.” The man pointed at the scanner.
Barnaby clutched his card to his chest, then swiped it. Red.
The guard rose. “ID.” He reached toward Barnaby.
The blonde scientist backed into the wall, dropping his ID. “She made me do it. She’s crazy!”
Kate stepped between them. “It’s ok, Barnaby.” She picked up the ID and handed it to him. “I wanted him to walk me to work, but it’s ok.” She put a hand on the small of his back and pushed him away. “It’s ok. See you later, Barnaby.” She turned back to the guard, held up her ID and swiped it again. “See — green.” She punched through the door and waited for a second.
The doors stayed closed; maybe she was safe. Kate wandered farther into the wing. Every twenty feet or so was a large door, apparently a corridor to some other area. As far as the eye could see, it was the same, doors and symmetrical corridors. And it was quiet, an unnerving kind of quiet.
She swiped her card at the nearest door and ventured inside. It was some sort of barracks or… a college dorm — that was what came to mind. She was standing in a large common room that led to six smaller rooms, each with bunk beds. No, they weren’t quite like dorm rooms… they were too sparse, more like cells in a prison. And they were empty. Abandoned, actually. The cells were disheveled; blankets and clothes littered the floors; personal belongings were strewn across the small sinks beside the bunk beds — as if the occupants had left in a hurry.
Kate retreated from the room and resumed walking in the main corridor for a while. Her tennis shoes made a squeaking sound with every step she took. In the distance, she heard talking. She had to go toward it, but some part of her resisted. It was safe here in the empty rooms, with no people.
She turned at the next “crossroads” and walked toward the talking. She could see it now — something like a nurse’s station in a hospital: a high-top bar with files laying on it and two or three women behind it.
There was another sound, from another direction — the loud rhythmic clop of boots echoing in the empty corridor. They were getting close. She inched closer to the nurses. She heard their voices “They want them all now.”—”I know”—”That’s what I said”—”Nothing they ever do makes sense”—”They aren’t even treating”—
Kate jerked around — the boots, behind her. Six men, guards. They were running toward her, guns drawn. “Stop where you are!”
She could run and maybe make it to the nurses station. The guards were closing fast now, 20 feet away. She took a step, then another, but they were there, around here, pointing their guns at her.
Kate held up her hands.
CHAPTER 54
David raised his hands.
The guard leveled the gun at him and moved closer. “You’re not Conner Anderson.”
“No shit, man,” David said under his breath. “Put the gun down and shut the fuck up; they could be listening.”
The guard stopped moving. He looked down, confused. “What?”
“He told me I had to come in for him.”
“What?”
“Look, we had a rough night last night. He said he would get sacked if I didn’t come in,” David insisted.
“Who are you?”
“His friend. You must be his really smart friend at work.”
“What?”
The guard was as dumb as a sack of hammers. “Is that all you can say? Jesus man, put the gun up and act natural.”
“Conner isn’t scheduled today.”
“Yeah, I gathered that, yet another half-drunk brain-fart on his part. I’m going to kill him if you fools don’t kill me first.” David tipped his hands forward and nodded, silently saying, well are you or aren’t you? When the guard said nothing, David said, “Dude, shoot me, or let me go.”
The man reluctantly holstered his gun, still looking thoroughly unsatisfied. “Where are you going?”
David walked toward him. “Getting the hell out of here, what’s the quickest way?”
The man turned and pointed but didn’t get a word out. David knocked him out cold with a sharp blow to the base of his skull.
He had to move fast now. He ran deeper into the facility. There was another problem, one he’d pushed to the back of his mind, given the more pressing survival issues. But now he had to think about how to cut the power. His best idea was not to attack the nuclear reactors directly — they would be insulated and well protected, assuming he could even get close to them. And there were three of them. The power lines were his best guess. If he blew the lines, it would cut the power to the entire facility — permanently, including any power they may have stored up from the reactor. But he was out of his element. What if the lines were buried under the facility or otherwise out of reach? Or routed through a heavily guarded building outside the reactor facility? Would he even know them when he saw them? There were a lot of what-ifs…
David found another schematic on the wall and scanned through the areas. Reactor 1, Reactor 2, Reactor 3, Turbine, Control Room, Primary Circuit Room. Circuit room — that could work. It was positioned opposite the reactors, and it looked like lines from every reactor flowed into the room.
He turned from the schematic just as two guards rounded the corner and marched toward him. He nodded and made his way to the circuit room. As he approached it, he could hear the low drone of machines and the buzz of high voltage power. It seemed to come through the walls and up through the floor. The floor didn’t vibrate, but as he scanned his badge and entered the room, his body began to shake from the pulse of the massive machines.
Inside, the room was huge — and cramped. Pipes and metal conduits seemed to snake in every direction, buzzing and popping periodically. He felt like he had been shrunk and beamed inside a circuit board on a computer.
David climbed deeper into the room and placed charges on the larger conduits at the points where they entered the room. There were several metal “closets” for lack of a better word. He placed charges on them as well. He only had a few explosives left. Would they be enough? How much time? He typed 5:00 minutes in the detonator and hid it at the base of the closet. Where to put the last charges?
He heard another noise over the din of the lines. Or maybe he didn’t. He took a charge out and shoved it between two smaller lines. He held it there for a second, withdrawing his hand slowly to make sure it would stay.