“Never mind,” Elliot said. “Just sit down.”
But the guard was insistent. “Who
“Justice,” Tina said.
Five minutes west of Reno, the chopper encountered snow. The flakes were hard, dry, and granular; they hissed like driven sand across the Perspex windscreen.
Jack Morgan, the pilot, glanced at George Alexander and said, “This will be hairy.” He was wearing night- vision goggles, and his eyes were invisible.
“Just a little snow,” Alexander said.
“A storm,” Morgan corrected.
“You’ve flown in storms before.”
“In these mountains the downdrafts and crosscurrents are going to be murderous.”
“We’ll make it,” Alexander said grimly.
“Maybe, maybe not,” Morgan said. He grinned. “But we’re sure going to have fun trying!”
“You’re crazy,” Hensen said from his seat behind the pilot.
“When we were running operations against the drug lords down in Colombia,” Morgan said, “they called me ‘Bats,’ meaning I had bats in the belfry.” He laughed.
Hensen was holding a submachine gun across his lap. He moved his hands over it slowly, as if he were caressing a woman. He closed his eyes, and in his mind he disassembled and then reassembled the weapon. He had a queasy stomach. He was trying hard not to think about the chopper, the bad weather, and the likelihood that they would take a long, swift, hard fall into a remote mountain ravine.
Chapter Thirty-Seven
The young guard wheezed in pain, but as far as Tina could see, he was not mortally wounded. The bullet had partially cauterized the wound as it passed through. The hole in the guy’s shoulder was reassuringly clean, and it wasn’t bleeding much.
“You’ll live,” Elliot said.
“I’m dying. Jesus!”
“No. It hurts like hell, but it isn’t serious. The bullet didn’t sever any major blood vessels.”
“How the hell would you know?” the wounded man asked, straining his words through clenched teeth.
“If you lie still, you’ll be all right. But if you agitate the wound, you might tear a bruised vessel, and then you’ll bleed to death.”
“Shit,” the guard said shakily.
“Understand?” Elliot asked.
The man nodded. His face was pale, and he was sweating.
Elliot tied the older guard securely to a chair. He didn’t want to tie the wounded man’s hands, so they carefully moved him to a supply closet and locked him in there.
“How’s your head?” Tina asked Elliot, gently touching the ugly knot that had raised on his temple, where the guard’s gun had struck him.
Elliot winced. “Stings.”
“It’s going to bruise.”
“I’ll be all right,” he said.
“Dizzy?”
“No.”
“Seeing double?”
“No,” he said. “I’m fine. I wasn’t hit that hard. There’s no concussion. Just a headache. Come on. Let’s find Danny and get him out of this place.”
They crossed the room, passing the guard who was bound and gagged in his chair. Tina carried the remaining rope, and Elliot kept the gun.
Opposite the sliding door through which she and Elliot had entered the security room was another door of more ordinary dimensions and construction. It opened onto a junction of two hallways, which Tina had discovered a few minutes ago, just after Elliot had shot the guard, when she had peeked through the door to see if reinforcements were on the way.
The corridors had been deserted then. They were deserted now too. Silent. White tile floors. White walls. Harsh fluorescent lighting.
One passageway extended fifty feet to the left of the door and fifty feet to the right; on both sides were more doors, all shut, plus a bank of four elevators on the right. The intersecting hall began directly in front of them, across from the guardroom, and bored at least four hundred feet into the mountain; a long row of doors waited on each side of it, and other corridors opened off it as well.
They whispered:
“You think Danny is on this floor?”
“I don’t know.”
“Where do we start?”
“We can’t just go around jerking open doors.”
“People are going to be behind some of them.”
“And the fewer people we encounter—”
“—the better chance we have of getting out alive.”
They stood, indecisive, looking left, then right, and then straight ahead.
Ten feet away, a set of elevator doors opened.
Tina cringed back against the corridor wall.
Elliot pointed the pistol at the lift.
No one got out.
The cab was at such an angle from them that they couldn’t see who was in it.
The doors closed.
Tina had the sickening feeling that someone had been about to step out, had sensed their presence, and had gone away to get help.
Even before Elliot had lowered the pistol, the same set of elevator doors slid open again. Then slid shut. Open. Shut. Open. Shut. Open.
The air grew cold.
With a sigh of relief, Tina said, “It’s Danny. He’s showing us the way.”
Nevertheless, they crept cautiously to the elevator and peered inside apprehensively. The cab was empty, and they boarded it, and the doors glided together.
According to the indicator board above the doors, they were on the fourth of four levels. The first floor was at the bottom of the structure, the deepest underground.
The cab controls would not operate unless one first inserted an acceptable ID card into a slot above them. But Tina and Elliot didn’t need the computer’s authorization to use the elevator; not with Danny on their side. The light on the indicator board changed from four to three to two, and the air inside the lift became so frigid that Tina’s breath hung in clouds before her. The doors slid open three floors below the surface, on the next to the last level.
They stepped into a hallway exactly like the one they had left upstairs.
The elevator doors closed behind them, and around them the air grew warmer again.
Five feet away, a door stood ajar, and animated conversation drifted out of the room beyond. Men’s and women’s voices. Half a dozen or more, judging by the sound of them. Indistinct words. Laughter.
Tina knew that she and Elliot were finished if someone came out of that room and saw them. Danny seemed able to work miracles with inanimate objects, but he could not control people, like the guard upstairs, whom Elliot had been forced to shoot. If they were discovered and confronted by a squad of angry security men, Elliot’s one
