“What?” Nikki and I said in unison.
“Yeah, they used to test us out with that stuff before they’d let us go into space. Tried to be sure we wouldn’t steal them blind. Can’t figure why she’d have that, though.”
“Maybe this is the reason,” I said holding up one of the rounds of spare ammunition she had in her bag. “These aren’t ordinary loads she was shooting at us. Look at the marks on the walls.
They hardly made a dent.”
Jake pried one of the spent projectiles out of the wall. “Looks like a liquid-filled load.
Poison?”
“I’ll bet they’re stun shells.” I said.
“Maybe she was going to disable us and then…'Nikki started and stopped in mid-sentence.
“Then quiz us,” I said. “That way she could find out if someone else knew about the rods.”
Jake nodded. “Makes sense. There’s one way to find out.” He lifted the truth serum kit and his eyebrows.
“Can you get her to babble away?” I asked. “How will you know what dosage?”
“This stuff is pretty safe to use. The auto-hypo regulates the dose and you’d need a pretty high dose to hurt someone. Least that’s what they used to tell us. Besides, she wasn’t exactly out to give you a good time. Let’s give her the drug before she has a chance to come to. That way she’ll be less apt to resist if she’s been programmed to resist truth serum.”
“If you think you know what you’re doing,” I said, a bit dubious of the plan.
After giving her a shot and a few whiffs from an oxygen mask, she was ready to talk. Our questions were very straight-forward:
“Who do you work for?”
“I-don’t-know.”
“How did they communicate with you?”
“Over-my-talkie.”
“After catching the people in the condo, how will you tell your boss you’ve succeeded?”
“Over-my-talkie.”
“What will you tell him?”
“Mission-successful. Will-bring-in.”
“Write that down, Nikki, the order of the words might be part of a code or something so they know it’s really the bag lady. Do you know where some paper is here?” I said.
Nikki scrambled into the kitchen and returned with a pad, “Ask her again so we get it right.”
We did and Nikki quickly wrote it down and continued to take notes as we questioned the bag lady.
“Bring them in to where?”
“Will-get-coordinates-with-call.”
“Why did she have the truth serum if she was to just bring us in?” Nikki asked.
The bag lady answered the question before we could put it to her, “Was-to-question-all-of-them. Ask-about- others-connected-to-group-and-eliminate-all-but-one-who-knows-of-others.”
We continued to question the bag lady until we’d gotten pass words, methods of doing things, and so forth. We tried to get everything from her that might be of help.
As we were finishing up with our questions, her eyes fluttered a bit and her face turned bright red. “She’s coming around,” Jake said. “We could safely give her another dose.”
“I don’t have any more questions,” I said. “Do either of you?”
They both shook their heads no.
“Then why don’t we—”
“What’s she doing?” Nikki asked.
Good question. The woman moved her mouth and made a horrible face. Too late I realized what was happening. ” I bet she just poisoned herself,” I said. I tried to pull her mouth open but she held it locked shut and made an evil looking face at me until I quit trying. Moments later as we helplessly watched, the woman gave a shudder, exhaled a long breath, and was dead.
Her jaw relaxed and I pulled it open and I saw the hollow tooth that was loose on her tongue.
An old but effective trick. I felt for the pulse on her neck.
Dead.
It was then that we realized just how ruthless the people were that we were up against.
It was time for the next step of our plan.
Chapter 17
After a ghoulish exercise in undressing the dead bag lady, Nikki was outfitted in the bag lady’s ballistic armor and clothes. That done, I showed Nikki how to operate the combat shotgun.
We loaded it with the stun shells since we hoped to take a prisoner or two at our next stop.
While we all crossed our fingers, Nikki called over the bag lady’s talkie. We received instructions to leave the van on the street and bring the prisoner—me—and information about how to receive the bag lady’s pay for the job. We had a tense moment when the man on the other end of things asked what vehicle we’d be arriving in.
What had the bag lady been driving and would whoever we were meeting know what she should be driving?
Or was it a trick?
“I’ll be driving my new blue van,” Nikki said into the talkie then closed her eyes tightly as if expecting to be hit.
A pause while Jake and I held our breaths.
“OK,” came the voice over the talkie. “Here’s how you get to us…”
Before we left, we booby trapped our decoy van. Anyone that tried to operate it without the proper computer code would discover himself flying at maximum speed—straight up. Though it would mean sacrificing one of our vans, it would probably be worth it, I figured, since that would get at least one undesirable off the face of the Earth and perhaps make someone think our van had malfunctioned and jetted us straight into Valhalla.
Nikki drove and I sat in the passenger’s seat. Jake sat out of sight in the office chair he’d welded into the back of the van just behind our seats. We had an improvised curtain—borrowed from Nikki’s condo—that hid Jake from casual inspection. We all wore our throat mikes and earphones so we could communicate with Jake, who’d most likely have to be left behind in the van when we got to our destination since it was probable that surveillance cameras would detect more than two people leaving the van at our destination.
Our meeting was to take place in New Denver’s Catacombs. If Jake and I had known about the Catacombs
“Where are the Catacombs?” I asked innocently. I had in mind some resort area in the mountains. Maybe some caves or something.
After Nikki filled us in, I had a little different idea. It was simple really: If you take the beauty of the Col-Kan sky and the jeweled, needle skyscrapers of New Denver and then imagine just the opposite of all that and then multiply by two times worse yet, you have a pretty good idea of what the Catacombs are like.
They originally were huge parking areas for those living and working in the buildings of New Denver. They were also interconnected so that the residents could move around the small city, visit, or go shopping even during a heavy snow storm or chilly weather. But like a lot of other major projects, the system was poorly thought out and even when everything was new, the parking lots had seldom been used since most of those who lived in the buildings weren’t home much; the condos were owned by those that would be traveling world-wide via the rocket port.
Such people seldom fooled with owning a vehicle of their own. When they needed to travel in New Denver, they took taxi-bots or even choppers to get around.
