quick motion impossible. Slowly she turned in a graceless pirouette, an oversize ballerina in a puffy suit. She expected to come face-to-face with Andrus and see the lifted muzzle of his gun.
But he wasn’t there. The room was empty except for her.
'Hope I didn’t startle you.'
His voice, as close as ever. She realized it was coming from inside her suit.
The bubble helmet was equipped with a radio set-microphone and speaker. He was addressing her over the air, from the transceiver in his own suit.
'I don’t startle that easily,' she lied.
'Don’t you? Funny. I could have sworn I heard you gasp. But I could be wrong. After all, I also thought you’d be dead by now.'
He’d assumed she’d been killed in the explosion. That was why he hadn’t lingered by the storeroom to get the drop on her.
But silencing the PA system had been a giveaway that she was still alive. And he must know where she was-at the control panel.
She had to get out of here before he came this way. Shuffling in her rubber boots, she moved toward the door.
'You’ve spoiled things, Tess.' He was trying to sound cool, faintly amused, but she heard the undertone of raw anger in his voice. 'My careful plans have been shot to hell-and all because of you.'
'Sorry.'
'You’re not. But I’ll make you sorry. You’re not getting out of this. You’re going to die down here.'
'It’s your own future I’d be concerned about, if I were you.'
Out in the hall now. Moving in the suit was hard work-like wading through thick silt or operating under the higher gravity of an alien planet. Her faceplate had fogged up with sweat. She rubbed her face against the visor to clear it.
'Not at all,' Andrus said. 'I intend to come out of this just fine. An hour from now, I’ll be safe…and free.'
She glanced inside the office across the corridor. Andrus wasn’t there. The office looked eerily normal, a place of business like any other, except for the knife-Mobius’s knife, a knife that had slit throats-still stuck in the wall.
She hesitated, then took a step inside the office.
'How will you manage that trick?' she asked.
'Before long, a hazmat team will enter this installation. I’ll blend in with them, leave with them. Easy enough-these suits all look alike.'
'They’ll be looking for you.'
'Eventually-but at first they’ll assume I was killed in the blast. They’ll mourn for their beloved assistant director, I’m sure. But they’ll forget one thing.'
'What’s that?'
'It’s Easter, Tess-and I am the resurrection and the life.'
Brave words, Andrus thought.
He could put up a front of bravado with Tess. But he couldn’t hide the truth from himself.
He was, to put it indelicately, fucked.
Oh, he hadn’t been lying to Tess. He still intended to survive this debacle. He would escape with his life and with the money he’d hidden in a secret bank account when he began moonlighting as Mobius three years ago.
Then there would be a new life under a new name. He had a variety of false IDs similar to the Donald Stevenson persona that had served him so well at the MiraMist.
But he would not have his triumph. He had meant to decapitate this city. He had meant to commit a crime that would elevate him to legendary heights.
She had ruined it for him. She had made a mockery of his comeback, the grand finale of his criminal career.
'That’s a hell of a plan, Gerry.' Tess’s voice crackled over the headset in his hazmat suit. 'You must have worked it out pretty quickly after you got hold of the VX.'
'I worked it out beforehand. Remember how you told Tennant that Mobius would start to make mistakes because the VX wasn’t in the script? You were wrong, Tess, dead wrong. The VX was the script.'
'You planned all this?'
'Yes, indeed. In the current climate of terrorist and counterterrorist activity, I knew it was only a matter of time until I obtained the kind of weapon I needed. I’ve been doing research for months. Don’t you recall my lecture on this command center? I knew a lot about the place, didn’t I? That’s because I always knew this would be ground zero. I had to know the installation’s layout-and its vulnerabilities.'
'Wait a minute. You’re saying that when you picked up Amanda Pierce-'
'I already knew who she was and what she was carrying. Come on, Tess, honestly now. What are the odds of a serial killer meeting up, purely by accident, with a woman toting a canister of nerve agent?'
'Coincidences happen.'
'Maybe so. But chance, said Pasteur, favors the prepared mind. And-if I might add an aphorism of my own- the prepared mind leaves nothing to chance.'
46
Tess had reached the end of the corridor.
'So you arranged to meet Pierce?' she asked.
'Of course. I’d been briefed on the case. I knew Pierce was carrying a sample of a toxic agent used in chem- bio warfare. I wasn’t told what kind. I was hoping for anthrax, actually. I could have had a lot of fun with anthrax.'
'You have a peculiar idea of fun.'
She halted just inside the main room, surveying the destruction. Half of the workstations had been knocked over, the computer terminals smashed. Swivel chairs lay upended everywhere. The beige carpet was spotted with VX droplets.
At Universal City, she had thought of the evacuated subway train as the essence of Mobius’s world, but this was his true world, this hell of rubble and poison mist, deep underground, sealed off from light and air.
He must be somewhere in this room. He couldn’t afford to leave the exit unguarded. But the clouds of VX and pulverized debris stirred up by the air-conditioning limited her visibility. He could be hidden behind one of the long semicircular arrays of workstations or concealed behind a pile of overturned chairs. He could be two steps away from her, veiled by smoke and fog.
'Whatever it was she’d gotten hold of,' Andrus said, 'I wanted it. I waited until she was en route to LA-and then I called her.'
' You called her?'
'Why not? I was able to learn her cell phone number without raising any suspicions. That’s an advantage of being on the fast track to a senior post. People are eager to do you favors. I knew that her phone was encrypted, and that if I contacted her on the road, there was little chance of Tennant listening in.'
It was difficult to scope out the room. She could barely turn her head inside the bubble helmet, and the rippling plastic of the face mask warped her vision with shifting lines of distortion.
'And you told her…?' Tess prompted.
'That I was the person she would meet in LA. That our meeting place had been changed. That she should wait in the MiraMist, at the hotel bar.'
'You got her to go right to you.'
'Clever of me, don’t you think?' Andrus sounded obscenely pleased with himself.
No, she was wrong to think of him as Andrus. For Andrus, she might have some human feeling.
He was Mobius. He was the killer who’d taken Paul from her.
'Oh,' he added, 'and I warned her that she was under surveillance. The evasive action she took the next day,
