“You’ve killed some down here before?”
“Couple dozen.”
“But just the bodies? Not the souls?”
“Taken them out. Soul surgery. Today’s our first try at a kill.”
“But the ones you took out—where did they go?”
Her face clouded, and she fell into what he could only interpret as a sullen silence. It was as if he’d insulted her, but how? What was the big deal if there was some part of the thing they didn’t understand yet?
They were now eighteen miles in. Eighteen goddamn miles! Where was this place? Who had built it and when? He recalled that on September 12, 2001, the Secretary of Defense had announced that the Defense Department had “lost” a trillion dollars, and he thought that projects like this might be an explanation.
They’d been working on this a long time, then, because facilities like this take years to construct. Hell, generations. And trillions of dollars, for sure.
Twenty-two miles.
“We’re also descending, aren’t we?”
“Yes, sir.”
“And?”
“We’re at six thousand meters at this time, sir.”
Holy God, that was twenty thousand feet! Eighteen miles in and four down. “Why so deep?”
“You don’t want the souls getting away. And they are slippery, sir. Very slippery.”
“They know what’s happening to them, then?”
“They’re alive. Never forget that. If you start messing with a soul, it wants to get away from you. And it’s smart. If one escaped, the enemy would see it immediately and know what we were up to. So we’re deep. Best place for us to be.”
“What kind of lookdown do you have?”
“Sir?”
“Satellite lookdown. Guardianship.”
“None since last week. But we’re guarded by a unit of Air Police and fully sensor protected.”
In other words, the facility was totally exposed. If the enemy got so much as an inkling of what was happening down here, they were coming around, and right now.
The car slowed to a stop.
“We’ve reached stage two, sir. Time to move to the lift for the rest of the trip. Stay seated, there’s gonna be an equalization.”
The door sighed, and there was a jarring pop, and Al’s ears rang. “What in hell is this?”
“We’re at four atmospheres down here, Sir.”
When they stepped out, the ceiling was so low that Al had almost to crouch. The chamber was hewn out of solid basalt—gleaming black walls scarred by drill trenches. It was also very, very confined. He was aware of the miles of stone overhead and all around him. It was like being in a coffin.
How could anything have been drilled this deep in a military facility without the Joint Chiefs being told?
“How long have you been down here?”
She glanced at him, but said nothing. She ushered him into an elevator that looked like some kind of meat locker. It was heavily insulated, with a very small cab. It contained bench seating for four people around its steel walls. There were seat belts.
He asked her, “Are these needed?”
She buckled herself in. “Advisable.”
There was a clank and a whirring sound, then a sucking whine and Al was practically lifted against the ceiling. Scrabbling hard, he got the ends of his belt and managed to strap himself in.
“We’re going down a further three miles,” she said.
Three miles straight down, after another thirty-five laterally and nine down—it was inconceivable. There was no technology he knew of that could accomplish this. But, obviously, somebody did know, and they had been experimenting on souls down here for a long time.
“It’s a Manhattan Project for the soul instead of the A-bomb,” he said.
“That’s right on the money, sir. Need-to-know’s spread very thin.”
“Samson?”
“Project director.”
The man was a shit, but he surely knew how to keep a secret. “Impressive. I never guessed.”
The elevator hummed and jostled slightly as it descended. Confinement disturbed him. And, truth to tell, the closer they got to actually doing it, the more uneasy the idea of killing a soul was making him. He was not really seeing how even the worst criminal deserved destruction like this. It felt like they were intruding into God’s business.
Actually, he wished he could call Samson and request that this be at least postponed. Even if he’d somehow managed the call, though, Tom would never allow it. He’d consider the request treason, and he wouldn’t be wrong. We had to learn everything we needed to learn to defeat that light, and if some criminals were denied eternal life in our quest for answers, then that was too damn bad.
The elevator stopped. “Gonna be another pop,” she said. “Open your mouth.”
She pressed a button and the door slid back. This time there was a loud thud and a sensation of being hit in the chest with a medicine ball.
“Wow!”
“Seven atmospheres,” she said.
They walked out into a tiny chamber with black, sweating walls. It was maybe five feet wide, seven high. Not much bigger than the interior of a coffin. On the far side was a door, equally black. “What is this, the entrance to hell?”
She laughed. “It is.”
He followed her down a steep corridor, then deeper still, down a winding metal staircase so narrow that he could hardly manage to negotiate it. They descended for easily twenty minutes, and he thought that coming back up was going to be a battle.
Now the two of them were in a chamber that really was the size of a biggish coffin. Embedded in one wall was another black door, this one with a round window in it like the bulging eye of an insect.
“You’ll need to disrobe, please.”
“Excuse me?”
“Take off your clothes, General. You’ll be provided with a special suit. So it won’t kill your soul, too, General.”
“What about you?”
“I stay out here, sir.”
He took off his tunic, his tie, his shirt, while she watched impassively. He waited, but she did not turn around. Finally, he removed his shoes and trousers. He waited again. “Ma’am, could you give me some privacy?”
She turned, then, and faced the wall. He could understand her reluctance—she now had a face full of basalt.
When he was naked he faced the door. It was eerie, the way the dark porthole seemed almost like something alive.
“The prisoner is ready,” she said. And the door began slowly to open.
Before him there appeared the most astonishing thing he had ever seen. The room was painted vividly, with images right out of the interior of a fabulous Egyptian tomb, lines of men, a god in a golden head-dress, prisoners standing stiffly, strange objects that looked like giant vacuum tubes.
“What the hell is going on here?”
Then he saw a stack of what looked like the same vacuum tubes in real life. There were men in the room, too, dressed in black uniforms without insignia.
“Excuse me, gentlemen, but I need something to wear.”
Nobody took any notice of him. They were clustered around the vacuum tubes, which were attached to thick
