for some quality time with the father.
“And then you’ll kill the kid in front of his father? Finish what the Navy is doing to him?”
You have no idea, do you? Why the Navy is cutting him loose?
“They’re tired of getting black eyes in all the national.
papers. They’ve probably figured. out that you’re going to kill and tell.”
I certainly am But that’s not why they’re cutting him loose, von Rensel They’re cutting him loose so he can come to me. They’re counting on me to kill him.
Train moved sideways a little, trying to locate the metallic voice. But it seemed to be coming from all around him.
“Why kill him? I thought you wanted him alive. To savor his fate.”
You figured right, von Rensel I want him to live with this for a long, long time. But you need to find out why certain very senior officers in the Navy might actually want him dead. Then you’ll understand why he’s free to come here tonight. Now sit tight. Stop scaring my spiders. My time is unfortunately limited.
He sensed motion across the room from him, a stirring of the musty air, a brief thinning of the darkness diagonally to his right, and then what sounded like a trapdoor being dropped quietly into place. Train sank back down on his haunches, reaching out for thestone wall and then settling his back against it. So what the hell was Galantz talking about? What was this stuff about the admirals? He stared out into the darkness, massaging his wrists and ankles, and waited.
Down on the hillside, Karen could see literally nothing but a purple haze, whether her eyes were opened or closed. She crouched motionless in the grass for a few minutes. She was at the very least night-blind.
But she could hear. The words Help me bring him in, intoned in that mechanical, gasping voice, floated clearly down the hill. Galantz! She froze at the sound of that voice, then senled down onto her stomach in the wet grass behind a mound of vegetation, held her breath, and tried to control the shaking in her knees. The night air was oppressively warm. It was starting to rain, and she thought she heard the distant rumble of thunder. She felt around to find the .380.
Train tensed when he heard sounds above him. Someone moving around-no, two people moving. Another sound: a dragging sound, like a sack of some kind being pulled across the floor above, toward the area of the trapdoor. A rattling noise that sounded like boards being shoved aside, then the noises stopped. A clatter of boards and sticks from above and then, there: Something hit the floor over there and groaned. A man’s voice. Sherman? Was that Sherman?
The trapdoor closed audibly this time, a heavy wooden thump, and there were steps coming down, two sets of feet.
A metallic clank.
Hide your eyes, von Rensel, said the machine voice. Train did as ordered, afraid of another disrupter blast. But instead, there was the noise of a small engine starting, over to his left, and then the room was filled with a pulsing red light, a red strobe light, coming from some device set up on the steps. It actually wasn’t very bright, but compared to the absolute darkness, it was initially almost blinding, and he uncovered his eyes only slowly. But at least he could seesort of. It was as if his eyes were taking pictures with a red flash unit.
The basement was rectangular and, for the most part, empty. Roughly fifty or sixty feet long and about thirty wide. Stone walls, an empty expanse of hard-packed. dirt floor. At his end, he recognized the remains of an enormous coal-burning furnace, its large insulated ducts reaching up through a mass of cobwebs into the house above. The grate door to the furnace had been removed, and what looked like the controls of a portable generator glinted in the furnace’s combustion chamber.
Extension cords ran the length of the basement to the other end,, where there appeared to be a cot with a single mattress, a table, and a folding chair. There was a PC sitting on the table, and three racks of other electronic equipment next to the table. There was a tangle of wiring on the floor.
He shielded his eyes against the strobe light, trying to adapt his eyes.
It was like watching a jilm through an antique projector, flashes of darkness punctuated by flashes of the scene in the basement. On, off.
On, off-about two times per second. Train shook his head, trying to clear his vision. The strobe effect was really disorienting, like watching the dancers in a discotheque, where disembodied faces flashed in and out of view, each time their expressions and attitudes slightly altered. Only everything down here was blood-red, not white. Red made sense, if Galantz had a nightvision device on.
The ceiling was made up of large, heavily cobwebbed wooden joists that sagged ominously into the basement in places. Near the bottom of the steps was one recognizable figure: Jack, in T-shirt and jeans, leaning insolently against the wall, his eyes hooded in the red strobe light, his arms folded across his chest. Not drunk this time, but casually alert, his eyes two black circles in the pulsing red light, his studied pose that of a street thug waiting for a knife fight to begin. On the steps was the silhouette of a man, barely visible because he was standing very close to the strobe source. Bigger than Jack, heftier, thicker. Galantz. Train couldn’t get a focus on the face because of the strobe light, which was placed conveniently just to one side of Galantz’s head. There was just the silhouette, standing there, arms h “ging down, holding what looked like a bulky automatic pistol in his right hand. The left arm, which ended -in a glinting metallic device of some kind, was held casually across the figure’s hips. But no face. Only the shape of the man’s head, distorted somewhat by something he was wearing. The nightvision device, Train thought.
And there was Sherman, crumpled on the floor near the bottom of the steps. Train put up an arm to shield his face from the disturbing pulsing of the strobe. He had thought Sherman was unconscious, but he wasn’t. He was lying on his -right side, his hands up to his face, covering his eyes.
Know that feeling, Train thought. Bet he was out there in the dark, irises wide open, when Galantz popped his little flash toy. Sherman groaned again and tried to sit up. Train could see Jack staring down at his father’s helpless figure, and the expression on his face was not a pretty one. They should be watching Sherman, waiting for him to comet of it.
This bastard was a master of light, Train thought. Galantz had a gun, and Jack might have one, too. And somewhere was the disrupter, ready to disable anyone in the room who didn’t see it coming.
Sherman groaned again, and this time he managed to sit up. He dropped his hands from his face, then slapped them back up there again when the strobe light hit him.
Where’s your girlfriend, Sherman? Galantz asked. Train tried to see Galantz’s throat, but there was only shadow.
The combination of the synthetic voice and the’s y gnu sing red light created a phantasmagorical image. And who was he talking about, Elizabeth Walsh or Karen?
The admiral did not reply. Galantz instructed Jack to go outside, see if Sherman had come alone. Jack moved immediately and wordlessly up the steps, heaved open the trapdoor, and closed it behind him. It was evident from the sounds that the trapdoor was hidden under a pile of wreckage on the ground floor.
“She’s not my girlfriend, you bastard,” Sherman said.
“You murdered my girlfriend.”
Now that you mention it, yes, I did Let me tell you about it while we’re waiting for Jackie boy to come back, okay?
After five minutes, just when she was about to get up and try to move downhill, Karen thought she heard something, something or someone moving carefully through the grass up by the house. Then the noises stopped, somewhere uphill of her position. It was hard to tell, as the patter of the first large raindrops began to mask the woods noises. She clutched the .380 and tried to remember if she had chambered it. Yes, she had.
But this one had a safety. She felt along both sides of the gun until she found the small latch down on the left side of the slide. Because if someone was coming down here to get her, he was going to get shot at a lot. She realized she was breathing too fast, and she put a clamp on it.
She tested her eyes on a hand held up in front of her face, but all she could see was a purple silhouette.
The poor admiral, that thing must have dropped him like a stone. She waited, putting all her mental energy into listening very carefully.
Then she heard the sounds again,. definitely footsteps, someone working slowly, carefully, across the hill above her now, one, two, three steps, soft crunching sounds in the grass, punctuated by intervils of silence.
She remained absolutely still. If whoever this was had been near the flash, even behind the disrupter, his
