find clothes that are both comfortable and stylish.
Bobby said, “When he enters the facility, they initialize the microchip in the badge, you know?”
“No.”
“Initialize — clear the memory on the microchip. Then every time he passes through a doorway, maybe the chip in the badge responds to microwave transmitters in the threshold, recording where he went and how long he stayed in each place. Then when he leaves, the data is downloaded into his file.”
“You creep me out when you talk computer.”
“I’m still the same full-on jerk-off, bro.”
“I get evil-twin vibes.”
“There’s just one Bobby,” he assured me.
I glanced at the bungalow where we had found Delacroix, half expecting to see eerie lights beyond the windows, frenzied bug-wing shadows flitting up the walls, and a shambling cadaver crossing the porch.
Snapping a finger against the badge, I said, “Tracking every step he makes even after they let him through the front door — that’s maximum-paranoid security.”
“This must’ve been on the floor beside the corpse with the other stuff. Somebody went in the bungalow ahead of us, took it, and put it here. Why?”
The answer was to be found in the line at the bottom of the badge.
Bobby said, “You think this ID got him into the labs where they were doing these genetic experiments, the very place where the shit hit the fan?”
“Maybe. MT. Mystery Train?”
Bobby glanced at the words embroidered on my cap, then at the badge again. “Nancy Drew would be proud.”
I switched off the flashlight. “I think I know where he wants us to go.”
“Where who wants us to go?”
“Whoever left this under the wiper.”
“Which is who?”
“I don’t have
“Yet you’re positive there’s an afterlife,” he said as he started the engine.
“The big answers I have. It’s just some of the little ones that elude me.”
“Okay, where are we going?”
“The egg room.”
“So now we’re in a Batman movie, and you’re the Riddler?”
“It’s not in Dead Town. It’s in a hangar on the north side of the base.”
“Egg room.”
“You’ll see.”
“He’s not our friend,” Bobby said.
“He who?”
“Whoever left that badge, bro, he’s no friend of ours. We don’t have friends in this place.”
“I’m not so sure of that.”
As he released the hand brake and shifted into drive, he said, “Could be a trap.”
“Probably not. He could’ve disabled the Jeep and been laying for us right here when we came out of the bungalow, if all he wanted was to waste us.”
Driving out of Dead Town, Bobby said, “Still could be a trap.”
“Okay, maybe.”
“That doesn’t bother you like it does me, ’cause you’ve got God and an afterlife and choirs of angels and palaces of gold in the sky, but all I’ve got is broccoli.”
“Better think about that,” I agreed.
I consulted my watch. Dawn was no more than two hours away.
As dark and mottled as a strange fungus, spongy masses of clouds had spread far into the east, leaving only a narrow band of clean sky in which the bright stars looked cold and even farther away than they actually were.
For more than two years, Wisteria Jane Snow’s gene-swapping retrovirus had been loose in the wider world beyond the laboratory. During that time, the destruction of the natural order had progressed almost as lazily as big fluffy snowflakes drifting out of a windless winter sky, but I suspected that at last the blizzard was at hand, the avalanche.
12
The hangar rises like a temple to some alien god with a wrathful disposition, surrounded on three sides by smaller service buildings that could pass for the humble dwellings of monks and novitiates. It is as long and wide as a football field, seven stories high, with no windows other than a line of narrow clerestory panes just below the spring line of the arched Quonset-style roof.
Bobby parked in front of a pair of doors at one end of the building, switching off the engine and headlights.
Each door is twenty feet wide and forty high. Set in upper and lower tracks, they were motor-driven, but the power to operate them was disconnected long ago.
The daunting mass of the building and the enormous steel doors make the place as forbidding as the fortress that might stand at the gap between this world and Hell to keep the demons from getting out.
Taking a flashlight from under his seat, Bobby said, “This place is the egg room?”
“Under this place.”
“I don’t like the look of it.”
“I’m not asking you to move in and set up housekeeping.”
Getting out of the Jeep, he said, “Are we near the airfield?”
Fort Wyvern, which was established as both a training and a support facility, boasts runways that can accommodate large jets and those giant C-13 transports that are capable of carrying trucks, assault vehicles, and tanks.
“Airfield’s half a mile that way,” I said, pointing. “They didn’t service aircraft here. Unless maybe choppers, but I don’t think that’s what this place was about, either.”
“What
“Don’t know.”
“Maybe it’s where they held bingo games.”
In spite of the negative aura around the building, in spite of the fact that we had perhaps been induced here by persons unknown and possibly hostile, I didn’t feel as though we were in imminent danger. Anyway, Bobby’s shotgun would stop any assailant a lot faster than my 9-millimeter. Leaving the Glock holstered, carrying only the flashlight, I led the way to a man-size door set in one of the larger portals.
“Big surf coming,” Bobby said.
“Guess or fact?”
“Fact.”
Bobby earns a living by analyzing weather-satellite data and other information to predict surf conditions worldwide, with a high degree of accuracy. His enterprise, Surfcast, provides information daily to tens of thousands of surfers through subscriptions to a bulletin sent by fax or E-mail, and through a 900 number that draws more than eight hundred thousand calls a year. Because his lifestyle is simple and his corporate offices are funky, no one in Moonlight Bay realizes that he is a multimillionaire and the richest man in town. If they knew, it would matter more to them than it does to Bobby. To him, wealth is having every day free to surf; everything else that money can buy is no more than an extra spoon of salsa on the enchilada.
“Gonna be minimum ten-foot corduroy to the horizon,” Bobby promised. “Some sets of twelve, pumping all
