face. Taylor glanced both ways—checking for witnesses, I supposed—then, in a quick, discreet motion, grabbed something from her pocket and lobbed it up through that gaping wound. As it sailed through the air, I recognized it as Charlie’s USB drive.
I followed her back to the front of the building, tagging along like a puppy dog as she headed straight for the main entrance. The guards smiled as they saw her approach. They must not have felt threatened. They didn’t even touch the rifles slung across their shoulders.
“It’s good to see you, Taylor,” one of the men said, greeting her with genuine warmth. “And your timing’s spot-on, as usual. The captain just left.”
“Awww, that’s a
“Think you can give him that for me, Johnny?” she asked, turning to the second soldier.
Both of the guards laughed. “I think I’ll have to give that one a pass,” the second soldier said. “I’m trying to
“That’s a good idea,” Taylor said. “I still need you on the door.”
“Okay, Taylor, enough of your goddamn charm.” Still smiling, the first soldier gestured her over to the side of the door. “You know the drill.”
Taylor nodded and held out her arms. The soldier lifted a portable metal detector from a loop of cord wrapped around his belt. He ran the wand over her entire body, up her front and back and then down the length of her arms and legs. After the scan, the soldier checked her pockets, giving them nothing but a quick, cursory pat. He waved her toward the building, then turned his attention to me.
The guards handled me with a bit more suspicion. I noticed the second soldier inching his gun forward as his partner looked me over; the soldier’s hand came to rest on the gun’s butt, ready to slip forward into the trigger guard. And the pat down was much more thorough, the soldier’s blunt hands running all the way up into my armpits and crotch. He felt the PowerBar in my pocket and made me take it out. He studied it for several seconds—holding it gingerly, as if it might explode—then tossed it over to his partner. I was about to complain, but the soldier cut me short with a curt shake of his head.
“You guys are good to go,” the soldier said, stepping up to the building and opening the door. “You know the rules, Taylor. Nothing to make me look bad.”
“Don’t worry. No anarchy today.” Taylor smiled and patted the soldier on the arm. “I’m just catching up with Danny.” Then we passed into the building.
The lobby was deserted. There was absolutely no furniture here, just one long, muddy carpet runner leading to a bank of elevators on the far side of the room. Lights were glowing overhead, but most of the fixtures had been cracked open and the fluorescent tubes removed. Taylor saw me looking and pointed up toward the roof. “They’ve got plenty of generators up there. The bulbs, however … they aren’t faring too well.”
The elevators were working, but Taylor walked right on by, leading me to the stairwell at the far end of the alcove. The light inside was inconsistent. I glanced up toward the roof and watched the stairwell pulse above me, the light waxing and waning with the strength of the generators. I could hear the electricity pulsing. It was a slow, slow heartbeat.
We climbed up to the third floor.
Taylor opened the door and led the way down a dimly lit corridor. The entire floor seemed deserted. I glanced through a couple of doorways and found row after row of empty cubicles. There was paper scattered across the floor. Upturned lamps on each desk. A couple of abandoned staplers.
All the furniture had been moved away from the walls. It looked as if, abandoned, these office spaces had surrendered to some previously unknown force of physics, something that pulled desks, chairs, and cubicle walls toward the center of each giant room. Maybe, in a thousand years, I’d come back and find a dense singularity in the center of each of these spaces. Nothing but compressed office furniture collapsed in on itself.
“Here we go.” Taylor’s voice echoed back down the length of the corridor, jolting me out of my reverie.
I found her in one of the big, empty rooms, squatting in front of a busted window. She was holding up Charlie’s USB drive. “Easier than smuggling it in,” she said, a sly smile on her face.
I followed her back to the stairwell, then up three more flights of stairs.
The sixth floor was bustling with activity. It had the same layout as three floors down, but the cubicles here were arranged with ruler-straight precision. And they were occupied, full of life. Each desk supported a heavy-duty notebook computer, illuminated from above by a standing desk lamp. A mix of casually dressed civilians and uniformed officers sat hunched over these machines, studying LCD screens and transcribing text from handwritten forms. A din of voices filled the air. It was standard office chatter: rat-a-tat-tat conversation, hushed laughter, muffled curses.
The difference between this floor and the one three floors down was disorienting. The architecture was the same, but the feel was radically different. Like it was the same place—the same floor—but separated by a vast period of time.
“This is the military command center,” Taylor explained, noticing the perplexed look on my face. “You’ll find the bigwigs up on the top two floors, plotting and planning, arranging the infrastructure, sending out search parties and data-gathering expeditions.” She gestured into one of the rooms. “Down here, you’ve got the dregs, crunching numbers and cataloging information, trying to make sense of what’s going on.”
We continued down the main corridor, past several more densely packed rooms. Finally, Taylor turned into a smaller office. There were only four cubicles here, all of them oversized and filled with multiple monitors. At the moment, the room held only a single occupant: a soldier dressed in a natty olive-drab uniform. He glanced up from his computer as soon as he heard us enter, and a wide smile spread across his face.
“Taylor!” the soldier exclaimed. He rose to his feet and greeted her with a warm embrace. I caught the grin on Taylor’s lips and felt a moment of intense jealousy; it was an irrational reaction, I knew, but it was something I couldn’t control. She was practically beaming. I hadn’t known her for long, but still, from all I’d seen, I wanted to be able to elicit that type of reaction in her, the sheer magnitude of that joy.
As soon as he let go, Taylor introduced us. “Danny, this is Dean. He’s a photographer. He’s trying to document the situation here.” The soldier’s arm remained draped around Taylor’s shoulder, and she reached up to pat his hand as she talked. “Danny’s my spy in the military-industrial complex. He helped me get in good with the soldiers.”
“You make it sound like treason,” Danny said. He held out his hand and I shook it. He was taller than me— about six foot two—and he had a powerful frame. His dark brown hair was sheared close to his skull, letting a glimpse of skin shine through. It made the curve of his head look like a powerful, tightly flexed muscle. He had a strong handshake. “I just help her out now and then. I figure I should do my part … lend a hand to the little guy.”
Danny smiled. He had a perfect smile—a warm, winning smile—and that bugged me to no end. “A photographer, huh,” he said, and he gave his head a tiny little shake. “You should be careful out there. The captain sees the press as public enemy number one, and he’s already got a couple of newsmen locked away at Fort Lewis … Frankly, I think he just doesn’t know what else to do.”
I nodded, remembering the Jeep with the P.P. plates on the outskirts of the city. Maybe I
I took a deep breath and watched as Taylor handed Danny Charlie’s USB drive. He sat back down at his computer and plugged it in, double clicking an icon as soon as it appeared on the screen. After a couple of seconds, Danny removed the drive and handed it back to Taylor.
“What was that?” I asked. “What did you just do?”
