40
Ames was back at the monitors drinking a cup of coffee when the truck blew up. He was looking right at it when it turned into a fireball, washing out the filters on the cameras with a bright white glare. He could feel the room vibrate, and heard the sound echo around him.
He set his coffee cup down carefully and rubbed at his eyes, still staring at his monitors.
When the images cleared, he saw what was left of the flatbed, mostly just the frame and wheels, burning like mad. Even the tires were on fire.
Of the men who had been there, there was no sign.
What could have happened? A fuel leak? Maybe the truck had been hauling explosives? No. He shook his head. He had seen that the thing was empty.
He shook his head, then took a sip of his coffee. What should he do about this? Anything? The men were beyond help, that was for sure. He hadn’t seen them for a few minutes, had assumed they had climbed back inside, unable to fix whatever was wrong. If they had — and they must have, because he didn’t see them running around out there — they were toast.
He could call the state police, he supposed, and report it, but he didn’t really want to have his presence noted. Even out here, somebody passing by would spot it soon enough and call it in. Yes, he was curious — but not enough to talk to the police. It didn’t concern him, and it wasn’t worth giving up the privacy and secrecy he had worked so hard to establish here.
Besides, the men in that truck were beyond help. There was nothing he or anyone else could do for them now. At least they probably never knew what hit them.
Where there had been a slab of concrete and steel rods, there was now a crater. But there was still dirt to be removed.
“Reaves, Holder, front and center!” Fernandez yelled. “Get those supersuits in gear!”
The pair of exosuited troopers moved forward, not quite a zombielike lurch, but not as smooth as a normal man’s walk, either. Accompanied by the hums of motors and hydraulics, they started moving dirt again.
“He surely heard our explosion,” Michaels said, pointing to the crater.
“If he is down there, I’d say he did,” Howard said. “That was unavoidable, which is why we had the decoy timed to go off at the exact same moment. The question is, did it work?”
“I guess we’ll find out soon enough.”
Ames watched the truck burn for a while, but there weren’t any more explosions, and he lost interest after a few minutes. He decided to get something to eat and go back to bed. One cup of coffee wouldn’t keep him from sleeping.
He loaded a fresh set of tapes into his recording devices, though. He’d check them in the morning, see how long it took the state patrol to arrive, and what they did while they were there. He also wanted to be sure they all left when they were finished. He didn’t want any stragglers anywhere on his property.
“We’re through, sir,” Reaves said.
Behind Reaves, Holder kept one augmented hand locked onto the trooper’s suit, preventing him from falling into the hole he’d just dug.
Howard nodded. “Lieutenant, the rope ladder.”
Julio came forward, unrolling the nylon and cross-slat device.
“It looks like it’s a good twenty feet to the landing, sir,” Fernandez said. “We’re going to be dangling.”
“No problem,” Howard said.
Michaels said, “Good. Let’s go find this guy, shall we?”
“Yes, sir, Commander. My thoughts exactly.”
Ames sat in the kitchen, eating a duck-egg omelet and black rye toast with marionberry jam. He paused, a bite halfway to his mouth.
What was that?
He listened carefully.
Nothing but the hum of the refrigerators. He waited a few seconds but heard nothing else.
One of the problems with a place this big and old was that it was full of creaky, groany things. Even this far under the surface, some of the heat must seep down enough to cause expansion and contraction. Unless there were resident ghosts, nobody was here but him. He was safer here than in a bank vault — nobody had a combination to
He finished his snack, washed and dried the dishes, and headed back to the bedroom. You didn’t want to go off and leave food caked on a plate when you might not be back for six or eight months. He hadn’t seen any ants, and they weren’t supposed to be able to get in here. On the other hand, they had found a roach on one of the space stations a couple years back, so why tempt fate?
He sat on the bed and started to pull his shoes off when he heard another noise.
One of his sensors had gone off.
The weird thing was, it wasn’t one of his perimeter alarms. Instead, it was a flashing red light that indicated a clogged air filter in one of the ventilator shafts.
What made it weird was that he had the filters cleaned and checked regularly. Out here in the desert, he had to. The only way that filter could be clogged this soon was if he’d left the door open behind him.
He stopped, felt a chill frost him.
Or if someone else had found another way in.
Michaels looked at General Howard.
Howard was studying a map on his flatscreen. After a moment he gestured down a hallway. “If Ames is still here, he should be over in that direction. The bedroom closest to the sensor room is only a hundred meters or so that way. That’s where I’d be staying, anyway.”
Michaels nodded.
Howard and his men carried 9mm subguns, along with their sidearms. Michaels had a pistol, one of the issue H&K tacticals, with instructions not to shoot unless somebody was in his face shooting at him. If Howard, Julio, and the two troopers all got outshot by one lawyer, the pistol probably wasn’t going to do him all that much good anyhow.
“Spread out,” Howard ordered. “And be quiet. Hand signals from now on.”
Ames held his pistol pointed at the floor, his finger outside the trigger guard, and moved carefully down the hall. He had to be imagining this, right?
He didn’t like coincidences.
Assume for the moment a worst-case scenario: Somebody was in here. If that was true, then it was bad news, very bad news. Because that would mean they had come specifically for him. That they were organized, well-informed, and extremely resourceful, not only to have found him, but to have mounted an assault and gotten inside undetected.
No. That shouldn’t be possible. They shouldn’t have been able to bypass his sensors, and couldn’t have gotten in if they had. No way.
No. He had seen the plans. He had explored every foot of the place. There were no secret doors he didn’t
