Kuhl took an instant to consider and then made his decision.
He turned toward the elevator, pressed the call button, stepped through the opening, and retreated.
“… oh my God, Ricci, this is unbelievable.”
Ricci’s face was bathed in sweat.
“Talk fast, Doc,” he said. “Have we got what we need?”
“We have it, yes. We have it, we have it. Several different types of inhibitors. Stored as computer models rather than pills. Novelty cures for novelty viruses. They had no reason to preproduce them, not physically, and they didn’t. But Ricci, what we’ve stumbled onto is beyond what we expected. There are hundreds, maybe thousands of activators. The virus must be infinitely mutable. A potential doomsday bug, and we’ve found-”
Ricci’s attention broke away from whatever Oh was telling him. He’d heard the thud of what might have been pistol shots down the hall. Two, maybe three. A
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fourth. Fairly close by. Then, perhaps five seconds afterward, several controlled, staccato bursts from a semiautomatic weapon that sounded like a VVRS.
He turned abruptly, ran across the room, through the door, and into the corridor. Looked left, then right.
No sign of Nichols in either direction.
His heart malleting in his chest again, he bounded down the hall, swung a corner past the microencapsulation lab, putting on speed. This was where the shots had come from.
Another turn, and then Ricci was met by the scene near the bottleneck elevator. It was a sight he would remember always.
Nichols was on the floor between him and the elevator door, sprawled on his back. Simmons and Rosander were down at the elevator itself. Seybold crouched over Nichols, cradling his head in his arms, the helmet off. Barnes, Newell, and Perry squatted over the other two fallen men, examining them, checking the severity of their wounds. And then Barnes looked up from the bodies at the sound of his approach, saw the question on his face, and shook his head no.
No.
Ricci dashed forward and knelt beside Seybold.
“How bad?” he asked.
Seybold glanced up from the young man in his arms, met Ricci’s gaze, held it. His long, pained look told him everything.
Then, weakly, Nichols’s hand came up from his side, and Ricci felt its touch on his arm. “Sir… I…” The thin, dry sound from his dying lips barely qualified as a whisper.
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Ricci pushed his visor up from his face, swallowed, and leaned over him. “I hear you,” he said. “Go on.”
Nichols looked up at him, his lips still moving, shaping unintelligible words.
Ricci took his hand into his own, bent closer. Their faces were almost touching now.
“Go on,” he said. “Go on, I’m here with you.”
Nichols grimaced, struggled out a sound.
“Wildcat,” he rasped. “Wild …”
Ricci felt something turn inside him. Slowly, grindingly. Like a great stone wheel.
He held Nichols’s hand.
“Okay, I heard you. Try to be easy now.”
Nichols lowered his eyelids but was still trying to talk. “Did … did we … ?”
Ricci nodded to his closed eyes. “We got it, Nichols. We-”
Nichols shuddered and produced a low rattle, and Ricci stopped talking, pulled in a breath that didn’t seem to reach his lungs.
The kid was gone. Gone before the answer to his question had left Ricci’s mouth.
“Pokey, you reading?”
“I hear you, Ricci.”
“Tell me what’s happening at the perimeter.”
“It’s getting busy near the main gate. Looks like some guards down there, a couple of jeeps. We saw two other cars turn out onto the road, really hauling, I don’t know where they came from. Didn’t exit through any of the gates, it’s like they came right out of the damn north side of the hill-”
Ricci thought a moment, standing over the bodies he
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would have to leave behind. Go far, killer. Go as far as you want, and we’ll see if it’s enough.
“Can’t worry about them now,” he said. “Your status?”
“We’re okay. Somebody radioed our booth to order the perimeter sealed. We had the caged bird answer, and Harpswell made sure he sang like we trained him.”
“Good. Be ready to open that service gate for us. We’ll meet you at the guardhouse, head to the pickup vehicle together.”
“Roger,” Pokey replied.
Ricci turned to Seybold.
“Let’s collect Carlysle and Realty and get the hell out of here,” he said.
There had been eleven of them when they entered. Now there were seven, one wounded, helped along by his companions.
Battered with loss, strong in purpose, Ricci’s men left the same way they had come, retracing their steps from lighted corridors to darkened ones, then through the commissary, kitchen, the freight entrance, and, at last, out into the night. The lack of resistance didn’t surprise Ricci. For all its malevolence, this was a working scientific facility, not an armed camp. The remaining security would be stretched thin, spread throughout the building or called to reinforce what they thought was a blocked perimeter fence. They did not know how the insertion team had gained access, did not know one of their gatehouses had been seized, and would be searching for a breach in the building’s integrity rather than an elevated freight door. But beyond any of that, they were without leadership. Their commander had fled,
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abandoned them as he’d abandoned his mercenary raiders in Kazakhstan. Brothers in arms.
Oskaboose and Harpswell remained in the booth until their teammates appeared, hit the switch to slide back the gate, and then hurried to join them. The activity inside the main gate had intensified; there were overlapping voices, headlights blinking on, engines thrumming to life.
They scrambled out the gate toward the road and the waiting escape vehicle.
Ricci had raised the driver on his comlink, advised him to be ready to roll, and as the insertion team arrived at the meet spot, the big armored van pulled out of the roadside trees with its rear payload doors wide open.
The insertion team poured inside.
And they rolled.
Crouched in back of the van, Ricci peered through its Level III ballistic cargo windows and saw two pairs of headlights above the black curve of road behind them.
Again, no shocker. There was only the one route across the hills to the highway, and it wouldn’t have taken the guards long to notice the open service gate.
“Those jeeps are getting close,” he said and snapped his head toward the driver. “How far to the bridge?”
“Less than half a mile,” he said. “We’d see it right now if this damned road wasn’t so full of twists.”
Ricci breathed. The van was powered by a turbocharged V-8, but its heavy, armor-plate hull gave the jeeps the edge in speed, and they were gaining fast.
He lowered the high, fold-down seat mounted to the side of the right load door, got into it, slid open a hidden
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gun port in the door, and thrust the muzzle of his VVRS through the port. At his nod, Seybold did the same behind the opposite door.
The jeeps were gaining, gaining, their high beams spearing the darkness. The lead vehicle was maybe a hundred yards back … ninety … eighty …
Ricci poured out a stream of fire, Seybold triggered his own gun, the two of them peppering the road with bullets, hopefully throwing some fear into their pursuers.
It worked. The jeeps dropped back, their ineffectual return fire spacking off the rear of the van.
“How we coming?” Ricci shouted to the driver.
“Almost there, almost, almost-”
They swung onto the short, concrete bridge.
Ricci and Seybold kept laying out parallel bands of fire, kept the jeeps trailing at a distance.
“Okay!” the driver called out. His foot tramped on the accelerator. “We’re across, we’re home, I can see the chopper straight up ahead!”
Ricci nodded, stopped firing, gave the lead jeep a chance to make the bridge.
Its front tires rolled onto the span.
“Now, Thibodeau!” he shouted over the comlink. “Do it!”
At the Two Shoulders base camp, Rollie Thibodeau lightly fingered a switch on his handheld remote-firing device, initiating the radio-addressable mines his team had affixed to the bridge support pillars.
Behind the pickup van, the bridge went up with a flash and a roar, its center heaving upward and then disintegrating, an avalanche of concrete that went crashing
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downward, taking the jeeps and their occupants with it, mangled, burning, tumbling, down and down and down in a great dome of flame to the frozen streambed below.
“Done,” Thibodeau grunted.
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VARIOUS LOCALES NOVEMBER 18, 2001
AS HE REACHED FOR THE TELEPHONE, HARLAN
DeVane was pleased to note that his hand was not trembling. Perhaps his control was only temporary and would slip once the ramifications of Kuhl’s call from Earthglow sank in. Perhaps some part of his mind was still denying that the Sleeper project was finished. He had invested so much in it, made his pronouncements, staked his name on its success. But the inhibitor codes had been expropriated. Seized by men Kuhl was convinced were operatives for Roger Gordian. What was left?