Ricci shuffled forward in a squat, the others close behind him, all of them sticking to the shadows along the
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main building’s wall. At the edge of the wall he signaled a halt. There were ten yards of open ground to the gatehouse. Dark yards. His group would be fine if they stayed low. He gave his command, and they made the stealthy dash.
Out of sight beneath the windows now, pulse racing, epinephrine flooding his system, its taste filling his mouth like he’d bitten into an allergy pill, Ricci waited for his men to hastily take their positions, Grillo and Barnes to the right of the door, gripping their VVRS guns, Newell right behind him on the left side, Carlysle crouched back in the darkness facing the door, ready for the kick.
Three fingers of one hand raised, Ricci drew his expandable ASP baton from its belt scabbard with the other and counted off. Vocally and manually. One finger went down.
“. .. two, three!”
In a heartbeat, Carlysle sprang erect and took two giant steps forward, his leg thrusting up and out. The sole of his boot hit the door under the handle, and it banged inward.
Ricci rushed into the gatehouse, clenching the tactical baton’s foam grip, thumbing the release stud to extend its tubular-steel segments. The guards seated side by side at the control panel twisted around toward the entrance, agape with stunned surprise. Peripherally aware of his own men moving in around him, Ricci saw assault rifles slung over the guards’ chair backs: a P-90 for Mr. Left, and an H&K for Mr. Right.
Mr. Right was quickest on the uptake, snatching for his weapon. Ricci went at him with the baton, smashed a blow to the back of his wristbone, and with a contin-
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uous movement slid it under his forearm, grabbed hold of the tip so he was holding both ends, and crossed it, applying strong pressure. The ulna snapped like brittle wood. Mr. Right flopped around on his chair and started to scream. Ricci pulled the baton free of his arm and then brought it up and struck his neck sideways at the pressure point below the ear. He made a noise like water sucking down a partially clogged drain and hit the floor motionless, the clouted arm bent at several unnatural angles.
Ricci pivoted toward Mr. Left, the baton arcing in front of him, but his hands were raised in the air, his firearm already taken, Grillo and Barnes jamming their guns into his ribs. Carlysle and Newell had their weapons trained on the guy who’d been caught napping.
Ricci stood between the two captive guards, looked from one to another, then gestured at the control panel.
“Which of you gamers wants to let us in the freight door?” he asked.
Neither of them responded.
He turned to Mr. Left, waved Grillo and Barnes aside, snapped the baton across his face. Blood gushed from his broken nose, and he crashed back over his chair to the floor.
Ricci whirled back toward the now wide-eyed napper, bunched the front of his shirt in his fist, and hauled him to his feet.
“Guess it has to be you,” he said.
“You still with us, Thibodeau?” Ricci asked over the comlink.
“Check,” he replied from the Two Shoulders camp.
“How about you, Pokey? Everything under control?”
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“Yup.” Oskaboose’s voice now, from the gatehouse. “It’s a big mess, though.”
“Next time, I’ll try to be neater,” Ricci said. ‘Those two guards should be out for a while. Either one starts to squeal, hit him with some more DMSO. He’ll conk.”
“Got it.”
“I don’t want you or Harps well taking your weapons off that third crack lookout. If anybody from the facility radios or approaches the booth, he’s your receptionist. Make sure he answers with a smile. And that he doesn’t forget what’ll happen to him if he says the wrong thing.”
“Got you again.”
Ricci paused a moment to order his thoughts. Then: “Doc?”
“I’m here.” This was the voice of Eric Oh, at the San Jose headquarters with Nimec and Megan the Merciless. “They just patched me into the A/V a minute or two ago.”
“Figured you could live without seeing the preliminaries,” Ricci said. “The signal clear at your end?”
“It’s a little scratchy, but they’re working to clean it up,” Eric said. “Where are you in the building right now? It looks like a kitchen.”
Ricci looked around, his helmet’s monocular NVD sight down over his right eye. Minus Oskaboose and Harpswell, his team had made their way through the opened freight entrance and then down a couple of dim and empty branching corridors, seeking the path of least resistance into the main section of the building. The first unlocked door had led them here. And a kitchen it was. A big one, too. Obviously, it produced food for the resident staff. There were heavy steel commercial appliances, walk-in refrigerators, triple-basin sinks, overhead
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grid hooks hung with cookware. Shelves stocked with seasonings, coffee, and other supplies.
For some incomprehensible reason, Ricci suddenly recalled his father’s preferred version of grace at the dinner table: Good friends, good food, good God, let’s eat. It had been years since that little snippet of his past had crested from the depths of memory.
“Yeah, Doc,” he said. “Hang tight, we’re moving.”
Ricci started toward a tall swing door at the far end of the room, leading his men down the aisle between a long cutting counter and a solid row of ovens, grills, and ranges.
A hurried glimpse beyond the door’s eye-level glass pane revealed the darkened commissary on the opposite side: tables and chairs; vending machines; convenience islands for napkins, condiments, and eating utensils.
Mundane. Commonplace. Like a high school cafeteria.
Ricci pushed through the door, his men at his heels, then saw the general employee entrance to the commissary to his left-double-swing doors this time-and hooked toward it.
He paused again at the doors, eased one of them open a crack with his gloved fingertips, and slowly leaned his head through the opening.
A hallway lined with doors stretched to either side. Name plaques on the doors, these were offices. And down at one end, he spotted something that simultaneously quickened his pulse and made his neck hairs bristle.
There were two signs on the wall, one above the other. The bottom sign was a simple arrow pointing to a cross corridor. The top sign displayed the biohazard symbol.
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Ricci rapidly led his team along the darkened corridor and turned in the direction of the arrow marker, aware of the dull, leached-away sound of their footsteps between the thick concrete walls.
At the juncture with the connecting hall was another set of swing doors. Recessed ceiling fluorescents glowed in the passage beyond their windows.
Ricci ordered his men to fan out against the walls, then went to the double doors and carefully looked past the glass. The hall beyond seemed empty. He gently shouldered through the partition into the milky wash of light.
The doors lining the sides of this passage were no longer of the ordinary office building variety. These were metal-clad, bullet-resistant installations, most with swipe readers and entry-code keypads.
Instructing the others to follow close behind him, Ricci moved forward into the corridor.
“You have any pointers, Doc, let’s hear them,” he said into his helmet mike.
“My guess is you’re heading in the right direction. In general, bioengineering firms are laid out like any commercial or industrial facility. According to the stages of production, from start to finish-”
“You don’t warehouse the showroom-ready car with the parts that go into it.”
“Exactly.”
“Okay, what else can you tell me?”
“The absolute best thing for us would be to find actual, preformulated inhibitors for the virus, chemical blockers that would prevent its binding proteins from attaching to Gordian’s cellular receptors. Failing that,
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we’d need to access Earthglow’s computerized gene banks to get the data on how the bug synthesizes its isoforms-”
A twinge of impatience. “Closer to English, Doc.”
“The proteins or peptides generated by alternative RNA splicing,” Eric said. “If we get those coded templates, we can use the information to derive our own inhibitors and stop the virus’s progress. But that could take a while, and Gordian’s condition doesn’t give us much-Wait, slow down, I want a look at that sign to your right.”
Ricci turned so his helmet camera was facing it.
The sign read:
FLOW CYTROMETRY
“Okay, thanks, that’s not what we need,” Eric said. “Back to what I started to explain, the inhibitors would be an end-stage product. Microencapsulated like the triggers that awakened the bug. And probably kept in the same area. Storage wouldn’t be complicated. The capsules are designed to have a long shelf life in a dry, clean, room-temperature environment.”
Ricci hastened down the passage. “What am I keeping my eyes out for?”