He stuck his head out the open doorway and looked back. Then, with hard jerks of the wheel, a lane at a time he began cutting into the gaps in the unbroken flow of traffic, working his way gradually past the middle of the freeway. He was a dozen lanes from the left-hand wall when he slammed his fist on the dash and said, “Shit! Shit! They’ve already got it sealed off!”
Ryan looked out the windshield. Five hundred yards ahead, the far left lane was blocked off by black APCs. Ground troops in battlesuits stood behind the barricade.
“That was the entrance to the Totality Concept complex,” the warlord said as they whizzed by. “And those were FIVE’S APCs. No way are we getting in there.”
“Do they expect us?” Ryan asked.
“They expect trouble,” Nara told him. “The CEOs are trying to protect their tickets out of here. By defending the TC complex with a jointly manned force, FIVE can keep any one Global from rushing in and taking it over. And they all have to be worried about their own upper-level managers. Probably figure the lot of them are going to go berserk when they find out how short the passenger list really is.”
“What are we going to do, Bill?” Damm asked.
“Go up another way,” the warlord said, “and try to break through from the outside.”
“You mean, on top, through the roof?” Damm queried.
“What other choice have we got?” Nara queried. Then she leaned between the front bucket seats and asked, “Ransom, how are we going to get into one of the other complexes?”
From the console beside him, Thrill Bill picked up a flat, black object about two inches square and showed it to her. “This van’s previous owner was a midlevel executive at Hutton-Byrum-Kobe. This is the key to the front door.”
The warlord moved into the far left lane and slowed. They slid along a solid concrete wall until it bent farther to the left, leaving a narrow shoulder for him to pull onto. A sign painted on the concrete said HBK. The shoulder ended abruptly in a blind wall. Thrill Bill stopped the van and pressed the key. The entire wall slid back, exposing a long, narrow room. Ryan recognized it as the interior of a wag-sized elevator.
“First things first,” the warlord said as he leaned out the van’s doorway with his laser rifle. He fired left-handed, a single pulse that melted the sec video-camera mounted high on the wall at the back of the car. Then he got out, stepped into the elevator and fried the camera on the facing wall.
Thrill Bill then pulled the van into the elevator and parked. The door slid shut behind them, and immediately the elevator lurched, groaned and started upward.
“We can’t stay in here,” the warlord told them. He climbed on the roof of the van, reached up and pushed open the trapdoor in the ceiling of the elevator. He pulled himself through the hole.
Ryan was the last one up, and Bill shut the trap after him. The light was dim, supplied by a single, caged bulb atop the frame that contained the car’s spinning gears and pulleys. The stained, concrete-lined shaft sped past them as they rose. Ryan saw a second set of cables swaying on the other side of the shaft. Over the sound of their elevator’s motor, he could hear a grinding, rushing noise from above.
“We’ve got another car coming down from the top,” Thrill Bill said. “When it passes by, we’ve got to jump onto the roof.”
“You’ve got no plan whatsoever, do you, Ransom?” Nara said.
“I plan to keep on living.”
The concrete box above kept dropping, and they kept rising to meet it. Ryan wondered when they would catch up to it after they jumped. Would it be thirty stories down, when it had finally come to a stop?
But the falling elevator came to a halt one floor below them.
Bill stepped across the four-foot gap between the cars. Damm, Ryan and Nara stepped after. They landed so lightly on the roof that no one inside could have heard them.