Cam - 03 - The Moonpool (44 page)

The first thing that happened was that the emergency battery-powered lights came on, providing at least some illumination in the concrete stairwell. I tried the door marked
EQUIPMENT ROOM NO
. 7, but it was locked. Tony tried to pry open the door back into the guards’ anteroom without making any noise, but it, too, was locked. We had our borrowed guns out now, and we each put an ear to the anteroom door to see if we could hear the guards moving around in there, but it was all quiet on that front.

“Up?” Tony whispered.

“Can’t dance,” I muttered, so we started up the steel stairs. We could see between the flights all the way to the top of the stairwell, but the higher we looked, the darker it got. Four flights later we arrived at the mezzanine level. There was one door that led into the moonpool’s section, marked
TRANSFER
&
HANDLING MACHINERY
, and three unmarked doors leading out into the exterior ring of the building. The three exterior doors were locked; the machinery room was not.

This door opened out into the landing area. We looked inside, but saw nothing but large pumps, switchboards, a maze of piping, and what looked like the top section of an elevator hoisting cable assembly. We couldn’t figure out how all this tied into the pool’s access, although I caught a glimpse of a wall ladder leading up to the next level all the way at the back. The emergency lights didn’t reveal how high it went.

“Next level’s the pool deck and control rooms,” I said. “There’s another security force anteroom up there.”

“So why didn’t they react to the ruckus down below?” Tony asked while he made sure no one was lurking behind the big pumps.

I patted the wall, which Ari had said was ten feet thick. If the slabs between floors were anywhere near that thick, no sounds would penetrate. Large radiation warning triangles were painted all along the back wall of the pump room.

“Let’s see where that ladder goes,” I said and worked my way through all the machinery to the back wall. The emergency lights barely shone back here, and the ceiling of the room, some fifteen or even eighteen feet above us, was dark. Tony went to one of the emergency lights and took it down off its mounting so he could point it upward. At the top of the ladder we saw a steel scuttle hatch, complete with a circular operating ring on the underside.

“Emergency escape hatch?” Tony said.

“From here or from the moonpool?” I wondered. Since we hadn’t seen any control consoles in here, all of this machinery was probably remotely operated, which meant that
this was an unmanned space. So the hatch had to be a way out for someone on the moonpool deck itself. The big question now was where it came out—in a separate airlock, or right out in the open?

Then from down the stairwell we heard the bang of the door being opened back against the wall and voices. The guards had figured out they were alone and had finally summoned some backup. Tony closed the machinery room door and looked for some way to wedge it shut. There was nothing in the room that would help us.

“Up the ladder,” I said. “Gimme that light.”

Tony started up while I broke the light’s bulb and lens and put it back on the wall. There were two other lights still going in the room, but they didn’t illuminate the top of the ladder. I started up as the noise from the stairwell grew louder. Several guards were out there, but they were being really careful because they knew we had the anteroom guards’ weapons. A gunfight in a concrete and steel stairwell is a scary thing, as I knew from personal experience. If the shooter didn’t get you, the ricochets might.

Tony climbed as high as he could and then swung to one side of the ladder so I could get as high as he was. We hung there, listening to the people out in the stairwell.

“They come in here, see us, point weapons, we give it up, right?” Tony asked quietly.

I nodded. I wasn’t going to shoot it out with cops who were just doing their duty, even if they were rent-a-cops. While we waited, Tony tried the operating ring. It was really stiff, but it did move, and he began to turn it counterclockwise. There were steel lugs embedded in the rim of the hatch, and we could see them begin to retract as he turned the wheel, degree by degree, slowly in case the hatch was visible to someone up above us. I tried to remember the layout of the pool deck, and whether or not there’d been a round, steel escape hatch in the floor anywhere.

The door below us banged open, and a voice yelled for us to throw down our weapons and come out with our hands in sight. There was still only emergency lighting out in the
stairwell, so there was no blaze of light when they opened the door. Tony kept working the wheel in tiny increments, stopping every time one of the lugs made a noise. I watched as one of the cops stuck his head through the door behind his gun and then jerked it back. A moment later, three cops swept into the room below us and made a quick search of all the machinery. No one had a flashlight, thank God.

“Clear,” one of them announced, and a voice outside swore. They withdrew from the machinery room as a discussion ensued out in the stairwell. One of them said that we had to be up on the pool level, but another argued that there was no way we could have gained access because all the vital area readers were locked up. More back-and-forth like that as they tried to decide what to do, and it was clear that they did not fancy climbing the next four flights of stairs with two armed bad guys up there. Tony nudged me—the hatch was unlocked.

He pressed his forehead up into the dome of the hatch and signaled for me to push up on the operating ring. He looked like a submarine skipper raising the periscope to take a look. A thin line of white light appeared around the rim of the hatch, and I wished those cops had closed the machinery room door when they withdrew. Anyone looking in right now would see us, and they were still all standing around down there arguing about what to do next. Tony dropped the hatch quietly back into place.

“Control room, I think,” he whispered. “I could see chair legs, consoles, a trashcan, and a coffeepot.”

“People?”

“Not where I could see ’em,” he said, “but there’s a chair damn near on top of the hatch. All the lights are on up there.”

This all made sense: If there was some kind of problem out there on the moonpool deck, the technicians would run for the safety of the control room, which had glass walls and sealing doors. From there they could go out via one of the security doors. If things really got out of hand, like a fire in the stairwell, they still had a way out—down the escape hatch. There was probably a second hatch embedded in the floor of the pump machinery room that we hadn’t seen.

It sounded like they’d made some sort of decision down there, because it got quiet again. We had two choices: go back down the ladder and see if we could escape behind them, or go up into the control room. I could see that Tony had come to the same conclusion and was waiting for me.

“We came here to stop Trask,” I said. “Whatever he’s going to do has to happen up there. I say we go on.”

Tony turned around and began to lift the hatch. There shouldn’t be anyone up there at the control level at this hour of the night, except possibly Trask and Ari Quartermain—and his mysterious inside man, I reminded myself, he of the hearts and minds.

White light spilled down into the pump room as Tony fully raised the hatch, which he pushed until we heard a lock-back latch snap into place. Then he went through the hatch, up into the control room, and out of sight. I followed when I saw his hand wave me up.

The control room ran the full width of the moonpool’s open deck level. There were several consoles and instrument banks, and a rank of locking file cabinets all along the back wall. A window wall overlooked the surface of the moonpool, but we were crawling on the floor on our hands and knees. We needed to get a look out into the deck area, but not at the expense of being discovered.

There was one door from the control room out to the catwalks on the sides of the pool. It had a glass window in the top half, which was covered with notices taped to the glass. I pointed at it, and Tony understood. We crawled over to the door, and he slowly rose up to peek through the glass beneath the pieces of paper. He dropped back down immediately and raised two fingers.

“Quartermain and one other guy,” he whispered. We could hear sounds from outside the access door, but they were indistinct because of the airlock. “They’re lying on the bridge leading out over the pool.”

“Trask?”

“No see’um.”

“Are they alive?”

He shrugged. “No blood, but they’re not moving. And: I can’t see any water.”

“That’s because it’s all going somewhere else right now,” a voice said from behind us. My heart sank. It was Trask, standing head and shoulders out of the hatch on the same ladder we’d come up, pointing Tony’s shotgun at us. He’d been hiding down in the pump room all along.

He waved the muzzle of the shotgun in a clear signal for us to shed our own weapons, which we did. Then he stepped up off the ladder and told us to get up. As we stood up, he picked up our weapons, stepped to the door leading out to the moonpool deck, and pitched them into the water.

“I was right behind you, the whole time,” he said. “There’s another escape trunk from the ground floor to the mezzanine level. And I am
so
glad you made it. I actually thought you might. You look a bit damp, though.”

“You kill those guys out there?” I asked, indicating the two motionless forms on the bridge.

“Not exactly,” he said. “The radiation might, once the water gets below a certain level.”

“You are one sick puppy, Colonel,” I said. “Where’s Billy the Kid?”

“Busy, Lieutenant, busy.” He laid the shotgun into the crook of his arm while flipping open a cell phone and hitting the speed dial. I was surprised that the phone would work in here with all the shielding; they must have an inside repeater antenna somewhere.

“How’s the feed?” he asked, then listened. He was watching us, but not focused on us, and I felt Tony change his position fractionally. The two muzzles of the shotgun lifted an equal fraction, and I heard Tony exhale. No chance of rushing that thing.

“Okay,” he said. “Another ten minutes and you can take it down.” He closed the phone and went to the door to listen. Then he nodded, as if very satisfied with himself.

“Those guys can’t figure out what to do,” he said. “I’ve
killed the card readers, and Moira made the physical locks shut down. And I’ll bet their radios just stopped working.”

If your cell phone works
, I thought,
then one of them is going to figure that out, too
. I hoped.

“I love it,” he said, easing himself into a chair at one of the consoles. “I’m using their own machinery to do this. They have tanks under this building where they can dump the water. If the level drops unexpectedly, makeup water from the city system comes on automatically to restore the level. That gave me the pump I needed. Then all we had to do was defeat some check-valves.”

“What’s a check-valve?”

“A valve that allows the water to go only in one direction. Pressure on one side of the valve pushes open a flap. Pressure on the other side seats the flap against a steel ring so no fluid can go the other way. We just removed the flaps.”

“We?”

He pointed at the two forms lying facedown on the bridge. “Dr. Thomason did the valve work; Dr. Quartermain got us in here. And the lovely Miss Moira is feeding the video and instrumentation system an enormous crock of digitized bullshit.”

“Control doesn’t know the water level is dropping?”

“Control knows there’s something going on because of all those rent-a-cops outside. But radiation-wise, Control is seeing exactly what I want them to see. They think they’re dealing with a break-in. You tell those guards why you were here?”

I nodded.

“Well, they’ll have reported that. More confusion in Control. When she switches the instrumentation systems back to normal, they’ll have a level-one radiation emergency in this building, and they’ll forget all about the intruders.”

“Why?”

“Because all those guards out there are going to leave the building as fast as their shiny black combat boots can carry them. Then Control will override the automatic refill plumbing and push huge amounts of water into the pool, with even bigger
pumps. Only it won’t stay in the pool—it’s all going downtown, at least until they discover the problem.”

I wondered if McMichaels had taken my warning seriously; I sure hoped so. Then a chilling thought hit me: If the water department turned off their pumps, there’d be zero resistance to the slug of radioactive water Trask was going to send back up the system.

Trask looked at his watch again. “Wondering how this is all going to come out, Lieutenant?” he asked.

“You bet,” I said. Tony was clenching and unclenching his fists, but that shotgun wasn’t moving. I thought the reflection of blue light from the moonpool was getting brighter.

“Mass confusion,” he said. “Terror in the streets. And somehow, it’s going to be all your fault.”

“Hunh?”

“Well, look at it this way: I belong in here, as do Drs. Quartermain and Thomason. We work here. We have access. You don’t. You climbed a fence. You assaulted guards. You broke in here. It was only my extreme vigilance that kept you from doing bad shit.” He was laughing now, sounding crazier than a loon.