Dark Oracle (18 page)

Just a little farther,
she told herself.
Just another hundred steps. . .

She played the game, over and over again. Another hundred steps. That was a manageable goal. Another hundred. Another.
One, two, three, four, five. . .

Breathe.

She could hear voices ahead. Clutching her dying flashlight in her hand, she nearly broke into a run. The distant sounds seemed to emanate from her right, down the narrowest part of the shaft. It had fallen in on itself, leaving only a space the size of a child between the roof and the ceiling.

Tara clambered over the debris, rattling stones into the dark. She shoved her bag and backpack ahead of her and wormed her way through the opening. Her breath quickened in her throat, and a panic attack washed over her. She clawed through with her hands, earth pressed against her cheek. She dragged herself forward on her hands and knees, sharp stone tearing against her skin. Her flashlight quivered and died, leaving her stranded in the makeshift grave.

Furious panic charged through her, as it had years before. She dug, she fought, she kicked and dragged her way through. Her fingernails ripped and bled. She tasted dirt and sweat in her mouth, and she struggled against it, against the earth and the rock and the feel of suffocation pressing down on her ribs. She kept focusing on the voices, on what must be ahead. . . She thought she glimpsed light. . .

She burst through the blockage in a shower of gravel, spilling her out into a larger cavern in a sprawl of light. Blinking, she tumbled onto her hands and knees, backpack and purse slamming to the ground.

She’d fallen into some kind of storage room. Electrical wires were strung overhead, dangling utility lights like lanterns at a festival. A massive stainless steel box dominated one wall of the room, spreading sheet-metal tentacles above and over the sheetrock walls. It was warm, at least. Her ears and fingers began to ache in the presence of warmth. She guessed it was an incinerator, by the orange labels warning not to touch the feed panel without proper safety gear, and by the traumatized look of the stick figure who fell in. Voices echoed from beyond the walls, from what could have been a hallway or another room.

Boxes were stacked neatly along the walls, and she ran her fingers over the labels. The original delivery addresses were to Major Gabriel. This place must be one of the facilities under his jurisdiction, as well. . . but one not on any map. Many were studded with bright radiation warning stickers. Lifting the lid of a banker’s box, she saw they were full of paper. . . e-mail, mostly benign correspondence and scientific chitchat. Some open boxes contained deflated radiation suits, limp gloves grasping at air.

She lifted the unsecured flap of the nearest large box, the one closest to the incinerator. It was marked for destruction. She peered inside, and recoiled in horror.

The smell was unmistakable. Tara turned away, covering her nose with the back of her hand. Bent in on itself on several impossible angles was a clear plastic bag with a body in it. Barbara DiRosa’s sightless eyes peered back at her from a contorted neck.

The door to the incinerator room opened, and Tara scrambled back, crablike, on her hands to safety behind a tower of boxes that smelled better than the one she’d opened. She hoped the spew of dirt and gravel from the far wall would remain unnoticed.

Two men, one dressed in combat fatigues and the other in a white radiation suit, clomped into the room. One of them donned a set of welder’s gloves and opened the mouth of the incinerator, while carrying on a conversation with the other about weekend plans.

“Did you pick up some OT this weekend?”

“Nah. Going to go visit my mother for her birthday.”

“I don’t see how you could turn down double-time. . . Special teams have been busy.”

“It’s Mom. What am I gonna do?”

“Tell her you’d rather be chasing down the bad guys in a canyon than eating quiche at brunch.”

“Whatever.”

Tara leaned forward. Harry had been set to meet DiRosa at Bandelier National Monument. There were canyons there. Her heart felt sick, wondering if one of these other boxes held Harry’s discarded remains. If this room was where her intuition had led her, it could be the end of her search.

The box scraped forward on the stone floor, and then there was a soft thump as it hit the incinerator. Tara wondered if the men had even looked inside it to see what had happened to one of the “bad guys.” The men heaved two more boxes of something that rattled like paper into the incinerator, and she could hear the snap and crackle of the papers as they turned to ash. The lid on the incinerator door squeaked shut.

“Seriously. There’s overtime to be had in the detention block.”

“What? Now that they’ve got an actual prisoner to work over?”

“They’re going to get that guy to talk, sooner or later. . .”

The door to the incinerator room slammed shut, disturbing the utility lights enough to cause them to swing slightly overhead, shaking the shadows. Tara crept out from behind the wall of boxes. Hope flared within her. Perhaps that prisoner was Harry.

Tara looked down at her filthy street clothes. She’d be spotted in an instant. Backtracking to one of the boxes she’d opened earlier, she pulled out a crumpled radiation suit and zipped it on over her clothes. Better. She pulled the hood up over her hair, finding it didn’t bother her nearly as much as it had before. She smiled grimly. Perhaps her time in the mine had overcome lesser forms of claustrophobia. It sure beat cognitive-behavioral therapy for results.

Slinging her bags over her good shoulder, she opened the door and stepped into the buzzing white light of Gabriel’s den.

Chapter Seventeen

T
ARA FORCED
herself not to stop and gawk, tried to shuffle along as if she knew where she was going. Gabriel’s den was vaster than she had anticipated: the hollowed-out mine housed computer servers buzzing along in a honeycomb of glassed-in rooms, connected by arterial hallways leading to vast work spaces the size of aircraft hangers. She glanced in the door windows, seeing figures in suits like hers, standing over shining white vats that hummed like refrigerators, insulated with layers of shiny foil. Copper tubing and wires extended from control panels, lights blinking softly.

She thought about the purpose of this place. . . Why an old silver mine? She remembered what Cassie had said about scientists trying to trap dark matter in an old gold mine in Minnesota. . . That made sense, but the extreme secrecy of this place still bothered her. What else could be going on here that was hidden from view?

She slipped down labyrinthine corridor after corridor, passing an occasional soldier or white-suited researcher. At this hour, there were few. She suspected she’d crossed back on her tracks more than once, and fear of discovery and frustration sucked at her. The corridors, bleached in fluorescent white light with drop ceilings, were identical to each other, designated only with cryptic numbers.

She paused before the eighth corridor. She’d been running into the number eight over and over, in her readings, in Magnusson’s cryptic symbolism, in the infinity loop of the accelerator. She turned down this way, listening for footsteps.

This hallway was different. These doors were solid steel, pierced by a window embedded with wire mesh, each one locked as she brushed her hands over them. Absent the smell of bleach and urine, this looked identical to the secure wing of every mental facility Tara had interrogated prisoners in. All the windows were dark and opaque, except one at the far end. She could hear voices on the other side. What they said was indistinguishable, but she could hear the angry swell and fall of speech.

The door burst open, and Tara involuntarily took a step back. A cart littered with syringes, an IV bag deflated like a beached jellyfish, and blood-speckled pieces of gauze barreled through. The technician pushing it stopped before her, startled, and gestured at her bags with his chin.

“Did you bring the liquid nitrogen he asked for?”

Tara nodded, voice stuck in her throat. The technician jabbed a thumb over his shoulder to indicate the room, rattling away. “He’s waiting.”

Tara pulled her hood closer over her face and strode purposefully past the room. In her peripheral vision, she glanced through the door swinging shut, and her breath jammed in her throat.

A man Tara guessed was Gabriel presented his back to the door, kneeling over a figure prone on the tiled floor. She couldn’t see the figure clearly, but she recognized Harry’s spit-polished shoes.

She swallowed, her hand reaching reflexively in her bag for her gun. She could pass by, wait for Gabriel to finish what he was doing and leave, then rescue Harry. But Harry might not have that much time. . .

Her heart won out over stealth. She jammed her foot in the door as it swung shut, and she invaded the room. She drew her gun in a fluid motion, aiming it at the back of Gabriel’s head.

“Put your hands behind your head.” Her voice rang with quiet authority in the tiny room.

Gabriel laced his hands behind his head. “Thank you for joining us, Dr. Sheridan.” His voice was smooth, entirely unruffled. “You’re about to make my life much simpler.”

Tara swallowed. “Get on your knees.” She circled around to check on Harry, heart hammering.
Please be alive,
she thought.

Harry lay crumpled on the floor, his face a swollen mass of bruises. One sleeve was rolled up, and she could see the wounds made by needle marks. Mercifully, she could see the rise and fall of his chest.

“Tara?” he mumbled. “Hi, babe. Did you meet the purple dragon on the cheese wagon, yet?”

“What did you do to him?” Tara demanded.

Gabriel shrugged. “We interrogated him. He’s proving rather obstinate, so we resorted to a sodium thiopental cocktail with a zolpidem chaser.”

Tara tried to haul Harry upright. He was limp as a fish, stumbling on his feet.

“Hey, are we gonna go nick some tubers? I like cheese.”

“Yeah, Harry. We’re gonna go get some cheese.” Supporting Harry’s weight as much as she could, she kept her gun trained on Gabriel, who looked upon her with the serene patience of a Buddha.

“Nachos. Nacho blaster with tinfoil.”

“Open the door.” Tara gestured at Gabriel with the gun.

“No.” Gabriel smiled beatifically at her. “Get bent, ma’am.”

Tara cocked the hammer on the revolver. “It would be a lot easier for me to shoot you and then search you for your access card. Open the damn door.”

“You’re not going to shoot a man on his knees.”

Tara wavered for only a moment. She was enraged beyond all reason by what he’d done to Harry. Gabriel deserved some retribution, and she was more than happy to give it to him.

She stepped to his side, took aim, and pulled the trigger. Gabriel tumbled back, howling.“You bitch!” He clutched his foot. Blood seeped through his fingers, staining the shiny leather of his boot. He stared at her in amazement. “You shot me!”

Tara cocked the hammer. She’d given him only a glancing blow, but she wanted him to know that she wouldn’t play by the good-guy rules. “I’ll do it again. I’ll take out your left knee and work my way up. Now, unlock that damn door.”

Gabriel reached in his jacket pocket, tossed his ID badge on the floor. It skittered to a stop by her toe. “Do it yourself. And you won’t get far. Every soldier in this place will be on you.”

This was a classic trick: distract your enemy long enough to get her to stoop down, then attack when her center of gravity is at its weakest. Keeping Gabriel in her sight, she told Harry, “Harry, pick up the badge.”

Obligingly, Harry reached down for the badge. It took him three tries to grasp it. “Fish sticks.”

“Hand it to me.” Harry did as he was told.

She told Gabriel, “Give me your radio.”

He lashed it across the floor, bouncing it against the wall. Tara crushed the radio’s faceplate with a well-aimed strike of her heel. As drop-proof as walkies were, none of them could withstand broken keys. She just hoped it wasn’t one of the models with a man-down alert that would summon help when an internal mercury switch detected that the radio had gone horizontal.

Tara kept Gabriel in front of her, moved with Harry toward the door. She didn’t take her eyes off him, swiping the card behind her back. It took a few tries, but she succeeded in getting it through the slot. The door opened with a metallic clang of bolts being reeled back, and she backed out of the door. She kicked it shut on Gabriel’s glowering face.

“Harry, I need you to walk with me, as fast as you can.”

Harry valiantly tried to shuffle along, but he was too slow. Tara tried to take as much of his weight as she could, wounded shoulder screaming, and she felt a stitch or two pop. His limbs were simply too floppy to move the way he wanted them to. They were going to draw too much attention. She looked up and down the hallway, fervently hoping the technician had left his cart here, somewhere. . .

They rounded the corner to meet the staccato click of a half dozen handgun safeties being released. Tara skidded to a stop before a line of soldiers, her jaw tightening as a female figure shouldered its way through them. Though she’d never met her as an adult, Tara recognized the woman with eyes like agates. A bandage was stuck to her temple, and her stringy blonde hair was scraped back from her elegant brow. Her dark clothes were covered in dust; she smelled like earth.

Tara recognized her instinctively. “Adrienne.”

“Hand me the gun.” She extended a gloved hand. The other was in a makeshift sling “It’s over.”

She had no choice. She placed the gun in her palm, bracing herself for the soldiers to slam her to the ground. As they surged forward, she spied a familiar figure at the back, a figure just removed enough to keep from getting his hands dirty.

“Corvus.” She had wanted to be wrong about his involvement with Gabriel, but the cards had been too right.

“Meatball licker,” said Harry. “Corvus is a meatball-licking emu.”

T
ARA PACED THE PERIMETER OF THE TINY CELL, STARING UP
at the ceiling. Harry guessed she was trying to figure out how to climb up, to see if there was a way through the drop ceiling back out to the hallway. It was too far up for her to reach, and trying would be dependent upon Harry sobering up enough to lift her.

That was not going so well.

Harry sat with his back to the wall, hands in his lap. She gave up and sat down beside him. “How are you doing?”

“Still fuzzy.” He shook his head. “I can think pretty clearly, but my coordination’s shot.” He tried to run his hand through his hair and stabbed himself in the ear with his finger.

“Just rest,” she said.

“You shouldn’t have come back for me.” His tone bristled with anger, and Tara shrank away. “Now, they have the laptop, and they have you.”

Tara’s mouth hardened. “I wasn’t going to leave you.”

Harry snorted. “Now, they’re going to have the technology to harness dark energy. . . Not a good trade. And they’ll kill us anyway.” Why couldn’t she have left well enough alone? Why couldn’t she have stayed away? Now, they were well and truly fucked.

Tara wrapped her arms around her knees. She didn’t say anything, just rested her chin on her knees. “I wasn’t going to leave you,” she said finally, stubbornly. “You may not want me here, or want me in any fashion, but leaving you behind was not the right thing to do.”

He blew out his breath, reached to touch her shoulder, but she shrugged his hand off. “It’s only a matter of time until they hack that thing.”

“We’ll see. I’m not as convinced about their competence as you are.”

“You haven’t spent the night getting the crap beaten out of you in a drug-induced stupor. They seem pretty competent at that, to me.”

They hadn’t made a move to interrogate her, yet. By throwing her in the same cell as Harry, he knew they were listening, hoping that one or the other of them would slip up and let out some information about Cassie’s whereabouts or the computer password in casual conversation. Harry knew Tara knew it, too. He deliberately hadn’t asked about Cassie at all.

“Your arm’s bleeding again,” he remarked. It bothered him to see her hurt, and he knew it would hurt him even more when they killed her.

She shrugged. “It’s all right. It’s not like I got the crap beaten out of me while in a drug-induced stupor.”

Awkward silence settled over them.

“Trust me, it could be much worse.” Her mouth thinned. “Gabriel is an amateur.”

“That so?” A note of challenge rose in Harry’s voice. “He doesn’t hold a candle to the Gardener, does he?”

Her knuckles whitened on her elbows. “No, he doesn’t.”

Harry was angry at her for coming here, was lashing out. She’d take it, let him open that wound, and he felt instantly guilty for it.

“I’ll tell you my bedtime story about the Gardener.” Her tone was bitter, and she tried to control it, succeeded in flattening her voice to a dull recounting. Harry imagined this was the disinterested, emotionless voice she used in court testimony, or when patients with psychological issues reclined on her couch and confessed terrible sins. But she couldn’t look at Harry while she told the story. Instead, she looked up at the light from the fluorescent tubes.

“Once upon a time, there was a guy in the kingdom of Missouri, a botanist. You would think that would be a pretty sedate profession, but not for Amos Dalton. He had a fanatical devotion to his plants, to his research. He even developed three new species of irises.

“But sadly, he was a pain in the ass to work with. Total diva. He was let go from his position with a major bulb and seed producer because he got into a fight with his supervisor over patent rights to his darlings. . . That’s what he called them. His darlings. He stomped off in a hissy fit. Unfortunately, his reputation preceded him, and he couldn’t find another job in his field. He went to work at a florist shop to make ends meet.

“But he was determined to feed his darlings. In his mind, it took a great and terrible sacrifice to make these delicate specimens flower. He began looking at the women he delivered flowers to as nothing more than the sum of their biological parts, as plant food. He’d convinced himself that there was something special about the blood of women’s wombs that would give life to his plants, that they would give them something he couldn’t: a creative spark, a bit of primal fertility that would wrap his seeds and bulbs in life.”

Harry saw that her eyes drifted to the side in unfocused memory. Her pupils dilated, and Harry could glimpse the darkness growing there.

“A dozen roses from a paramour. . . a get-well bouquet of daisies. . . They led him to women who opened up their doors to him in delight, overjoyed to become part of his project.

“It was the bridal bouquet that made me most suspicious. I was working on his profile and drew the Eight and Nine of Pentacles from the Tarot, reversed. The Eight represented sour fruits of labor, the Nine suggested danger to a woman in a garden. A bride went missing on her wedding day, taken right from the church. Corvus and I arrived on the scene, and all that was left behind were white rose petals, a symbol of Death.”

She paused, and there was an audible click in her throat.

Harry touched her hand.

She shook her head. “I’m recently associating Corvus with that card, sorry.” She blew out a shaking breath, continued. “There was no bouquet, none anywhere. I was focused on the flower petals, where they’d come from. I took them to the lab, found that they were laced with ether. The bride’s credit card receipts showed the name of an internet company that rerouted orders to local florists, and I tracked down the address from there.”

“Did you go alone?”

She nodded. “I tried to call Corvus for backup, but he was not to be found. As usual. He said later that he hadn’t gotten the message. There was no time to wait if I hoped to find the bride alive.