Red Knight Falling (21 page)

THIRTY-EIGHT

Whatever the cargo crew expected when the door rattled up, flooding the truck with light, it probably wasn’t us. I leaped down from the truck, sticking my gun in the closest docker’s face and shoving him backward, clearing room for Cody and Jessie to follow me out. Three guys at a card table playing penny-ante poker on the edge of the cluttered loading bay dropped their cards and shot up their hands when they got a look at Jessie’s submachine gun. Another tried his luck. He kicked back his chair and bolted for the door on the far side of the bay, or maybe the bright-red fire-alarm handle right next to it.

Cody had Jessie’s Glock, but he didn’t use it. Instead, he charged after the runner like a star linebacker, throwing his shoulder into him and taking him down in a full-on tackle. They crashed into a stack of wooden cargo pallets together, tumbling to the ground, wrestling for the gun until Cody ended the fight with a pile driver of a punch that knocked him out cold.

“Listen up,” Jessie said, keeping the table covered. “We don’t want you and we don’t want your money. Nobody does anything stupid, nobody has to get hurt.”

One by one, we trussed up the workers with zip ties, took their cell phones, and loaded them into the truck. With the last worker on board, I rolled the cargo door shut and swung the heavy latch to lock it down. Two quick slaps on the side of the truck was Kevin’s signal to get rolling, driving back the way he came in. I watched the truck round the corner and slip out of sight, leaving us behind.

“I see Kevin coming my way,” April’s voice said in my ear. She was stationed back at the SUV, keeping an eye out for anyone approaching the guardhouse. “As soon as you’re clear, we’ll anonymously notify the local authorities so they can come release those gentlemen from the truck. No problems so far, I gather?”

“No problems,” I said, “but that was the easy part.”

I cracked the door at the back of the loading bay and poked my head out. A white-tiled corridor ran left and right. One direction marked with a yellow stripe along the wall, the other with a streak of pale blue. Up in the corner, in a bend to the right, a slender security camera whirred its eye in my direction. I ducked back and pulled the door closed.

“We’ve got cameras.”

“I’m on it,” Kevin’s voice said in my ear. “Hang back a second.”

I heard a truck door slam, and quick footsteps.

“Okay, I’m back with April and you are . . . golden. I’m feeding all the cameras a five-second loop of empty hall footage. Nobody will know you’re there.”

“How about you use those cameras and let us know where the guards are?” Jessie asked.

“I can blind the cams, or I can watch through them,” Kevin said. “But if I can see through them, so can the guards in the security room. Pick one.”

Jessie grimaced. “Fine. Keep ’em blind. We’ll just be extra sneaky.”

“Fun fact,” Kevin added. “Unless they’re running off an independent security system, there are
no
cameras in the middle or inner shells.”

I nodded. “Makes sense. That’s where Diehl keeps his occult security. Doesn’t want his rent-a-cops seeing that stuff. Kevin, don’t suppose you have a map?”

“Take a right, then the first left. From there it’s a straight shot to the choke between the outer and middle shells.”

Which was exactly what we didn’t want, at least not without securing three ID cards to get us safely through. Still, I led the charge, Jessie right behind me and Cody covering our backs as we crept up the corridor. Bright-white light washed down from long ceiling panels every five feet or so, banishing shadows and turning the long, straight halls into a perfect shooting gallery.

We made our way past the R&D labs, crouching low to inch our way past long plate-glass windows, freezing at the sound of footsteps. As we approached the checkpoint, one sign beside a closed door caught my eye:
E
MPLOYEE
L
OCKERS
/C
HANGING
R
OOMS
.

I didn’t have much hope that some hapless scientist—or better yet, three of them—had left their identification behind, but it was worth a look. What we actually found, hanging in a row of tall metal lockers, was better than nothing.

“Bunny suits,” Jessie said.

When a contaminant smaller than a grain of sand could ruin a research project or destroy thousands of dollars’ worth of equipment, nothing is more important than a sterile environment. The white, glossy Gore-Tex coveralls were ready for the clean room, designed to sheath Diehl’s researchers from head to toe and keep them from shedding a single loose eyelash.

“Those guards at the checkpoint,” Cody said. “They’ve gotta have the access cards we need, right? So how about we play a little dress-up? With these on, we’ll look like we belong here. Probably get right on top of ’em before they notice we aren’t wearing IDs.”

“And then we give them the bum’s rush. I like it.” Jessie grinned and looked my way. “This guy? He’s a keeper.”

We suited up fast, pulling the coveralls on over our street clothes. The bulky suit made me feel like an astronaut in training, especially when the hood went on and I stared out at the world through a tiny oval window of translucent plastic. When I looked at Jessie and Cody, all I could make out were their eyes—and from more than five feet away, not even that. Perfect. I took a deep breath. The inside of the bunny suit smelled like fresh talcum powder.

The guns were a problem: definitely not standard scientific equipment, and hard to hide. While I didn’t mind hooking one of the stun grenades onto my belt under the coveralls, the guards weren’t going to politely wait while we unzipped our suits to get at our firearms. I pulled down another bunny suit from the locker and folded it neatly, like a bundle of laundry, then collected Cody and Jessie’s guns. Our weapons fit snug between the folds of thick plastic, and I hefted the bundle in my arms. Nothing suspicious here—not unless someone came close enough to see the two pistol grips sticking a scant inch out to the left and right, ready to grab. In the hall outside, Cody and Jessie flanked me and stayed close.

The booties squished under my feet, slippery on the spotless tile, and the overhead fluorescents cast spears of light through the porthole visor and into my eyes. Still, I couldn’t miss the checkpoint up ahead: not with two guards idling alongside an airport-style metal detector and big block letters on the wall reading
M
IDDLE
S
HELL
A
CCESS
: G
REEN
C
LEARANCE
R
EQUIRED
.

One of the guards flipped through a magazine on the screen of his Diehl-brand tablet PC. The other pushed away from the counter he’d been leaning against, giving us a hard look as we approached.

“Hey,” he said as he stared me up and down, “where’s your employee ID?”

“Thought we’d take yours,” I replied.

Cody and Jessie’s hands snaked under the folded bundle in my arms, drawing their pistols and taking aim. I curled my gloved hand around the submachine gun’s grip and braced the stock against my other palm, letting the discarded suit crumple to the floor.

One of the guards glanced toward a big red button on his desk console. Just a glance, with his open hands tense enough to tremble.

“I wouldn’t,” Jessie said.

He didn’t. We zip-tied their wrists and ankles, laying them down on the floor behind the console, out of casual view.

“I know what you’re thinking,” I said as I crouched down, plucking the laminated badges from their belts. “You’re thinking that the second we’re out of sight, you can scream for help and your buddies will come running. What you
should
be thinking is that if the other guards can hear you, so will we. And we’ll be back here—to quiet you, permanently—before the cavalry comes to save you. Sit tight, keep your mouths shut, and we won’t have to hurt you. Understood?”

Tiny, frightened nods. They understood, all right.

“We get the right stuff?” Jessie asked.

I rubbed my fingers across the IDs, tracing glossy faces on a lime-green background. I felt the metal disk folded inside each one, warding talismans like the one Agent Cooper had shown us. Perfect.

The problem was, we had only two of them.

I bundled up the guns again and handed an ID to Jessie and Cody. “Here. Clip them onto your suits. Unless someone gets close enough to peek inside your helmet and realizes the photo doesn’t match, it’s a perfect disguise.”

“What about you?” Jessie asked.

“If we see someone coming, I’ll get behind you.”

“No,” Jessie said, emphasizing the words this time. “What about you?”

I knew what she meant. The burners. Bobby Diehl’s psychic-lobotomy traps.

“If I focus hard enough, I should be able to feel them before I set one off.”

“Should?”

I nodded. “Should.”

“That’s one hell of a ‘should,’” she told me.

I led the way into the middle shell. I wanted to get moving before I lost my nerve.

Kevin navigated us through the tangle of hallways, past shuttered windows and doors with heavy-duty electronic locks. This was Spearhead’s nerve center, the labs where Diehl’s brain trust worked to invent the next big thing in home electronics. We passed a pair of guards on patrol in the hall, and I quickly slipped behind Jessie. They barely gave us a passing glance.

Then I felt it, in the heart of a four-way junction. The tickle at the back of my sinuses, like the tip of a feather.

I stopped so fast Cody bumped into me, almost knocking the bundled guns from my arms. “What is it?” he asked.

I shook my head. Stretching out my senses, letting my vision slip out of focus, I strained to find the trap. Its energy buzzed all around me, like a gnat winging into my ears and eyes, only to dart out of reach when I slapped at it.

Then I saw it. A shimmering wave like a heat mirage, walling off the corridor to the right. A row of twisted runes gleamed on the tile floor, cut into the porcelain with a blade thinner than a spider’s web. The psychic trap perched, silent, waiting for prey to stumble into its arms.

“Kevin,” I said, “this way’s a no-go. I need another route.”

“Uh, there isn’t one. Not unless you want to cut right through the main R&D lab, which is probably the most guarded room in the entire plant.”

“No good,” Jessie said. “We haven’t even laid eyes on the tablet yet. Set off an alarm now, I guarantee Santa Monica’s finest will be waiting for us outside by the time we leave. That ends with us in custody, or climbing over a pile of dead cops, neither of which I’m in the mood for.”

I frowned, thinking fast. Then I got an idea.

“Here,” I said, passing the bundle with the guns to Cody. “The two of you, walk about ten feet down that hall. Then one of you can toss your ID card to me, and I’ll meet back up with you.”

Jessie glanced at her ID, and at the seemingly empty corridor. “So you’re
sure
these badges will keep us safe?”

“The talismans inside them will. But hey, if you’re worried, give me yours and I’ll be the first one through.”

She shook her head. “Nah. That’s all I needed to hear.”

All the same, she held her breath as she walked through the shimmering field, with Cody right on her heels. They stopped about halfway down the hall and turned back to me. Jessie paused, her fingers on the ID card.

“Safe to take this off?”

“You’re good,” I said. “Just stand right where you are, and don’t come any closer to me. Toss the card on over.”

That was the moment when the two guards we’d passed earlier decided to double back in our direction.

THIRTY-NINE

The guards closed in on me, eyes as hard as the fat revolvers on their hips. Up the hall, I saw Jessie edge closer to the bundled guns in Cody’s arms.

“You. Where’s your badge?”

I spread my gloved hands, chuckling behind the coverall’s visor. “Got chewed up in the washing machine, can you believe that? Now I’ve got to go see HR and have a new one made. They’re gonna dock my pay fifty bucks for it, too.”

The other guard shook his head, one hand easing closer to his holster. “You telling me they let you this far into the building without any ID?”

“Yeah, the guys at the checkpoint just waved me on through. C’mon, can you just look the other way this once? I’ve got way too much work to do. I’ll go to HR right after my shift ends, I promise.”

A walkie-talkie squawked. The closest guard plucked his from his belt, sighing as he raised it to his lips.

“Patrol Green Two, over.”

A voice on the other end, blanketed in a wash of static, responded.

“Patrol Two, get down to the green checkpoint ASAP. They missed their call-in, and they’re not responding to the radio. Something’s wrong. Over.”

They knew. We locked eyes. Standing like gunfighters on the street at high noon, about to draw. Except it was two against one, and I didn’t have a weapon.

The walkie-talkie tumbled from the closest guard’s hand in slow motion, plummeting as he reached for his revolver, his partner doing the same. Chrome snaked against tan leather as the barrel swung up and I sidestepped, snatching the ID card from his belt with one hand and his wrist with the other. I twisted his gun arm into a joint lock and shoved hard, sending him stumbling.

Straight into the shimmering mirage, without the protection of his ID.

The walkie-talkie smashed on the tiles with the sound of a gunshot, bouncing, case cracked and electronic guts spilling out. The guard hit the ground, too, webbed in a sheath of black lightning, his jaw clenched and eyes bulging as his whole body lurched into a violent seizure. His partner dropped to a crouch, bringing his .38 up in both hands and pinning me in his sights—then Jessie’s pistol barked and a bullet punched through his brain. A spatter of scarlet stained the ivory tile where he fell.

I clipped the stolen ID onto my belt, catching my breath. The guard in the trap flopped on the floor like a fish on a dock, drooling white foam from the corner of his mouth. There wasn’t anything left of him in the wake of the curse blast, just a meat puppet with its strings cut.
That, and their pain receptors
, I remembered Agent Cooper saying.
Diehl was particularly proud of that one.

I crossed over, reached for the bundle in Cody’s arms, took out the other silenced Glock, and put a bullet between his eyes. It was the best I could do for him. The thrashing stopped. Then I tugged down the zipper on my coveralls with fingers gone cold, stripping off the suit.

“Dispatch will send another patrol to that checkpoint any minute now,” I said, “or just raise the alarm. We’re officially on borrowed time.”

“What happened?” April said in my ear. “We heard gunfire.”

Jessie followed my lead, ripping her hood back, lips curled in a grimace as she glanced down at the two dead men. “Hopefully nobody else did. Okay, we’re officially upping the tempo here. Kevin, you’d better be watching that alarm system like a hawk.”

“No worries,” his voice said. “I’ve got the whole place on lockdown. You just watch out for the spooky stuff.”

We left the coveralls in a pile on the hallway floor. Next to the corpses and the bloodstains, they were the least of our concerns. As I turned, I caught Cody looking my way. Something in his eyes I couldn’t quite read. An unease that wasn’t there before. I squeezed the grip of the Glock and stared straight ahead.

You said you could handle this,
I thought, stepping over the legs of the man I’d just killed.
I hope to God you weren’t lying.

I shoved the worry out of my way. No time for that now. We prowled the empty halls, low and fast, guns at the ready. Jessie shouldered the MP5-N, sweeping around each new corner with her finger on the trigger. If anyone else crossed our path, we wouldn’t be slowing down to take prisoners.

“Heads up,” Kevin said. “Security just tried to trip the burglar alarm. I’m running a bypass: they
think
Santa Monica PD just got a red alert, but I killed the signal before it went out. In about fifteen minutes, when no SWAT teams show up, they’re gonna know something’s funny. I can’t stop ’em from picking up a telephone and dialing 911 the old-fashioned way, so you might wanna move a little faster.”

“You’d think there’d be a siren,” Jessie muttered, “or some kind of evacuation.”

I didn’t like it. I liked what we found around the next corner even less: the inner shell checkpoint, abandoned. A half-eaten burrito in tinfoil sat out on the lonely security console, still steaming.

“Why would they pull security
away
from the place they’re supposed to be guarding?” Cody asked.

“Two possibilities,” I said. “Either they’re moving all hands to the exits to try and stop us from getting out of here alive—or security didn’t move out, it moved
in
, closer to the tablet.”

Jessie held up three fingers. “Don’t forget the third option: C, all of the above. Let’s go.”

The inner shell was nothing but a looping octagonal hallway painted in a thick red stripe, eventually winding back to where it began. Windowless doors marked the space, every twenty feet or so, with simple and dour plaques:
E
XPERIMENT
S
TAGING
A
,
E
XPERIMENT
S
TAGING
B
,
R
ESTRICTED
M
ATERIALS
B
—

“Here we are,” I said, glancing to the door. On the wall beside the brushed steel handle, a red light blinked above a key-card reader. “Kevin, don’t suppose you can remotely unlock this thing?”

“Under normal circumstances, that’d be iffy at best, but let me dig around and . . . yes! Found it. Man, I am on
fire
tonight.”

Jessie gritted her teeth, taking hold of the door handle as the light flickered from red to green and the lock let out a faint
click
.

Beyond the door, in a short, downward-sloping hallway, bulky white boxes lined the stainless-steel walls. They were some kind of refrigeration units, vented and hooked to bulky cables and bright-yellow hoses. Each was about seven feet tall and half as wide, with a clipboard dangling from a side hook and bearing notes festooned with calculations and times and scientific graphs. The units made me think of sarcophagi for a high-tech pharaoh. As we made our way inside, the air grew cold enough to prickle my skin. It smelled like swimming-pool chlorine—a sterile, sharp odor that drove into my sinuses like twin ice picks.

The hall opened up into a high-ceilinged laboratory. More refrigeration units ringed the outskirts of the circular chamber, maybe ten in all, coolant pipes running along and into the steel-plated walls. A monitor the size of a small movie screen hung high on the far wall, tilted down at an angle and displaying a constant feed of data. Some kind of test in progress: I made out temperatures, coolant levels, and strings of numbers and sloping neon graphs I couldn’t begin to guess at.

The pedestal in the heart of the room drew my eye. A cylinder of stainless steel with a glass case on top, like a display in some exclusive and icy museum. Under the glass, the curse tablet lay on a bed of black velvet.

We spread out as we approached the pedestal, cautious, and I held up a warning hand. Tiny black disks surrounded the pedestal, set into the tile floor every inch or so.

“Hold up,” I said. “Looks like infrared eyes. And a seismic alarm, just inside the case.”

Jessie shrugged. “And normally I’d be all kinds of cautious, but under the circumstances? Let’s just smash the glass, grab that sucker, and get out of here while we still can.”

“So typical,” Mikki said, her voice dripping with disdain. “Just break it. That’s your solution for everything, isn’t it?”

I spun, wide-eyed, my gaze flitting across the empty lab. It took a heartbeat to realize where I’d heard her voice coming from.

My own earpiece.

The giant monitor flickered and became a video feed. Bobby Diehl grinned down at us, larger than life, sitting behind his office desk with the LA night skyline blazing at his back. He had guests: Mikki, snuggling against him with one arm curled sinuously around his shoulders, and Roman Steranko, leaning back against the towering window with his ankles crossed and a wry smile on his lips. Roman held a tablet PC in the palm of his hand, happily tapping away with the speed and grace of a concert pianist.

“Wait,” I heard Kevin say. “What the hell was that?
Mikki?
”

When Roman spoke, his voice echoed both from our earpieces and from the monitor speakers high above our heads.

“Yep. Your encrypted comm feed is my bitch. Just like
you
are, come to think of it.”

Bobby spread his hands. His car-salesman grin somehow grew larger, more maniacal.

“Hey, folks! Bobby Diehl here. And as far as ‘getting out of here while you still can’ goes? That ship sailed about fifteen minutes ago.”

The laboratory door slammed shut on pneumatic hinges, sealing us in.