Root of Unity (9 page)

“Cas, talk to me. What are you thinking?”

“I’m going to find their base,” I said.

“How?”

“I need a map,” I said.

“What?”

“A physical paper map. Where can you buy one of those these days?”

“Um, I don’t know. I’d stop at somewhere with Internet and print one, if I were you.”

“You’re the guy sitting at a computer,” I said, irritation bleeding into my voice. “Find out where I can buy a fucking map. On paper.”

“Other than Amazon?”

“Stop being a smartass.”

“Okay, okay.” He hesitated. “Are you sure you’re all right? You’re, uh, a little more snappish than usual.”

“I’m
fine.”

“All right already. Um, it looks like your best bets are bookstores, travel centers, gas stations, or drugstores. I can call around to see who has some. Yes, yes, the antediluvian method of phone inquiries—I
could
hack their inventories, but that would actually be more work, believe it or not—”

“I’m at a drugstore,” I said. “I’ll check here first.”

Silence.

“Hello?”

“Why are you at a drugstore?”

I tried to dredge up a flip answer and couldn’t. My thoughts scraped uncomfortably against each other.

“Cas, are you injured?”

Bailing on the conversation was easier than answering. “No,” I said, and hung up.

The drugstore did, in fact, have a rack of local street maps. I bought one and went back out to my stolen car to unfold it.

I didn’t know when the bad guys had started out, but…
Estimate. Probabilities.

I closed my eyes. Why did everything still insist on being so fuzzy?

Inner and outer search radii. Concentric circles of decreasing probability. Adjusted for the metric of road access and speed rather than straight-line distance. A jagged ring rose up in my head, clumsily centered on the location I’d been attacked.

I examined the map more closely. The direction they’d come from—they weren’t trying to hide anything; they’d meant to kill me. If they’d been going east on the freeway, they would’ve come from the other side of the overpass.

Half the circle faded out.

They’d had a fleet of at least four SUVs and the windowless van. Figure about fifteen hundred square feet just for those vehicles—that was the size of a small house. And they probably had more.

These guys had a ton of gear, but it wasn’t high-end or exotic, it was cheap and effective. This wasn’t going to be one of the more unusual enemies I’d gone up against—they weren’t Dawna Polk with her shiny military precision and ornate secret base or Vikash Agarwal with his absurd ray gun and ridiculous mountain lair. These people were more like me. All about business.

Which meant I was looking for a building that had already existed, not an unmapped metal dome in the middle of the desert or a special underground staging area. The unpopulated bits of my search ring faded out, too.

And I knew what I was looking for. A large building, probably an industrial warehouse of some kind.

There weren’t all that many places left to look. Doing a drive through all the most likely ones would only take me about five hours, depending on how bad rush hour traffic got out here.

Of course, there was a faster way.

I made a face, feeling like a child throwing a temper tantrum, and called Checker back.

He picked up right away. “Cas, hey.”

I ignored the weight of all the worried questions he wasn’t asking me. “I need you to check a few places for me,” I said. “I’m looking for somewhere with a lot of space—more than a few thousand square feet—and away from prying eyes. My guess is a warehouse or industrial park in a place that’s not all that well-trafficked. I’m going to read off some intersections to you—can you scan the satellite pictures or whatever for the surrounding areas?”

“These days a monkey could do that,” he said with cheerful sarcasm. “It doesn’t even take skill. Shoot.”

“Off exit 55, up Hollins Road. Five and a quarter miles from the freeway. See anything?”

He paused for a minute. “Looks like mostly ranches.”

Ranches. Lots of land, little indoor space. No room for fleets of vehicles someone wanted to hide from curious passersby—or from satellite pictures, come to that. “All right. Move up to exit 56.”

We worked our way through my entire search ring. In less than twenty minutes we’d narrowed it to three likely possibilities.

“Do you want me to connect back up with Arthur or Pilar?” asked Checker. “If they sent a dozen guys after you with napalm—”

“No,” I said. “If the NSA tries to go in at the same time, we’re just going to get each other killed. And I’m better than they are.” Not to mention that the last thing I wanted was the NSA knowing anything about me. And I didn’t want to take the time to wait for Arthur—at least, that’s what I told myself. “I’ll find her.”

“Cas—”

“What?” The word might have been harsher than it needed to be.

“You’re not in this alone. There
are
people who will back you up. You know that, right?”

“You sound like Arthur,” I said, without thinking.

“Well, that should tell you something!”

I stopped at the passion in his voice.

It was true that Arthur had been trying, for upwards of a year, to bash it through my head that I had backup now. That I could ask people for help, if I needed or wanted it.

When he said it, it always seemed to make sense. In the moment, I either didn’t think of it or found a good reason to go it alone. After all, I always had sound logical reasons for what I did, didn’t I?

Didn’t I?

Like now. Arthur was busy following his other lead, and we’d find his friend faster if we kept working in parallel. Besides, it
would
take him ages to get out here—I wasn’t just being petty. I wasn’t.

And even if I weren’t hours east of the city, who else was I going to call? I knew a Mob sniper who still claimed he owed me eighty percent of a favor, but I didn’t trust him further than a nickel’s worth, not the least of which because his boss had been trying to freeze me out of the underground for a year now. I knew a forger who hadn’t sold me out when he’d had the chance, but that didn’t change the fact that he was a
forger,
not someone I could call into a firefight even if I’d wanted to. To be perfectly honest, the only person I truly trusted to be skilled enough to have my back was halfway around the world bashing corrupted warlords’ heads in, and that was even farther than Pasadena.

“I could call Rio,” I said, just to get a rise out of Checker.

“If you think you should,” said Checker after a moment, very stiffly. I almost laughed. He was going to strain something trying to avoid saying what he thought about that idea. I suspected it was a rant about selling your soul to the devil to kill a spider—albeit a poisonous one.

“Maybe I
should
call him,” I continued. “After all, we’re talking potential global economic collapse; it might be good to bring in every gun.” Except that even planes could only fly so fast, and I wasn’t about to let this go on another twenty-four hours. I wasn’t inclined to call Rio away from whatever head-bashing he was engaged in only for him to arrive to find there was nothing left to do.

Having my pride wasn’t pettiness. And I was perfectly capable of doing this job for Arthur, without Rio or the NSA or anyone else.

“Look, these guys aren’t anything special,” I said to Checker. “They’re not psychics or robots or even creepy international black-ops people. They’re just your general run-of-the-mill criminal kidnappers with cheap automatic weapons.” And some nifty explosives, but I didn’t mention that. “I can handle them, okay?”

“Okay,” said Checker, the word fragile and drawn out.

“I’ll call you once I’ve got Halliday.”

“Okay. You’d better.”

I didn’t know why I found his concern so irritating.

Chapter 9

I zipped
the little old Honda out to the first industrial park Checker and I had identified. It was a sprawling complex of warehouses, with a network of driveways in between wide connecting parking lots. Through the gate at the entrance I could see rows of white tractor trailers, and beer-heavy men in jeans shouted to each other as they lowered loading gates and hauled crates in and out. The place was a beehive of activity. Several prominently placed signs indicated it might be an ice packing plant—or maybe shrimp. The picture on the sign made it hard to tell.

Checker had said he’d be looking into the people whose names were on the real estate I was checking out, but he’d warned me it might not be helpful if the bad guys were using well-laid shell corporations or simply squatting. It looked like he didn’t have to investigate this one.

I drove to the next location.

The second neighborhood was a lot emptier. I slowed down as the road narrowed and the traffic dropped off. The buildings looming past the dirty curbsides were all either shuttered or boarded up.

This looked like a place I would choose to hide out in myself. I was betting the people who had Halliday felt the same way.

At this location, we’d identified a large abandoned factory as the likeliest base point for our bad guys, as it had the space and the lack of foot traffic. I cruised closer, and my back itched uncomfortably as I came level with the factory.
It’s unlikely they know what you look like,
I reminded myself—after all, I’d killed everyone who’d seen me. And they weren’t going to be sniping random drivers who took a jaunt through the surrounding streets—that was far too good a way to get noticed.

The factory was a cluster of huge near-windowless buildings. A solid, high cement wall lined the curb in the gaps between structures, keeping hooligans on the street from wandering in, but the buildings themselves were the bulk of the barrier. Erratic graffiti dotted the wall here and there, but it was old and half-assed, as if even the graffiti artists lost whatever will they had as soon as they came out here.

Yeah. This place was perfect.

The main entrance had a solid metal gate that was locked up with a rusted chain and padlock. I drove on by. Two other entrances were similarly barricaded, and three corrugated metal gates looked like they’d lead straight into buildings or down into underground loading docks.

If they had any surveillance, it was likely to be at those points—and maybe along the wall, to see if anyone was climbing over. Squatting in a huge abandoned complex like this meant they probably wouldn’t have wired the whole thing up for security.

Probably.

Well, there was only one way to find out.

I drove back around the complex to the end farthest from the freeway. The buildings abutting the street here were dilapidated: all crumbling brick and filthy, cracked concrete, with even the plywood nailed over the sparse, high windows dirty and warped. Considering how huge this place was, our bad guys had almost certainly based themselves in a more solid part of it. I’d break in here.

All the windows facing the outside were third-story or above, and stupid Arthur had told me to leave the C-4—I stubbornly ignored the fact that I hadn’t wanted to take the time to pick any up anyway—but those weren’t the only ways in. I did a noise calculation. Thick walls, the decibel levels of exploding brick and screeching metal. They’d probably hear me, wherever they were, but by the time they came to check out the noise and realized what had happened, I’d hopefully have Halliday already. Once I located the professor, skedaddling out of the complex and stealing another car—or one of the bad guys’ own SUVs, if convenient—would be the easy part.

I pulled out a knife, pried open the steering wheel of the Honda, and cut out the airbag—airbags were too unpredictable, with too many variables attached. Then I fastened my seatbelt and adjusted my gun so it wasn’t in the small of my back, slipped into reverse and zoomed the little car backward, and spun it around in a neat, tight doughnut so I was facing the brick wall.

Newton’s Second Law. I needed enough deceleration against the wall, times the mass of the car, to generate sufficient force. Subtract the amount that would be absorbed by the hood crumpling—fucking safety measures—and backtrack through the equation to find the necessary speed at impact.

Oh, and check my own acceleration against the seatbelt. Wouldn’t do to break through the wall only to kill myself. I wasn’t fond of the idea of cracking a rib or two, either.

The numbers fell out pleasantly, provided I hit at the minimum necessary speed. Just bruising. Bruising I could handle.

The car was a stick shift. I pressed the clutch and revved the engine, watching the RPMs climb. Two thousand, three thousand—heading for the power band—

If I fucked this up I’d either smash into a brick wall and wreck the car with nothing to show for it, or go in too hot and put myself in the hospital. Maybe Checker had a point about asking for backup.

Well, too late now. I slipped the clutch and goosed the gas, and the car leapt forward like it had been shot out of a cannon.

The wall flashed huge in my vision for an instant. The crash was deafening.

The metal screamed like a living thing and the brick gave way with a boom like the earth had split open, rending itself apart in the path of the car and burying me with huge chunks of debris in the hailstorm from hell. The seatbelt yanked me back with over 30 Gs of acceleration; it split me in two from hip to shoulder and crushed the breath from my lungs. The windshield shattered in my face. I ducked my head and closed my eyes and the sky fell on the Honda’s roof.

The car lurched to a halt, and the avalanche above my head completed itself with a fine shower of gravel and dust.

I unbuckled the seatbelt, my sternum aching like someone had slammed an iron bar against it. Maybe the bruising hadn’t been such a good idea. The door was jammed up against the tumble of brick and cement chunks, so I climbed out the broken windshield instead, getting my feet under me and hopping through onto the crumpled hood. The metal was jagged and buckled, contorted into a steel sculpture of sharp points and deep dents and covered in broken brick.

I jumped down, my boots echoing on the cement floor in the wide open space. The inside of the building was dark, high-ceilinged, and empty—and huge, the cavernous nothingness fading away in the dimness. Rows of gigantic support pillars marched through the space like massive sentinel guards frozen in time.