Search: A Novel of Forbidden History (28 page)

He decided to erase the search database itself. He overrode the sysop function, typed in his command, hit
ENTER
.

It was simpler than he’d hoped. No security measures had been considered necessary and none had been taken to protect the isolated workstations, likely because they had no physical connection to any other computer network, or to the Internet, and were contained in a room impervious to radio transmissions.

On-screen a progress window opened: The system would need four hours to erase the entire database.

David knew it was unlikely the process would be allowed to continue to completion, but even an hour would help. Until they restored their database, Ironwood’s team wouldn’t be able to reproduce their results.

He left the big screen and ran back to Jack Lyle’s hard drive, checked its progress. Thirty seconds left.

Then he heard the thud of footsteps, and a door slammed open.

In Heaven.

Merrit stood in the open doorway to the security facility above the Red Room. He moved his gun in a two-handed sweep from left to right, scanning for movement as his eyes adjusted to the unnatural underlighting. There was no one in the observation room.

Then he saw the camera console. It was powered up. Images on all four screens.

He stepped onto the metal balcony and looked down at the Red Room for the first time, seeing only a bank of gaming consoles, computer stations, and equipment. No personnel. No Weir.

The next thing that registered was the missing ceiling panel.

Weir
had
been here—and because the only way out was past three former marines with shoot-to-kill orders, he was still there.

Merrit ran onto the catwalk and dropped over its railing through the missing panel to the table. He was on his feet in a heartbeat, gun in hand.

The catwalk above clanked.

“You’re not supposed to be in there!” J.R. called down. Then a pained grunt announced his clumsy drop beside Merrit.

“Weir’s trapped in here!” Merrit swept the room with his weapon, seeking anything large enough to hide a man.

The room was clear.

Merrit pointed to the cylindrical door. “Where does that go?”

“The computer room. Even I can’t go in there.”

Merrit was already spinning the revolving door to open it. He entered the cylinder, rotating it until—

It was like stepping into a meat locker. In the dim light, he could see his breath. He could also see, in the enclosure’s center, eight metal shelving units, five feet high, eight feet long. Each was stacked with what looked to be stereo components or DVD players, all identical—black fronts dotted with a constellation of small blinking lights. The components were on brackets that kept them a few inches from each other, top and bottom, side to side. Each shelving unit was back to back with another, with hundreds of multicolored ribbon cables woven in between.

Gun held ready, Merrit explored the stacks, alert for anything that would betray a fugitive. He stopped by the wall closest to the crowded shelves. A large ducting tube hung from the ceiling, directly over a stack of wooden crates. The tube, obviously arranged to blast cold air straight down onto the shelves, had once been joined to the wall and a large air-conditioning outlet. Now it dangled free.

Merrit moved on. No matter how haphazard an installation this room was, it was still in a casino, where the interiors of large air ducts were always subdivided into smaller ones so that no one could crawl through them.

But he found no other potential hiding place for Weir.

The cylinder door rotated again, and J.R. poked his head through. “The old man’s going to go apeshit if he finds out you were in here.”

Merrit knew he wasn’t wrong about this. Weir had been in the upper level, and he couldn’t have eluded the guards outside the only exit. He
had
to have come in here.

“There’s got to be another way out.”

“Like that?” J.R. pointed to the dangling wall duct.

Merrit shook his head at J.R.’s ignorance of his own family’s business. “Standard casino building rule. It’s subdivided.”

“Wanna bet? That one got added for all this computer junk. Subdividing, that costs money, right?”

Merrit swore. Ironwood’s damned cost cutting. He grabbed one of the crates and stacked it on another under the air-conditioning outlet. “Where does the duct come out?”

“The roof, probably. Above the convention floor between the towers.”

“Get up there. Take guards with you. But if you hear gunshots from the duct, tell them to back off, understand?”

As soon as he was alone, Merrit pulled himself onto the top crate, then leapt up to catch the edge of the outlet. He scaled the wall and pushed deep into the ductwork.

Weir would never reach the roof alive.

Still in the chilled computer room, David was in the floor-level inlet of the retrofitted air-return duct, his fingers numb from holding closed the vent screen.

When Merrit entered, he’d just squeezed in. There’d been no time to refasten the screen that concealed him. If Ironwood’s security chief had bothered to bend down and peer in, even without a flashlight he’d have seen his prey, and that would’ve been the end.

Literally. David had seen the gun.

Ironwood’s assurance that Merrit was not to interfere with him was no help now. Merrit had gone rogue, and there was no time to wonder why. He’d reach the roof in minutes, and then he’d come back here.

David carefully latched the vent screen before turning around and crawling deeper into the ductwork. A few feet along, he stopped and, with eyes closed, listened intently. He placed the sounds of the casino, one by one, on the mental map he’d formed of the whole resort, with his own position a dot in a three-dimensional wireframe.

Finally he heard noises that could guide him out: the far-off but unmistakable rumble of a truck backing up, the whine of its gears, the beep of its reverse alarm. If he followed that sound profile . . .

Five minutes later, David fell out of the retrofitted duct and into the steaming-hot blanket of moisture-heavy air that enveloped a casino loading dock. In the impersonal cacophony of trucks and carts, his arrival passed unnoticed, and, pulling a cap out of his knapsack, he joined a few off-duty employees exiting and walked out with them.

But when he reached the parking lot, he ran.

Less than sixty seconds after Weir left the casino, Jack Lyle took a call from an agent in one of three surveillance vans on the outskirts of Encounters: Weir was running.

For now, Lyle ordered pursuit only, no interference. While he’d been questioning Weir in Atlantic City police headquarters, a team of AFOSI technicians had installed a new SIM card in Weir’s phone. It could still make and receive calls as before, but now its GPS function could not be switched off. For added backup, the team had also replaced the tracking devices in Weir’s iPod and digital recorder.

As long as those three units were operational, and the target himself was under visual observation, Lyle was willing to cut him some slack. The kid could be late for a movie, out on some errand. There was still nothing to track in the Ironwood investigation—the RFID tag in the hard drive hadn’t been switched on yet.

Thirty minutes later, Lyle’s willingness to give Weir the benefit of the doubt evaporated when a second report said the target was now in a cab on the Atlantic City Expressway, heading for the airport.

By the time Roz swung the black Intrepid into the driveway of his Best Western, Lyle’s team had pulled the passenger lists for all flight departures in the next few hours. Weir’s name wasn’t on them. By the time Roz had Lyle halfway to the airport, the team had the reason for omission.

The target was on his way back to the city at the wheel of a metallic gold Cadillac DTS, rented at the airport.

Lyle checked the Intrepid’s navigation screen as it tracked the progress of the Cadillac. He had a few new questions. Why go out to the airport to rent a car when the casino could provide one? More to the point, who was paying for it? There’d been no activity on any of Weir’s credit cards for weeks.

The Cadillac made an unexpected turn. Well before reaching the city, the car exited the expressway onto the Garden State Parkway. Weir was going out of state.

“Do we think he’s an errand boy?” Roz asked. She began changing lanes
to take the same off-ramp Weir had. The New Jersey daytime sky had been almost gray with the haze of heat, but now it was turning indigo as sunset neared, bringing a welcome drop in temperature. Traffic was light, and Roz was able to hang back a safe distance.

“Delivering his next batch of data to the SARGE database? Too easy.”

“It sort of makes sense.”

“Except he didn’t switch on the hard-drive tag.”

“Maybe he did and it’s broken,” Roz said. “Or maybe he agreed to anything you said to get the hell out of Dodge.”

“I did scare him pretty good.”

“Maybe someone scared him better.”

“How on earth did this happen?”

Ironwood’s voice was tight with indignation.

An error message flashed on every screen in the Red Room, including the big one.

“This room was off-limits to everyone!” The big man stabbed his finger at the open panel in the ceiling. “How is
that
not part of this room?!”

Merrit remained calm. “I had no say in the security arrangements.”

“Then who—?” Ironwood’s gaze settled on his son. As if restraining himself with difficulty, he turned away to a woman at the closest workstation. She was bent over her keyboard, typing rapidly.

“Keisha . . . how bad?”

The woman leaned back in her chair, hands behind her head. “The program he set up? It erased and overwrote three percent of the database before I could stop it. I figure we lost about six million square miles.”

“We still have Cornwall?”

Keisha shook her head. Her beaded dreadlocks swayed. “All of England’s only about fifty thousand square miles. We lost that in the first few minutes.”

“Frank. You saw the screen, right? Before everything got erased?”

“Un-huh.”

“The search was positive?”

“Un-huh.”

“So the program found what it was looking for in Cornwall?”

The woman prompted him. “In the first dataset, Frankie.”

“Un-huh,” Frank said. “It found it and stopped.”

Merrit saw her smile of relief as she turned to Ironwood. “The good news is we know it’s there. Since it was in the first search grid, we also know where it is to within a mile.”

Ironwood didn’t look or sound reassured to Merrit. “This isn’t some
barren stretch of desert or hidden valley. Those castle ruins are a tourist attraction. I can’t send in a full-scale dig team.”

The woman turned back to her screen, typing while talking. “We know the search started at sea level. That means the outpost ruins aren’t more than ninety feet deep. You could send in a couple of geologists to take some echo readings. Map the stratigraphy. I can even do a rough estimate of where the search ended based on when Frank called to report it.” She shot a glance over her shoulder at Ironwood. “Give me an hour. I’ll narrow the location to a thousand feet or so.”