The Dragon Factory (55 page)

“The picture’s fuzzy, I can’t see you,” SAM said. “Where are you?”

“Between two security doors.”

“Are there jackets on the wall?”

“Lab coats, yes.”

“Put on an orange one. That’s for the computer maintenance staff. There’s like a million of them, and they can go almost anywhere as long as they have the right keycards. No one will look twice at you.”

“Works for me.”

I slipped into an orange lab coat, but there was nothing I could do about my camo fatigue pants. I clipped the minicamera to the jacket and hoped no one would notice it. If you didn’t peer too close at it, the thing looked like a slightly oversized button.

I passed through the next security door and walked a long hallway that fed off into rooms marked:
KITCHEN, LAUNDRY, DRY GOODS,
and a few others. None of these doors had keycard locks, but there were security cameras mounted at both ends of the hallway. No way to bypass them, but SAM said that it was all about what color lab coat you wore. As I walked, I peeled the adhesive off of another of the code-reader doohickeys, and when I reached the door I surreptitiously pressed it in place.

I faked a sneezing fit and made a show of patting my pockets for a tissue. I pretended to wipe my nose on my sleeve and Bug said, “You’re good to go.”

I removed the newly recoded master keycard and opened the door.

No problems.

I was inside the Deck now.

“The image feed is back,” said SAM. “You’re right near a big hallway that runs the length of the upper level. The staff calls it Main Street.”

The doorway led to a wide central corridor that was packed with people wearing a rainbow assortment of lab coats and coveralls. Most people ignored me. No one cared about my pants or boots: I saw everything
from sandals, to sneakers, to high heels. Several people in orange lab coats passed by and they were the only ones who appeared to notice me, but they gave me nods and went about their business.

Then SAM walked right past me.

I was so surprised I began to say something to him, but I immediately clamped my mouth shut. This boy was at least a year older than SAM. He looked just like him, though. Same gap in his front teeth, same soft chin and dark eyes. I tried to turn the camera his way, but there were too many people.

When the boy was gone I discreetly tapped my earbud. “Hey, SAM . . . I think I just saw your brother.”

“I don’t have a—,” SAM began to say when suddenly there were three long, harsh bleats from an alarm system. Everyone froze in place.

I began to slip under my lab coat for my gun, but then a hugely amplified voice blared from speakers mounted in the ceiling, “The Deck is going into Visitor Mode. Please prepare to receive visitors.”

It repeated several times and suddenly everyone was in motion. Wall panels shifted to close off whole wings of the building; scores of staff members filed through hidden doorways that closed behind them so seamlessly it was as if the people had vanished from this reality. The blaring message repeated and repeated.

Then Church’s voice was in my ear: “Cowboy . . . there is a small commercial jet inbound to your location.”

“I know,” I said. “We’re about to have visitors.”

The Deck

Monday, August 30, 6:13
P.M.

Time Remaining on the Extinction Clock: 41 hours, 47minutes E.S.T.

Hecate and Paris were all smiles as they stepped down from their jet. Cyrus and Otto were dressed in suits that were ten years out of style, and a stack of suitcases was piled on an electric cart. A tall, austere man in a modern suit stood next to them.

“Alpha!” cried Hecate, and ran to her father. Instead of bowing, she hugged him and buried her face in the side of his neck. Cyrus was momentarily nonplussed, but after a hesitation he hugged his daughter. “Alpha . . . Daddy . . . ,” she murmured.

Cyrus looked wide-eyed at Paris, who adjusted his own expression from a glad smile to one of concern. “Alpha . . . ever since we were attacked Hecate’s been very upset. So have I, as a matter of fact. If the government is sending black ops teams against us then we’re out of our depth. We—”

Hecate cut him off. She had tears in her blue eyes. “We
need
you. Daddy . . . we
need
you.”

“I—” Cyrus looked truly at a loss.

“She’s right, Alpha,” said Paris, stepping close so he could pat Hecate’s back. “We’re afraid of losing everything. We’re . . . well . . . we just don’t know what to do. I can’t tell you how grateful we are that you’re willing to come to the Dragon Factory. We need to know how to make it more secure, and if we have to abandon it . . . then we need your advice on how to preserve our research.”

Hecate leaned back from the embrace, staring deep into her father’s eyes. “If we have to . . . if you don’t think we’re safe there . . . can we transfer our data to your computers here? We have to keep it safe.”

“We have to keep it in the family,” said Paris.

Cyrus looked at Otto, who raised a single eyebrow. The tall man with him wore no expression at all.

“Why . . . certainly,” said Cyrus, though his voice was anything but certain.

Hecate threw herself back into Cyrus’s arms and wept with obvious relief. Paris closed his eyes as if the weight of the world had been lifted from his shoulders.

“Thank you,” he murmured. “Alpha . . .
Father
. . . thank you.”

Eventually they climbed aboard the jet.

Otto Wirths and the other man lingered for a moment before following them.

“Those are his children?” the man asked, a note of skepticism in his voice. “Those are the Twins?”

“Yes,” said Otto.

“They’re more effusive than I expected.”

“Aren’t they.”

“Mr. Jakoby brought me all the way out here because of them?”

Otto wore a smile that did not reach as far as his eyes. “We are being played, Mr. Veder.”

Conrad Veder smiled thinly. “No kidding.”

They climbed aboard. Once the jet was refueled, it taxied in a circle and took off for the Dragon Factory.

The Deck

Monday, August 30, 6:14
P.M.

Time Remaining on the Extinction Clock: 41 hours, 46 minutes E.S.T.

“The Deck is in Work Mode,” said the voice from the speakers. “All duty personnel return to assigned tasks.”

There was a pause and then, “Supervisor protocols are in place.”

The doors and hidden panels shifted again and the multicolored swarms of people emerged. I found a men’s room and ducked inside. Once I made sure I was alone I said, “What was that all about?”

Church said, “A Learjet owned by White Owl, a dummy company that MindReader traced back to Paris Jakoby, just landed and picked up three passengers. From the satellite image SAM thinks that the passengers were Otto Wirths and Cyrus Jakoby. We didn’t get a good angle on the third man.”

“Swell. Looks like I came to the wrong party.”

“Amazing and Alpha Team are in follow-craft. They’ll assess and take the next steps to find the device.”

“What about me?”

“Your call. If the Jakobys are heading to the Dragon Factory, then
Amazing will infil and attempt to secure the device. Once she succeeds, the fist of God in the form of three DMS teams and National Guard units will pound the Deck.”

It was a crappy set of choices. If I left I still wouldn’t catch up to Grace before she caught up to the Jakobys. If I stayed here I might learn something, but I might also get caught.

“Keep SAM on the line and give me a quick tour. I’ll see what I can see, and then I want to collect Echo and follow Alpha to the frat party.”

“Roger that.”

In flight

Monday, August 30, 6:36
P.M.

Time Remaining on the Extinction Clock: 41 hours, 24 minutes E.S.T.

Maj. Grace Courtland sat hunched over her laptop watching a white dot move across the satellite image of the southern United States. The dot kept just inside U.S. airspace, cruising fifty miles north of the Mexican border as it crossed Arizona and New Mexico; then it cut across the Texas midlands and out over the Gulf of Mexico south of Houston.

She tapped her commlink. “Bug, have you gotten through to the FAA yet?”

“Just finishing with them now. The jet filed a flight plan for Freeport, Grand Bahama Island. The FAA have records of the same jet making the run twice monthly for the last few years.”

“That’s it, then. Brilliant, Bug.”

Grace sat back and closed her eyes. It was going to be a couple of hours yet until touchdown, and there was nothing much she could do until then. She’d eavesdropped on the command channel while Joe infiltrated the Deck, and her heart had been in her throat the whole time. Partly because of the oppressively huge stakes they were playing for and partly for Joe.

Joe.

Early this morning, after making love, she had told him that she
loved him. She’d said the words that she swore that she would never say to anyone as long as she wore a uniform. It was stupid, it was wrong, and it was dangerous.

Later that morning she hadn’t said a word to him. She was too embarrassed and too frightened of the damage their pillow talk might reveal in the light of day. And then, of course, everything started happening.

Grace wished she could roll back the clock to this morning so she could take back those words. Or, failing that, to have had the courage to stay all night and talk with him later that morning. Instead she had fled—the one act of cowardice in a life filled with risk taking.

That morning, when she’d said those words, Joe should have given her the pat lecture on the dangers of getting too close to a fellow combatant. It was never smart and it usually worked out to heartbreak of one kind or another, and that included the very real possibility of getting drummed out of the DMS and shipped back to England with a career-ending reprimand in her jacket. She’d never work in covert ops again, not unless she wanted to gallop into battle behind a desk.

She felt sick and stupid for saying those words.

What made it worse . . . so very much worse, was that Joe had said them back.

I love you, Grace.

She could hear the echo of those words as if Joe was whispering them into her ear as her pursuit craft tore through the skies.

I love you, Grace.

“God,” she said, and Redman—her second in command—glanced up.

“Major . . . ?”

She shook her head and closed her eyes again.

The Deck

Monday, August 30, 6:40
P.M.

Time Remaining on the Extinction Clock: 41 hours, 20 minutes E.S.T.

I moved through the Deck quickly but casually. I found a clipboard on an unoccupied desk and took it. Every time I saw someone who looked vaguely official I studied the clipboard and mumbled meaningless computer words to myself. Bug must have heard me, because I heard him chuckling in my ear.

SAM steered me through the common areas toward the research centers. His knowledge of the Deck ended there, but that was fine. I wasn’t going to stick around very long. The Deck was multileveled and I took a combination of escalators, stairs, and moving walkways to get around. A couple of times I thought I saw SAM again—or the kid who looked like him—but each time there were other people around and I couldn’t risk trying to make contact. It was another mystery to be solved later.

I reached a level that was marked:
AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY,
which I thought was kind of funny since this was the secret lab of a maniac out to destroy the world. But I guess there’s bureaucracy everywhere.

I used another of Bug’s sensors to reset my master keycard and then slipped inside the restricted area. Just inside was a glass-enclosed metal walkway that ran along all four sides of a huge room in which sat rows of big tanks in massive hydraulic cradles that rocked them back and forth. The tanks had glass domes with blue lights that filled the room with an eerie glow. There were at least thirty of the tanks connected to computers on the floor and a network of pipes and cables above. I leaned close to the glass and looked down to see a half-dozen technicians in hazmat suits adjusting dials, working at computer stations, or taking readings. There were huge biohazard warning signs everywhere.

“Are you seeing this?” I whispered.

Church said, “Yes.” He didn’t sound happy. “Walk around and see if you can get a better angle on the tanks.”

I moved along, pretending to make notes on my clipboard, until I found a spot that offered the best view of the closest tank.

“Whoa!” It was Dr. Hu and for once he seemed disturbed rather than jazzed by something science related.

“What am I looking at?”