BETA - Project Avatar, page 37
He eased his fingers away from this operation and let out a long breath. “There. That went better than it might have.”
“Why? What did you think was going to happen?”
He gave her a nervous smile and looked away evasively. “Oh, well, nothing really, but these electronic gizmos can be so fickle. At any rate, you might as well make yourself comfortable. This thing will figure out the combination, I’m pretty sure, but it’s bound to take a couple of minutes.”
“We only have a few minutes.”
“Such an anxious young woman! Sometimes in this hectic world of ours, we must stop and smell the roses. Just think what a delightful memory this moment will make, when you and I have a chance to reminisce about it many years down the road.”
She replied between her teeth, “If this whole thing is a memory an hour from now, I’ll already be delighted.”
After a moment the door’s security bolts drew up out of their sockets with a loud clack. John gently pulled the door open, gave her a cocky smile, propped the faceplate back over the keypad on the wall, and led the way inside.
“I didn’t expect it to be so dark,” he said. “You would have thought they’d leave the lights on—they were only going to a meeting.”
“They’re accountants,” she reminded him.
“Ah, of course. Saving those precious pennies of your taxpayers’ money. Well, it looks like there are three computers turned on, so pick your favorite. I’m afraid you’ll have to work in the dark, though. We’d better not flip any wall switches.”
Most of the small building consisted of a single long room divided into cubicles by chest-high walls. There were twelve to fifteen computer stations, three of which displayed glowing screensavers.
Dee hurried to the first one. The moment she sat down and put her hand on the mouse, she began to feel uncomfortably exposed, sitting with her back to the big, dark room.
“Did you bring a gun?” she whispered.
John was strolling around the room, looking the place over. “A gun? To a top-security military installation? No, I’m afraid that never crossed my mind.”
“Don’t patronize me. I’m not stupid.”
“I should certainly hope not! You’re supposed to be the brains of this operation. I’m just here to guard the door.”
The computer screen leaped to life, showing icons scattered on a desktop. No password screen—the accountant had left his computer unsecured. Dee’s heart skipped with joy at this unexpected piece of good fortune. She had brought a password-cracking program that was extraordinarily efficient, but she had still expected to waste a good three minutes just logging in.
She dived right into the archival threads, searching for the central record of official commands that trickled down through the Pentagon hierarchy. Her fingers were trembling so, and she couldn’t type at her usual blinding speed. So, pausing for a moment, she shook her hands in the air to loosen the joints, then got back to work.
“Hey, maybe we can find out what UMBRA stands for,” she said, vainly trying to affect some of John’s easy flippancy.
“Maybe next time,” he said. He was standing just behind her now, watching over her shoulder. “We have seven minutes and twenty-four seconds, conservatively.”
Dee had found the internal cryptographic firewall. “Ha! This is one of my code protocols!” She glanced over her shoulder at John. “They must have borrowed it from the NSA. Of all the nerve! I’m not even getting royalties on this.”
“Seven minutes and three seconds.”
“Okay, stop doing that.”
She typed:
CTRL - ALT -&-D– O-L-shift-tab-%
The screen went blank, and a text-input box appeared with nine spaces. She typed in a password and hit enter. A new menu came on screen, with all its entries in plaintext. All signs of cryptographic coding had disappeared.
“That’s amazing!” John said. He was leaning over her shoulder now, studying the screen. “It’s all completely decoded, isn’t it? How the deuce did you do that so quickly?”
She gave him a guilty look. “Promise you won’t tell anyone?”
“Oh, have a dash at it. My lips aren’t so loose as all that.”
“I install backdoor entrances into all my cryptographic systems. Just in case I’m called back to debug something. So all I’ve got to do is type a line of code, and it bypasses the whole security system. Saves a lot of time.”
“I say! How convenient. Someday you’ll have to tell me whether that’s ethical, but let’s not waste time on the niceties just now.”
“These folders are really vast. And I’m not sure that I can see how they’re organized.”
“Ah, yes. You’re not the first to make that remark about the military command structure. Go over to that icon in the corner there. That should link you to the NSA operations.”
“Do you know how to navigate this? Here, maybe you should just—”
“Slide over, make some room. It’s all laid out Yankee style, but I guess Militarese is about the same in all languages. Here we go; it’ll be somewhere in here. I say, it’s rather tempting to insert a few orders while we’re here. Any regimes you’d like to see deposed, that sort of thing?”
“Just hurry up. I hate it in here.”
John tapped the screen, indicating an icon labeled SHADCOM/xclas. “This will be it. This is where they’ll log the black ops that receive commands through the NSA.”
He began scrolling through a thread of headers.
110522.0334.NSCENTCOM
priGAMMA – eyes only
EastEuroArena.op.Onionskin phase IV RO
// Code 43287-b execute on locality 83 //
Extract ETDA 110601.1200 44N25’16” 26E07’51”
// Halt WMO if NMC !! //
“You can actually read all that stuff?” Dee asked doubtfully.
“Close enough, I should say. It’s all sorted by date and time. So the order would have to be somewhere in this part right in here. Or maybe here?”
“Wait . . . just a moment. Good lord!”
“What is it?” Dee leaned in closer, scrutinizing the screen over his shoulder.
“There it is!” John tapped the screen with his fingertip. “Operation Hydra. It's real, all right. This is all by the books. Absolutely incredible. And everything seems to be in order.”
“So it's an official operation?” Dee couldn't conceal her shock. She had been almost a hundred percent certain that Operation Hydra was an illegal conspiracy.
John continued to scroll carefully down through the file. “Yes,” he said slowly, then more firmly: “Yes. Absolutely. It seems to have received top-level authorization through the executive branch. It's White House certified.”
“I just . . . can't believe it.”
“Here's the principle intelligence officer for the operation. A CIA man . . . no surprise there. His name is Whylom. Have you heard of him?”
“Whylom? No.”
“Nor have I. And look over here! Sure enough, the dedicated military unit attached to the operation is UMBRA.” John glanced back over his shoulder, then wrinkled his brow as he saw the look on Dee's face. “Steady, now! Are you feeling quite well?”
“Yes . . . I . . . I suppose I should feel relieved. If that's how it is, then the whole thing is none of my business, so I can concentrate on staying alive.”
He nodded firmly. “Quite right. That's definitely our primary objective at this point.”
“But I just find it so hard to accept. The whole thing is so cold-blooded.”
John winced a little, though it was hard to tell if he were cringing from this statement's naiveté or its cynicism. “Well, don't take it too hard. We of the British Empire used to get pretty—er—pragmatic about things, at least every now and again. Back when it was our turn to rule the world.”
“Well, let's get out of here. I'm so sorry I dragged you through all of this and risked both of our lives over nothing.”
John turned back to the computer, and had his finger hovering over the escape key, when suddenly he pulled his hand away as if burned. “Just a tic! Look! Right here.”
Dee leaned in and followed John's index finger to a line that read:
CMDTHREAD: BG T. Grimmer
“Brigadier General Tyrone Grimmer,” Dee told him, thinking he didn't recognize the name. “He's the head of UMBRA.”
John shook his head vigorously. “No, you don't understand! This line is supposed to indicate the person who is in the immediate position that authorized the operation. Don't you see? That can't be Grimmer!”
“Oh!” Dee gripped John's shoulder, much harder then she realized, as the implication sank in. “Grimmer's supposed to be acting under Whylom's authority, right?”
“Now you've got it. According to this document, this Whylom chap is authorizing UMBRA, and Grimmer is authorizing Whylom. This whole document is a knock off!”
“It's fake?”
“Queer as a three-pound note.” He looked back over his shoulder and examined her face to see how she was taking the news. “Sorry to be the one who breaks the news, but you were right. Someone had better blow the whistle on these blighters, before they get into some real mischief.”
Dee nodded her head firmly. “I knew it. Well, I can't exactly say that that's good news. I suppose it takes a few decades off my life expectancy. But at least you've given me back some faith in my government.”
“Better than nothing,” John murmured, typing commands to navigate out of the secret folders.
It took only a few seconds to rearrange the interior of the accounting shed exactly as it had been when they arrived, and to lock the door behind them. John even had time to bolt the faceplate back onto the keypad outside.
They jogged back to the edge of the main building and jumped the little fence again. They were sneaking back toward the parking lot behind the shrubbery when she noticed a maintenance man watching them from beside a palm tree he had been trimming with a pole shear. She paused to look at him more closely.
The man wore a damp green jumpsuit and was raking the pruned debris from under the palm. When he saw her looking his way, he quickly pretended he hadn’t been watching. He seemed to be muttering something to himself—or speaking into his collar.
“Wait,” Dee said to John. He stopped at the edge of the parking lot and turned.
The maintenance man was short and broad-shouldered, with dark hair and a stubbly chin. He looked extremely familiar. Then Dee had it. He was one of the hijackers—the one who had tried to garrote General Grimmer on the airplane.
“This is an ambush,” she whispered.
Chapter 36
“An ambush, you say?”
John sauntered back along the muddy ground behind the shrubs and gave Dee a reassuring and rather patronizing smile. He looked around, taking in the full one hundred eighty degree view of the parking lot and its environs through lazy, half-lidded eyes.
She opened her mouth to reply but didn’t get the chance.
“Go,” John said in her ear. Then he grabbed her wrist and took off at a sprint, almost pulling her off her feet. He let go, and she followed close on his heels, both of them sprinting toward the front doors of the main building. Behind them, she heard several men shouting but dared not look back.
John charged directly toward his reflection in the paired, half-mirrored doors. He leaped into the middle of the left-hand door, putting his full weight behind his shoulder, and the reinforced pane caved inward, cracking in a big web of faults without actually coming loose from its frame. Landing on his feet, he reached in through a narrow hole in the broken polymer and pulled the crash bar from the inside. The door swung open, and he grabbed Dee by the arm and threw her bodily into the building.
She heard the dull, repetitive pounding sound that she now recognized as suppressed submachine gun fire. The unbroken door on the right suddenly exploded, its shards covering the entryway floor.
It was dark inside, and the two marines manning the metal scanner had been caught unawares. One of them must have been leaning back in a chair when John slammed into the front door, because he was now lying flat on his back on the floor tiles, struggling to get to his feet. The other was yelling at them as he fumbled with the catch on his white belt holster. Dee and John charged through both the metal detector and the millimeter wave scanner, jumped a waist-high barrier, and were around the corner into a hall before the marines had time to start shooting.
John wasn’t slowing down, and Dee could barely keep up. The halls were empty, and they seemed to make a fairly effective maze. John negotiated two T intersections, moving as if he knew where he was going. She had no idea where they were, so she stayed on his heels.
John stopped outside a copy room with big windows facing the hall, and shoved open the door. Dee darted silently inside, and he followed. Without a word, he ushered her to the stacked boxes of paper at the back of the room. He pried his way behind them, using his shoulder for a wedge, and she quickly followed him into the narrow space between the boxes and the wall.
Through a narrow crevice between the two stacks of boxes, she could see the hall through the windows. The two marines ran past the room, shouting back and forth in booming voices. This seemed to be a great hiding place. The fact that the room had a glass wall made it hardly worth checking—you could see that it was empty, without even opening the door.
The swarthy agent in the maintenance uniform trotted past a moment later. He was holding some sort of machine pistol with a large silencer. He barely paused to look into the copy room, then kept moving.
Next came the agent named Holtz. Dee remembered him from the chase in Geneva and she felt an involuntary shudder at the memory. Tall and blond, with a chilly, cadaverous look. He, too, was in a green maintenance uniform, but he had found time to put on his midnight-red beret as well.
Holtz stopped at the window, and scanned the interior of the room, shading his eyes. As he looked, he raised a large semiautomatic pistol into view. Apparently seeing nothing that raised suspicions, he moved cautiously on.
“There’s a stairwell in the next corridor,” John whispered directly into Dee’s ear. She was struck by how calm his voice sounded. Keeping a cool head at a moment like this struck her as practically pathological. He said, “We’ll slip out of here in a moment and take the stairs to the roof. There’s a helipad up there.”
She shook her head. “The roof? What are we going to do, steal a helicopter?”
“Yes. Assuming it’s still up there.”
She stared at him. He was serious.
“I’ll go first. Just stay with me. Do let’s be quiet, shall we?”
Or, she reflected, as Beta might have put it, Advance rapidly but with caution. “Okay. I’m right behind you.”
They slipped out from behind the boxes, both of them watching the hallway nervously through the big glass panes.
“I don’t think I quite understand how UMBRA followed you here to the Caymans,” John’s muffled voice said from behind the boxes, as he struggled out toward the light.
“What’s with the tone of voice?” she hissed. “I sure didn’t tell them.”
“I can’t imagine what tone you’re talking about. I’m merely suggesting there must have been a leak somewhere.”
“Meaning what?”
“Meaning nothing at all, I’m sure. At any rate, maintaining a proper security protocol is one of the hardest aspects of tradecraft.” He gave her a placid smile. “Takes years to learn.” With that, he moved to the door.
She saved the caustic reply and followed him into the hall, where they headed in the same direction as their pursuers.
They made it as far as the first corner before being spotted. Just as they were turning left at the end of the corridor, a young UMBRA soldier in combat uniform stepped out of a doorway just a few yards ahead of them.
“Hold it!” he yelled. “Right here! I’ve got them!”
Before the soldier could level his gun, John grabbed Dee by the wrist and ducked back into the hall they had come from. They took a quick left, heading deeper into the building, away from the stairwell that led to the roof.
They dodged around two more turns, and then John pulled Dee through a large door and into a big, dark space. The only light came from rows of windows high up along one wall. It took her a moment to realize that this was the cafeteria.
They ran in the dim light, occasionally bumping into a table or chair.
“What are we doing?” she whispered.
“Just stick close,” he said irritably. “Honestly, I can’t see a blessed thing. Maybe there’s some sort of exit through the kitchen.”
“The kitchen’s not over there. It’s this way.” She stepped around him and headed toward the swinging stainless steel doors.
They were almost there when the hall entrance at the kitchen end of the room swung open, and someone switched on the lights. Great banks of fluorescent bulbs hummed to life overhead, and Dee and John stood blinking in the glare.
Holtz was standing a few yards away from them, training the muzzle of his heavy pistol on them. He approached them with a few smooth strides and stopped just out of arm’s reach. He wore a triumphant smirk behind the blond stubble.
Holtz’s free hand reached up behind his lapel for a moment, and Dee assumed he was switching a microphone on or off. Off, she decided. Why did he turn it off? And why not yell out to the others?
“Well, I’ll be damned! John Henley-Wright, isn’t it?”
“Good day, Agent Holtz,” John said with glum politesse.
“I sure would love to know why you keep turning up during this operation. In fact, frankly, if I had a little more time, I would love to extract an honest answer out of you, the old-fashioned way.”
“You do seem the type who enjoys that sort of thing.”
“Yeah, I sure would. And not just because of the lump you gave me on that airplane last week. It’s nothing personal. I just never liked your type, pretty much categorically. You know what I mean? What’s the matter, John, run out of smart-ass replies?”
“Why? What did you think was going to happen?”
He gave her a nervous smile and looked away evasively. “Oh, well, nothing really, but these electronic gizmos can be so fickle. At any rate, you might as well make yourself comfortable. This thing will figure out the combination, I’m pretty sure, but it’s bound to take a couple of minutes.”
“We only have a few minutes.”
“Such an anxious young woman! Sometimes in this hectic world of ours, we must stop and smell the roses. Just think what a delightful memory this moment will make, when you and I have a chance to reminisce about it many years down the road.”
She replied between her teeth, “If this whole thing is a memory an hour from now, I’ll already be delighted.”
After a moment the door’s security bolts drew up out of their sockets with a loud clack. John gently pulled the door open, gave her a cocky smile, propped the faceplate back over the keypad on the wall, and led the way inside.
“I didn’t expect it to be so dark,” he said. “You would have thought they’d leave the lights on—they were only going to a meeting.”
“They’re accountants,” she reminded him.
“Ah, of course. Saving those precious pennies of your taxpayers’ money. Well, it looks like there are three computers turned on, so pick your favorite. I’m afraid you’ll have to work in the dark, though. We’d better not flip any wall switches.”
Most of the small building consisted of a single long room divided into cubicles by chest-high walls. There were twelve to fifteen computer stations, three of which displayed glowing screensavers.
Dee hurried to the first one. The moment she sat down and put her hand on the mouse, she began to feel uncomfortably exposed, sitting with her back to the big, dark room.
“Did you bring a gun?” she whispered.
John was strolling around the room, looking the place over. “A gun? To a top-security military installation? No, I’m afraid that never crossed my mind.”
“Don’t patronize me. I’m not stupid.”
“I should certainly hope not! You’re supposed to be the brains of this operation. I’m just here to guard the door.”
The computer screen leaped to life, showing icons scattered on a desktop. No password screen—the accountant had left his computer unsecured. Dee’s heart skipped with joy at this unexpected piece of good fortune. She had brought a password-cracking program that was extraordinarily efficient, but she had still expected to waste a good three minutes just logging in.
She dived right into the archival threads, searching for the central record of official commands that trickled down through the Pentagon hierarchy. Her fingers were trembling so, and she couldn’t type at her usual blinding speed. So, pausing for a moment, she shook her hands in the air to loosen the joints, then got back to work.
“Hey, maybe we can find out what UMBRA stands for,” she said, vainly trying to affect some of John’s easy flippancy.
“Maybe next time,” he said. He was standing just behind her now, watching over her shoulder. “We have seven minutes and twenty-four seconds, conservatively.”
Dee had found the internal cryptographic firewall. “Ha! This is one of my code protocols!” She glanced over her shoulder at John. “They must have borrowed it from the NSA. Of all the nerve! I’m not even getting royalties on this.”
“Seven minutes and three seconds.”
“Okay, stop doing that.”
She typed:
CTRL - ALT -&-D– O-L-shift-tab-%
The screen went blank, and a text-input box appeared with nine spaces. She typed in a password and hit enter. A new menu came on screen, with all its entries in plaintext. All signs of cryptographic coding had disappeared.
“That’s amazing!” John said. He was leaning over her shoulder now, studying the screen. “It’s all completely decoded, isn’t it? How the deuce did you do that so quickly?”
She gave him a guilty look. “Promise you won’t tell anyone?”
“Oh, have a dash at it. My lips aren’t so loose as all that.”
“I install backdoor entrances into all my cryptographic systems. Just in case I’m called back to debug something. So all I’ve got to do is type a line of code, and it bypasses the whole security system. Saves a lot of time.”
“I say! How convenient. Someday you’ll have to tell me whether that’s ethical, but let’s not waste time on the niceties just now.”
“These folders are really vast. And I’m not sure that I can see how they’re organized.”
“Ah, yes. You’re not the first to make that remark about the military command structure. Go over to that icon in the corner there. That should link you to the NSA operations.”
“Do you know how to navigate this? Here, maybe you should just—”
“Slide over, make some room. It’s all laid out Yankee style, but I guess Militarese is about the same in all languages. Here we go; it’ll be somewhere in here. I say, it’s rather tempting to insert a few orders while we’re here. Any regimes you’d like to see deposed, that sort of thing?”
“Just hurry up. I hate it in here.”
John tapped the screen, indicating an icon labeled SHADCOM/xclas. “This will be it. This is where they’ll log the black ops that receive commands through the NSA.”
He began scrolling through a thread of headers.
110522.0334.NSCENTCOM
priGAMMA – eyes only
EastEuroArena.op.Onionskin phase IV RO
// Code 43287-b execute on locality 83 //
Extract ETDA 110601.1200 44N25’16” 26E07’51”
// Halt WMO if NMC !! //
“You can actually read all that stuff?” Dee asked doubtfully.
“Close enough, I should say. It’s all sorted by date and time. So the order would have to be somewhere in this part right in here. Or maybe here?”
“Wait . . . just a moment. Good lord!”
“What is it?” Dee leaned in closer, scrutinizing the screen over his shoulder.
“There it is!” John tapped the screen with his fingertip. “Operation Hydra. It's real, all right. This is all by the books. Absolutely incredible. And everything seems to be in order.”
“So it's an official operation?” Dee couldn't conceal her shock. She had been almost a hundred percent certain that Operation Hydra was an illegal conspiracy.
John continued to scroll carefully down through the file. “Yes,” he said slowly, then more firmly: “Yes. Absolutely. It seems to have received top-level authorization through the executive branch. It's White House certified.”
“I just . . . can't believe it.”
“Here's the principle intelligence officer for the operation. A CIA man . . . no surprise there. His name is Whylom. Have you heard of him?”
“Whylom? No.”
“Nor have I. And look over here! Sure enough, the dedicated military unit attached to the operation is UMBRA.” John glanced back over his shoulder, then wrinkled his brow as he saw the look on Dee's face. “Steady, now! Are you feeling quite well?”
“Yes . . . I . . . I suppose I should feel relieved. If that's how it is, then the whole thing is none of my business, so I can concentrate on staying alive.”
He nodded firmly. “Quite right. That's definitely our primary objective at this point.”
“But I just find it so hard to accept. The whole thing is so cold-blooded.”
John winced a little, though it was hard to tell if he were cringing from this statement's naiveté or its cynicism. “Well, don't take it too hard. We of the British Empire used to get pretty—er—pragmatic about things, at least every now and again. Back when it was our turn to rule the world.”
“Well, let's get out of here. I'm so sorry I dragged you through all of this and risked both of our lives over nothing.”
John turned back to the computer, and had his finger hovering over the escape key, when suddenly he pulled his hand away as if burned. “Just a tic! Look! Right here.”
Dee leaned in and followed John's index finger to a line that read:
CMDTHREAD: BG T. Grimmer
“Brigadier General Tyrone Grimmer,” Dee told him, thinking he didn't recognize the name. “He's the head of UMBRA.”
John shook his head vigorously. “No, you don't understand! This line is supposed to indicate the person who is in the immediate position that authorized the operation. Don't you see? That can't be Grimmer!”
“Oh!” Dee gripped John's shoulder, much harder then she realized, as the implication sank in. “Grimmer's supposed to be acting under Whylom's authority, right?”
“Now you've got it. According to this document, this Whylom chap is authorizing UMBRA, and Grimmer is authorizing Whylom. This whole document is a knock off!”
“It's fake?”
“Queer as a three-pound note.” He looked back over his shoulder and examined her face to see how she was taking the news. “Sorry to be the one who breaks the news, but you were right. Someone had better blow the whistle on these blighters, before they get into some real mischief.”
Dee nodded her head firmly. “I knew it. Well, I can't exactly say that that's good news. I suppose it takes a few decades off my life expectancy. But at least you've given me back some faith in my government.”
“Better than nothing,” John murmured, typing commands to navigate out of the secret folders.
It took only a few seconds to rearrange the interior of the accounting shed exactly as it had been when they arrived, and to lock the door behind them. John even had time to bolt the faceplate back onto the keypad outside.
They jogged back to the edge of the main building and jumped the little fence again. They were sneaking back toward the parking lot behind the shrubbery when she noticed a maintenance man watching them from beside a palm tree he had been trimming with a pole shear. She paused to look at him more closely.
The man wore a damp green jumpsuit and was raking the pruned debris from under the palm. When he saw her looking his way, he quickly pretended he hadn’t been watching. He seemed to be muttering something to himself—or speaking into his collar.
“Wait,” Dee said to John. He stopped at the edge of the parking lot and turned.
The maintenance man was short and broad-shouldered, with dark hair and a stubbly chin. He looked extremely familiar. Then Dee had it. He was one of the hijackers—the one who had tried to garrote General Grimmer on the airplane.
“This is an ambush,” she whispered.
Chapter 36
“An ambush, you say?”
John sauntered back along the muddy ground behind the shrubs and gave Dee a reassuring and rather patronizing smile. He looked around, taking in the full one hundred eighty degree view of the parking lot and its environs through lazy, half-lidded eyes.
She opened her mouth to reply but didn’t get the chance.
“Go,” John said in her ear. Then he grabbed her wrist and took off at a sprint, almost pulling her off her feet. He let go, and she followed close on his heels, both of them sprinting toward the front doors of the main building. Behind them, she heard several men shouting but dared not look back.
John charged directly toward his reflection in the paired, half-mirrored doors. He leaped into the middle of the left-hand door, putting his full weight behind his shoulder, and the reinforced pane caved inward, cracking in a big web of faults without actually coming loose from its frame. Landing on his feet, he reached in through a narrow hole in the broken polymer and pulled the crash bar from the inside. The door swung open, and he grabbed Dee by the arm and threw her bodily into the building.
She heard the dull, repetitive pounding sound that she now recognized as suppressed submachine gun fire. The unbroken door on the right suddenly exploded, its shards covering the entryway floor.
It was dark inside, and the two marines manning the metal scanner had been caught unawares. One of them must have been leaning back in a chair when John slammed into the front door, because he was now lying flat on his back on the floor tiles, struggling to get to his feet. The other was yelling at them as he fumbled with the catch on his white belt holster. Dee and John charged through both the metal detector and the millimeter wave scanner, jumped a waist-high barrier, and were around the corner into a hall before the marines had time to start shooting.
John wasn’t slowing down, and Dee could barely keep up. The halls were empty, and they seemed to make a fairly effective maze. John negotiated two T intersections, moving as if he knew where he was going. She had no idea where they were, so she stayed on his heels.
John stopped outside a copy room with big windows facing the hall, and shoved open the door. Dee darted silently inside, and he followed. Without a word, he ushered her to the stacked boxes of paper at the back of the room. He pried his way behind them, using his shoulder for a wedge, and she quickly followed him into the narrow space between the boxes and the wall.
Through a narrow crevice between the two stacks of boxes, she could see the hall through the windows. The two marines ran past the room, shouting back and forth in booming voices. This seemed to be a great hiding place. The fact that the room had a glass wall made it hardly worth checking—you could see that it was empty, without even opening the door.
The swarthy agent in the maintenance uniform trotted past a moment later. He was holding some sort of machine pistol with a large silencer. He barely paused to look into the copy room, then kept moving.
Next came the agent named Holtz. Dee remembered him from the chase in Geneva and she felt an involuntary shudder at the memory. Tall and blond, with a chilly, cadaverous look. He, too, was in a green maintenance uniform, but he had found time to put on his midnight-red beret as well.
Holtz stopped at the window, and scanned the interior of the room, shading his eyes. As he looked, he raised a large semiautomatic pistol into view. Apparently seeing nothing that raised suspicions, he moved cautiously on.
“There’s a stairwell in the next corridor,” John whispered directly into Dee’s ear. She was struck by how calm his voice sounded. Keeping a cool head at a moment like this struck her as practically pathological. He said, “We’ll slip out of here in a moment and take the stairs to the roof. There’s a helipad up there.”
She shook her head. “The roof? What are we going to do, steal a helicopter?”
“Yes. Assuming it’s still up there.”
She stared at him. He was serious.
“I’ll go first. Just stay with me. Do let’s be quiet, shall we?”
Or, she reflected, as Beta might have put it, Advance rapidly but with caution. “Okay. I’m right behind you.”
They slipped out from behind the boxes, both of them watching the hallway nervously through the big glass panes.
“I don’t think I quite understand how UMBRA followed you here to the Caymans,” John’s muffled voice said from behind the boxes, as he struggled out toward the light.
“What’s with the tone of voice?” she hissed. “I sure didn’t tell them.”
“I can’t imagine what tone you’re talking about. I’m merely suggesting there must have been a leak somewhere.”
“Meaning what?”
“Meaning nothing at all, I’m sure. At any rate, maintaining a proper security protocol is one of the hardest aspects of tradecraft.” He gave her a placid smile. “Takes years to learn.” With that, he moved to the door.
She saved the caustic reply and followed him into the hall, where they headed in the same direction as their pursuers.
They made it as far as the first corner before being spotted. Just as they were turning left at the end of the corridor, a young UMBRA soldier in combat uniform stepped out of a doorway just a few yards ahead of them.
“Hold it!” he yelled. “Right here! I’ve got them!”
Before the soldier could level his gun, John grabbed Dee by the wrist and ducked back into the hall they had come from. They took a quick left, heading deeper into the building, away from the stairwell that led to the roof.
They dodged around two more turns, and then John pulled Dee through a large door and into a big, dark space. The only light came from rows of windows high up along one wall. It took her a moment to realize that this was the cafeteria.
They ran in the dim light, occasionally bumping into a table or chair.
“What are we doing?” she whispered.
“Just stick close,” he said irritably. “Honestly, I can’t see a blessed thing. Maybe there’s some sort of exit through the kitchen.”
“The kitchen’s not over there. It’s this way.” She stepped around him and headed toward the swinging stainless steel doors.
They were almost there when the hall entrance at the kitchen end of the room swung open, and someone switched on the lights. Great banks of fluorescent bulbs hummed to life overhead, and Dee and John stood blinking in the glare.
Holtz was standing a few yards away from them, training the muzzle of his heavy pistol on them. He approached them with a few smooth strides and stopped just out of arm’s reach. He wore a triumphant smirk behind the blond stubble.
Holtz’s free hand reached up behind his lapel for a moment, and Dee assumed he was switching a microphone on or off. Off, she decided. Why did he turn it off? And why not yell out to the others?
“Well, I’ll be damned! John Henley-Wright, isn’t it?”
“Good day, Agent Holtz,” John said with glum politesse.
“I sure would love to know why you keep turning up during this operation. In fact, frankly, if I had a little more time, I would love to extract an honest answer out of you, the old-fashioned way.”
“You do seem the type who enjoys that sort of thing.”
“Yeah, I sure would. And not just because of the lump you gave me on that airplane last week. It’s nothing personal. I just never liked your type, pretty much categorically. You know what I mean? What’s the matter, John, run out of smart-ass replies?”
