“You mean other than every A-C base worldwide? Those who either don’t have one or want to keep it hidden.”
Adriana checked the wall opposite the door we’d used. “There’s something here . . .” She pushed against it. Nothing. She shoved against the other side of what she felt was the door. Nothing.
Had an odd thought and went with it. Went to the wall where Adriana had pushed the first time. Pushed hard but quickly, more like a fast slam. The wall opened a little. “Or, someone who really wanted to show off how clever they were.”
“How did you know?” she asked me as we opened what was absolutely a door.
“It works just like those cabinets that close magnetically. I don’t think they’re trying to hide this area so much as be arty.”
“Yeah, again, that’s a LaRue move,” Amy agreed. She snorted. “Especially when we see what’s in here.”
What was in here were seven unisex bathrooms along the left-hand side and the stairwell at the far right corner. This room was done up just like the lobby, but the bathroom doors were more clearly marked. However, they opened in the same way as the door to the elevator lobby did—by pressing hard and fast.
Looked at Buchanan. “You thinking what I’m thinking?”
CHAPTER 82
“IF YOU’RE THINKING that we now can get upstairs without the elevators, Missus Chief, then, yes. If you’re thinking something else, then no.”
“Wow, Malcolm, I’m shocked. These are bathrooms.”
Everyone gave me polite looks. “Do you need to go, Kitty?” Serene asked without a trace of sarcasm.
Resisted the urge to roll my eyes. “No. Bathrooms. What lives in bathrooms?”
“Bacteria,” Lorraine answered promptly.
“And other things you don’t want to know about,” Claudia added.
“Oh, come on, you guys! Gates. Gates live in bathrooms, and Ronald Yates along with the freaking former Diplomatic Corps were best buds forever with Amy’s dad and so forth. No wonder no one could find the entrance from the main research facility to this one. It’s because no one was looking for a gate.”
Abigail and Naomi hypersped through all seven rooms. “No gate,” Naomi said when they finished “We looked for the mark, because I have to figure any gate they’d have here is cloaked, but there’s nothing.”
Knew exactly how Buchanan was feeling about all of our covert ops skills. “It’s likely to be a cube, like in the bedroom. Look, I’ll search for it while Malcolm helps you guys get going and start searching the other levels.”
“I’ll stay with Kitty,” Adriana said before Buchanan could express the worry clearly written on his face.
“Faster you go, faster you’re back,” I pointed out.
He nodded. “I haven’t found any hidden cameras yet, and they haven’t triggered any of my trackers, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t hidden cameras, just that we haven’t found or been caught by them yet.”
“Yeah, no one’s come to kill us. Yet.”
“Be careful and don’t leave this area without me, Missus Chief, no matter what you find, unless it’s the choice between leaving and being captured, hurt, or killed.”
“I promise, Malcolm.”
He didn’t look like he believed me, and the rest of the girls didn’t, either. But they all went to the stairwell, Buchanan checked whatever he was checking, felt all was well, and the seven of them zipped off.
“Where do you want to start searching?” Adriana asked. “And, is it an American thing to have the walls so . . . brightly and garishly colored everywhere, including in the bathroom stalls themselves?”
“No, it’s called protective coloration or hiding in plain sight. If everything’s sparkly and garish, then the cube gate won’t stand out as odd. As for where we start, I think we want to try the end.” Because most people didn’t go to the farthest point to use the facilities. When you had to go, you grabbed the nearest stall.
Went to the stall farthest from the elevators and therefore nearest to the stairs and started hunting.
These were the nice kinds of individual bathrooms that had a sink and toilet and table all in one room, versus a bank of stalls, very similar to what we had on the second floor of the Zoo. However the décor wasn’t the same at all.
While the Zoo was done up in a Tasteful Rich Person Motif, Adriana wasn’t kidding—the walls were a riot of color. This was I’m So Much Artier Than You to the max. However, I was sure much of this was being done on purpose, and not only to impress. “You try opening the hidden doors that may or may not be here and I’ll see if I can find the cube gate.”
We were at this for several minutes. It was amazingly hard to spot something that was likely to be a glittering geometric shape within a mural of glittering geometric shapes. The tiles that made up the bathroom were all little squares, just like the little squares that made up the power cubes. Had to hand it to LaRue, who was the likely designer—the woman was good. Sneaky, sneaky good.
“I can’t find anything that seems to be a hidden door,” Adriana said. Then she stiffened, went to the door, and opened it a crack. “Someone’s coming,” she whispered urgently. “And I think they’re coming to this stall.”
“It so figures.” Hadn’t found a thing hiding in plain sight here, and we had nowhere to go if someone opened the door. Locking it would just give us a couple of seconds and whoever was trying to get in here a clear sign that intruders were about.
Adriana pulled a gun from somewhere. Not that I thought anyone working here was going to fall on the Side of Right, but killing someone who just wanted to relieve themselves seemed really wrong. Plus sounds in bathrooms echoed and we really didn’t want the entire facility alerted to our presence if we could help it.
Looked around frantically and, as I did, I noted that the tiles on the floor were the same small squares as everything else. And no one in their right mind wanted to put their hands on a bathroom floor, no matter how clean it looked.
Thought fast. It wouldn’t be likely to be under the sink or right by the toilet, because those areas got cleaned the most and you wouldn’t want to risk that the janitor was thinking of, say, how much he’d prefer to be on Hawaii’s sandy beaches right when he wiped up around the hidden cube.
But it would still have to be easily accessible. The table in this room wasn’t square, it was round, and, if I looked at it clinically, totally out of place.
Hyperspeed was good for many things and right now I was never happier that I had it available to me.
Grabbed Adriana, squatted down, pulled my phone out and randomly looked at a section of the top level while I honestly thought about how where I really wanted to be was with Buchanan, dumped my phone back into my purse, and slammed my hand onto the floor under the table just as the door started to open.
Half a moment later we were in a dark corridor. “Gah!” Buchanan jumped.
Amy, who was next to him, gave a little shriek. “What the hell?”
“Wow,” I said as Adriana and I straightened up. “I didn’t think you were a jumpy dude, Malcolm. Ames, breathe, it’s just us.”
“Normally I’m not jumpy, but when two women who are three floors away appear out of nowhere at my feet, it tends to throw me.”
“What Malcolm said,” Amy added.
“Good to know. But what do you mean by three floors?”
“The number of stairs between this floor and the one technically below it are double what they were to get from the bottom level to the next. But we found no entrance.”
“And the blueprints don’t show a fourth floor,” Amy added. “So, how did you two find us?”