"Damn fools," Carlisle grunted.
Reeves was back on the line. "The shop's shut, Lieutenant."
"Okay. So send the one squad up to the roof and the other to the communications center. We need to secure them both as quickly as possible."
"Where will you be?"
"I'm coming down to communications with you. Meet me at the elevators."
Kline
It was four o'clock – time for Cynthia to load the final stage of the program. After that, her work would be done. Her instructions were to leave the building as quickly as possible and go to the Eastside Heliport where she would be contacted and, presumably, taken either to a safe house or out of the country altogether. She fed in the diskette. The primary screen flickered and a message appeared.
THIS PROGRAM HAS TO BE FED INTO THE MAIN ACCESS GRID IN SECTION C70. GO THERE IMMEDIATELY.
THE SURVEILLANCE CAMERAS ARE DOWN SO YOU WILL NOT BE DETECTED.
She thought about the gun in her handbag. Nobody had told her to come armed, but there had been such a strange atmosphere around the CCC complex for the last few days that she had decided to bring a token of personal insurance. She had felt a little trepidation about bringing the little palm gun through the weapon detectors in the lobby, but if anything was going to get past, it was the lightweight, plastic Browning. If she had really reached the end of her assignment, she had to be extremely careful. Since she had been kept so much in the dark, she had no way of telling what might be coming to a head in some other part of the operation. There was also the chance that one of her superiors had decided that she was expendable. It had happened before and would certainly happen again. When she had first volunteered for service in the United States, she had known that there was a chance she might be killed. If nothing else, the suicide cap in one of her back molars was a constant reminder. She did not intend to go without a struggle, however. As far as she was concerned, there were not many fates worse than death, and passive acceptance was a betrayal of the principles for which she was fighting.
She stood up and slipped the diskette into her pocket. There was only one other person in the section: Toni, who had also pulled duty for that crucial Sunday, was watching soap opera reruns on her primary screen. Most of the girls had wangled invitations to see the president. A number had also been transferred out to God knew where after their deacon boyfriends had been arrested by Internal Affairs. Cynthia concealed the Browning in the palm of her hand. In training camp, they had called it the princess pistol.
"I'm going to the little girls' room," she announced.
Toni did not even bother to look up from Tender Time. Cynthia left the work area and hurried down the corridor in the direction of the seventy section where the unfiltered landline link to Virginia Beach was housed. She wondered if Harry Carlisle was in the building. He had been acting so strange since he had come back from his week-long disappearance. They had talked on the phone, but he had been so tense and distant that she had become half convinced that he knew what she was.
She reached the entrance to C70. The empty corridors were very spooky. The complex was sinister enough when the corridors were bustling with the business of God and justice. Now, without the hurrying people, an aura of dread pervaded, as if something evil and threatening was lurking around every brightly lit corner.
C70 was a closed white door. As she walked up to it, a synthivoice made clear just how closed it was.
"This is a class A security area. Identify yourself and produce authority for access."
That seemed to be the end of her mission. Somebody somewhere had screwed up. There was no way that she could get into C70. She turned to go. The synthivoice stopped her dead.
"Your authority is accepted. Proceed."
The door slid open. Cynthia walked in. She had expected it to close behind her, but it did not. Feeling a little uncomfortable, she surveyed the room. It was large and white, bare except for the terminal against the far wall. Only twice in her life had she seen anything quite so complex. It had three tiers of keyboards, eight monitors, and even provision for DNI leads. Large letters were flashing on the central monitor.
She sat down in the workstation's large white leather chair, wondering who routinely used the thing. It had certainly not been designed for underlings. She fed in the disk. The screens all lit up. A large cartoon vulture appeared on the primary screen. It lazily flapped it wings.
The vulture flapped its wings once more, and then the screen cleared.
THE PROGRAM IS LOADED – THANK YOU FOR YOUR SUBMISSION.
She removed the diskette. It was time to get the hell out of there. She looked up from the monitor and, to her horror, saw Deacon Winters standing in the open doorway with a big Moss-berg pointed at her. The expression on his face was an unpleasant leer.
"So what do you think you're doing in here?"
Winters
Winters had been paired with a deacon called Gresler – John Wayne Gresler. He was a hard, pious, and, Winters suspected, brutal man. Promotion had passed him by, and he seemed content to remain a solid foot soldier in the battle against the forces of evil. Closed and silent, he had a face as yielding as a granite mountainside. Along with Winters, he had been assigned to C section. Everyone expected it to be a milk run. Although the surveillance cameras were out, a number of deacons had reported that there was only a handful of women up there. Winters and Gresler were to go up there and, as fast as possible, make certain that such was still the case, then use the override channel to get fresh orders. No one saw any reason to send a backup with them.
When they reached the floor, the two of them split up to check through the numbered work sections. It hardly seemed worth bothering. As predicted, the place was like a high-tech morgue. Winters was working his way down through the high seventies when he spotted something that was not quite as it should have been. The class A, ID only, security door to area C70 was jammed in the open position, and a red warning light was flashing on the wall above it. A class A door never remained open.
Winters got a good grip of his Mossberg. Thomas had handed out the heaviest weapons in the armory; he seemed to be taking the strange behavior of the electronics and the unusual prowling of the PD very seriously. Winters was not quite as convinced. What could the PD do to them? Without calling out to Gresler, he moved almost cockily toward the door, sure that there could be nothing life-threatening beyond it. It was probably another symptom of the electronic chaos that seemed to be breaking out all over. Raising the Mossberg to the ready position was little more than bravado.
He turned into the open doorway. To his surprise, he saw that there was a woman sitting in the control seat of the room's single terminal. She suddenly turned and faced him, as if she had sensed him standing there. His eyebrows lifted in surprise. It was Cynthia Kline, the whore who had been sleeping with the traitor Carlisle. Something unpleasant uncurled in his mind. He had a fleeting vision of Kline and himself, alone in one of the chambers in the sub-basement. She was naked and strapped down to a vaulting horse frame. Her expression was one of pure, silent-scream terror. As the vision faded, his own face twisted into an unpleasant grin.
"So what do you think you're doing in here?"
Kline
She fired without thinking. The plastic Browning was in front of her on the terminal. She scooped it up in one smooth movement and aimed by instinct. The Browning made a series of quiet pops. The flat, lozenge-shaped slugs were tiny when they left the gun's rectangular barrel, but on impact they sprang open to form ripping, tearing stars of hardened plastic. The first took Winters in the chest. The second hit him in the throat. The third and fourth were close together in his forehead. Her instructors would have been proud of her. For a few seconds Winters stood absolutely still, blood flowing down his face and neck and staining his shirt. He looked surprised. Then his eyes rolled up, and he toppled and fell. His blood spread in a widening pool, across the white tiles of the floor. Cynthia let out a harsh bark of grim laughter.