The air sizzled.
“Drink?” Mercer twisted himself away from her eyes, reaching into Lindstrom’s desk for the bottle he knew would be there.
“Yes, please,” Aggie said, acquiescing to Mercer’s desire to sidestep their emotions.
He poured Scotch into two paper cups, slopping each one nearly half full. Of all the morning drinks he’d had in his life, and there had been quite a few, Mercer believed that he and Aggie had actually done enough to warrant this one. He finished his in a heavy swallow, pouring another by the time Aggie had taken a first tentative sip. She found a pack of cigarettes on Andy’s desk and smoked one of them almost as fast as Mercer drank.
“Is it over?” she asked.
“You know, I think it really is.” They were standing close together, the top of her head well above his shoulder, her face tilted to his, her lips full and inviting. There was an unmistakable gleam behind her emerald eyes.
As he stooped to kiss her, the door to Andy’s office flew open, the matronly receptionist from the front office almost falling to the floor in her rush. She was about to speak, but when she saw that Andy wasn’t there, her face collapsed. Mercer realized she was really in distress, far more than the others dealing with the emergency.
Not recalling her name, he asked her if anything was wrong, and in a rush it came pouring from her so fast there was hardly a pause between words.
“There was a shooting at the main gate. Ralph, the nice older guard is dead, another person, I don’t know who, is lying in the street, blood all around his body. A man attacked them, shot up the booth with some sort of machine gun and stole one of the company trucks. Oh, God, poor old Ralph, he was just a nice man.”
She fell into a chair, overcome by everything that had happened, her doughy body pooling around the wooden chair, her rounded cheeks stained with fresh tears. Mercer shot a look at Aggie, who immediately understood that he wanted her to look after the receptionist, and then he was gone again, running out of the building, shouldering aside those already in a scurry over the crisis.
The air was bitter cold under a pewter sky as he raced toward his rented Blazer still sitting in the Op-center parking lot. Despite everything he had been through since the previous afternoon, he’d managed to keep his keys, transferring them to the deep pocket of the coveralls when he’d donned the garment in the escape pod. The engine roared with the first crank, and a second later the truck slashed through the terminal’s gates, threading nimbly around the people clustered near their fallen coworkers. As he sped from the facility, he hoped one of them had had enough sense to alert the authorities in Valdez.
The pistol he’d taken from Kerikov was lodged behind his back. He pulled it out and set it on the plastic console between the two front seats. He drove furiously, the heavy-duty tires screaming as he took corners fifteen or twenty miles faster than posted. He estimated that ten minutes had elapsed since the attack, factoring in the distance between the main entrance and the Op-center and the time it took witnesses to get themselves in motion after the initial assault.
If he had had his Jaguar, he could have made up that time effortlessly, but the Blazer was built for rugged off-road use, not high-speed pursuit.
He didn’t waste more than a second realizing who it was he was pursuing. With Kerikov dead in the harbor, only Abu Alam remained unaccounted for. It made sense that after triggering the explosives aboard the Hope, Alam would leave Prince William Sound as fast as possible. Because of the heavy traffic around the town caused by emergency vehicles headed toward the harbor, there would be no way for him to get to the airport. His only other option was the Richardson Highway and Anchorage a couple hundred miles north. Once there, he would be lost forever.
The road uncoiled before the Blazer, the powerful Chevy engine roaring under the broad hood, the wheels reacting eagerly to Mercer’s guidance. As he drove, he shoved aside his exhaustion, knowing that he couldn’t push himself much farther or his body would simply fail to respond. This whole affair had all started here for him, at a test with Howard Small and his tunneling device, and he was going to see that it ended here too, probably no more than a few miles from Howard’s mini-mole site.
His mind cast back to that time only a few weeks before, recalling that the turnoff to the site was around a couple more bends in the road. Mercer didn’t realize his concentration had wavered until he rounded a sharp corner, and there, stretched across the two-lane road, was an overturned tour bus, glittering fragments of glass spread around the motor coach like handfuls of diamonds tossed onto the macadam. Dazed people milled around the scene, many of them stained by their own blood, others still struggling out of the destroyed vehicle.
Using both feet, Mercer ratcheted the brakes to the floor mat. Greasy black slicks burned off the tires, a sharp stench filling the confines of the Blazer. One elderly woman, her eyes owl-wide, stood transfixed as the truck careened toward her. Mercer yanked the wheel over, fishtailing the Blazer to a stop only feet from where she stood. Even as the body of the truck settled back onto its suspension, Mercer jammed the accelerator.
When he whipped his truck around to miss the woman, the Blazer lined up with a dirt track that forked off the Richardson Highway and climbed up to its right, heading straight to where the pipeline crossed over Thompson Pass. Mercer knew the track well. This was where he and Howard had been conducting their tests.
As the Blazer left the asphalt and the tires dug into the muddy road, he guessed at what had happened just moments before. Alam must have rounded the corner wide, directly into the path of the oncoming bus. Like Mercer just now, he would have hauled his truck to the right to get back into his lane and noticed the road leading up into the hills. Ignoring the swerving bus, he would have made a quick escape toward the testing site, while below him, the driver of the bus lost control of his heavy charge.
Mercer could not allow himself to consider that Alam had managed to squeak past the bus and continue toward Anchorage.
The access road twisted sharply in hairpin switchbacks, and almost immediately Mercer noticed fresh tire tracks in the hardened dirt, darker sprays of soil churned up from the wheels of a speeding vehicle. With Howard dead and the site shut down until people from UCLA came to get the mini-mole and all the other equipment, there would be no reason for anyone to be here. Alam was just ahead and this was a dead-end road. Mercer grabbed the automatic pistol and set it on his lap.
The road was narrow, trees and greenery scratching the side of the Blazer as it powered upward. When he finally burst into the site itself, the thick forest gave way to a huge field at the base of a solid wall of rock towering two hundred feet above the tallest trees. A steel cyclone fence had been erected around the area and where it crossed the access road, the gate was smashed back, hanging limply from one hinge.
The scene looked exactly as it had when Mercer and Howard had left for their celebratory fishing trip. Two enclosed trailers sat side by side, cement blocks placed under their integrated jacks keeping them level. A flatbed eighteen-wheeler was parked a little way off. Minnie herself sat at the base of the cliff under a tarp, heavy cables running from her to spools that were attached to large portable generators. She was still lined up to the main test-boring hole in the mountain, a perfectly round aperture that was so black it seemed to absorb light. A red Alyeska pickup truck sat next to one of the travel trailers Howard and his team had used as an office.