“I don’t know,” she said. “The previous director didn’t share that information with me.”
Dammit.
“All right, you and I need to look for it. There’s got to be one here.”
She glanced at the monitor. “If we go out there, that’ll happen to us, too, won’t it?”
“Claudia! Help me find the exit!”
Not everyone Matt passed in the hallways was dead, but there was no question they soon would be. He felt no compassion for any of them, no guilt for what he’d done. Every last one of them had taken an active role in the deaths of billions. They deserved their fate. Just like he would eventually deserve his.
A fire was raging at the epicenter of the explosion, its heat prickling his skin. He idly wondered if the flames would consume all the air down here. If so, those who had survived his gas attack would live only to suffocate a few hours later. Again, the thought did not trouble him.
Not surprisingly, the door to the principal director’s suite was closed. Matt waved in front of the reader the ID card he’d taken from Sims, but nothing happened, not even a beep denying him access. He pulled out the card Wicks had given him, and encountered the same result.
That was all right. He had a solution.
Switching the rifle to semiautomatic, he aimed at the area around the lock and shot an arc through the door.
The gunfire didn’t frighten Perez. It merely focused his anger.
Claudia, on the other hand, screamed.
“Keep looking,” he ordered.
He ran his fingers under the countertop behind his desk. Three inches from the end farthest from the door, he found a switch. He pushed it, but nothing happened.
What the hell?
Out in the antechamber, the gunfire ceased.
He pushed it again, and this time heard a click under the cover. He dropped to his knees, sure he’d discovered the way out, but what he found instead was only the latch for the exit door. The escape exit itself had never been built.
He dove toward his desk, pulled open the bottom drawer, and fished around for the Smith & Wesson 9mm pistol he kept there. As he freed the gun, the door to his office flew open. He aimed across the room, but no one was there.
“Principal Director Perez,” a strange-sounding voice said from the other room. “It’s good to meet you.”
Perez aimed at the wall he thought the man was hiding behind, and pulled the trigger.
“Good thinking,” the intruder said. “And not bad on the aim, either. But these bases were built to last. No flimsy walls around here. Trust me, I knew the guy in charge of putting them in.”
Who the hell was this guy?
“What do you want?” Perez said.
“Already have what I want, thanks. You just aren’t aware of it yet.”
Perez moved to the other corner of his desk so that he’d have a more acute angle on the doorway He couldn’t see anything yet, so, with gun held out in front, he carefully stepped out from cover.
Across the room, Claudia coughed.
“Ah, that got back there quicker than I expected,” the voice said.
As Perez narrowed his eyes, unsure what the man meant, he had the sudden need to blink.
Another cough, but this one was his.
“Downward spiral from here, I’m afraid,” the voice said.
Perez staggered back to his desk, his chest heaving. Between blinks, he saw something move into the doorway. He lifted his hand, raising the gun, only he wasn’t holding it anymore. He looked around. It was on the ground where he’d started blinking. He took a step toward it but began coughing again.
“You won’t need that anymore,” the voice said, closer now.
The voice belonged to a man, that much Perez could tell, but what the guy looked like was hidden behind a full-face gas mask.
“How you feeling? Pretty crappy, huh?” The man looked past Perez. “I think your friend over there’s done for. Sorry about that.” He turned back to Perez. “You know what? That’s a lie. I’m not sorry.”
Perez could feel his strength draining away, but he wasn’t ready to collapse yet. “Who…are you?” he said.
“Me? I was a member of Project Eden, way before your time.” The man looked around. “I helped build this place. Yeah, but then I realized what was really going on. Been trying to stop you guys ever since. The destruction of Bluebird? That was my people. The message you were telling everyone about tonight? Mine, too.”
The gnat, Perez realized. This man was the gnat who had been bugging the Project for years.
“You aren’t…going to stop…anything,” Perez said, forcing each word out. “The Project’s too big.”
“I guess that’s a wait-and-see thing, isn’t it? Only you won’t be around to see it. But trust me, it’s going to happen.”
Perez doubled over in a coughing fit.
“Bet that hurts,” the man said. “You know, it’s amazing what you can find when you hunt around a deserted military base. I guess I could have taken a nuke, but that would have been too heavy to carry in here. The gas is a nice touch, though, don’t you think? From the poetic point of view, it would have been better if it was some kind of deadly disease you all weren’t vaccinated against, but this will work faster.”
Perez wasn’t about to give the man the satisfaction of his death. With his last ounce of will, he pushed himself up, and said as forcibly as he could, “This isn’t going to kill me.”
“Perhaps not,” the man told him. “Could be not enough of the gas got back here to kill both of you. That’s a shame.”
He raised his rifle and shot Perez in the thigh.
Screaming, Perez fell to the ground.
“Caught the artery on the first shot. Not bad,” the man said. “Now you are going to die. You’re going to bleed out right there on that nice carpet, in this nice office.” The man plopped down on the desk. “And I’m sitting right here until you do.”
Perez rolled onto his back, knowing the man was right.
I was so close. A few more weeks, maybe a month, and I would have truly ruled the world.
Through half-closed eyes, he looked at the man and whispered, “Fucking gnat.”
Matt waited until he was sure Perez was dead before leaving the office.
The former principal director had said his death would not stop the Project, and that was true, but it was a big step in that direction.
He wondered if Wicks had been able to get out. He hoped so. His old friend had done a lot for the Resistance from the inside, and didn’t deserve the death the others here had received.
Matt, on the other hand, wasn’t so sure about himself. There was a part of him that wanted to pull off his gas mask, and face the punishment he felt he deserved. Maybe if Wicks hadn’t come through with the information he’d passed along, Matt could have gone through with it, but now it wasn’t an option.
There was a thud somewhere in the hall behind him. Thinking it was probably the echo of something collapsing closer to the explosion, he kept walking.
Someone yelled behind him, the voice so strained and raw he couldn’t make out any words.
When he turned, he saw he was no longer the only one still breathing in the hallway. Down by the last corridor intersection, a woman was leaning against the wall. She was staring at him, her chest heaving. It wouldn’t be long, he knew, before she joined her dead colleagues.
As she pushed from the wall and took a few staggering steps toward him, he realized he’d seen her before. She was the woman who had been in the office with Perez. Matt had seen her crumble to the floor and assumed she’d died.