Sullivan and Rawlings did exactly as told. They, too, disappeared off screen.
“Come on,” Murphy said under his breath. “Come on.”
“Not going to happen,” Lancer told him.
“Don’t be a downer, man.”
The road remained empty, reinforcing the watch officer’s belief that they weren’t going to witness any streaking. He was about to tell Murphy to get his cash ready when Sullivan staggered into the frame and collapsed onto the road.
“What the hell?” Lancer said.
He started to reach forward to call in backup when something pricked his neck and Murphy said softly in his ear, “Sorry.”
With a suddenness that was almost more shocking than the condition itself, the watch officer realized he was paralyzed, unable to move even a finger.
He could hear the others in the communications room going about their business. On the screen in front of him, he could see the young couple dragging Sullivan back off the road. He wanted to yell. He wanted to reach out to his keyboard and type in the three-character combination that would raise the alarm. More than anything, he wanted to slam his fist into the side of Murphy’s head.
“It will all be over soon.” Murphy patted him on the cheek, then removed the watch officer’s headset. Into the mic, he said, “Resident team’s having a hard time locating our visitors. Suggest dispatching second team to help in the search.” A pause. “It’s Murphy. Lancer’s on a bathroom break…okay, great, thanks.” He put the headset down in front of the computer. As soon as two more men appeared on the monitor, heading out to assist Sullivan and Rawlings, he walked back toward his own station.
Lancer concentrated on his hands, willing them to move, but they remained frozen in place. How long was this going to last? At some point the paralysis had to wear off, right? For God’s sake, someone please notice that there’s something wrong! Look! At! Me!
“Want to show you something.” Murphy was back at his side.
The traitor set an inch-thick, square-zippered case on the desk. Lancer immediately recognized it as the case Murphy kept his personal headphones in, something he’d brought with him every day. Murphy unzipped it, and opened it up. The headphones inside were no mere earbuds. These were state of the art, and probably cost at least a couple hundred dollars. They had foam padding on each side that fit over the ears, and were connected via a horseshoe-shaped band that could extend or contract depending on the size of the user’s head.
What? Was Murphy going to blast Lancer with music?
Then Murphy did something unexpected. He first peeled back the leather covering the padding on one side. Underneath wasn’t padding at all. It looked more like a thin plastic bag that had been rolled so that it would fit snuggly into the space.
“Cute, huh?” Murphy said.
He stretched the plastic out.
Not a bag, a…lightweight mask, with a small circular opening where the mouth would be.
Murphy disassembled the other padded earpiece, this time removing a plastic oval ring, then the speaker itself. He mounted the speaker in the ring, and attached the ring to the opening in the mask, closing it off.
“This is the best part,” he said.
From the headband he removed three thin flat containers. Each seemed to be divided in the middle, with a clear liquid on both sides.
“Can I use this?” he asked, reaching for Lancer’s coffee mug. “Thanks.”
He seemed to glance around, and Lancer heard him dump the remaining coffee on the floor before setting the mug back on the desk. He wiped the interior with a tissue, then poured in the contents from one side of one of the containers.
“I promised you it wouldn’t be long.”
He donned the plastic mask. Lancer immediately saw it for what it was-a gas mask.
No! No! The scream in his head wanted nothing more than to pass his lips, but his vocal cords didn’t even quiver.
Murphy opened the second side-
No!
— and dumped it into the mug.
Olivia Silva lay on the bed of her cell, her eyes closed. She’d been this way for over an hour, and most observers would have thought she was asleep.
They would have been wrong.
She was in a meditative state, one that allowed her to conserve her energy while maintaining complete awareness of her surroundings. She floated on a sea of nothing-recharging and refreshing her mind.
But most of all, preparing.
When the alarm beyond her cell door went off, she opened her eyes.
The gaseous neurotoxin created by the chemicals Murphy had combined was cloudless, lethal, and, in the enclosed space of the control room, extremely fast-acting. It worked so quickly, in fact, that the two guards who were inside the control room hadn’t even had time to know something was wrong before they fell to the ground, dead.
As pleased as he was with the results, Murphy’s initial concern was that the sudden deaths would be noticed by the guards on the other side of the glass wall, but as his contact had predicted, unless someone had collapsed right next to the wall, the other would never notice. Most of those in the control room were sitting behind larger monitors, and were already hard to see.
Murphy returned to his own station, and accessed the controls to the Bluff’s numerous security systems. He couldn’t take them all off-line. That would trigger the master alarm, and seal everyone inside until reinforcements arrived. What he could do was set up a rolling blackout of the zones across the property, timed to match the progress of the assault team as they approached the house, and make it look like a systems test. He slotted the thumb drive into his terminal and uploaded the program that would trigger the progression.
Once the program was ready to run, he tuned to the radio frequency the assault team was using.
“Control down,” he said. “Beginning blackout sequence on my mark. Mark.” He clicked the switch, starting the program.
He then switched to the terminal in the back row that controlled the detention cells. The woman who’d been manning the station was slumped forward, dead like the others. Murphy pushed her to the floor and took her chair. Removing a second thumb drive, he mounted it in the appropriate port, and used the program it contained to bypass the security alerts and disable the automatic locking feature on the door leading into the detention wing. Though the monitors would still indicate the door was locked, it wouldn’t be.
He brought up a view of cell number eleven. The Silva woman was lying down, apparently asleep.
Not for long.
He triggered the switch that unlocked her door, and accessed the alarm controls, hovering the cursor over the one for the detention wing.
Now it was time for part two.
Chaos.
Taylor had been stationed at the entrance to the detention wing for nearly seven hours. One more and he would be done for the night. So far, besides the guards who had either been starting or finishing duty on the block, no one had gone through the door in the clear Plexiglas wall that separated the arrival area from the detention cells. That wasn’t unusual. There were only twenty cells here, and only five were being used.
These were the most important prisoners taken by the resistance, members of the Project who were deemed both dangerous and potentially useful. Normally, the only time someone passed through the security door would be to question one of the prisoners, or deliver the meals. It was, without a doubt, a boring job, but one he and his fellow guards knew was important.
At the moment, though, his mind wasn’t on the prisoners or the potential death of billions. He was thinking about the beer waiting for him upstairs and the basketball game that was already recording on the receiver in his room.
Bwhap-bwhap-bwhap.