There must be at least two million . . . no, he decided, more like three million people gathered all around the Array. Maybe even more. The land itself had disappeared beneath their swarming mass.
He managed to pull himself away from this appalling sight and headed for his locker, pulling out a duffel bag already containing a change of clothes. He then headed for the gym and emptied the bag on to a bench. Something fell out and clattered on the tiles.
It was an inhaler, he realized. He picked it up and stared at it for a moment, then opened it up to find it was loaded with half a dozen cellophane-wrapped balls of loup-garou. He stared at the device with a peculiar hunger and licked his lips. He should throw it away – indeed, he wanted to – but some instinct made him shove it back in the bag, instead.
He took a shower, standing under a blast of hot water for a good twenty minutes until the heat had permeated through his skin and into his bones. He then put on a change of clothes, grabbed a coffee and sandwich and found a random workstation in the main operations room that registered his clearance as he approached, projecting custom pre-sets on to the dark panels on either side. He first checked his latest messages, all of them internal memos detailing personnel’s duties under the current crisis. Saul deleted them all in disgust.
Not for the first time, it occurred to him that there were very likely people working in the offices all around him who would not hesitate to have him killed simply because of what he now knew. And, if what Narendra had told him about his being trailed by an ASI team was true, it was conceivable that such an order had already been given.
He slunk lower in his chair, brooding, but looked up in time to see Donohue pass by.
A glass partition separated him from the corridor along which Donohue was striding, in an obvious hurry. If he’d so much as glanced to one side, he’d have noticed Saul staring back at him. But the Public Standards agent continued with brisk purpose, his gaze focused directly ahead.
Saul slipped out of his seat, intending to follow him, then paused as he remembered the inhaler still in his duffel-bag. He retrieved it before hurrying out into the corridor.
Trailing Donohue at a discreet distance, he watched as the man proceeded into an executive suite, leaving the door fractionally ajar.
Saul quietly stepped up to the door, with a quick glance back the way he’d come. The command centre was very nearly deserted, much more so than he had ever seen it. Only a very few individuals were either still working at their desks or conferring quietly behind semi-transparent partitions. Luckily none of them paid him any attention, as he peeked through the open door to see Donohue leaning over a desk, with his back to him, staring at information on a screen that only he could see.
Saul ducked away from the door, and made his way to another vacant workstation nearby. He waited there, one hand up to conceal the side of his head, leaning forward as if to concentrate on some piece of scrolling information. He was watching discreetly when Donohue emerged from the executive suite a few minutes later, hurrying back towards the elevators.
Saul followed him, rigid with tension, aware that stumbling across Donohue like this was sheer luck. He kept a discreet distance, hovering around a corner while Donohue boarded an elevator. As soon as its doors closed, Saul quickly boarded the one adjoining, punching the button for the basement car park. He couldn’t be sure that was where Donohue was heading, but the chances were pretty good.
Adrenalin chased away all the aches and pains that still plagued him as the elevator dropped, but it wasn’t enough to overcome the fatigue. I need this, he thought, fumbling for the inhaler. Just one more shot to give him a little bit of killer instinct. Maybe things had gone badly that time on Kepler, but the real mistake had been taking too much, too fast.
Just enough, and no more. That was all he needed.
He pressed the device against his lips, hitting the activator and inhaling deeply. He gasped as the loup-garou exploded into his lungs, reeling back against the wall of the elevator as the drug punched its way into his bloodstream and began racing towards his brain’s chemoreceptors. His fingers twitched slightly as he pushed the inhaler back into his pocket.
After the doors slid open, Saul stepped out into an enormous, dimly lit space that normally would be filled with maintenance trucks and Agency vehicles. Instead, more than a dozen battle-scarred Dogs, surrounded by yelling repair crews, dominated most of the available space, while nearly as many sonar tanks stood waiting next to an impromptu repair station. Half a dozen engineers were crowded around the display panel of an industrial robot that whirred and vibrated while applying the bright flame of a plasma torch to the treads of one tank.
Saul stared around wildly, desperate at the thought that he’d managed to lose Donohue.
There! Saul recognized Donohue’s ID tag bobbing along past a cluster of troopers, almost unnoticeable amongst their varicoloured UP icons. He hurried past a pair of Black Dogs carrying sonar cannons on their backs, their batteries blaring noisily as the ear-muffled operators ran test checks across the ceiling.
He noticed Donohue was making his way towards a row of cars parked along one wall and hurried after him, closing the distance while casting a quick glance over his shoulder to make sure no one was looking their way.
Saul slammed into Donohue from behind, just as he was pulling the door of a car open. The man grunted under the force of the impact, which sent him flying forward across the driver’s seat. He recovered quickly, however, ramming his left elbow back into Saul’s ribs, while struggling to pull his gun from its shoulder holster.
Saul brought a knee up hard between the man’s thighs, and Donohue slumped forward, wheezing noisily. Saul leaned further inside the car and locked an arm around Donohue’s neck, while groping with his other hand until he found the holster, and pressed Donohue’s standard-issue Agnessa up against the back of the man’s head.
‘Slide over, and keep your hands visible,’ Saul commanded.
Donohue nodded wordlessly, and moved himself over to the passenger seat. His eyes widened in shock as he turned to face his assailant.
‘You son of a bitch,’ Donohue hissed. ‘If you ever had a chance of getting out of this alive, you just lost it.’
A tide of white-hot anger obscuring his thinking, Saul flicked the gun around to grasp it by the muzzle, then whipped the handle viciously across Donohue’s head.
Donohue reeled back in shock, then reached up one trembling hand to feel the blood seeping from his forehead. ‘What the fuck do you want?’ he screeched.
‘Shut the fuck up,’ Saul snapped, pressing the Agnessa between Donohue’s eyes. He groped at the dashboard, opaquing the windows as far as they would go, so as to hide them both from outside scrutiny.
‘Why were you following me when I arrived in Sophia?’ Saul demanded. ‘Were you intending to kill me, like you did Farad Maalouf?’
‘You have no idea what you’re involved in,’ Donohue snarled. ‘I told you to get the fuck off Earth, and you ignored me. You got yourself caught up in something you shouldn’t have had any part in.’
‘Tell me, about Mitchell Stone,’ Saul demanded through clenched teeth. ‘You told me he was dead, but that’s not what I’ve been hearing. Why bother lying to me?’
‘So it’s true what I heard,’ Donohue snapped back. ‘You did get your hands on the Tau Ceti files. We’d never have figured that out if you hadn’t sent them to your girlfriend over a public network.’