“What do you want?”
Ted Cooper moved back a step. “Cooperation.”
“Why should I trust you? You are worse than a house rat, Professor.”
“I'm not a rat, Major,” Ted said, rubbing his palms together. “I am what you call an industrialist. You see, Miller, he is a rat, he and his little crew of scientists. Rats move with rats. And rats only want the food for the day. They don’t store, or save for the rainy day.”
He licked his lips. The rabid guy in the locked room behind the glass was at it again. He banged his head on the glass. The major winced. It made a sickening sound. Blood spattered the glass and ran down it.
“I want the big meat, Major Santiago. That’s why I’m here. I want to help you get well and you help me get to the motherload.”
Juan Santiago watched Ted from under red eyes. The itch in his hand was getting worse. But he was in a place now where he could not afford to be vulnerable. This American was negotiating.
Americans always fucked you in negotiations.
“There is no motherload.”
“Oh yes there is, and Admiral Anton Huebner is on his way to claim it. But what about you, huh, don’t you want something? Everybody wants something!”
Santiago gave up then. He pulled the sleeve of his fatigues and his nails went to work. When he was done, the sight wasn’t pretty.
“Aw, now that is not how a man should live,” Ted whispered.
The major moaned in pain. He cracked his neck. He felt a little better. That had been working, relieving the pain in the spine and head. The other infected soldiers were doing it too.
“Now here’s a proposal, Major. You let me in there, in that lab with all the documents and important formulas and stuff, you know. I get the doctor in my crew to create an antidote—”
“You are a cheap liar too.” Santiago shook his head. He spat on the floor.
It was sputum, a yellow glob.
“Okay, I was saying, I get the doctor to make you an antidote and I return. You let me in there before the admiral gets here. He’ll never know I took anything. Simple.”
“Your billionaire could make a better deal—”
“Miller?” Ted scoffed. “You don’t understand, Major. Miller isn’t going to make it. I don’t think so.”
Santiago’s yellowing eyes wavered. He rose slowly from the table he had been sitting on. Two of his men sat against the wall like a torpedoed ship.
He sighed.
“I will fuck you up, if you don’t deliver.”
“I will,” Ted said, walking away.
Frank Miller reasoned that if they stayed longer they also would come down with the disease that’s in the facility. Therefore, two things were needed.
“One, we need weapons,” he said, counting off on his fingers. “Two, we need to understand this disease—”
“An antidote,” Anabia Nassif put in.
“Yes.”
“And how about why we are here?” Ted asked. “The research in that lab?”
“This disease is the research, Professor Cooper,” Nassif pointed out. “If we find an antidote while here, we have achieved something. Hell, who knows if one of us or several is already infected?”
“Now that, that’s some scary shit to say,” Liam Murphy mumbled.
That silence that called up horrific imaginations came upon the group. To distract herself, Olivia had her notes. She wrote in longhand and made copious side notes. She’d love a couple of glasses of whiskey too, if that were possible, and if she didn’t suppose that at this time, even she needed her head working right.
She wished, though, that the Russian would invite her to drink.
“Alright, I’m all up for an antidote and all.” Ted joined Miller in the middle of the room. “But whatever we are gonna do, we gotta get on with, fast.”
Olivia took a sheet off her notebook. She wrote on it and passed it to Peter. He read it and nodded.
Nicolai got up and went to his boxes.
He looked around the room. “I need a hand. Who wants to join me?”
Olivia jumped up. “I will.”
“I think I can make something simple for a weapon.”
“What? A Molotov cocktail?” asked Ted Cooper.
“Yes, if that is what it takes to get out of here.”
Olivia joined the Russian. The rest of the crew watched as Ted Cooper made his exit again. When he was gone, Olivia rushed to get her camera. Peter held her hand on her way through the door.
“Be careful,” he told her.
The crew all nodded. Olivia slipped out after Miller quietly.
She saw Cooper go straight past the rocket room where the soldiers were. She heard the boom of the quarantined soldier as he attacked the glass windows. The professor went on without looking that way.
Cooper went past without so much as a hoot from the two sentries at the door of the rocket room.
The sentries appeared well, healthy. She stopped about two meters from them. Miller went out of sight into a door that the major hadn’t allowed the crew to go near.
Disappointed, Olivia stood flattened against the wall. She had hoped to follow Miller, out to wherever he was off to. To take photos of him betraying the crew. She hadn’t factored in the sentries.
She started back to the others.
When Olivia was back with the crew she told them what she saw.
“Ted Cooper went out without permission, I think.”
“What does that prove?” Itay Friedman said.
Olivia glared at him. “That he is one of them!”
Guided by her notes, she outlined her theory. She argued that the professor meant to see them out, either to the soldiers in the facility now, or to some third party.
Ted was, in fact, meeting that third party right now.
“We have to make him feel like he’s winning,” she concluded. “That’s how we beat him.”
The men said it made sense.
Disgruntled with the direction his expedition had taken, and in his friend, Frank Miller requested that the crew be split in two. One half would work on arming the crew, and the other must find a way to get into the main laboratory under the watchful eyes of the soldiers.
Miller, Itay Friedman, and Victor Borodin would get into the laboratory.
“And what if we can’t find anything there to help us?” Borodin asked.
Miller said, “We will.”
Friedman spread Kruger’s map and blueprints on the floor after they shut the door and drove the lock in. It would be no use if Professor Cooper found them on the floor, scheming.
“We need a way around the guards. Ms. Olivia said there are two sentries on watch duty. Here is the rocket room, and here is the laboratory.” Miller tapped on a spot on the map.
“And this is where we are, this room.”
With shaking hands he traced the lines — the walls — surrounding the room in which they were. The block stretched down in one rectangular shape from the rocket room, all the way past their room and two rooms after. They had not gotten to those ones yet, and no one knows what treasures lurked in those places.
However, to their left there was another room, larger than this one. After it was the hall that led to the U-boat pen. But between that room and the rocket room, there was the hallway.
“If we could get from here, across the hallway and into this room,” Miller mused.
He tapped a space right beside the laboratory, directly behind the enclosure where the ailing soldiers were imprisoned.
“But how do we get there?” Miller said, half to himself.
He looked at the light bulb burning low and yellow. The rest did too.