“What’s here?” Doe asked.
“Atomic stuff? Radiation?” Cheh added.
“Chemical warfare?” the German persisted.
“Worse,” Lessing did not want to talk about it. “Come on, we’ve got to go down.”
“Wait.” Cheh gnawed at her thin lower lip. “We have a right to know, mate. Who… what… killed these people, then?”
Doe pawed at his cheek with one knobby finger. “Biological warfare!” He backed away, toward the front room.
Lessing’s grimace told him he had hit the target dead on. “Damn it, there’s nothing here that’ll hurt us! If there was a leak we’d all be dead by now.”
“But these people…?”
“Somebody else was here just before us. I don’t know who, yet. Or why.”
“Too bloody lovely,” Cheh peered into the silent elevator. ‘The Russians? The Israelis?”
“The Jews wouldn’t have to kill anybody,” Doe sneered. His shaky voice belied his truculent tone. “Just ask President Rubin pretty-please for the key ya? More likely one of the American rebel factions. Bankrupt farmers? Black ghetto gangs? Tax protesters? Anti-war? Pro-war? Mexy immigrants?”
“Or mothers against bleedin’ child abuse!” Cheh knitted her pale brows in thought. “At least the American Army probably has its hands too full to bother with us right away. How much time do we have?”
“Who knows?” Lessing shrugged. “There must be alarms, even on this fallen-down chicken coop of a base.”
“They’ll send somebody, eh? Eventually?”
Lessing gestured toward the elevator. “That’s right. Let’s get it over with. Quick. Whatever happened here happened about a day and a half ago. Either we finish up and hide in the hills until our pickup, or else we abort.”
“Abort, I say,” Doe blurted. “No killer germs for me!”
“No mission, no money,” Lessing snarled back.
“God damn it. You go. I stand watch.” “Fine. I’ll do it alone.”
“No reason to get all exclusive and snobby, mate.” Cheh came over to stand beside him. “Two of us still. Just say what our chances are.”
A companion was more welcome than Lessing wanted to admit. He said, “We’ve seen nobody alive so far. If they’re dead down inside too, we grab what we’re after and get back out within ten minutes. We can holler if we run into trouble.” He slapped the sleek communications box strapped to his belt. “You, Doe, find the others. Bring them up to search the yard, the bodies, the garage. Break radio silence only if you spot somebody coming this way.”
“Look…,” Doe began lamely.
Lessing let himself smile. “No problem. We’ll squawk if the party gets exciting.”
“Right.” The German took a deep breath, then coughed into his fist. He was a good man in afire fight, but a black catacomb, possibly filled with invisible, miasmic death, might have daunted a stronger man.
Doe’s footsteps clumped back through the house and down the steps. Cheh fidgeted while Lessing inspected the elevator. There were three buttons on the panel and no traps that he could detect He realized that he was stalling; he would lose his nerve if he waited too long. He jabbed the middle button quickly. The door closed, lights came on, and the car began to descend. The emergency power was indeed working.
The door sighed aside to awaken shadowless, fluorescent tubes along the ceiling of a cream-colored anteroom. Lessing advanced, crouched, and advanced again, while Cheh covered him with her laser rifle. There was no one; the room held only sheeted furniture. An open door in the rear wall gave into a passage about ten meters long. This had two doors on either side, and a fifth at the far end upon which a stenciled sign proclaimed in letters the color of old, dried blood: SECURITY CLEARANCE 1-A ONLY.
Three of the side rooms were offices, dust-filmed and unused; the fourth was a storeroom. Bright cans of floor wax, boxes of toilet rolls, and cartons of duplicator paper lined its walls. Lessing made only a cursory search. A secret door was possible but unlikely.
Inside the room at the far end of the hall Arthur L. Kopper lay face down in a welter of cartons and electronic components; the badge on his stained and crumpled white shirt proved his identity. Lessing rolled him over. Kopper had been a fat, elderly, little man, the very model of a petty bureaucrat. His balding head was just beginning to show the purplish-brown mottlings of decay.
“Radio room,” Lessing murmured. He stepped over the corpse to inspect the communications gear that covered the back wall.
He saw it at once. One item did not belong: a fist-sized, silvery cannister spliced into the console.
“Hummingbird!” Cheh breathed. “Czech or Korean?”
A hummingbird was a small, self-powered computer. Plugged into a security rig, it silenced alarms, overrode local signals, and continued to send whatever “situation green, all normal” message had been programmed into the system. A hummingbird could not be shut off, and it usually contained a bomb to keep busy fingers from mucking with it.
Lessing prodded the spilled electronic parts with the butt of his rifle. The silence was more worrisome than Arthur L. Kopper’s mortal remains. “Jury-rigging around the hummingbird so you could get a message out?” he asked the corpse conversationally. The erstwhile Mr. Kopper made no reply.
Cheh sidled over to the communications board and peered at the innocuous cylinder. She did not touch it. “No backup security system?”
“They built this place just after the turn of the century, maybe during the missile crisis in 2013,” Lessing said. “The Born-Agains were in power then, and their security was state-of-the-art for the time. Hummingbirds came later.”
Arthur L. Kopper made no comment, his glazed, dead-fish eyes fixed upon the ceiling.
Lessing rubbed the bridge of his nose. “Always spoil-sports. Somebody develops a gadget, somebody else makes it obsolete.” He shivered. Kopper’s death was fresh, but there was old death down here too.
He retreated to the door. “Come on. Even if the hummingbird is still sending out a clear signal, somebody may’ve telephoned and got no answer. They’ll be on the way.”
Cheh stopped for a final look. “No point to a hummingbird after an assault. You put it on first, to silence any alarm. An inside job? A weasel?”
They both hefted their weapons involuntarily. “Damn,” whispered Lessing. “The bastard may still be around.”
They made it back to the elevator in record time.
At the top Lessing turned to face the girl. He gave himself no time to think, to consider whether Gomez’ 75,000 American dollars might be poor exchange for losing his life. He said, “I’ve got to go down again, all the way to the bottom this time. You don’t need to come. Get back to the others and look for transport.”
“Neither Teen nor I saw any vehicles,” the girl said stubbornly.
“What about the staff here? They had to have something. That rusty truck in the yard is garbage… window-dressing.”
“Too right, but… I’ll tell Doe to widen the search circle.”
“Go out and join him, dammit! I can handle the rest myself.”
He stared at her until she dropped her gaze and left The grubby little bedroom was stuffy, the cheap furniture sly and secretive. Lessing found it hard to breathe; the air was thick with the smell of mothballs and old clothing.
He was still studying the elevator panel when he heard footsteps.
It was Cheh. He had not told her to return, and he raised his head to protest.
“Passed on your message.” She brushed back a lock of short, fine, dirty-blonde hair from her forehead. “I’m goin’ too. You’ll want backup down there.”
“No!” he snapped. “No need. Nobody…”
“Push the bleedin’ button.” She gave him no chance to argue but thumbed the third and lowest stud on the panel herself.