Together, they descended once more into the netherworld.
The lowest level was bigger: a dozen rooms and cubicles buried twenty meters beneath the New Mexico desert. The fluorescent lighting still worked, and the silent foyer and outer office were bright and impersonally businesslike with the irred-leatherettechairs, buff-hued filing cabinets, and desks panelled with no-scuff-real-wood plastic. Above one desk a homemade sign still proclaimed: SMOKERS WILL BE WALLED UP ALIVE. Lessing exchanged a grin with the Australian girl. Only a few old-timers still smoked tobacco.
God, it was cold down here, though. The heat must be off. Lessing stopped to sniff. A reassuring drone somewhere far away behind the walls told him that the air-conditioning was working. The place smelled like the inside of a vacuum cleaner, like any other sealed building.
It was totally still. If there were a weasel hiding down here, he was either very good or else he was as frozen as soybean ice cream!
Behind the anteroom, at the end of a short corridor, they came to a heavy security door. This stood open, apparently in perfect working order. The retinal-pattern scanner had been shut off, but the alarm light beside the door glowed a pleasant green, showing that the hummingbird was operating. It looked more and more like an inside job. They might not need Char, their electronics man, after all.
Lessing checked around the door. Some of these places were protected by secondary systems, he knew: gas, automatically activated machine guns, lasers. He found nothing, signalled to Cheh, and stepped gingerly over the sill.
The laboratories opening off the passage beyond the door had long since been stripped. Everything movable was gone, and only bare wires and less-dusty squares on the formica-topped tables showed where equipment had once stood. Bare shelves and racks, filing cabinets, a few pieces of heavy machinery of unknown function, all were shrouded in plastic. It was a morgue, a mummy’s tomb, a sepulchre for the murderous offspring of the paranoid twentieth century.
Not that the twenty-first was proving any less bloodthirsty
The stillness could be deceptive. Lessing forced himself to remember the chances of one or more hidden foes down here. He crouched and glided from door to door, wall to wall, as though the place were full of Russian “advisors,” just like Angola. Behind him, Cheh did the same. The laboratories were lifeless, the fluorescent lights bright and unblinking. The cold increased. There must be an outlet directly to the winter landscape above. Yet the air did not smell fresh; it stank of ancient chemicals.
His ears caught a throbbing, a motor sound just above the threshold of audibility, from the room ahead. He hefted his rifle as he had done a hundred times before in a dozen different countries and slid forward.
Ahead, he saw another open security door, this one with keys yet protruding from its double locks. There was a room beyond. Lessing sidled in, Cheh covering him warily.
This place was furnished: more filing cabinets, chairs, desks, red leatherette and plastic and crackle-finish metal. Here was the record room for what was still stored on the base.
At the far end, a heavy, steel door stood ajar, its glass window glinting white in the impersonal fluorescent glare.
White? It did not look like paint. Frost?
Both the motor noise and the cold emanated from that inner chamber.
Lessing understood. “Refrigerator,” he whispered. Then, in case the Australians called it something else, he added, “Cold storage.”
The girl nodded, watery, blue eyes large and round. It was her turn to move up.
Lessing stood sentinel over the mute furnishings, a deep foreboding skulking just below the horizon of his consciousness. His head ached, and his own eyes felt like sandstone pebbles in their sockets. He struggled to focus. On a desk before him lay a stained blotter, a stapler, and a flip-top calendar that still cheerily displayed the month of April 2035. He would lay money on there being neatly stacked stationery, envelopes, and boxes of paperclips in the drawers. Pencils, ballpoint pens, ribbon boxes for the printers, all would be in place, ready to hand, waiting for some bored Army secretary to come bustling back from her coffee break and get down to work. Most of what was personal and human would be gone, however: the photographs of friends and children, the old Christmas cards, the party invitations, the souvenir napkin from somebody’s wedding reception, the letter opener bought during a forgotten holiday in Mexico. The blank, timeless room had an accusatory air, like an old girl friend you didn’t call any more. Life had once been injected into this remote, subterranean labyrinth; now it had been withdrawn.
Cheh’s hoarse call jolted him back to the present. The Australian girl stood by the doorway of the cold room. She beckoned urgently.
“Here… a deader!”
In the far rear corner of the outer office, behind one of the desks, a man lay crumpled against the grill of an air-conditioning duct.
He had not died easily. A trail of blood and entrails zigzagged back to the heavy door of the cold room, and smears upon the desk panels and baseboards showed where he had dragged himself along. He was young, thin-faced, and athletic, handsome in a bland, middle-class- American sort of way. His eyes were closed, the lashes black half-moons within deep sockets. The cold had slowed decay, and only a chalky tinge to his tanned cheeks hinted that he was not just sleeping. His features were relaxed and peaceful, but his lower back was a shattered ruin. A stitch-gun had plowed six, maybe seven, tiny, explosive needles from behind into his spine, buttocks, and thighs.
Lessing inspected the corpse quickly. Whether the man had been one of the locals or the weasel himself could be discussed later. The mission demanded precision, and he knew what had to be done. Five steps carried him to the thick door of the refrigerated room. It took only a moment to scan the compartments and bins within for the aluminum cases Gomez wanted. Those cases would be marked with U.S. Army identification numbers and the letters PCV: “Pacov,” as the little Goanese pronounced the acronym. There were supposed to be two separate PCV containers, PCV-1 and PCV-2.
Doors hung ajar, cartons and containers lay in untidy disarray upon the frosted, black-plastic floor, and someone had even opened the service hatch to the refrigeration unit, revealing coils and ice-sheathed mechanisms inside. The motor was running full blast, struggling unsuccessfully to cool not only this storage chamber but also the rest of the complex — and the whole Southwest beyond!
He spotted the PCV cases at once. They lay open just inside one of the storage compartments: three boxes of dully shining metal marked “PCV-1.” The ten egg-shaped depressions in the grey plastic foam inside each case were empty. Lessing looked about and saw three more boxes, smaller and flatter than the first, stencilled “PCV-2.” These were also open, and their deep, squarish sockets held nothing.
“What’s up?” Cheh put her head around the door.
“Shit! We’ve been preempted,” Lessing let out pent-up breath in a whooping gasp. The dry, frigid air made him cough, and he sat down upon a stack of containers.
The girl understood at once. “The opfoes’ve nicked our stuff? Bastards!” Only a few mercenaries remembered that “opfo” had once stood for “opposing forces”; when Lessing had first heard the term out in Angola, he had thought it a word from some African language.
He groaned and got up. It was harder and harder to find energy — and willpower — for this sort of strenuous, damn-fool mission after you passed thirty. Lessing was now thirty-two.
Something else caught his eye: another open carton, of buff-colored plastic this time. One comer was ripped away. The ribbed flooring beneath it was dark red with congealed blood. The dead youth outside had wanted something from this box, wanted it very badly.