"You don't? Well, she does." Lasser dropped the printout, clasped his hands over his little belly in a familiar lecture pose, and considered his words before using them. "Eve Simpson and Boren Mills are the heart and soul of IEE. Mills is as close to our President as Lon Salter — and we don't want to get into a pissing contest with the CEO of the most powerful industrial arm in Streamlined America. I may as well tell you: Mills was one of the few Navy people during the war who knew T Section's charter — and he knows about rovers too. We couldn't prevent him from telling the Simpson woman. It's my guess she was toying with you in several ways at once; don't underestimate her. Young and the Fed party owe more to Simpson and Mills than they do to S & R. Between 'em, those two can do more for an image through media than all the rest of us put together." The portly little man sighed, made a helpless gesture with one hand. " Now d'you see why we have to shrug this little fiasco off, Quantrill?"
"Do you see that she's no more responsible than a spoiled brat?"
"Granted." Lasser began to chuckle, shaking his head in gentle disapprobation. "You should've heard the hotel staff report, it fairly begs description. First thing they saw was you, facedown on the floor, and they got the idea there was a hand-to-hand fight going on in the bath. So they broke the door down, and found your, ah, friend Eve alone, naked as a thousand-pound jaybird and ready to toss them all out. She damn' near did. But Control picked up your mayday and there's no shortage of S & R teams in Santa Fe at the moment, so…" Lasser spread his hands; seemed to take the whole thing as a great joke.
"At least you've explained something about Mills," said Quantrill. "I thought I'd seen him before, and now I know when. It was the night I did my first hit, on some Navy saboteur. Mills was Navy too; saw me coming out of the guy's room. I had cosmetic cover but I think he made me last night at the banquet. It was one of those deja vu things; you look around and you're staring at him, just like the first time."
"I wouldn't worry about it," Lasser said after a moment of reflection. "If you wore cosmetic cover, Mills probably isn't sure — and if he is, so what? He knows what you do for a living."
Quantrill narrowed his eyes, cocked his head at Lasser, sat up straight. "If he has the need to know, he's in my chain of command."
The two stared at each other a long moment.
Lasser said, "What's good for IEE is good for this country. But you are not, repeat not, to repeat that irresponsible notion." The flush across Lasser's cheeks said, I've told you too much.
CHAPTER 14
Quantrill was on his feet in a day, and in a sprint chopper a week later en route to Indianapolis. From the air he spotted two of the three old nuke scars, vast gray dustbowls with shallow lakes at their centers, that had all but killed Indianapolis in '96. Both bombs had targeted soft military sites, a Naval weapons plant and an Army post East of the city's center. The third strike had come during a later nuclear flurry, taking out the Municipal Airport after its conversion to a military base.
Slammed by airbursts, partly consumed by firestorm, the Hoosier heart of the city had refused to quit.
Some of the of the old buildings still stood, monuments to an architectural style that had wasted energy when the stuff was cheap. Now, this very morning, one of those old structures had succumbed.
Dropping toward a parking area off Burdsall Parkway, Noah Laker banked their sprint chopper over the felled trade center, now no longer burning but smoldering still. Adams strained at her harness, craning her neck as Laker's deft work brought them over the collapsed edge of the structure. "One of those long-span deathtraps of the eighties," she said. "Rain load, you think?"
Quantrill shrugged. Heavy rains might have been the last straw, but Howell had told him to look for earlier straws. They'd found rebel arms along the border, but in Indianapolis? It'd been a deep cache, the kind you might expect in a region of heavy industry. So deep they'd excavated a bit too far under the old blast-damaged foundation. The acres-wide roof had collapsed only on one corner, kneeling into its parking lot, an obeisance toward Monument Circle in the center of town.
Three of the stubby black Loring sprint choppers were already at the site. Laker's group brought their strength up to nineteen, not twenty; they expected the rover, Quantrill, to disappear. He did not disappoint them.
He took his time, nodding at the fluorescent scrawls left by regulars at stairwells and ramps as he descended into the bowels of the structure. Some of the crews had been on the site for twelve hours, and you had to accept their cryptic signs as gospel even if the ferroconcrete swayed underfoot. "Going in, Control," he said. "Ramp three-ell. Somebody's been here with chemlamps. You copy?"
A moment's pause. "Copying, Q. Mirovitch set the lamps, ah, eleven hours ago, so you should have light for another twenty-five hours."
Quantrill came to a landing halfway down, saw an arm protruding from beneath the laminated girder which had slammed down through the walkway. He grasped the wrist, released it gently. Only one more level remained, but now he picked his way over shards of plastic rail and jagged hunks of concrete. The air below carried a pungent damp stink and the faint odor of ozone.
At the bottom stairwell door was a woman. No, only half a woman. He kept going, eased the heavy door open and jammed it with a hunk of debris. He studied the faint glow in the quiet dank hell of the lowest sub-basement for long seconds. It wasn't entirely quiet; as he stood in the scant protection of the doorframe, a desk-sized chunk of concrete slithered a few centimeters down a pile of debris in muted warning.
"Bottom level, Control, facing East. Either Mirovitch planted some chemlamps under debris, or there's been more settling since he was here. Don't suppose you could send him down…"
The desexed voice was distant now. "Mirovitch was rotated out after he reported what he found, Q."
"Mustn't risk the prettyboys, huh?" But he knew better. The less a regular knew about weapons caches, the less he would speculate.
"Say again, Q," the faint voice requested.
"Forget it." He drew two chemlamps from his backpac, energized them, snapped a teat on one and squeezed carefully against its slender length. Bright gobbets of liquid light splashed near his feet, a trail he could follow later. With stealthy caution he skirted the collapsed segments, moving into deeper gloom.
He felt the faint tremor through his bootsoles, saw dust sift through another rent in the concrete above to his left. Several levels above him — endless tons of hair-trigger-balanced junk above him — something big had let go.
"Report, Q." It must've been a beaut. Now Control was loud in his noggin.
"Proceeding East, Control. I'm still suckin' wind, if that's what — wups. Well, Mirovitch was right." In the dim dazzle of his chemlamp was a welter of cartons. They had fallen from a stack against the East wall to reveal the top of a trapezoidal opening. It hadn't always been trapezoidal; it had been forced awry by the building's collapse. It hadn't been part of the original concrete pour, either.
The cartons weighed little, obviously just a mask for the portal beyond. Quantrill eased several of them away; stood shaking his head as he studied the skewed opening. He squirted the chemlamp fluid into the black maw before him, saw the spatter outline a stack of fiberite casings and, farther back, more military storage canisters. He wished then for an incandescent lamp but thrust that wish away. He'd seen what happened when an electric bulb cracked in an atmosphere full of dust. Usually nothing happened. But at times that dusty mixture supported combustion, and then what happened was of no further interest to the bulb user.