He freed a twenty-dollar bill from his pocket and placed it on the counter. “Thanks.”
He sprinted for the staircase, gun still out. One man remained in the room upstairs, a man the cleanup crew would have reported to, a man who would have some answers. For him. For T.C.
He reached the room in question, the bottom half of the “2” and top half of the “4” missing. He could see the frame’s wood was rotted too much to resist even a slight kick, never mind a full one.
He threw a full one into it. The door shattered at latch level and flew inward.
Blaine was through it while it was still in motion, gun raised before the crash against the wall sounded. In the back of his mind he had already recorded that the room was all wrong: too big, spacious, well furnished, even smelled decent. He had recorded all this even before the voice of the lone occupant reached him in the half light.
“Good evening, Mr. McCracken,” said Ryan Sundowner. “I’ve been expecting you.”
Chapter 8
McCracken Looked at the youngish man in the tattered sports jacket and then at himself holding the gun.
“I’m Ryan Sundowner,” the man continued. “Head of the Bureau of Scientific Intelligence.”
“The Toy Factory,” McCracken followed. “I’ve heard of you. The fact that you knew I was coming doesn’t bode well for our friendship.”
Sundowner gazed at the pistol which Blaine had lowered only slightly. “If that statement was due to the fact that I’m a part of what you’ve become involved in, I accept the responsibility. Trouble is, I’m as confused and scared as you are.”
“Not quite. You were expecting me, I wasn’t expecting you. What the hell has the Toy Factory got to do with all this?”
“Long story.” Sundowner stopped. “The gun, Mr. McCracken, you really don’t need it.”
“I’ll be the judge of that.”
“I dismissed my men to avoid any unpleasant incidents.”
“Lucky for them.”
“I know what you’ve been through. If it’s any consolation, the three bodies you discovered in the brownstone belonged to my men.”
“Your men? Then who—”
“Killed them and killed that woman? I don’t know. But between the two of us, I’m hoping we can find out. I’ve got a car waiting downstairs. I’m heading back to Washington. I’d like you to come with me.”
“I’ll go with you as far as LaGuardia. The rest depends on how much I learn to love your company. How’d you know about the woman?”
“Your call into the Sanitation Department was traced to her room.”
“Next question: why did she have to die?”
Sundowner didn’t respond until they were in the backseat of the car and the driver had pulled out into traffic. “It starts with those crystals.”
“Lydia Brandywine works for you,” McCracken realized.
“Worked. Past tense. They got her, too.”
“Efficient lot, aren’t they?”
“This is all new to me, Mr. McCracken. If I sound calm, it’s because I, you, all of us are facing something far more terrifying than a few deaths.”
Blaine’s eyes flared. “Not ‘just’ a few. You’d best remember that.”
“I understand how you felt about the woman. I spent much of the night going over your complete file. She was included in it.”
“That file was sealed after Omega. It was one of my conditions.”
“I unsealed it. For reasons of national security, a person with authority can do just about anything.”
“I don’t have a thing to do with national security anymore. Or was that left out of the file?”
“No, it was quite clear on that point.”
“Guess I made a mistake giving Lydia my real name. She passed it on to your goons and they passed it on to you before they died. Don’t know enough to keep my big mouth shut.” Blaine looked angry again. “Right now I’d like to shove those crystals down yours.”
“I’d let you if you had enough of them. That’s how important those crystals are to us. We’ve been looking for something like them for months, years really.” He started to reach into his pocket. “Here. You of all people deserve to see what they look like.”
Sundowner’s hand emerged with a jagged piece of ruby red crystal, perhaps six inches in length at its longest point. It was filled with grooves and ridges, seemed shiny even in the dull light of the backseat. McCracken took it in his hand. It felt cold, though it wasn’t. He supposed the coldness was in his mind, emanating from the fact that he was now clutching what had led to T.C.’s death. He wanted to fling it out the window but squeezed it tight instead.
“We call it Atragon,” Sundowner explained. “You are now holding in your hand the greatest natural power source ever known to man. We hope it will be the batteries to run Bugzapper.”
“Bugzapper?”
“I’ll give you a complete demonstration once we reach Washington.”
“I don’t remember agreeing to go. See, I’ve got my own trail to follow.”
“It’s the same one as mine, unless I miss my guess. Terry Catherine Hayes was killed by men who don’t want us to find further stores of the Atragon crystals. Find the crystals, and you find the men.”
“Is it really that simple?”
“In a sense, yes. But in another sense we’re facing the most complicated threat to our very existence we have ever faced.”
“You have a knack for being melodramatic.”
“In this case, I’m understating, believe me. Three days ago a small town was obliterated by a particle beam with some rather unique properties. There wasn’t a single carbon atom left. That includes the inhabitants.”
McCracken looked at him closely.
“Mr. McCracken, your file emphasizes the fact that you are obsessed with saving the world one piece at a time, that you can’t stand to see innocent people die. Well, over a thousand died in the town of Hope Valley, and that could be just the beginning. The wielder of the beam weapon is blackmailing us. Simply stated, we have three weeks to unilaterally begin the process of dismantling our nuclear arsenal or we will face annihilation.”
“The Soviets?”
“The indications are there, too many of them probably. The point is somebody’s got this death beam, and there’s nothing we can do at present to stop it.”
“I love phrases like ‘at present’.”
“It’s accurate here, I assure you. In effect, Bugzapper is a shield of energy effectively enclosing the entire country and rendering it invulnerable to enemy attack.”
“Missiles as well as death rays?”
“Under the right conditions, absolutely. But the right conditions include Atragon to power the shield. The crystal you’re holding acts as a solar receptor with tremendous storage capacities. A virtual twin of it powered three floors of the Toy Factory last week for over an hour.”
“Without burning up?”
“More than that, we had to shut the system down because our circuits were starting to overload.”
“So it was you who had the crystals stolen from Earnst in the first place.”
Sundowner nodded. “Yes. Standard procedure, I’m afraid, to avoid drawing attention to our experiments. There didn’t seem to be any rush for completing them at the time.”
“Until Hope Valley.”
Another nod. “With the realization that the crystals might be our only shield against annihilation, Atragon became a very precious commodity indeed. I ordered our men to move on Earnst to learn his source for it.”
“Only they failed, thanks to me. And then they got whacked by a first-class hitter a few hours after these four guys with beards and black coats traded in their prayer shawls for machine guns.”