“The laser takes care of that. If a security guard is watching his monitor, all he’ll see is a flash of light on the screen.”
They hurried down the corridor and turned the corner. Once again, the shielder detected a new camera and a laser beam hit the center of the lens. A second door was at the end of the corridor, which led to an emergency staircase. They followed the staircase upward to the landing and paused again.
“You ready?” Mother Blessing asked.
Hollis nodded. “Keep going.”
“I spent too many months sitting around on that wretched island,” Mother Blessing said. “This is much more entertaining.”
She pushed open the door and they entered a basement room filled with machines and communications equipment. A white walkway on the floor led to a reception desk where a security guard was eating a sandwich wrapped in wax paper.
“Stay here,” Mother Blessing said to Hollis. She handed him the submachine gun, stepped out of the shadows, and walked briskly toward the reception area. “Don’t worry! Everything is going to be all right! Did you get the phone call?”
Still holding the sandwich, the guard shook his head. “What phone call?”
The Irish Harlequin drew the automatic from beneath her jacket and fired. The bullet hit the guard in the middle of his chest and knocked him out of his chair. Mother Blessing didn’t break her stride. She slipped the handgun back in the holster, stepped around the desk, and approached a steel door.
Hollis caught up with the Harlequin. “There’s no door handle.”
“It’s electronically activated.” Mother Blessing scrutinized a small steel box attached to the wall near the door. “This is a palm vein scanner that uses infrared light. Even if we had known about this, it would be difficult to create a bio dupe. Most veins aren’t visible beneath the skin.”
“So what are we going to do?”
“When you’re trying to overcome security barriers, the choices are either low-tech or very high-tech.”
Mother Blessing took the submachine gun from Hollis, removed a spare ammunition clip from the equipment bag, and slid the clip between her belt and waistband. The Harlequin pointed her weapon at the door and motioned Hollis to step aside. “Get ready. We’re going low.”
She fired the submachine gun. Pieces of metal and wood spun through the air as bullets cut a jagged hole through the left edge of the door. As Mother Blessing snapped the spare clip into her weapon, Hollis shoved his hand through the hole and pulled hard. Metal scraped against metal and the door lurched open.
He rushed into the room and found himself staring at a glass tower at least three stories high. Layers of piled-up computer hardware were inside the tower, and their blinking lights were reflected on the glass like miniature fireworks. The whole structure looked both beautiful and mysterious-as if an alien spaceship had suddenly materialized inside the building.
A large monitor hung on the wall about twenty feet away from the tower. It showed an image of Berlin from some location outside the building, a duplicate world where computer-generated figures strolled through a city square. Two frightened computer technicians stood at a control panel directly below the monitor. They were motionless for a few seconds, and then the younger man hit a button on the panel and darted across the room.
Mother Blessing drew her handgun, paused for a second, and shot the fugitive in the leg. As the technician sprawled across the floor, an emergency light started flashing and the computer-generated voice came from a wall speaker.
“Verlassen Sie das Gebäuder. Veslassen Sie-”
Looking annoyed, Mother Blessing put a bullet in the speaker. “We don’t want to leave the building,” she said. “We’re having such a lovely time.”
The wounded man lay on his side, clutching his leg and screaming. Mother Blessing approached her target and stood over his body. “Stay quiet and be glad you’re alive. I don’t like people who set off alarms.”
The wounded man ignored her. He shouted for a doctor and began to roll back and forth.
“I asked you to stay quiet,” Mother Blessing said. “That’s a simple request.”
She waited a few seconds to see if the wounded man was going to obey her. When he kept shouting, she shot him in the head and walked over to the control panel. The surviving technician was a slender man in his thirties with short black hair and a bony face. He was breathing so quickly that Hollis thought he might faint.
“And what’s your name?” Mother Blessing asked.
“Gunther Lindemann.”
“Good evening, Mr. Lindemann. What we want is access to a USB outlet for a flash drive.”
“Not…not here,” Lindemann said. “But there are three outlets inside the tower.”
“Okay. Let’s take a tour.”
Lindemann led them over to a sliding door on one side of the tower. Hollis could see that the walls of the tower were six inches thick. Each glass panel was held in place by an outer steel frame. Another palm vein scanner was mounted on the wall. Lindemann slid his hand into the box and the door clicked open.
Cold air surrounded them as they entered the sterile environment. Quickly, Hollis walked over to a workstation with a computer, keyboard, and monitor. He removed the gold chain holding the flash drive, then snapped the drive into an access port.
A message scrolled across the monitor screen in four languages: UNKNOWN VIRUS DETECTED. RISK-HIGH. The screen went blank for a moment and then a red square appeared containing ninety little squares. Only one of the boxes was a solid red color, and it flashed on and off as if a single cancer cell had appeared in a healthy body.
Mother Blessing turned to Lindemann. “How many guards are in the building?”
“Please don’t-”
She interrupted him. “Just answer my question.”
“One guard is at the desk outside and two are upstairs. The off-duty guards live in an apartment across the street. They’ll be here any moment.”
“Then I should probably be ready to greet them.” She turned to Hollis. “Let me know when we’re done.”
Mother Blessing led Lindemann out the door while Hollis remained at the workstation. A second red square started flashing, and Hollis wondered what kind of battle was going on inside the computer. As he waited, he thought about Vicki. What would she say if she were standing beside him right now? The death of the guard and the computer technician would have bothered her deeply. Seed to sapling. She had always used that phrase. Anything done with hatred had the potential to grow and block the Light.
He glanced back at the monitor. The two red squares glowed brightly and now the virus began to double itself every ten seconds. All the other lights on the terminal started to flash, and a warning siren went off somewhere in the tower. In less than a minute the virus had conquered the machine. The workstation monitor was a solid red color, and then the screen went completely black.
Hollis ran out of the tower and found Lindemann lying facedown on the floor. Mother Blessing stood ten feet away from the technician, pointing the submachine gun at the entrance.
“That’s it. Let’s go.”
She turned toward Lindemann with the same cold look in her eyes.
“Don’t waste your time killing him,” Hollis said. “Let’s get out of here.”
“As you wish,” Mother Blessing said as if she had just spared an insect. “This one can tell the Tabula that I’m no longer hiding on an island.”
They returned to the basement. As they retraced their steps around the equipment stacks, the room lit up with a sudden explosion of gunfire. Hollis and Mother Blessing threw themselves on the floor behind an emergency power generator. Bullets from different angles cut into the heating ducts overhead.
The firing stopped. Hollis heard the click and snap of ammunition clips being loaded into assault rifles. Someone shouted in German, and all the ceiling lights in the basement were turned off.