“We’re not going to find any,” Shaunessy said. “Barron had them recalled.”
“He had them what?”
“Some kind of story about a defect. He had all masks collected and told everyone the replacements were en route. He’s probably got them in storage somewhere, available only to his most loyal underlings.”
The truth was, we were probably breathing spores already. In small quantities, they blew through the air invisibly, too small to see. “All right,” I said. “There’s no avoiding it, then. We’ve got a few hours until we start showing symptoms. Let’s make the most of them.”
We left the building and stepped outside. Here, the spores were visible as gray dust in the air. They coated my tongue when I took a breath, and I coughed. The thought of what they were doing inside me made me sick.
“If we’re going to get to the underground storage complex, we’ll need a vehicle,” Shaunessy said.
I spoke to a Ligados man, who got on his phone, and in five minutes we were driving south across the desert in a jeep. As we left the base’s complex of streets and buildings, we left the cloud of spores behind. Dust kicked up from the jeep’s wheels, and grit peppered our faces, but it felt like breathing fresh air again. The place we were heading to was no secret, and I had seen pictures of it taken from the air. The question was what we would find when we got there. General Barron’s troops still defending the complex? A pitched battle underway? Or the Ligados already in control?
Kirtland extended for miles south into the desert. The flat landscape was scattered with training areas, laser testing facilities, solar energy stations, and various classified program facilities, in the center of which stood KUMSC, the Kirtland Underground Munitions Storage Complex, where all the nuclear warheads were stored. General Barron had also set up his field command center nearby, cluttering the desert landscape with tents and antennas and tanks and field artillery.
When we drove into visual range, we saw no sign of a battle. The chaos of the base to the north hadn’t affected this place. That meant either that Barron had been remarkably thorough in filtering secret Ligados from these soldiers, or…
“They’re infected, aren’t they?” Shaunessy said, coming to the same conclusion I had. “He’s already infected all the soldiers and staff at his command center with his own spores.”
I nodded, pressing my lips into a grim line. “In the desert like this, Barron would have complete access to their water supply. He’s seen all the leaders who have been assassinated by Ligados, so he has to know he’s a target. Sometime in the last few days, he must have decided he’d rather be safe than sorry with the troops closest to him.”
“So what hope does a team of commandos have?” she asked. “They can’t sneak in here. There’s no cover. The place is surrounded by hundreds of perfectly loyal soldiers who know they’re coming. The nukes are safe. Aren’t they?”
I didn’t answer. Our jeep had reached a checkpoint, where two soldiers carrying submachine guns held up their hands for us to stop. The checkpoint stood at a break in the first of a concentric series of sand redoubts that had been raised by military earthmoving vehicles—essentially large dunes or berms that would slow the advance of vehicles or infantry while providing some cover to the defenders. Both of the soldiers wore noise-canceling headphones.
“What’s with the headphones?” Shaunessy asked as I slowed to a stop.
“Instructions,” I said. “The chief vulnerability of Barron’s slave soldiers is that someone else might take command. If he broadcasts the command signal through base speakers, then anybody could tell the soldiers what to do, and they’d obey. He needs to make sure they obey only him.”
“So if I pulled their headphones off and told them to defend me, they would do it?”
“Sure,” I said. “If they didn’t shoot you the moment you reached for them. I’m sure they’ve been instructed to protect their headphones at all costs.”
The first soldier approached the car, while the other stayed back and covered us with his weapon. Beyond him, I saw an emplacement with the barrel of an intimidating heavy machine gun protruding from it. I hoped this worked. I had every expectation that the plans I had learned through the fungal network while in Brazil would have been followed successfully, but it was a very different thing to stand here and bet our lives on it.
I caught the soldier’s eye. Then I held my hands flat and vertical, one on each side of my head, and drove them sharply forward and together. The soldier blinked at me. I held my breath. The soldier glanced at his partner. Then he surreptitiously slipped his right earphone away from his ear—the ear his partner couldn’t see.
“You want to pretend to look at our documentation, then let us pass,” I said. “You don’t want to tell anyone what happened or that we are here.”
The soldier peered at my hand as if I were showing him ID, checked his tablet, then waved us through. His partner stepped out of the way to let us by.
Shaunessy gaped back at them. “What did you just do?” she said. “I thought all these soldiers worked for Barron now.”
“I gave a signal,” I said. “It’s American Sign Language for the word ‘focus,’ but that’s not important. The important part is that the Ligados, as I told you, anticipated that this might happen. McCarrick’s spores, if you recall, are just a genetically tweaked version of the original fungus. They still have most of the same characteristics as Aspergillus ligados, though the desire to act for the benefit of the fungus has been hijacked and replaced with the desires given them by their master. After they were infected with Barron’s spores, but before the new strain of fungus had completely infiltrated their brains, the Ligados among the staff here spread knowledge of the hand sign to all the other soldiers.
“It’s a pretty simple concept. The hand sign is an indicator that the person wants to say something to you, and you should listen to them. In and of itself, it’s not a command, but with the command signal playing in their ears, it serves as one. They can’t hear me, but they can see me, and so I can still tell them what to want. In this case, I’m telling them to want to listen to me, which makes them want to take their headphones off. And once they do that, they’re mine.”
Shaunessy nodded, but she looked like she might be sick. “So when the commando teams arrive, they’ll just talk their way in. They’ll make the same sign you did and then just waltz in and steal the nukes, and nobody will stop them.”
“Actually,” I said. “I think they’re already here.”
We slipped past the other checkpoints as easily as we had the first. We parked the jeep and walked toward KUMSC, inconspicuous now that we were inside the perimeter. The aboveground facility was practical and unadorned, essentially a series of freight elevators, conveyor belts, and roll-up steel doorways where warheads and other munitions hardware could be transferred to and from trucks.
“I guess we’re headed down,” Shaunessy said.
“That would be my guess,” I said. A guard stood by the nearest elevator, but I gave the hand sign and talked my way in as easily as before. The elevator required a key to operate, but the guard produced one and turned it for us. We heard the hum of machinery and the shriek of scraping metal as the mechanism spun up and started moving. The elevator car reached the top with a clunk, and the doors slid open.
I stepped inside. “You can back out now if you like,” I said.
Shaunessy shook her head and followed me through the doors. “If we don’t stop them, we’re all as good as dead,” she said. “It’s not like it’s safer to stay up here.”