“T-minus thirty,” Francisco says. “That means we have to hustle.”
With a hiss of air through his teeth, he starts up the side of the road, motioning us to follow him.
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
THE ROAD IS DESERTED.
I sense the lake to our right, a low-slung stone wall defining the boundary of the property around it. We pass the occasional cabin to our left, and Francisco diverts us into the woods out of sight, switching back to the road only after we’re a good distance away. Only once do we spot headlights coming toward us down the lake road, and Francisco quickly moves the group behind the foliage until the car passes.
As we get closer to whatever our destination is, Francisco staggers us so we’re not as obvious of a group, or as large of a target. I use the opportunity to drop back a little ways to where Miranda is.
“You guys have done this before,” I say.
“A few times a year,” she says. “For two years now.”
“Same group?”
“Different groups. But they usually keep Lee and I together.”
“It’s like a camping trip of some kind?”
“It’s no camping trip,” she says. “It’s a hunting trip.”
“No talking, please,” Francisco says.
He’s fallen back within earshot.
He stops the group by putting up a fist, then he points from his eyes to a spot in the distance.
A utility road opens out of nowhere, marked only by a single rustic wooden sign:
“What is this place?” I whisper.
“It’s the water processing plant for the city of Manchester,” Lee says. “The lake provides drinking water for one hundred and sixty thousand people. All of it passes through here to get purified before it winds up in their homes.”
“What are we doing here?” I say.
“We’re just taking a tour,” Lee says. “An unauthorized, nighttime tour.”
“Don’t look so serious,” Miranda says. “This is the fun part.”
Without another word, she hops over the stone wall and disappears into the darkness. Lee does the same, then whistles for Francisco and me to follow.
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
ONE SENTRY DRIVES THE ROAD AT NIGHT.
That’s what they tell me. One sentry, every two hours or so, unless something draws his attention before that time. It’s our job to make sure nothing draws his attention.
We come to the locked side door of the treatment plant building.
Miranda pulls a small kit out of her pocket and leans down in front of the lock.
“We’re going to break in?” I ask Lee.
“That’s right. We sneak in, find what we’re looking for, and leave undetected. That’s how The Hunt works. They can never know we were here. Or else our team loses points,” Lee says.
“So this is a game?”
“We’re scored on our performance, then the scores are tabulated and added to our game profiles back in camp.”
“The game I played last night.”
“The one you tanked on. Yeah,” he says with a smile.
“Keep it down,” Francisco says.
“Yeah, I’m trying to concentrate,” Miranda says.
She holds a miniature flashlight in her teeth while she expertly works the lock.
A minute later, the door opens.
“We’re in,” she says. “Sixteen minutes.”
“Let’s do this,” Lee says.
We slip inside and close the door behind us. I’m surprised that I feel the same rush I do when I embark on a Program assignment. The danger, the excitement of possible discovery, the need for a focus so intense that it shuts out every other thing in your life to the point where all of your problems seem far away.
I look at Lee and Miranda, and I recognize the expression on their faces: the excited buzz of doing something forbidden.
Then I look at Francisco, and I see something else.
He is calm.
He glances over to find me looking at him, and his entire physicality changes in an instant. His shoulders rise and his jaw tightens, his body taking on tension.
It happens so quickly, it’s easy to think I misread him in the first place.
Francisco hisses under his breath, drawing our attention, and then he guides us to a wall, pointing down a hall and up to the ceiling, where a camera is mounted in the corner.
“No motion detector,” he says. “Just a digital recording system, but an older one that rotates and records with a slow frame rate.”
The frame rate is not unusual for a security camera. Regular video records at thirty frames per second or greater. But most surveillance video runs at six to ten FPS to save energy and storage space. Although playback will have a herky-jerky quality, it’s still easy to make out the motion of the figures on the video, the way they’re dressed—
And their faces.
The good news is that Francisco knows about the system and where it’s located. It’s not only old, it’s badly placed, midway down the hallway and against the wall, sweeping left and right. That makes it easy to wait until it’s aimed away and move below it.
We pass down the hallway until we’re clear of the camera. Then we move into the main chamber of the water treatment plant, a massive room filled with complex machinery and the computers that monitor it. Francisco pulls out an iPad mini, bringing up a schematic of the building before focusing in on the room and the machinery all around us.
“We’re looking for this,” he says, pointing to a piece of machinery on the screen.
“What is it?” I say.
“It’s the chemical feed system. That’s where they add the chloramine,” Lee says.
Chloramine. I’ve heard that term before. It’s a compound of chlorine and ammonia that some municipalities use in their drinking water as a disinfectant in place of pure chlorine.
Lee says, “They feed the chloramine into the water in late-stage treatment to kill all the nasties.”
“Why do we need to find that?”
“Maybe we want the nasties left in there,” Lee says.
And he smiles.
Francisco interrupts him. “We find it because that’s the game,” he says. “We don’t ask questions.”
I don’t like what I’m seeing here. Not at all.
Nobody would imagine a terrorist threat in the middle of rural New Hampshire, in a place safe from just about everything except the weather and wildlife. But a hundred and sixty thousand people is a tempting target. And how many targets like this exist throughout the United States?
The scope of it is staggering. If you were to disturb the water supply for a city like Manchester, then every water supply of this size and greater would suddenly need to be protected. The cost in security, man hours, and structural upgrades would be prohibitive. How can you protect every municipal water plant, every Department of Public Works, nuclear facility, university laboratory, electrical facility? Trying to do so would bankrupt the U.S. economy.
“Six minutes, guys,” Miranda says.
“What happens if we’re late?” I say.
“We lose points if we’re late, and we can’t let that happen,” Miranda says.
“Over here,” Lee says.
He’s tracing a piece of machinery along the wall, following a large pipe across the room, where it disappears into the floor.
“Damn, it’s in a separate room,” he says. “Let’s go.”
He starts down a metal ladder.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
BELOW.
That’s where we find it.
The chemical feed system, the last stop before the water is distributed into the community.