It sounded like they’d made some sort of decision down there, because it got quiet again. We had two choices: go back down the ladder and see if we could escape behind them, or go up into the control room. I could see that Tony had come to the same conclusion and was waiting for me.
“We came here to stop Trask,” I said. “Whatever he’s going to do has to happen up there. I say we go on.”
Tony turned around and began to lift the hatch. There shouldn’t be anyone up there at the control level at this hour of the night, except possibly Trask and Ari Quartermain-and his mysterious inside man, I reminded myself, he of the hearts and minds.
White light spilled down into the pump room as Tony fully raised the hatch, which he pushed until we heard a lock-back latch snap into place. Then he went through the hatch, up into the control room, and out of sight. I followed when I saw his hand wave me up.
The control room ran the full width of the moonpool’s open deck level. There were several consoles and instrument banks, and a rank of locking file cabinets all along the back wall. A window wall overlooked the surface of the moonpool, but we were crawling on the floor on our hands and knees. We needed to get a look out into the deck area, but not at the expense of being discovered.
There was one door from the control room out to the catwalks on the sides of the pool. It had a glass window in the top half, which was covered with notices taped to the glass. I pointed at it, and Tony understood. We crawled over to the door, and he slowly rose up to peek through the glass beneath the pieces of paper. He dropped back down immediately and raised two fingers.
“Quartermain and one other guy,” he whispered. We could hear sounds from outside the access door, but they were indistinct because of the airlock. “They’re lying on the bridge leading out over the pool.”
“Trask?”
“No see’um.”
“Are they alive?”
He shrugged. “No blood, but they’re not moving. And: I can’t see any water.”
“That’s because it’s all going somewhere else right now,” a voice said from behind us. My heart sank. It was Trask, standing head and shoulders out of the hatch on the same ladder we’d come up, pointing Tony’s shotgun at us. He’d been hiding down in the pump room all along.
He waved the muzzle of the shotgun in a clear signal for us to shed our own weapons, which we did. Then he stepped up off the ladder and told us to get up. As we stood up, he picked up our weapons, stepped to the door leading out to the moonpool deck, and pitched them into the water.
“I was right behind you, the whole time,” he said. “There’s another escape trunk from the ground floor to the mezzanine level. And I am so glad you made it. I actually thought you might. You look a bit damp, though.”
“You kill those guys out there?” I asked, indicating the two motionless forms on the bridge.
“Not exactly,” he said. “The radiation might, once the water gets below a certain level.”
“You are one sick puppy, Colonel,” I said. “Where’s Billy the Kid?”
“Busy, Lieutenant, busy.” He laid the shotgun into the crook of his arm while flipping open a cell phone and hitting the speed dial. I was surprised that the phone would work in here with all the shielding; they must have an inside repeater antenna somewhere.
“How’s the feed?” he asked, then listened. He was watching us, but not focused on us, and I felt Tony change his position fractionally. The two muzzles of the shotgun lifted an equal fraction, and I heard Tony exhale. No chance of rushing that thing.
“Okay,” he said. “Another ten minutes and you can take it down.” He closed the phone and went to the door to listen. Then he nodded, as if very satisfied with himself.
“Those guys can’t figure out what to do,” he said. “I’ve killed the card readers, and Moira made the physical locks shut down. And I’ll bet their radios just stopped working.”
If your cell phone works, I thought, then one of them is going to figure that out, too. I hoped.
“I love it,” he said, easing himself into a chair at one of the consoles. “I’m using their own machinery to do this. They have tanks under this building where they can dump the water. If the level drops unexpectedly, makeup water from the city system comes on automatically to restore the level. That gave me the pump I needed. Then all we had to do was defeat some check-valves.”
“What’s a check-valve?”
“A valve that allows the water to go only in one direction. Pressure on one side of the valve pushes open a flap. Pressure on the other side seats the flap against a steel ring so no fluid can go the other way. We just removed the flaps.”
“We?”
He pointed at the two forms lying facedown on the bridge. “Dr. Thomason did the valve work; Dr. Quartermain got us in here. And the lovely Miss Moira is feeding the video and instrumentation system an enormous crock of digitized bullshit.”
“Control doesn’t know the water level is dropping?”
“Control knows there’s something going on because of all those rent-a-cops outside. But radiation-wise, Control is seeing exactly what I want them to see. They think they’re dealing with a break-in. You tell those guards why you were here?”
I nodded.
“Well, they’ll have reported that. More confusion in Control. When she switches the instrumentation systems back to normal, they’ll have a level-one radiation emergency in this building, and they’ll forget all about the intruders.”
“Why?”
“Because all those guards out there are going to leave the building as fast as their shiny black combat boots can carry them. Then Control will override the automatic refill plumbing and push huge amounts of water into the pool, with even bigger pumps. Only it won’t stay in the pool-it’s all going downtown, at least until they discover the problem.”
I wondered if McMichaels had taken my warning seriously; I sure hoped so. Then a chilling thought hit me: If the water department turned off their pumps, there’d be zero resistance to the slug of radioactive water Trask was going to send back up the system.
Trask looked at his watch again. “Wondering how this is all going to come out, Lieutenant?” he asked.
“You bet,” I said. Tony was clenching and unclenching his fists, but that shotgun wasn’t moving. I thought the reflection of blue light from the moonpool was getting brighter.
“Mass confusion,” he said. “Terror in the streets. And somehow, it’s going to be all your fault.”
“Hunh?”
“Well, look at it this way: I belong in here, as do Drs. Quartermain and Thomason. We work here. We have access. You don’t. You climbed a fence. You assaulted guards. You broke in here. It was only my extreme vigilance that kept you from doing bad shit.” He was laughing now, sounding crazier than a loon.
“Oka-a-y,” I said. “I follow all that. But why would we want to do bad shit to a nuclear power plant? Are we supposed to be agents of a foreign power? Do we make money out of this? Where’s our motive, Colonel?”
“Ah, motive,” he said. “Yes, what was your motive? Well, remember why Dr. Quartermain hired you? Remember all that Red Team stuff? You were simply doing your jobs, and you succeeded beyond Quartermain’s wildest expectations. Things simply got out of hand, that’s all. You know, like most of the government’s ‘good ideas’? Occupying Iraq, for instance? Most of government’s good ideas usually do turn to shit.”
“So you’re going to what-kill all of us?” I asked. “You’ll be the last guy standing, so you get to tell the tale?”
“Oh, hell, no,” he said, staring at Tony. “Not unless your twitchy buddy there makes me do it. Calm down, you.” Then he turned back to me. “No, actually, I need you alive and intact. I need a couple of guilty bastards in cuffs when the mother of all investigations gets going. I’ve got a story, you’ll have a story, Control will have a story, hell, even Mad Moira, if she gets caught, she’ll have a story. Talk about a federal goat-grab.”