The man groaned. Quantum speaking had caused him to miss the voice mail prompt. He’d have to go back a step. Or maybe two. He pressed seven again.
“So,” Quantum said in a slightly louder voice, “maybe call Reception?”
Francis clearly didn’t want to do that. With another sigh, he pointed behind him, made a walking motion with his hands, and mouthed the word stairs.
Quantum set off in the indicated direction. He’d better hurry. Eventually the guy might give up on the voice mail system and come after him. All that time messing with the phone probably wouldn’t improve his disposition.
Once he found the stairwell, he put on a pair of latex gloves before opening the door. He didn’t want to leave any fingerprints.
He headed downstairs as fast as he dared in the flickering light of a fluorescent tube. The stairwell was painted battleship gray. It had dents in the walls and large slivers of dusty wood on the steps. It looked like someone had tried to ride a wooden crate down the steps — smashing walls and losing bits along the way.
At the bottom he had to throw himself at the door a couple of times to get it open. He wedged a sliver of wood in the doorframe to keep the door from closing all the way. He didn’t want to get stuck down here. He might be lost until someone chanced upon his mummified corpse.
He hit the corridor and started a quick jog. He had to find Joe and take the device from him before the security guard came looking. No time for finesse on this one. Brute force would have to do the trick. That was OK. Sometimes he liked brute force.
He ran along quietly, listening. The corridor was deserted and had been for a long time. Guests weren’t the only ones who didn’t come down here.
A rasping sound reached his ears, and he slowed. Light spilled out from a door halfway down the corridor.
Cautiously, he approached. The dusty floor showed footprints coming from the opposite direction. A man and a dog.
The window had been broken out, most likely by Joe, and the door was ajar. Quantum twisted sideways and went through the door without touching anything. Covered pieces of furniture surrounded him like military ghosts at attention. He crept forward. Joe was making enough noise that he could get close to him undetected.
It sounded as if the man had a hacksaw and was cutting through metal with a lot of noise and elbow grease. That had to mean he’d found the Oscillator.
The words pounded in his head as he slipped behind a wardrobe and peeked through a line of furniture toward the corner of the room. Joe was hunched around a steel column. His right arm was jerking forward and backward in time with the awful rasping noise.
Quantum considered his options. Best plan was to take out the dog first, the man second. He had bullets enough for both, but he didn’t want to spook either one until the last second.
A flash of yellow legs showed under a squat wardrobe. The dog was heading toward him. That made the decision easy. He touched the hilt of his gun, but pulled out the Taser instead. If he played his cards right, he could take the dog out without Joe even noticing it over the sound of the sawing.
The dog walked around the corner. Its nose was raised as it sniffed. It didn’t seem to sense any danger, and it was trained to help, not to attack. The dog wagged its tail and took a tentative step forward.
“Good dog,” he said in a low voice that wouldn’t be heard by Joe over the sound of his sawing.
The dog heard his words. It moved forward another step.
He tasered the dog. The dog went right down and lay on the ground, twitching and foaming at the mouth. That had been easier than he’d imagined.
Careful to stay away from its head, he scooped up the warm body and stuffed it into an empty wardrobe, then eased the doors closed. He turned the tiny key in the lock. The dog wouldn’t be bothering him again. He hoped that someone would find it before it starved, but that wasn’t his problem. His problem was in the back of the room, all alone, deaf to what had just happened because he was sawing away.
The rasping noise finally stopped, and a metal object clattered to the ground.
“I got it out, Edison!” Joe called, jubilant.
The dog whimpered. A quiet sound, and Quantum didn’t see how it could carry across the room, but it did.
The man jumped to his feet. “You OK, boy?”
Quantum stuck the Taser in his pocket and pulled out the gun. He had to kill Tesla, then take the device. There was no other way.
He slipped behind the wardrobe next to the one that held the dog.
Rapid footsteps came closer. “Edison?”
The dog whimpered again, a faint sound of pain and despair.
Joe blundered past a desk and stood in front of Quantum’s wardrobe, confused.
Quantum shouldered the wardrobe out into the aisle, tipping it forward onto the hapless man. Joe fell backward and struck his head against a desk on his way down. The crack reverberated around the room. The dog yipped.
Quantum walked to the end of the wardrobe with his gun out and ready to fire.
Joe Tesla lay flat on his back. The wardrobe had landed across his chest, pinning him. Not that it mattered. Blood poured out of a wound on the side of his skull, and Quantum could see that his eyes were closed.
He wouldn’t have to shoot him after all. Joe, assuming he lived, wouldn’t be able to identify him later. Best to just leave him there.
The dog seemed to have recovered and set to barking. He doubted that anyone would hear it. If the dust on the floor was any indication, nobody but he and Joe had come this way in months.
Still, he hurried across the room to where Joe had been working. There, on the floor next to the column, was a metal object that looked like a metal platform with a candlestick stuck to the top. He recognized it from pictures online: Tesla’s Oscillator.
He scooped it up and left the man and dog to die.
To make sure that they wouldn’t be found any time soon, he turned off the light and closed the door behind him.
Chapter 31
Francis gave up on the damn voice mail system. He was going to have to track the guy down and drag him upstairs even if it made him look like a fool and cost the company money. Plus, he’d have to deal with the guy’s snotty attitude. Mathison? What a name!
He hurried down the gray stairs to the sub-basement. The sooner he got this over, the sooner he could go on break. He wanted to call the bakery about the cake he’d ordered to celebrate his first six months on the job. He was officially out of the probationary period and was starting to save money for his own place. Things were looking up.
He flicked on the overhead fluorescents as soon as he stepped into the hall. This level gave him the creeps, and he was glad that he didn’t have to come down here often. Nothing worth guarding.
A yellow dog slammed out of a door at the end of the corridor, and Francis jumped. The dog streaked toward him, barking. He turned toward the door, but the dog passed him and pushed him back a step.
Francis put his hand on the butt of his nightstick, but he didn’t want to hurt the dog. What the hell was it doing down here anyway?
“Easy, boy!” he called out, wondering if it was a boy. “Good dog!”
The dog stopped barking and stared up at him. It bumped him with its nose and looked back the way it had come. It whined and took a few steps down the hall.
The IT guy hadn’t had a dog with him, so where had this pooch come from, and what did it want?
The dog whined again and bumped his hand, leaving a sticky trail. Francis pulled his hand away, prepared to wipe off dog spit, then stopped. The dog hadn’t drooled on him. Its muzzle was stained with blood.
He knelt next to the dog. Only now did he realize how upset the animal was. It was shaking like a leaf, and its eyes were practically popping out of its head. Gently, he felt the dog’s head, body, and legs. The dog didn’t shy away or yelp. It wasn’t wounded.