He found it on the floor a few feet away and groaned as he was forced to bend over again to pick it up, but retrieved it quickly nonetheless. The tough little device was intact, of course, it’s components were built to withstand the sort of nonsense that the average citizen would put it through, and a bit of a bang from falling to the floor wasn’t even close to the crap most people put theirs through.
The drive dump was almost complete, and Langley’s network feed was already indexing the contents by file type and keyword. He was about to put it away, satisfied, when the desktop computer he was dumping beeped for attention.
Joshua frowned, peering at it.
Now what.
A file had finished compiling in the background, and was now demanding a user’s attention, so he tapped through the explanations and opened the finished file.
The screen went dark for a moment, and then turned a deep red as the file began playing.
The tunnel looked like something out of an old pirate movie, Anselm decided, or perhaps the sort of thing he’d expect to find under a city like Paris or Rome, certainly not a modern place like Tower City. The rough floor and walls looked like they’d simply carved it right out of the stone, which was probably what they did, of course, so he figured that it was added after the Tower had been built.
In many ways that made his job somewhat simpler, which was a good thing.
An after the fact construction of this sort probably meant that the backers of the Tower Project weren’t involved, which meant a lot less paperwork.
Anselm smiled slightly as he crept along the tunnel, feeling exposed and foolish as he did so.
He really shouldn’t be worrying about arrests now, not yet at anyrate. And paperwork would be a Godsend if he survived long enough to get to it. For the moment, that was far from certain, because he had a bad feeling that he was in well over his head and sinking all too quickly.
There was a pair of security doors up ahead of him when Anselm slowed a bit, and he could see that they were open just a touch.
He drew his pistol this time, not caring too much about appearances anymore. He was well out of place, poking his nose around somewhere he shouldn’t be, so he may as well look the part in all respects.
He edged the door open slightly, looking in slowly, and winced in frustrated anger when the damned thing squeaked.
This was NOT a level three.
Joshua Corvine felt ill as he looked at the results of the genetic compilation that had completed while he had been doing his Drive Dump.
The situation was just slightly more serious than he’d thought, though he wasn’t entirely certain how much more serious it really was. The bug he was looking at was a genuine nightmare, to be sure, but there were already quite enough of those kicking around that they didn’t quite twist his stomach anymore.
What made this one special was twofold, Joshua thought. First, it wasn’t just a Biological, there was at least some evidence of Nanotube engineering, which was just slightly more advanced than Raymond Gorra should have been able to manage while working in these facilities. Joshua wasn’t entirely certain what the Nanotubes were for, but he knew that major pharmaceutical companies had been using them for years now to deliver drugs and medications to long term patients, so it wasn’t much of a stretch to see them being used in a Bio-weapon.
The other thing that made this one special, though, was external. It was the Tower.
Joshua’s face hardened as he looked at the information on the screen, then jumped as a squeak from behind him jolted him up and out of his seat.
The guard’s gun filled his fist as he spun around, noting that the door was now rushing open and a figure was coming through, and a big gun swinging towards him.
They came level with each other almost as one, and Joshua found himself looking down the surprisingly large looking bore of a weapon he recognized as a FN FiveseveN Magnum, a weapon he remembered deriding as underpowered for its job when it was first introduced.
Oddly enough, he wasn’t feeling `underthreatened’ at the moment.
Across from him, the tall blond man who was leveling the pistol at him had a similarly nervous look as he stared back at Joshua over the sights of his weapon.
“Don’t move.” The blond man said firmly.
“Ditto.” Joshua returned sourly.
American.
That was the Interpol Agent’s first thought as Anselm Gunnar found himself staring down the barrel of a Norinco Type Twenty Two autoloader. The accent was American, of course, not the gun. The Gun was typical of what your well armed terrorist might be carrying in the year 2023. A Chinese six millimeter autoloader that was basically a knock off of a Soviet Makarov from twenty years earlier, though in a somewhat improved caliber.
The gun wasn’t nearly as interesting as the man behind it, Anselm decided, though the six millimeter bore was more than enough to keep part of his attention very tightly focused indeed.
The man behind the gun was not what Anselm had expected to find deep in a terrorist controlled facility, assuming that was what he was in. The man was obviously in his forties or fifties, and hadn’t really kept himself up. Anselm thought that he might have been fit once upon a time, but those days were gone now.
That didn’t make him any less dangerous, however. The body on the ground between them was much more in keeping with Anselm’s expectations actually. The unconscious man was fit, young, appeared to be of a more or less competent manner, judging from the gear he was wearing. The only problem was that the man was unconscious. That and the man who wasn’t taking a nap was obviously the one who’d sent the young, fit, competent looking man to dream land.
Anselm Gunnar was a lot of things, but he liked to think that fool wasn’t one of them.
He kept his distance from the old fat man and didn’t let the barrel of his FiveseveN waver.
“Who are you” He asked softly, eyes flicking around the room.
It was a laboratory, obviously enough, which sent chills down Anselm’s spine. Lab space in a terrorist camp wasn’t usually good news, to say the least. There was a side door, as well as the large security doors he’d come through, and Anselm shifted slightly so he could watch the man and the side door at the same time.
“I could ask the same thing,” The overweight man said, his voice oddly soft.
Definitely American, Anselm thought, listening to the accent.
That didn’t mean anything, of course. The United States had it’s share of homebrewed terrorists, The Cheyenne Brigade popped instantly to mind, and he’d already picked out members of at least three wildly disparate terrorist organizations here at Tower City.
Still, why would a terrorist sneak in and knock out one of the guards
“Agent Gunnar,” Anselm said, taking a breath, “Interpol.”
The overweight man’s face cracked, and he cut off a strangled half laugh while shaking his head. His gun, Anselm noted dryly, didn’t waver in the process.
“You’re kidding me.” The American replied dryly.
“I’m afraid not.” Anselm replied, pulling his jacket back slightly and slowly withdrawing his identification with his free hand.
He tossed it over to the man when the American put his own free hand out, wryly noting that neither of them let their weapon’s shift more than a few centimeters.
The American looked over the ID with a disgusted look, then tossed it back. “Great. This just figures.”
“Your turn.” Anselm reminded him, pocketing the ID wallet.
The overweight American hesitated, and then sighed. “Joshua Corvine. CIA.”
Anselm grimaced, mirroring his counterpart’s actions of a few seconds later. “I don’t suppose you have identification”