“Tell me more about Bunker 17.”
Jorgenson did.
Down below the Bullets returned to the court, provoking a chorus of boos in the sparsely populated arena.
“Hell of an arsenal,” Bane commented when the DCO chief was finished.
“And that arsenal might be responsible for starting World War III.”
Something nagged at Bane. “Except that would have been a potential, even expected, ramification of Vortex from the beginning,” he noted. “Whatever Metzencroy uncovered must be worse.”
“Worse than nuclear war?”
“He’d still be alive otherwise.”
Jorgenson sat there blankly. “We’ve got to see the President now, Josh, immediately. I want him to hear all this firsthand from you.”
“As a matter of fact I’ve got a few things on my mind I’d like to ask him about.”
“You wouldn’t mention them if you didn’t want to talk.”
Bane’s stare went cold. “Who put the kill order out on me five years ago, Art?”
Jorgenson’s mouth dropped. “What?”
“Don’t play dumb with me.”
“I swear, Josh, this is the first time I’ve heard of it.”
“Then you deny it.”
“I can’t deny it any more than I can affirm it. Five years is a long time in government, Josh, a whole era. There were different people running things then.”
“Different from you, I suppose.”
“No better, no worse. You do what you have to.”
Bane’s eyes narrowed into somber slits of fury. “I want to know who put the kill order out, Art.”
“It may be buried.”
“Dig it up.”
“If the information still exists, I’ll find it. You have my word on that.”
Bane briefly swung his eyes around him. “You left your bodyguards in the lobby, Art. You took quite a chance.”
Jorgenson swallowed hard. “They’d only have gotten in the way. I trust you, Josh, and besides, if you wanted to kill me badly enough, a hundred of them wouldn’t have made a difference.”
“True.”
The DCO chief started to stand up. “Then let’s go see the President, Josh. It’s time to—”
Jorgenson’s head snapped backward. He collapsed back into his chair.
“Art!” Bane screamed, grabbing him.
Jorgenson’s head slumped to his chest, his eyes open and sightless. A neat hole the size of a nickel had been carved in his forehead. There was little blood but Jorgenson was dead, hit by a sniper’s bullet.
Bane eased his hands away, found they were trembling slightly. The sniper might have his sights turned on him now. Keeping his body low, Bane moved into the aisle, slipping behind a pair of men descending toward the refreshment stands. He was covered now. The sniper, if he hadn’t fled after killing Jorgenson, had no view of him. Bane ducked when he came to the archway, sped in front of the two men and rushed down the ramp toward the upper level concession stands, considering his next step. He could move toward the lobby, find Jorgenson’s men, and tell them what had happened. But that would mean exposing himself unnecessarily. The sniper could be part of a larger team and in trying to find Jorgenson’s men, he might end up being found himself. The risk was too great. Jorgenson was dead and the bodyguards weren’t about to change it. Bane would have to make contact another way from another place. He started for the stairs marked Exit, struck by a sudden surge of desperation.
The only man in Washington he could trust was dead. A man who had always been there when he needed him would be buried in two days’ time because Bane had insisted on taking precautions which had proven unnecessary. He felt distinctly alone, and the feeling bothered him more than it ever had before. Jorgenson had supplied him with a number of the missing pieces to the Vortex puzzle but he still lacked enough to put it together.
Thirty-six missiles packing ten warheads each …
Something awful’s gonna happen, Davey had said, and whatever it was would make World War III pale by comparison.
Bane found he was trembling as he stepped out of the arena into the night.
Chapter Twenty-six
“Are you ready to begin, Doctor?”
“I was only waiting for you, Colonel,” Teke said, rising from his desk chair. “Please come in.”
Chilgers entered Teke’s office. These had been in many ways two difficult days for the colonel. Things hadn’t gone as planned, unsuspected factors having entered in. How could he know Trench would cross him? The bastard had, though, and Bane had remained alive because of it. A new strategy had been called for, and Chilgers had chosen one that would allow him to deal with two problems at once. Now Jorgenson was dead and Bane had disappeared. Chilgers felt better, able to look forward to tonight’s experiment with a clear head. All other matters seemed trivial when measured against the potential of Davey Phelps. The time had come to test how far that potential stretched.
“Thank you, Doctor,” Chilgers said and took a chair, feeling immediately uncomfortable within the steel walls and tile floors of Teke’s sterile domain, missing the walnut paneling and thick carpet of his office.
“I’d better explain a few things first,” Teke began, his bald head shimmering beneath the white fluorescent lighting. “Our initial scans of the boy’s brain have found nothing unusual other than a bit of unconscious flux that reads higher than it should. This lack of findings is nothing to worry about, though, because the boy has just now begun to regain full consciousness. We’ve kept him sedated the entire time since he arrived here to avoid any harmful reactions before or during our preliminary testing. Precautions, you understand, against what we suspect the boy might be capable of.”
“I understand.”
“In any case, we are slowly bringing him around from the sedation for observation of his … abilities when in a conscious state.”
“You have a means to control him in such a situation?”
Teke shrugged, bulky shoulders cramping his thick neck. “Not quite. I’ve got a few ideas but nothing I’m totally comfortable with. It’s a catchy situation. We must allow the boy to be fully conscious before testing his powers. But if these powers are what we suspect them to be, we may be placing ourselves in a somewhat risky predicament. The boy’s power seems to be greatest when he is threatened, which the incidents in New York more than testify to. Once he is allowed to fully awaken and realizes what’s happened, I dare say we might be treated to a more thorough demonstration than we had planned on.”
“There are ways around that surely.”
“Yes,” Teke acknowledged, “but all of them involve the direct use of some kind of sedative. No matter what the level, though, strong or mild, a sedative will undermine his powers and make it impossible for us to accurately test their level. What’s more, including the time it took to deliver him, he has now been under to some degree for nearly forty hours. The possibility of permanent nerve and brain damage now begins to enter in.”
“We can’t have that,” Chilgers said flatly.
“No, we can’t. The problem then becomes how to control the boy once we withdraw the sedative and begin stage one.”
“Ah, so you’ve already developed an agenda,” Chilgers said satisfied, smoothing the corners of his suit jacket.
“You would have expected something different, Colonel?” Teke cracked a small smile which vanished quickly. “I’ve broken this particular operation into three stages: gauging the general extent of the boy’s power, isolating its location in the brain — point of origin, that is — and finally learning what caused it, our goal being the eventual recreation of the effect in our own subjects.”