It was exactly the opening I needed. “Well, she’ll have more than enough to occupy her soon. Rio managed to poison her, you know. Back when we were all captured. A bad poison, too. She’ll be starting to feel the effects any time now and be dead in two days. Christ, what a relief.” I bit my lip. I was talking too much, but then, I’m a very bad liar.
Arthur didn’t seem to notice. He went still. “What?”
“Yeah. There’s an antidote, but once she starts showing symptoms, it’ll be too late. Come on, let’s head.” I kept him in the corner of my eye, wondering if he would turn the shotgun on me, demand the antidote to take back to Dawna. But he didn’t seem to be that far gone.
Hopefully he’d be just far gone enough to warn her.
Chapter 34
We left the motorcycle in a park a few blocks out and I led the way at a jog, hoping I remembered the layout of streets correctly in this part of Los Angeles. I didn’t have the city memorized by a long shot, but I’d had enough close escapes that I had made a point of swallowing large portions of the road map, and hard experience had taught me to take special care to know the areas near the airports.
Of course, the moment we skidded around the corner onto El Segundo, we ran straight into a gang of looters shouting raucously and hurling Molotov cocktails through the windows of a large sporting goods store.
They saw us. One of them catcalled. Another drew a knife. I shot him before he finished the motion.
The shouting stopped as if the looters’ voices had been snuffed out. I saw another guy start to reach into his pants and shot him, too. One of his mates started screaming profanity at me, and my handgun barked one more time—I had far more bullets than I had patience.
The looters all froze. The sporting goods store started to catch fire, the flames roaring upward and backlighting them into aggressive silhouettes.
By that time Arthur had the shotgun up on my left. “Get out of here!” he shouted.
The gang scattered.
I started to move forward, but Arthur grabbed my arm, hard. “The Air Force base,” he said. “We ain’t killing anyone. Looters who try and attack us, that’s one thing, but we ain’t killing men and women just doing their jobs.”
His grip was powerful enough to leave a bruise, and his stance said he would stand his ground unless I shot him, too. Part of my brain noted this as impressive, considering that at this point, he had to know how pitifully his skills stacked up against mine—not to mention I was still holding a pistol with which I’d just shot three people, and also had a G36 assault rifle slung over my shoulder.
I searched his face. He’d go down fighting for this. “Okay,” I said.
His fingers tightened, the muscles around his eyes pinching. “Promise me.”
“I said okay!” Behind me, flames rose in the store in a whoosh, punching up through the second floor, the heat scorching my exposed skin. “I promise, all right? Come on!”
He let go of me, and we dashed.
As we slipped onto the edges of the base property, I caught sight of flashlight beams dancing through one of the far buildings in a beehive of activity. That building must be the nerve center of whatever disaster response they had going, I thought—farming out personnel to help local authorities quell the rioting, coordinating logistics during the crisis. While, I hoped, maintaining some sort of emergency communication with the outside world.
We hurried into the complex. With the personnel all concentrated elsewhere, this end of the base was mostly deserted. Only one young man in fatigues tried to challenge us, running forward through the dark and shouting; I pulled my otherwise useless phone out of my pocket and threw it. He collapsed to the pavement as if his strings had been cut.
Arthur’s expression tightened.
“What? He’s not dead,” I snapped.
We hurried toward one of the central buildings, a looming white-and-glass edifice that probably housed offices. I took a moment to get my bearings, turning toward the southeast. Yes, this was the one. Perfect.
“Let’s split up,” I said to Arthur. I gestured toward the far-off flashes of light and movement. “Whatever communications equipment they’ve got is probably that way somewhere, where all the people are. Go do your PI thing, figure out if they’ve got a line to the outside world and how we can get access.”
He hesitated, and I literally held my breath.
“Where are you going to be?”
“I need to jury rig some working hardware. I’m going to look for a server room in a Faraday cage, maybe try to cobble together some unfried equipment.” I was improvising the technobabble, but it sounded good. “Meet me back here on the top floor.”
Before he could respond, I drove the butt of my rifle through the glass of the door next to me, the pane showering down with a crash. Arthur winced and glanced around, but no alarm sounded. As I’d suspected, security was at least partially down. “Top floor,” I reminded Arthur, and ducked through the broken door.
The halls inside were dark and cavernously empty. I didn’t waste any time: I broke into the first office I came to, unscrewed the back of a dead computer, and yanked out all the circuit boards. When I’d asked Checker how much Arthur knew about computers, his answer had been, “Well, he knows how to use a search engine, which is sadly more than I can say for a lot of people.” I didn’t know too much more than that myself when it came to hardware, but Arthur didn’t know how much I didn’t know.
I collected an armful of as many sufficiently electronic-looking doodads as I could and headed for the stairs. The ground floor had been deserted, but in the stairwell I ran into one surprised-looking woman in a civilian suit who ended up sleeping off her concussion hidden in a dark bathroom stall. See, Arthur? I’m keeping my word.
Fortunately, the top floor was just as empty as the bottom one had been. As per Rio’s instructions, I found the southeast corner, which turned out to be a conference room. It was slightly less dark than the rest of the building by virtue of the two walls’ worth of windows that let in whatever moon and starlight Southern California had tonight. I dumped my armful of circuit boards and ribbon cable on the table and left to find another nearby office; within fifteen minutes, I had amassed a large pile of random electronic hardware as well as four laptops, a pair of scissors, a utility knife, a roll of scotch tape, and a screwdriver. I surveyed my stash.
“Time to be a motherfucking genius,” I muttered to myself, and set to work.
I wondered if Arthur would come back and find me. I wondered if the people I’d sent him for would find me first.
I wondered if he’d do what I needed him to in the first place. If he’d try. If the base personnel would take him down before he had a chance.
Enough time passed in the dim conference room that I started to wonder how much longer I should give him until I should assume my plan had failed. How much longer until I should start coming up with other options. But then I heard a quiet call from somewhere down the halclass="underline" “Russell?”
I drew my gun and didn’t move, in case he wasn’t alone. “In here,” I called, equally softly.
Footsteps approached from down the hallway, and Arthur came in, holstering his own weapon. “They got communications,” he reported. “Think I see a few ways in, but it’ll be tricky. How long will you need in there?”
“Not long,” I said. “Couple of minutes, at most. I’ll, uh, I’ll be able to let you know in a second.” I put my gun down and picked up the utility knife. While Arthur had been gone, I’d had time to twist wires between a whole mess of the circuit components until they twined into an overlapping tangle, as if Checker’s Hole had upchucked on the table. I’d opened the cases of two of the laptops as well, spreading their guts into the jumble. Now I picked up a bundle of wires and started stripping the ends with confidence.