The Lord of Opium

50

THE SECRET ROOM

When the sun slipped behind the Chiricahua Mountains, they left the abandoned observatory. Heat still radiated from the ground, and a wind had whipped up a dust storm. It blew into their eyes and dried their lips, but it also made them less easy to spot on the treeless road.

The white dome of El Patrón’s observatory loomed against the shadow of night rising in the east. To the south appeared the Scorpion Star, always the first to be seen at evening and the last to disappear at dawn. They slipped into a side door and tiptoed along the dark, curved wall to the door of the lunchroom. No one noticed them. The technicians were busy with screens and computers.

The room was deserted, and they helped themselves to hot chocolate and donuts. Only the greasy wrappers that had been around the turkey burritos were left. “We’re taking a huge chance, but I think Listen is right. We need a pick-me-up before tackling the solar telescope,” said Cienfuegos. Matt found a machine that served boxes of apple juice, and he pocketed a few of these before they went to the other building.

He dreaded the giant shaft plunging beneath the solar telescope in a way that wasn’t quite rational. After all, they had survived it before. Yet something about the enclosed space, the hot air gusting up, the darkness and awareness of tons of earth over his head made him break out in a sweat before they even got to the elevator.

“I wish we could leave Listen up here,” Matt whispered when they had reached the shaft door.

“She’s safer with us,” said Cienfuegos.

“Don’t worry, Listen. We did it before and we can do it again,” said Matt, more to reassure himself than her. He held on to the elevator door, wishing he could back out.

“I’m not scared of heights,” the little girl said.

“You can’t be sure of that. You’ve never seen a drop like this.”

“She’ll be fine,” said the jefe, pulling the door closed. And then they were sinking at a forty-five-degree angle. Round and round they spiraled the huge tube of the telescope. Dim lights gleamed on its dark-green surface. “It’s hot down here,” said Listen, pulling her blouse loose. She was already drenched in sweat.

Air conditioners whirred at various levels, and a warm breeze rose out of the depths. They passed another elevator slowly rising and saw the sickly faces of the eejits moving up.

The heat was unbearable, even at night. Soon they were all panting, and Matt opened one of the apple juice boxes and handed it to Listen. They passed a platform in an alcove and saw eejits mending a pipe with an oxyacetylene torch. Sparks showered into the elevator cage. More heat.

The elevator bumped at the bottom. They moved quickly, but before they got to the door, they heard the sizzle of more sparks. Cienfuegos signaled for them to stop. Matt saw an eejit trying to cut through the wall to the forbidden room.

Listen grabbed Matt’s arm. “I can see Dr. Angel and Dr. Marcos,” she whispered.

Suddenly there was a flash of light, and a lightning bolt snaked out of the wall and incinerated the eejit. The odor of burnt flesh drifted through the hall. “Next!” shouted a voice Matt recognized. Another eejit took up the torch. There was a line of them waiting in the space between the telescope and the wall.

“This won’t work,” said Dr. Angel. “We’ve tried it before.”

“When I want your advice, I’ll ask for it,” said Happy Man Hikwa. “Each time the wall will degrade a little more. Eventually, we’ll break through.”

“It isn’t just the substance the door’s made of, it’s the force field running through it. There’s a plasma current that reacts to energy,” said Dr. Marcos. “The more you pour in, the more powerfully it pushes back. We’ve tried this before.”

Happy Man barked a command, and a soldier struck Dr. Marcos on the head with the butt of a gun. The doctor fell to his knees. The next eejit blasted the wall until another tongue of fire erupted from it. The remaining eejits watched passively.

“Can we do anything?” whispered Matt.

Cienfuegos watched as the next man moved into position. He drew his stun gun and fired at Happy Man twice in rapid succession, a lethal shot. The jefe jumped back, pulling Matt and Listen with him. “Run,” he said, but when they got to the elevator, it was gone. They had forgotten to prop open the door, and someone had called for it. They could see it slowly spiraling upward. “Climb!” the jefe said desperately.

There was a chicken-wire barrier enclosing the elevator shaft, and Matt tried to haul himself up, but the openings were too small. His feet didn’t fit, and he could only cling with his fingers. Cienfuegos tried to boost Listen into a position to climb, but the structure of the barrier was against them. She wasn’t strong enough to hold on. The jefe turned, thrusting Matt and the little girl behind him, and took aim at the soldiers.

He brought two down, but a third one shot him. It was an old-fashioned gun with metal bullets, and the impact threw Cienfuegos against the barrier. He raised his weapon and was struck by several more bullets. He crumpled to the floor. Listen screamed. The soldier took aim at Matt and a voice shouted, “Stop!”

It was Dr. Angel. “Stop! He’s the only one who can open the door! That’s El Patrón’s clone!”

The soldiers halted. They looked back. “We only take orders from our patrón,” one said.

“You don’t have a patrón anymore,” Dr. Angel said. “If you want to survive, join us. If not”—she looked upward—“the Farm Patrol will take care of you.”

Dr. Marcos came up behind her. His head was bleeding, but he seemed to have recovered. “Take the boy,” he ordered. “Leave the girl and the eejit.”

“Stay with him,” Matt whispered, hoping that Listen would, for once, follow orders. She did. She fell over Cienfuegos’s body and clung to his shirt, which was beginning to ooze blood. Matt forced himself to look away. He couldn’t think about it now. He couldn’t fall apart.

“I thought you were on your way to the Scorpion Star,” he said as soldiers shoved him down the hallway.

“We had to turn back at the border,” said Dr. Angel. “Someone reactivated the lockdown, but no matter. There are worse things than becoming the Lady of Opium.”

The door glowed faintly with residual heat, but the mark of the scorpion was still visible. “Let it cool,” Matt said. “If you burn my hand, nothing’s going to happen.” The charred lumps of the two eejits had been kicked aside, and the body of Happy Man was slumped against a wall. The other eejits were waiting for orders. “What happened to Glass Eye?” Matt asked.

“You killed him,” Dr. Marcos said. “The bright light sent his brain into shock. Half of it was nuts and bolts anyway.” He splashed water from a bottle against the door to cool it faster.

“You tried to cut through this wall before,” stated Matt.

“Father did,” said Dr. Angel. “He used up more than a hundred eejits, but that was in the good old days when we had more than we needed. Now, with the border closed, we have to treat them like pampered, pedigreed cats. Good food, new houses, rest periods.” She shook her head over the foolishness of it all. “I suppose we have you to thank for that, Matt.”

“You’re not calling me patrón anymore, I see.”

Dr. Angel laughed. “We’re the patróns now. If you’re good, we’ll let you live, and maybe that foul-mouthed little imp, too. How did you train an eejit to kill? Father was never able to do it.”

“The eejit has to have been a soldier or policeman before,” said Matt, who realized that the doctor hadn’t recognized Cienfuegos.

“Interesting,” said Dr. Angel. Matt could see who the dominant member was in this family. He wouldn’t give much for Dr. Marcos’s chances if he tried to order his sister around. Neither of them seemed to be grieving for their father.

“I think it’s cool enough,” said one of the soldiers. “What happens if one of us touches that scorpion?”

“Try it and see,” said Dr. Angel, but the soldier, who’d seen lightning come out of the wall, was in no mood to experiment.

Matt flexed his hands. He was a little frightened himself of touching that wall. Who knew what changes all that fire power had caused? But the sooner he satisfied the greed of these doctors, the sooner he could get back to Listen. He would not think about Cienfuegos. Not yet. Not if he wanted to stay sane.

He put his hand against the scorpion. Ants crawled over his skin. His heart shuddered with the impact of the scanner. And then the reaction faded. The door in the wall slid back, and he heard a collective gasp behind him. Dr. Angel shone a flashlight inside.

Thousands of gold coins formed a path down a long, dark hallway. They winked and glittered as the flashlight in the doctor’s hand trembled. The soldiers had their own lights, and soon a dozen or more beams were illuminating the walls and discovering side chambers.

On either side of the door were the grim statues of Mayan warriors, not genuine ones, of course, for none had survived the Spanish conquest. These statues were copied from wall paintings. They were beautifully done, their heads long and slightly deformed from the way Mayan infants were bound to their mothers’ carrying boards. Their noses were large and aristocratically curved. Their ears were heavy with turquoise and gold. They wore loincloths of jaguar, and the teeth of jaguars hung about their necks. They were pok-a-tok players.

Dr. Angel rushed down the dark hallway, followed by Dr. Marcos and the soldiers. In the distance were more treasures—real art works from Babylon and Mohenjo-daro and many other ancient, forgotten places. There was a room made entirely of amber, and a diamond throne that had belonged to the shah of Iran. Matt heard exclamations as each wonder was discovered. He followed them a short way, but his attention was drawn to something else near the door.

It was a diagram etched in metal. It was very close to the one he’d seen in the abandoned observatory, and now he realized that the man who had lived there was one of the designers of the Scorpion Star. What had happened to him? Had he been drawn by the chance to build something so marvelous that the ethics about its use hadn’t bothered him?

What had driven him out in such a hurry that a book lay open on his desk and his glasses were left beside it?

The diagram wasn’t exactly the same. Some of the buildings were of different sizes, and an area called Savannah was missing. There were no cryptic notes or formulas, but at the bottom was a pair of glowing scorpions and the words COUPLE and UNCOUPLE.

Matt knew more or less what those words meant. “Couple” was to bring together, as happened when people married. They became a couple. And “uncouple”?

Matt reached out and pressed his hand against the scorpion above UNCOUPLE. The familiar energy went through him, so something was happening. He waited a few minutes and stepped back. Outside, the eejits were waiting. He put his hand on the door, and it slid back into place. “Come with me,” he told them.