The Traveler

56

Breaking into buildings was considered a minor but important Harlequin skill. When Maya was a teenager, Linden spent three days teaching her about door locks, security cards, and surveillance systems. At the end of this informal tutorial, the French Harlequin helped her break into the University College London. They wandered through the empty hallways and slipped a postcard into the black coat covering Jeremy Bentham’s bones.

The electronic blueprint of the research facility showed a ventilation duct that led underground to the basement level of the genetic research building. At various points on the blueprint, the architect had written “PIR” in small letters, indicating a system of passive infrared motion detectors. There was a way to deal with that particular problem, but Maya was worried that another security device might have been added later.

HOLLIS STOPPED AT a mall west of Philadelphia. They purchased rock-climbing equipment from a sporting goods store and a small canister of liquid nitrogen from a medical equipment warehouse. A home repair store was close to the mall, and they spent an hour strolling up and down the enormous aisles. Maya filled the shopping cart with a hammer and chisel, a flashlight, a crowbar, a small propane blowtorch, and a pair of bolt cutters. She felt as if everyone was watching them, but Hollis joked with the young woman at the cash register and they got out of the store without being stopped.

Late that afternoon, they reached the town of Purchase, New York. It was a wealthy community with large homes, private day schools, and corporate headquarters surrounded by landscaped parks. Maya decided that the area was the perfect location for a secret research center. The facility was close to New York City and the local airports, but the Tabula could easily keep their activities hidden behind a stone wall.

They checked into a motel and Maya slept for a few hours with her sword beside her. When she woke up, she found Hollis shaving in the bathroom. “You ready to go?” she asked.

Hollis pulled on a clean shirt, and then tied back his dreadlocks. “Give me a couple of minutes,” he said. “A man should look good before he fights.”

Around ten o’clock at night they left the motel, drove past the Old Oaks Country Club, and turned north onto a two-lane road. The research center was easy to find. Sodium security lights were mounted on the wall and a security guard sat in a booth at the entrance. Hollis kept glancing in the side mirror, but no one followed them. A mile later, he took a side road north and parked on the shoulder near a grove of apple trees. The apples had been picked weeks ago and dead leaves covered the ground.

It was very quiet in the truck. Maya realized that she’d gotten used to the music coming from the speakers; it had sustained them during the journey.

“This is going to be difficult,” Hollis said. “I’m sure there are a lot of security guards inside the research center.”

“You don’t have to go.”

“I know you’re doing this for Gabriel, but we got to save Vicki, too.” Hollis looked out the windshield at the night sky. “She’s smart and brave, and she stands up for what’s right. Any man would be lucky to be part of her life.”

“It sounds like you want to be that person.”

Hollis laughed. “If I was lucky I wouldn’t be sitting in a beat-up truck with a Harlequin. You people have way too many enemies.”

They got out of the pickup and pushed their way through a dense thicket of pin oaks and blackberry bushes. Maya was carrying her sword and the combat shotgun. Hollis took along a semiautomatic rifle and a canvas bag filled with the tools. When they came out of the trees near the north wall of the research center, they found a ventilation duct coming out of the ground. The opening was covered with a heavy steel grate.

Hollis cut off two padlocks with the bolt cutters and pried up the grate with the crowbar. He shone the flashlight in the duct, but the light beam didn’t reach beyond ten feet. Maya felt warm air touch her skin.

“According to the blueprint, the duct goes straight to the basement,” she told Hollis. “I can’t tell if there’s room enough to maneuver, so I’ll go headfirst.”

“How will I know if you’re all right?”

“Let me down at three-foot intervals. If I snap the rope twice it’s okay to let out some more line.”

Maya pulled on the rock-climbing harness while Hollis attached a carabiner and pulley to the edge of the grate. After everything was secure, the Harlequin went down the ventilation duct with a few tools held beneath her jacket. The steel duct was dark, hot, and just wide enough for one person. She felt as if she was being lowered into a cave.

After forty feet of rope was released, Maya reached a T junction where the duct went off in two different directions. Hanging upside down, she pulled out the hammer and chisel and got ready to cut through the sheet metal. When the chisel blade hit the duct, the sound echoed around her. Sweat dripped down her face as she swung the hammer again and again. Suddenly, the chisel cut through the steel and a thin sliver of light appeared. Maya cut out a hole and pried back the steel. She snapped the line twice and Hollis lowered her into an underground tunnel with a concrete floor and cinder-block walls. The tunnel was lined with water, power, and ventilation pipes. The only illumination came from a series of fluorescent fixtures placed at twenty-foot intervals.

It took ten minutes to double up the climbing rope and lower down a knapsack with the tools. Five minutes after that, Hollis was standing beside her.

“How do we get upstairs?” he asked.

“On the north corner of the building, there’s an emergency staircase. We’ve got to find the staircase without triggering the security system.”

They went down the tunnel and stopped at the first open doorway. Maya took out a small mirror and held it at an angle. On the other side of the door frame was a small white plastic box with a curved diffuser lens.

“The blueprints said that they’re using PIR motion detectors. It senses the infrared energy given off by objects and trips an alarm if it goes above a certain limit.”

“And that’s why we got the nitrogen?”

“Right.” She reached into the knapsack and pulled out the liquid nitrogen. The container looked like a thermos with a nozzle on one end. Carefully, she reached through the door frame and sprayed the motion detector. When it was covered with white frost, they continued down the tunnel.

The engineers who had built the underground area had painted sector numbers on the walls, but Maya didn’t understand their meaning. In certain areas of the tunnel, they could hear a constant mechanical hum that sounded like a steam turbine, but the machinery remained out of sight. After wandering around for ten minutes, they reached another junction in the tunnel. Two passageways led off in different directions with no signs indicating the right path. Reaching into her pocket, Maya took out the random number generator. Odd number means right, she decided, and pressed the button. Number 3531 appeared.

“Go right,” she told Hollis.

“Why?”

“No reason at all.”

“The tunnel on the left looks bigger. I say we go that way.”

They went left and spent ten minutes exploring empty storage rooms. Finally the passageway hit a dead end. When they turned back, they found the Harlequin lute that Maya had scratched on the wall with her knife.

Hollis looked annoyed. “This doesn’t mean your little number machine gave us the correct choice. Give me a break, Maya. The number doesn’t mean anything.”

“It means we go right.”

They entered the second passageway and disabled another motion detector. Suddenly Hollis stopped and pointed up. A small silver box was mounted on the ceiling. “Is that a motion detector?”

Maya shook her head and put her hand to her lips.

“Just tell me what it is.”

She grabbed his arm and they ran down the passageway. Pushing open a steel door, they entered a room the size of a football field that was filled with concrete support pillars.

“What the hell is going on?”

“That was their backup system. A sound detector. It probably feeds into a computer program called Echo. The computer filters out mechanical noises and detects the sound of a human voice.”

“So they know we’re here?”

Maya opened up the top of her sword case. “The detector could have picked up our voices twenty minutes ago. Come on, we’ve got to find the staircase.”

The basement area had only five sources of light: a single lightbulb in each of the distant corners and a fifth bulb in the middle. They left the corner of the room and walked slowly between the gray pillars to the light at the center. The concrete floor was dusty, and the air was hot and stagnant.

The lightbulbs flickered, and then died. For a few seconds they stood in complete darkness until Hollis switched on their only flashlight. He looked tense and ready to fight.

They heard a squeaking, raspy sound as if a door was being forced open. Silence. Then the door was shut with a hollow boom. The tips of Maya’s fingers were tingling. She touched Hollis’s arm-don’t move-and they both heard a quick barking noise that sounded like laughter.

Hollis pointed the flashlight between two rows of pillars and they saw something pass through the shadows. “Splicers,” he said. “They sent them down to kill us.”

Maya reached into the knapsack and found the propane blowtorch. Her hands were awkward, fumbling, as she turned the steel knob and lit the nozzle with a cigarette lighter. A blue flame came out of the nozzle with a soft roaring sound. She held it up and took a few steps forward.

Dark shapes passed between the pillars. More quick laughter. The splicers were changing position, running in a circle around them. Maya and Hollis stood with their backs to each other within the small circle of light.

“They don’t die easy,” Hollis told her. “And if you shoot them in the body, the wound heals right away.”

“Go for the head?”

“If you can do it. They’ll keep attacking until they’re destroyed.”

Maya spun around and saw the pack of hyenas about twenty feet away. There were between eight and ten splicers-and they were moving fast. Yellowish fur with black spots. Blunt dark muzzles.

One of the splicers made a high-pitched laughing sound. The pack broke apart, ran between the pillars, and attacked from two sides. Maya placed the blowtorch on the floor in front of her and pumped a round into the combat shotgun. She waited until the pack was ten feet away from her then fired at the lead animal. The pellets hit his chest and he was flung backward, but the others kept coming. Hollis stayed near her, firing his rifle at the other group.

She squeezed the trigger again and again until the firing chamber was empty. Dropping the gun, she drew her sword and pointed it forward like a lance. A splicer leaped through the air and was skewered on the blade. His heavy body fell in front of her. Desperately, she pulled out the sword and began swinging with quick, slashing strokes as two more splicers attacked. They yelped and screamed as the sword cut through their thick skin.

Maya spun around and saw Hollis running away from her, trying to snap a new ammunition clip into his rifle while three splicers chased him. He turned, dropped the flashlight, and swung the rifle at the first attacker, knocking it sideways. Two more splicers jumped on him and he fell backward into the shadows.

Maya picked up the blowtorch with her left hand and gripped her sword with her right. She ran over to Hollis while he tried to fight off the two splicers. She swung downward, cutting off one animal’s head and stabbing the other in the belly. Hollis’s jacket was ripped open. His arm was covered with blood.

“Get up!” she shouted. “You’ve got to get up!”

Hollis scrambled to his feet, found a new ammunition clip, and snapped it into the rifle. A wounded splicer was trying to crawl away, but Maya swung her blade down like an executioner. Her arms were trembling as she stood over the dead body. The splicer’s mouth was open and she could see its teeth.

“Get ready,” Hollis said. “They’re coming again.” He raised his rifle and began murmuring a Jonesie prayer. “I pray to God with all my heart. May His Light protect me from the Evil that-”

A barking laugh came from behind them, and then they were attacked from three sides. Maya fought with her sword, stabbing and slashing at the teeth and claws that came at her, red tongues and wild eyes that burned with hatred. Hollis took single shots at first, trying to conserve his ammunition, then switched to automatic fire. The splicers attacked again and again until the final animal came toward her. Maya raised her sword, ready to swing, but Hollis stepped forward and shot the splicer in the head.

THEY STOOD TOGETHER, surrounded by the dead. Maya felt numb inside, overwhelmed by the fury of the attack.

“You okay?” Hollis’s voice was harsh and strained.

Maya turned to face him. “I think so. What about you?”

“One of them slashed my shoulder, but I can still move my arm. Come on. We need to get moving.”

Maya slipped her sword back into the carrying case. Holding the shotgun with one hand, she led them to the outer edge of the underground area. It took them only a few minutes to find a steel security door, protected by electromagnetic sensors. A cable led from the door to a circuit box and Hollis popped it open. Wires and switches were everywhere, but they were color coded. That made it easier.

“They already know we’re in the building,” Maya explained. “I don’t want them to realize that we’ve reached the staircase.”

“What wire do we cut?”

“Don’t cut anything. That just triggers the alarm.”

Never avoid a difficult decision, her father once told her. Only fools think they can guarantee the right choice. Maya decided that the tamper wires were green and the red wires carried current. She used the blowtorch to melt the plastic covering off each pair of red wires, and then attached them together with small alligator clips.

“Is that going to work?”

“Maybe not.”

“Are they going to be waiting for us?”

“Probably.”

“Well, that sounds promising.” Hollis smiled slightly and that made her feel better. He wasn’t like her father or Mother Blessing, but he was beginning to think like a Harlequin. You had to accept your fate, and still be brave.

Nothing happened when they forced open the steel door. They were at the bottom level of a concrete emergency staircase with lightbulbs on each landing. Maya took the first step, and then started moving quickly.

Find the Traveler.