They heard the guard’s soft footfalls on the carpet grow quieter, then all was still.
Winston stood, careful to lift his chair as he moved it. He bent over, peering through the gaps in the bookshelves at about chest height. He took a step, then another, trying to change his viewpoint. Then he caught the bright glow of the guard’s cell phone screen. He stood in the book stacks, only three or four rows down. The guard raised his phone out of view, and Winston felt sure he could hear whispering.
He grabbed his backpack from the floor and beckoned urgently at Shade to follow him.
“What—?” Shade started, but Winston cut him off by turning his waving hand into a fist. Shade pushed his chair from the table, grabbed his own pack, and followed.
Winston led them back out into the main Literature & Humanities hall, but instead of walking into the open where they would be visible, Winston pulled them behind the first bookshelf to the left, keeping them against the wall. After a few steps, they reached the corner, turned right, and arrived at a door marked “Employees Only.” If the boys kept going, they would arrive at one of the information desks, which Winston knew would be staffed. He definitely did not want to be spotted and have more people know where they were going.
“What are you doing?” Shade whispered near Winston’s ear.
“That guard is calling someone about us,” Winston whispered back. “We have to get out of here right now.”
“Can we run?”
“Risky. The other guard is probably on the first floor. And if he’s calling the cops, the front might already be watched.”
“The roof?”
“Then we’re trapped.”
The red LED on the sensor pad next to the Employees Only door caught Winston’s eye. He’d spent enough time in Central to have a pretty good idea where everything was, although he’d never been behind the scenes in staff areas.
Think! Winston commanded himself. What can you do?
Phones? Not much use here. Running options were almost nil. The knives in their packs would be about as useful as their leftover muffins unless they were going to take hostages.
Then Winston thought of the artifacts. He had an alien energy weapon. An image of Luke Skywalker firing his blaster into a door’s control panel to keep out the stormtroopers sprang to mind. Could he open the door if he shorted out the panel?
Winston followed his first impulse. He turned his back to Shade and crouched down. “Remember the long, metal, wiggly tube thing I showed you? Grab that.”
Shade unzipped the top of Winston’s backpack and a second later handed over the device, holding it between his thumb and index finger as if it were a dead rat.
“That thing creeps me out,” he said. “I’m going to call it Vlad.”
Winston didn’t waste time replying as Shade zipped his pack back up.
Gripping the crossbar, Winston set the device’s tips close to the sensor pad. Any employee could tap his or her ID badge to the sensor plate and the door lock would disengage, but they didn’t have a badge or any time to think about how to get one. As pressure quickly mounted in the back of Winston’s head and the metal tips limbered up, he thought about how to roast the lock. How did he control the voltage? And would it even do anything aside from fry the electronics, leave the lock bolt stuck in place, and probably set off an alarm?
What happened then came as a total surprise. Winston knew about augmented reality, when cameras combined with computers and displays in a way that let the user view the normal world but see data and graphics layered on top of it. He even had an app on his phone — or did until this morning — that would show the position of every nearby Starbucks on his screen as he panned around the camera’s view. But this went way beyond Google Glass or anything else he’d read about.
As the rods gripped the doorway’s sensor pad, he saw something like a schematic diagram start to materialize inside of the door frame. Wiring and circuitry glowed an almost neon blue in sharp contrast to the wall, which started to fade and dim. This seeing-two-things-at-once effect was similar to what he’d witnessed in the motel room, but here the blue diagram seemed to crystallize before him, spreading out from the artifact like frost growing across glass. It reached up and across the walls and down through the floor, even to floors he couldn’t see with his regular vision.
It was a geek’s dream. The world suddenly rendered as an electrical network, like being a single cell and seeing the body’s circulatory system branching infinitely off into the distance. If he let his awareness flow beyond the library, he wondered how far he could see. The block? All of Portland? The world?
“Winston?” Shade whispered as he touched Winston’s arm.
He blinked. The blue schematics remained, the real world still muted before him, but his reverie was broken.
Concentrate.
Winston narrowed his focus to the sensor pad. He could make out the RF sensor wired into a small circuit board, which led off through a pair of twisted wire cables. A third wire traveled only a couple of inches to the right. That would go to the lock. He had to create a signal that would trigger the lock to disengage.
In only a second or two, Winston’s tinnitus flared in his left ear, loud enough to make him wince. He gripped the crossbar tighter, trying to mentally command the lock to open, just as he had with the Stadlerator 7000.
Open, he thought. Open!
The lock clicked, and the LED turned from red to green.
Winston let out his breath and relaxed. His tinnitus vanished. The device — he wasn’t about to call it Vlad — returned to its usual unmoving shape as Winston lowered it and pulled the door open with his free hand. They rushed through, and Winston tried to close the door softly behind them. When it clicked shut and the lock re-engaged, Winston winced and thought it sounded loud enough to alert every employee on the third floor.
They stood in a small room with linoleum tiling and old, green fluorescent lighting. Before them, an elevator waited, and to the right of this sat the squat, closed entrance to a dumbwaiter. Winston wondered if they could fit in the dumbwaiter, which had to be meant for transporting books. Winston saw no call button, though, meaning it must be operated from the basement, and he scrapped that idea.
Only one way out. He hit the elevator call button.
“Where are we going?” Shade whispered.
“Gotta be the basement,” Winston replied. “Cross your fingers for an emergency exit.”
The elevator bell dinged and its doors opened. Winston and Shade jumped inside and hit the control panel’s B button. As the doors started to close, they heard someone jiggle the handle on the outer staff door. Fortunately, no click of the lock followed. No one shouted — yet. In their moment of waiting for disaster, the elevator doors shut and the car began to drop.
14
Scoot in the Chute
Bledsoe gulped the last of his black coffee as the Gulfstream touched down at Portland International and rolled for nearly a mile to the military hanger. When the plane’s door finally opened, two men stood at the bottom of the stairs. He’d read their files during the flight, but the larger man, Lynch, was obviously ex-military. He wore it like a big name tag, standing stiffly, feet at shoulder width, hands clasped behind his back, eyes forward. The other agent, Smith, carefully watched Bledsoe descend the stairs. The younger man’s curly red hair almost hid attentive eyes that flicked from Bledsoe’s face to his feet to how his hands grasped the handrail for support. Good. He needed smart, observant people. He didn’t want them too smart, though. The number of people who knew all of Project Majestic’s critical details could be counted on two hands. So far as everybody else needed to know, this was just about chasing down another terrorist. That was how he’d been able to enlist the FBI’s help, but the fewer people he had asking questions the better.
As far as hangars went, this wasn’t a large one. An array of lights hung from the interior’s four steel crossbeams, and every surface, including the cement floor, gleamed w
ith the white sterility of a surgical operating theater. The place smelled of fresh paint. Except for the Gulfstream, a navy blue Mercedes sedan, and the stack of long brown boxes piled against one wall, the hangar stood completely empty. Beyond the hangar doors, the late morning shone brilliant blue, with only a few idle clouds and a soft breeze blowing over the endless acres of airport tarmac.
Bledsoe stepped onto the glossy hangar floor and stumbled slightly. His head still buzzed from only having slept a couple of hours on the plane. Apart from that, he’d worked through the night making preparations. At some point soon, his adrenaline and excitement would bleed off and he’d need some rest.
He shook Smith’s hand, then Lynch’s.
“Thank you for helping on this case,” Bledsoe said to Lynch, clearly the more dominant of the two men. “What’s the latest?”
“Sir,” said Lynch with just a bit too much eagerness. “I made a sweep of every prepaid cellular retail outlet this morning, and—”
“After you lost the boys.”
Lynch swallowed. That knocked a little wind out of his sails. “Yes, sir. But I sorted the options based on proximity to the boys’ last known location and filtered again by the businesses’ opening times.”
“Short version,” said Bledsoe.
“I found the Radio Shack where the boys bought new phones.”
Bledsoe nodded and gave the man a hint of smile. Maybe this guy wasn’t only dumb muscle, after all. “Good. And you got the tracking info?”
“Yes, sir. About ten minutes ago.”
“And?”
“The boys are together,” offered Smith. “They’re at the Central Library downtown. Or they were. We lost their signals as you were taxiing in.”
Bledsoe fought down his anger and forced himself to think.
“Either they disabled the phones, suspecting they were being traced, or they went somewhere there’s no signal.”
Lynch gestured toward the waiting Town Car. “Either way, we have police in the building as we speak. A library security guard who saw the boys is talking to them now. We’ll know shortly.”
“Good.”
Bledsoe stretched before ducking into the vehicle’s back seat. At least this ride wouldn’t be as long as the last.
Lynch got behind the wheel. Smith walked around the car and reached for the passenger door, but Bledsoe called to him, “Smith, hand me one of those boxes, will you?” He pointed to the pile against the wall. After a moment’s hesitation, Smith fetched one and set it across Bledsoe’s lap.
“What’s in the boxes?” Lynch asked.
“Radiation sensors,” said Bledsoe without elaborating. He opened the box and set a hand on the dark display screen mounted at the end of its long, double-pronged sensor rod. “Actually, Smith, put three more in the trunk. The rest are safe here?”
“Yes, sir,” said Smith flatly as he moved to obey. “The Bureau owns this hangar.”
Once finished, Smith settled into his seat up front as Lynch drove them out. The building’s single large door slid down behind them. “The library, sir?”
Bledsoe stifled a yawn as he powered up the radiation scanner and started navigating through the options and menus he’d studied in the documentation during his flight.
“No,” he said. “The police can handle that end for now. And you, Smith, I need you to grab another car.”
The younger man’s eyes narrowed as he realized he was being pulled from the main action.
“May I ask why, sir?”
“Because I want to make sure we check out the Tagaloa boy before anyone else does. Question the family and check out the boy’s stuff.”
Agent Smith turned away before Bledsoe could read his face, but the younger man’s stillness as he answered “Yes, sir” spoke plenty about his displeasure. Bledsoe didn’t care. Smith’s type couldn’t help asking lots of questions. Fine — go ask them out in the suburbs. Maybe he would even find something useful.
“Out you go,” said Bledsoe. “Double quick, and let me know what you find. Meanwhile, I have another stop to make.”
***
The elevator doors parted before Winston and Shade to reveal a cement basement filled with rank after rank of bookshelves, a place library employees called “the stacks.” The air was dry and cool, and the smell of countless thousands of aging volumes was so thick Winston could almost taste the paper dust on the back of his tongue.
Winston pulled Shade along with him out of the elevator and alongside the wall next to the stack room entrance. He peeked his head around the corner and saw no one, but that could change at any moment. He knew that library staff did the lion’s share of their sorting down here. Most of the requests he made for old or rare texts with information unlikely to be found online nearly always ended up down here.
Winston tried to recall the library’s layout. He was fairly sure that there was an exit on the far side of the stacks room. It would be way in the back, off to the left, and it would come out at a little recessed door most people didn’t even know existed. The door wasn’t hidden, but it probably hadn’t been used in decades, and the library’s landscaping had grown up around it.
Elsewhere in the library, someone called the elevator. The doors slid shut, and the boys heard the whir of its car climbing.
“What about the elevator shaft?” Shade whispered.
Winston cocked his head at Shade, curling his upper lip in an expression that asked, “Are you insane?”
Shade’s shrug retorted that the elevator shaft was no crazier than anything else happening today.
Winston tightened his grip on Shade’s sleeve. “Come on.”
They hurried into the open space of the stacks room, resisting the urge to crouch. If they were spotted, Winston could always try to play the “we’re lost” card.
Once through the room’s open space and into the cover of tall bookshelves, Winston slowed, listening. Straight ahead, at the end of the aisle, a box fan hummed on a low table, blowing air back toward the entrance. Off to their right, someone gave a short laugh.
“I know…saw…too,” said a female speaker. In the basement’s confines, with the sound broken up by all the shelving, it was hard to judge her distance. Twenty feet away? Thirty?
Behind them, the elevator door chimed. Panic spiked through Winston’s body. Near the end of the aisle, he checked back over his shoulder. As he did so, his backpack bumped into the box fan. It slid on the tabletop and tottered at the edge.
Winston couldn’t see the fan, but he felt what he’d done and threw a hand back to try and stop the disaster. Through blind luck, his palm landed atop the fan with a soft clang. Winston cringed at the noise, but at least the fan remained upright.
The elevator doors started to open just as a man’s voice to the right asked, “What was that?”
Winston tried to lunge forward, but he was twisted and off balance. Then Shade collided with his backpack, propelling him forward and almost off his feet. He had just enough time to register a figure wearing dark-blue slacks and a light-blue short-sleeved shirt with a patch on the arm before he and Shade were behind the cover of the nearby shelving.
They ran, and Winston was glad for the fan’s constant hum covering the slap of their footsteps. The stack room’s far wall took a little dogleg jog to the right, further hiding them from view. That wouldn’t last long, though.
“Portland police!” boomed a man’s voice. “Anybody here?”
“Here!” said both library workers in unison.
Right in front of Winston stood the wood-and-glass double doors of the back exit. A fire alarm pull handle was mounted in the wall beside it. In the top-right corner of the door frame, Winston saw a wire emerge from the molding and dip into the wall’s sheetrock. An alarm. If he forced open the door, the alarm would go off. That might be all right. They could run for it, but Shade was a slower runner. Beyond the doors waited a bare anteroom containing only two stacks of boxes, some used cans of paint, and a single folding ch
air. At the far end of this room, the real exit to outside waited, and it might be tightly locked. Winston couldn’t gamble on getting them out in only a few seconds.
They ran past the door and another three or four bookshelves until they reached the corner of the stack room.
“Is it just you two down here?” asked another voice, lower than the others.
There were at least two cops. Great. More footsteps indicated that the employees were rushing to meet the police near the room’s entrance.
“I don’t know,” said the library guy. “We were at the desk over there, prepping carts. There was a noise over that way right when you showed up, but it could be nothing.”
“Any coworkers down here with you?” asked the first policeman.
“You mean clerks or pages? Sue and Jim left for break, but that was like five minutes ago.”
“I heard the elevator,” said the woman. “Maybe a minute ago, but we didn’t hear anyone come in. Sometimes people push the wrong button.”
“We’ll check it out,” said the officer.
They heard hard-soled shoes tap across the concrete, heading to their left. That put them near the back wall, not far from the exit Winston wanted.
Shade glared frantically at Winston, hands open, pleading for an idea on what to do next.
Winston had no idea. Filled bookshelves took up the entire wall behind them, and a room-length shelf stood before them. If they went left, they’d run into the police, and to the right, there was nothing but more shelving and a large canvas bin half-filled with books sitting below a large, square opening in the wall. As he watched, Winston heard the muffled bang of someone closing a metal door high above the square opening. A second later, a couple of paperbacks whisked down a slide and landed atop the bin’s pile.
Winston Chase and the Alpha Machine Page 15
