by James Harris
Hawk was alarmed by the man’s sudden outburst. Was he having some sort of anxiety attack? Joe saw it as false bravado. He was fed up. In a blur of speed, he rushed over to H, grabbed him by the ears, and held him. “Tell me, you old fart!”
H was stunned by Joe’s audacity.
Hawk, not sure if he should intercede, grabbed Joe’s arm.
“Tell me, or I’ll cook your mind,” Joe said. “I swear I will! On the count of five: 5, 4, 3, 2, 1 …”
“No Joe! No!” Hawk said.
“Tell me or I swear …”
“Joe, we don’t have to do it this way.”
The Director found hidden resolve and stared at Joe. “I won’t tell you. Now get out!” He reached for a hidden alarm bell.
That capped it for Hawk. He pushed past Joe and threw H into his leather chair so that he faced him. H looked up into his eyes and Hawk spoke in the Voice. H no longer resisted. His eyes became dull.
Hawk pushed.
“No, I can’t! Torture me if you wish.”
“I want to tell you. I trust you. You’re good boys.”
“Rest. That would be nice. I’m so tired, you know. Life has been difficult lately.”
H let out a gush of air as he sighed deeply. His voice diminished to a whisper. “He’s in a medical bunker under the Capitol Building.”
Hawk looked into H’s cloudy eyes. He saw nearly fifty years of a military career. Hard work. Now H worked for the other side, for Stell.
“Your father is in the underground sector of the Capitol Building. Level III underground.”
“3AC.”
Before the twins could ask further questions, the door burst open.
“H, there’s a security breach!” a young guard yelled. He spotted the two youths. “Get back from him and raise your hands now!”
“You can see them?” H asked. His haggard face and bloodshot eyes stared up at the young guard. “I mean …” he continued. “You see them both?”
The military guard screwed up his face and stammered. “Uh, yes, sir. The two guys in front of you. Yes, I can see them. Can’t you?”
Hawk spun around and rendered the officer immobile with the Voice. The man stood as if frozen solid.
“You’ll never get away with this … this breach of security, this insult!” H said to the twins. “We dealt with your father: We can deal with you the same way.”
Hawk grabbed Joe, who was trying to get at H.
“We’ve got what we came for, Joe.”
“But he’s Stell’s lackey. Let’s take him prisoner. Maybe we could trade him for Dad.”
“I am no one’s lackey!” H said. “What do you know about what went on? I saved the national security of this country. We are now the only superpower on this planet. Lackey! My ass!”
“So we will have you to thank for all the screw-ups of the future, will we?”
Hawk turned him away. “Leave it alone, Joe.”
Joe brushed him off, but cooled down. “Let’s take care of these two and figure a way out.”
“You’re going to kill us,” H said, more as a statement than a question.
Joe and Hawk screwed up their faces. “No! Do we look like killers?”
“You look like high school kids in way over their heads. Do you even shave yet?”
“Don’t piss me off, H,” Joe said evenly. “You were doing so well up to this point.”
“Enough!” Hawk said. “Time to go.”
“If anything, I mean anything, happens to my father, I will be back for you, old man,” Joe said.
H wiped his hand across his mouth. “Do I look scared, kid?”
“He’s stalling for time, Joe. Let’s go.”
The brothers stood beside each other and looked at H. They pushed.
Without a word, H walked behind his desk and slumped into his chair. He cradled his head in his arms and fell fast asleep at his desk. The guard registered nothing. He was comatose, yet upright staring straight ahead.
“Come on, Hawk. This place is on alert.”
CHAPTER60
An hour later the twins had escaped the building and were back in their rental car.
“I think we should go to the Capitol Building right now,” Joe said, as he signaled right onto Jefferson Avenue from Tenth Street, turning left at the J. Edgar Hoover building.
“I agree, Joe, but we can’t just walk in. There are too many surveillance devices and too many military personnel around. They would be on to us right away.”
“How do we get in then?”
“I have an idea.”
“Well, share it then,” Joe said with his eyes on the traffic ahead.
“From underground. We don’t actually go through the Capitol Building itself, we go under it. We come in from one of the underground passages.”
“Hmm. I like it. Still, what about security?”
“We could handle them.”
Hawk fished a city map out of the glove compartment. He studied the map and looked out the car window at the street signs. “I have a plan. Follow Pennsylvania to the left. Go to First Avenue”
Several minutes later, he looked up from the map and said, “Pull the car over, Joe.”
Joe pulled into a vacant parking slot. They sat, with the car idling, facing a small park.
“See that gray vent cover on the lawn by that building. The kind of vent cover you see for underground subways?”
Joe nodded.
“Well, that’s a fresh air vent into a maze of underground passages.”
“How did you know …?”
“I read it someplace. Follow your line of sight. These passages go to the Capitol Building on your left and snake underground past the Ulysses S. Grant Memorial to the far right.”
“Do you remember how many of these vents there are?”
“I have no idea. They’re clever. The openings are inconspicuous even though they’re right out in the open. I suspect they’re not hidden to make surveillance easier.”
“Is everything in this city under surveillance?” Joe said.
“Let’s park and walk around. Maybe we can get lucky and find one.”
It took the boys two days before they found a suitable vent. The evening of the second day, they reconnoitered the location. It was fortuitous that a street lamp had burnt out on the block they had chosen obscuring their movements from the drivers passing by. Secondly, bushes planted to hide the vent from view had not been properly maintained. The overgrown shrubs helped hide the twins from curious bystanders.
The vent was mounted in formed concrete and painted gray. It resembled a miniature shed that had been squashed by a giant foot. There was a gray-painted aluminum roof mounted on vented walls and protected by steel-wire mesh. The boys examined the perimeter of the vent housing but could not find any anti-intrusion alarms. The housing was bolted and double locked on one side with a piano hinge on the other for ease of access.
On hands and knees, they cut through the locks with bolt cutters and pried open the housing with a tire iron. The housing had been painted over many times, so it took a lot of coaxing before it sprang loose. Both boys pushed and grunted until the heavy housing slowly creaked open.
“Come on,” Joe said, hoisting the coil of rope over his shoulder. “I saw the rung of a ladder going down the side.”
“You did?” Hawk snapped on his flashlight and pointed it downward. “Oh, I see it.”
Joe grabbed the light from him and turned it off. “Someone could see us. We don’t need a light to advertise the fact
that we’re here.”
“All right. All right. Let’s go down,” Hawk said uneasily. “I don’t like this neighborhood anyway.” He hoisted himself over the side. “The first rung is farther down than I thought. Catch this rope and secure it for me. I’m going to have to climb down the rope to the ladder.”
He threw the rope up and Joe tied it to the mesh. In a few moments, Hawk had made his way safely to the ladder. “OK. Your turn. Come on down.”
Joe slowly lowered the housing and mesh on top of himself, carefully slid down the rope, and joined Hawk at the ladder. His weight, pulling on the rope attached to the housing, closed it behind him. Once secure, he released the slipknot in a second dangling rope and watched it flutter down.
Hawk began the long descent down the shaft. Luckily for him, he couldn’t see how deep the shaft was. His acrophobia would have caused him to freeze and cling to the metal rungs. He just hoped Joe was right about it leading to the passageways they needed.
As they descended, they could feel a steadily increasing force of air.
“There’s got to be a big exhaust fan down here somewhere,” Hawk said.
“Let’s try not to step in it.”
“No kidding. It’s huge. There’s good news, though. We can get through. The ladder passes right beside it.”
As they descended, the fwap fwap fwap of the giant blades got louder and louder.
The wind was strong. It clawed at their bodies as if trying to tear them from the ladder. Their clothes flapped about them. Maybe if they let go they could stay suspended by the sheer force of the wind, like at one of those carnival rides. Or maybe not.
“How do we get through here?” Hawk yelled back over the din of the fan.
“We have to be careful, but I think we can squeeze through.” Joe’s hair was standing straight up.
“You want to go first?”
Joe made a defiant face, and nodded for Hawk to keep going down the ladder.
Hawk gave a wary look at the fan, but continued to descend. His hair was being blown up and sideways toward the fan.
Both of them tightened their grip on the rungs of the ladder. The side rungs led them safely past the fan blades. Now, instead of been blown, they were being sucked toward the middle of the fan.
They descended carefully, rung by rung, holding on for dear life. It was like hanging onto a ship’s mast in the midst of a hurricane.
Ten minutes later it was over; they were on solid ground. They had reached the bottom safely. Their ears were ringing.
Hawk looked up and down the “T” passageway. “Which way?”
“Toward the Capitol building. It’s got to be that way.”
The twins jogged down the dark concrete passageway. Ten minutes later the boys slowed as they neared a three-way intersection.
Hawk pointed to the stenciled signs on the wall of each of the three passageways. “Look, Joe, this passage says ‘AA to AE block.’ Don’t we want AC3 or 3AC, something like that?”
“You’re right. H mentioned 3AC. It must be down this way.”
They continued straight ahead.
“I’ve been thinking,” Hawk said. “Now that we’re close to the room, shouldn’t we take precautions? I mean, think about it. What if Stell figures out what happened with H? It’s been two days. If Stell thinks H spilled the beans, wouldn’t he anticipate us coming here?”
“If I were him, I would. Stell’s had plenty of time to arrange something.”
“Yeah, something like a trap.”
“OK. What’s your plan?”
“We take it real easy. We don’t treat this as a rescue; we treat it as a recon mission. We’re here to gather information on Dad’s whereabouts.”
“You’re convinced they’ve moved him?”
“I’m sure of it. They know they’ve been compromised. They would’ve connected the dots already and moved him.”
“Then why are we even bothering?”
“We haven’t a choice.”
They edged closer and closer to room 3AC. It was dark inside the passageways, though dawn had broken outside. There was no sign of any activity.
“It’s too quiet,” Joe said in a stage whisper.
“Sh! Keep it down. I think I see the door ahead.”
“It’s too quiet.”
The twins crept up to the non-descript brushed-metal door of Room 3AC.
Hawk tried the door. “It’s locked.”
“Allow me,” Joe whispered.
Hawk stepped aside and let Joe approach the door. There was a deadbolt lock. Joe placed his hand over the keyhole and squeezed his eyes shut. There was a brief flash of dazzling light. Joe removed his hand from the face of the lock. A trickle of smoke curled up from the keyhole. There was an odor of burnt machine oil.
Joe reached out and popped the door open. He shot Hawk a cocky smile.
Creeping into the dark room, they saw a side table holding some surgery equipment next to a bed. A portable intravenous feed line beside the bed was attached to a prone figure covered up with blankets.
There were no guards.
“My God, he is here,” Hawk said.
“Dad,” Joe whispered urgently. “Dad!” No response.
“They’ve probably got him on medication,” Hawk said. “He’s got to be sedated or he would have broken out of here in a second.”
They approached the bed.
Joe reached out and shook the body gently. He stretched out and pulled a sheet off of the figure, jumping back in shock.
Hawk rushed over and recoiled. There was a manikin in the bed, not their father. It had a sick smile painted on its face in glaring red lipstick. The eye sockets had been painted black with thin white rings around them. It looked like some hideous carnival freak.
“It’s a setup!”
“Shit! Let’s go, go!”
As they turned to the door they saw a flashing red dot. Infrared sensors had alerted the guards. There was a dull clunk as emergency lighting flooded the area in brilliant light.
An alarm that sounded like a school bell began clanging. The boys flew out into the hallway skidding into a turn and back toward the passageway but ground to a stop when they heard the sound of pounding boots coming their way.
Spinning in their tracks, they went in the opposite direction. They headed toward an elevator ahead of them.
The elevator chimed. The doors slowly opened and soldiers with weapons tumbled out.
The men spotted them and began shouting. The boys yanked open the stairwell door and ran in. Bullets clanked and thudded all around them.
The stairs were metal with concrete steps. They ran up, two at a time. There were shouts from below. The soldiers were racing after them.
They heard the clunking of boots running down the metal stairs overhead.
“They’ve got us cornered!” Joe said.
“They think they have us cornered. Keep going up.”
They pounded their way up the stairs, paying no heed to the sounds above and below them.
Hawk caught a glimpse of combat boots one flight above. He pressed Joe against the side of the stairwell wall. Four soldiers came into view. Hawk used the Voice.
The soldiers paused momentarily, directly in front of them. Joe held his breath. With a look of disgust on their faces, the soldiers gave the boys wide berth and continued down the stairs.
“What’d you do, Hawk? Why did they look at us like that?”
Hawk grinned. “I implanted a visual image of lumpy vomit to replace our bodies. Worked rather well.”
Another set of soldiers came down, and Hawk used the same routine on them. Their ruse was quickly discovered, however, when the descending group met up with the ascending one, with no one caught in between. The twins heard increased shouts from below as the soldiers reversed and bolted up the stairs.
The twins made it up to the ground floor. They yanked open the heavy steel door and peered back and forth. More soldiers were headed their way. Once again, Hawk was a
ble to cloak them.
“I can’t keep this up much longer, Joe. There are too many soldiers. I’m not strong enough to force a cloaking image on all of them simultaneously. We have to make a break for it.”
“The security station, Hawk. It has only two guards.”
The security network had been set up to stop people from coming in, not from leaving. The entire scanning and screening station had its back to the inside of the Capitol Building. The guards weren’t even looking their way.
Like tight ends in a football game, the pair sprinted toward the front doors. They catapulted over a flimsy security rail reminiscent of velvet rope guides in movie theaters.
The front guards jolted to alertness, but couldn’t grasp what the immediate problem was. Chaos had erupted in the lobby. There were soldiers with guns. People scattered, dove for cover, and fled the building. They heard the shouts of the pursuing guards but the guards didn’t understand the problem. They didn’t know what degree of force to use.
Shots rang out, echoing loudly throughout the marble building.
Everyone at the front of the building dove for cover. Since it was early morning, the lobby was packed with Capitol Building early-bird employees, senators, and dignitaries, who were now rushing around in utter confusion.
The front entrance guards recovered quickly and reached for their weapons. By the time they had their pistols out of their holsters, Hawk and Joe had disappeared through the brass front doors into a throng of government workers.
Stell’s trap had failed. It might have succeeded had he been there personally. But he wasn’t. He was at a secret meeting place with some people destined to change the course of Earth’s history.
CHAPTER61
As Hawk and Joe were escaping from Capitol Hill, Stell was at Bolling Air Force Base, twenty miles to the southeast, staring at a newly built air force administration building with a magnificent view of the Potomac River.
There was an early morning drizzle, but the clouds were clearing, promising a warm day ahead. Stell had parked his car at the southernmost edge of the base, within view of Interstate Highway 295. Behind him, to the southwest, was the mighty Potomac River.
