Chapter 28 #2
“Yes, sir, but leaves go in this bag, not the conveyor—you’ll get them back on the way out. Could I see your ID first?”
As Ella complied, she said, with just the barest hint of a waver, “Fascinating contraption! What is it?”
“X-ray machine, sir. Just got it.”
“Golly, what they won’t think of next.”
The belt rolled through a red-lit tunnel perhaps eighteen inches long, encased in metal that reached all the way to the ceiling.
Beatrix watched Ella’s wallet go through, followed by a watch, which stopped in the tunnel with a ding—a dull white amid the red.
Maybe there was an “X-ray” in there, but it was also a spell detector.
The military must have decided they could keep its existence a secret this way and catch any hidden wizards with the invisibility reversal spell, floor and pat-down.
The typic was midway through with the latter, and Beatrix readied herself. The moment he was done, she would need to get onto Ella’s back again.
But when he finished, he was standing between them.
“All right, sir, you’re good to go. Retrieve your belongings and we’ll let you through.”
“Uh,” Ella said, obviously trying to think of a reason to get around him to the side of the conveyor belt where her belongings no longer were.
The radio transceivers attached to both guards’ belts crackled. “Hurry up in there—we want to start the tour,” said a voice made tinny by the technology.
“Sending him through in a moment,” the typic said, still in the way. “Go ahead, sir.”
As Ella moved forward with a grim air, Beatrix did the only thing she could think of—stepped gingerly forward on the metal lips until she reached the tunnel.
She couldn’t go through because she’d trigger the belt to start moving.
She couldn’t go over because it connected to the ceiling.
The only way to the other side was around, but the tunnel’s metal casing protruded beyond the lip, leaving nothing to walk on.
“Does everyone go through this or just the visitors?” Ella asked as Beatrix reached for the other side of the casing.
“Everyone, sir—heading in and out. Security is paramount here.”
Beatrix stretched out her right foot and hooked it around the other side. While Ella checked her wallet as if wanting to assure herself that her ID was in there, Beatrix inched her body over, lost her grip on the slippery casing and fell half a foot before catching herself.
“We’ll keep your watch here with your leaves and you can retrieve it on the way out, sir,” the wizard guard said as Beatrix scooched herself back up, awash in adrenaline.
“Oh? Why?”
“Just a precaution, sir.”
Ella gave a chuckle that was one notch shy of manic. “Think I’m trying to smuggle something in, eh?”
“Oh, no, sir! It’s just the procedure.”
The wizard touched his shield-disrupter to the barrier, opening a hole in it to clear the way into the main building. “There you go, sir.”
Seconds were all she had left. As Ella hung back, saying something about the excellent security, Beatrix surged forward, heart pumping so fast it felt as if it alone propelled her.
She fell on her hands and knees on the other side of the conveyor belt with an audible thunk of kneecap against metal that might have given up the game if the guards’ transceivers hadn’t crackled again.
“Send him through,” the irritated voice ordered.
“Yes, sir. Sorry, sir.”
Beatrix, scrambling to get to Ella, half-fell on her. Ella staggered under her weight.
“Oh!” The typic guard ran toward them. “Sir, are you all right?”
“Charlie horse,” Ella croaked, righting herself and hobbling toward the opening. “I’m fine! Thank you very much for your important work!”
Once they were through, Beatrix slid off with a whispered “sorry!” Her hands shook. The thought of going through all that again to get out …
But what mattered was that she was in.
“Apologies for the holdup,” Ella called to the sizable group of military officials clustered around the vice president. “I like new technology, you know, and I was fascinated by the X-ray machine.”
“Then you’ll enjoy the tour before the speech, Freddie,” said a typic with salt-and-pepper hair and an important-looking uniform. Beatrix stared at him. Was this Whitaker? “But we’d better get a move on—you need to be out the door by three-forty, don’t you, Mr. Vice President?”
As Draden said that unfortunately he did, Beatrix reflexively looked at her watch, but that was just as invisible as the rest of her.
She found a clock on a wall that announced the time as three-fifteen, and she stopped caring who the man was.
Twenty-five minutes—less, really, because they’d need to allow time to get through security.
She and Ella had thought Draden intended to stay at least an hour.
What could she hope to find in fifteen or twenty minutes?
The group went left down the main hallway.
She headed right, hugging the wall, looking over her shoulder every few steps until she realized that everyone was walking the other direction—no doubt gathering for the vice president’s speech.
She tried yet again to recall the layout of the place, but her borrowed memories were impressionistic and disconnected.
She passed by the mess hall and “remembered” smuggling a sandwich out for Martinelli in defiance of a no-food-in-offices rule.
She saw a poster on the wall that declared “A Patriot Keeps His Country’s Secrets” and had a flash memory of walking by in Peter’s body, snickering at the drawing of the pompous-looking man holding his finger to his lips.
Not in the least bit helpful.
She stopped in an out-of-the-way corner, closed her eyes and focused.
Hadn’t Peter found her at the League’s conference all those months earlier because he had an instinct about where to go?
Granted, they were tied together by the Vows at that point.
But what if they were still connected in some deep-seated way?
What if the Vows forged a conduit to lay the cable between them, so to speak, and even with the cable snapped, there was still the conduit to call between?
What if that explained why she was so certain he was here?
Where are you? she thought, hard and insistent. Peter—tell me where you are!
She opened her eyes, ready to follow her instincts, however faint.
Forward or back? Forward. Left or right?
Right. No, left. She walked for several more minutes—a clock on the wall told her it was three twenty-three—and came to a halt at a door that called to her more strongly than anything in this building yet had.
Carefully, oh so carefully, she opened it. Inside was an office that seemed to be no one’s—walls bare, a wooden desk with a scratch down one leg and no papers or photographs on it. A desk she knew. She’d sat at it and walked around it and banged her fist into it as she relived Peter’s memories.
But he wasn’t in his old office. Naturally.
She inched the door open, looked up and down the corridor, and slipped out, finally admitting that she’d convinced herself she had a chance of finding him in this complex only because she’d had nothing else to pin her hopes on.
He probably wasn’t here at all. Even if he was, how could she find him in the time she had left?
She looked for a clock, saw it was three twenty-five and knew with a sick jolt that she had to get back to the checkpoint.
She took a single step that direction and a flash of red stopped her cold. Someone was coming around the corner.
The same someone—unless she was very much mistaken—who’d laid in wait for her at the hospital.
She pressed against the wall and held her breath as he went by, the edge of his scarlet coat coming within an inch of her. When he reached the end of the corridor, he opened a door and disappeared behind it, giving her a glimpse of stairs.
Stairs. She’d forgotten that most of the complex was underground. If she followed the wizard, he might lead her right to Peter.
If she followed the wizard, she’d be stuck here, no maybe about it.
She turned and rushed back the way she’d come—not to leave but to alert Ella she wouldn’t be going. That was the system they’d worked out so Ella would know she had not been captured.
She made it back to the main corridor with what she hoped was time to spare. But as she rounded the bend, a throng of men strode at her, taking up both sides of the hallway.
She leapt into an office with an open door and anxiously watched soldier after soldier passing by. The vice president’s speech must be done. Come on, come on!
As soon as the hallway cleared, she darted out and ran for it. There—there was Ella—she wasn’t too late—
“Go to the john when you get home,” Morse growled. Beatrix watched in dismay as he shoved Ella through the archway to the guard waiting inside the checkpoint. The hole in the shield closed.
Beatrix tried to think of a way to communicate to Ella, without alerting Morse, that she was all right. She came up empty. What if Ella fought the guard and burst back in? What if she got herself arrested? Go through, she thought. Please.
To her relief, Ella did.
Morse turned—for a horrible second he seemed to look right at her, as if he knew she was there—and strode off into the complex instead of leaving with the vice president’s party.
He was headed the way she’d just come. Heart rattling, she set off after him, letting a soldier get between them so his footsteps would cover any sound she made.
How long should she wait before following Morse down the stairs?
If she jumped the gun and he heard her …
But just then, he veered into an office. She hung back near the half-open door, leery of going in. There wasn’t a sound. What was he doing?
A minute or two elapsed. She was debating with herself whether it would be a better use of time to go to the basement when she realized that the officer striding down the corridor toward her was the man who’d called Ella “Freddie.”
Whitaker coming to talk to Morse?
Gritting her teeth, she crept into the office and pressed against a wall. Morse, who’d had his back to her, abruptly turned. Her blood pressure spiked. God, he’d heard her—
The next second, the officer walked in. Morse was looking at him, not her. The door shut with a click.
“Well?” asked maybe-Whitaker.
“Wait until I soundproof the room,” Morse said softly, a hint of irritation there. (Did he speak respectfully to anyone? Draden?)
She risked taking her eyes off Morse long enough to look at the other man’s uniform. Hardware on his chest. Three stars on his shoulders. Steel name tag with a single word that showed she had leapt to the right conclusion: Whitaker.
If only she’d thought to bring a recording device.
“Look,” the general said, “we’re running out of time. We can try at a later event—there’ll be other chances. But I think we’d better admit to ourselves that this one is shot.”
“No,” Morse said.
Whitaker shook his head. “I realize you and James are convinced the guy knows more than he’s letting on”—Peter? she thought—“but I was always against waiting until the last minute to grab him”—Peter!—“and now … What is that?”
Morse held up a see-through bag with what looked like rubble inside. “Project 96.”
“What?” Whitaker said, obviously aghast at the thought of his weapon in pieces, but Beatrix was horrorstruck for another reason.
“A different transmitter,” Morse said, putting words to her fears. “One that Blackwell either made after he left or smuggled out of here. We found this in the forest behind his house today.”
He dipped a hand in the bag and pulled out one of the largest pieces, no bigger than her thumb. “Here: The top half of the ear rune. And this”—he extracted another jagged bit of debris. “Ear again. Same size as the runes on our copy. The color and texture of the material is an exact match.”
“Yeah? And?”
“Clearly this was the source of the explosion that was big enough.”
She’d thought she’d done such a good job destroying the weapon. She’d thought no one would ever know.
Whitaker waved a dismissive hand. “Come on, he was in the hospital that day.”
“He was in the hospital after. Twenty-one minutes after.”
“I don’t know if I see the—”
“His weapon went off, and something happened to him. Something that put him in a coma and undermined his ability to spellcast.”
This couldn’t be happening. It couldn’t.
“Stop with the riddles and just spit it out, Morse.”
“Someone—Garrett, I presume—set it off using him as the fuel.”
Beatrix, shaking all over, stared in horror at the men. Morse, implacable. Whitaker, a smile spreading over his face.
“A wizard,” he said. “You’re saying that all we have to do is change our fuel from a typic to a wizard.”
Morse nodded.
“No, wait,” Whitaker said, heaving a sigh, “there’s definitely something wrong with our copy, if it is the copy.
We ran tests using the variant fuels, and all those explosions are roughly twenty percent under the mark.
We’re not going to get to five miles, even with a wizard. We’ll be lucky to hit four.”
“Blackwell says he’s found a fix. Might have caused the problem before he left.”
“Oh! Well, then.” Whitaker’s face settled into a jovial expression that was deeply unsettling, given the circumstances. “Sounds like we’re a go after all. X-minus”—he glanced at his watch—“four days, twenty hours.”
“Yes.”
“Oh—have you found the wife?”
“No,” Morse bit out, and Beatrix—in no doubt whatsoever that they were talking about her—shuddered at his tone.
Whitaker crossed his arms. “I don’t like loose ends.”
“I don’t leave any. I will get her.”
“Good. Heading out?”
Morse, dropping the soundproofing spell, gave a terse jerk of his head, once up, once down.
“I’ll walk you to the checkpoint,” Whitaker said, and their footsteps faded as they strode off.
Beatrix sat in a huddle on the floor, shattered.
Five miles.
Could they really mean five miles from every direction around the point of detonation?
That was an explosion the size of a city. An entire city.
How many people would die because she’d imprudently thought that bits of rubble hidden amid underbrush in the middle of a forest couldn’t in a million years give Draden’s men what they wanted?