Ixeos: Book One of the Ixeos Trilogy (18 page)

“
Regarder où vous allez
!” a male voice hissed, angry.

Neahle looked at Hannah, who just shook her head and mouthed, “Later.”

“
Je ne peux pas voir
!” came a second voice.

“And I can’t understand half of what you’re sayin’,” came a third, too loud. “Speak English, why don’t ya?”

Neahle saw Hannah jump and felt the grip on her arm tighten. Otherwise she didn’t move and Neahle stayed glued to her spot, as still as a stone.

The street was only two lanes but the opposite side had a line of trees planted in the sidewalk. Tall buildings kept both sides in shadow. Still, as the shuffling got closer, Neahle could see movement from the corner of her eye, and then saw three dark clad figures skulking down the sidewalk under the leaves. They weren’t sneaking along the walls as the outsiders did. Rather, they were walking along as if the world were as it used to be. One of them was weaving slightly. He was obviously the one whose feet they could hear shuffling away down the street.

They heard more whispering but couldn’t make out the words. Finally, the three men turned left at the end of the block and disappeared from view. Neahle slumped against the wall, her hand over her heart.

“Oh, my God!” she whispered. “Who were they?”

“Members of a gang,” Hannah said, straining to see down the road. “And Rod.”

Chapter Twenty-Three

“R
eady?” Abacus asked. Neahle was
standing next to him with a small back pack over her shoulders. They were at the entrance to a dark tunnel; Abacus had a torch in hand. Clay was tucking a book into his already full bag and trying to close it.

“Clay, come on! You don’t need any more books!” His sister was frustrated. They hoped to be gone less than three days and were supposed to pack light. Clay, however, had stuck several large books in his pack.

“I might—all of these have pictures of the machines. It’s not like they’re going to be packed in boxes on a shelf at a store all nicely labeled. And they’re not light. We don’t want to haul a bunch of machines back that we don’t need.”

“We don’t know that the M3 is the right one,” Neahle reminded him.

“That’s true, but at least we’ll know where to find other models if we need them. It’d be a lot easier to get the right thing the first time.” Clay slid the straps over his shoulders and secured the snap at his chest.

“Maybe you could just tear the relevant pages out of the book?” Abacus suggested.

Both the McClellands were horrified. “You can’t tear the pages out of a book!” Neahle said.

“Excuse me!” Abacus laughed. “Just trying to simplify things. Are we ready now?”

Nodding, the siblings followed him down the tunnel. After much debate, they had decided that it made sense to target the machines at Bletchley Park first. As Clay had argued, if those were gone, they could be pretty sure they were on the right track and save a lot of time down the road.

“London’s the closest portal to Bletchley, but London is pretty populated. We have a good doorway into Corsham in Wiltshire, where the Central Government Emergency War Headquarters was. I’m tempted to go there just in case they’ve got a machine stuck in a drawer somewhere. It’s a hundred and fifty miles or so from Bletchley though, so that’s a consideration. We’ve also got a doorway into Winchester, which is closer—maybe a hundred miles. The appeal to both of these is that we can completely skirt London and reduce our chances of running into trouble. We’ll have to decide now—this tunnel is about to split. We have to choose one way or the other.” Abacus held the torch aloft and led them through a narrow part of the limestone quarry.

“I’d rather take longer to get where we’re going than risk getting caught,” Neahle said. The memory of Hannah killing the First was always in the back of her mind.

“Yep, I agree,” Clay said. “We both know how to ride a motorcycle—our dad has one. As long as you’ve got at least two stashed away, I’d rather do that.”

“We can come back another way, right? Like if something happens and we end up in London.” Neahle asked anxiously.

Abacus laughed. “It’s not time travel. They’re just doors. Sometimes the doors are unstable, I’ll grant you, but even so, they always reappear. The ones in England are all rock solid, and just like any other door, they’re always there.”

“Okay, that makes me feel better,” Neahle said. “I vote for Corsham, then. We might as well check out the War Headquarters first, right?”

“Right. Although we still need to go to Bletchley Park and see if any machines are there,” Clay said.

“Sounds like a plan,” said Abacus. He made a right turn at the next intersection of tunnels.

The Emergency War Headquarters had been built in the 1950s as a place for the government to operate in the event of a nuclear war with the Soviet Union. One hundred and twenty feet under the surface, the two hundred and forty acre complex was huge and empty. Conceived to accommodate over four thousand people at a time, it was like a cruise ship underground. Neahle was thankful for the flaming torches as they walked the dark polished floors.

“We’ve talked about moving here if we ever need to vacate the Paris tunnels for awhile. There’s a lake for water, generators for power. There’s no fuel here now, but we could probably get enough in to run computers and a few other things. They drained the lake in the eighties, but it’s half filled again with groundwater.” Abacus led them quickly through the building. Clay saw neon arrows painted on the walls.

“Did you do that?” he asked, pointing to one.

“Yeah. Vasco and I got lost in here one time. Early on. This was one of the first places we found. Ironic that we got in this world through the Paris tunnels, which are huge, and then found this one, also huge. Really, most of the tunnels we get into are pretty small, except in subways. The arrows seemed like a good idea.” He grinned at them. “We were plenty hungry by the time we got out of here!”

Two things quickly became apparent. The first was that the British had cleaned the facility out when they shut it down, and unless there was a secret vault or room somewhere, they wouldn’t find so much as a paperclip much less an Enigma machine. The other was that the bunker was simply too huge to take time to look.

“We could spend weeks in here!” Neahle said after they’d walked through dozens of rooms.

Abacus nodded. “I haven’t come here much after we got the arrows painted. I’d forgotten how completely abandoned it is. It’s definitely not worth the effort—talk about a needle in a haystack! Let’s get on to Bletchley.”

The exit was up a wide ramp, then through a smaller door cut into a massive steel door. The large door was big enough to drive military vehicles through, leading down to an upper level marked off with parking areas. The smaller door was the size of double front door. Abacus opened one side and held it open for the McClellands to walk through.

They stood squinting in the sunlight, although it was a typical gloomy British day. Neahle looked around, shading her eyes. It was everything she’d ever thought England would be: rolling hills, stone walls, old trees, thatch-roofed houses in the distance. She saw a herd of sheep grazing in a field a quarter of a mile away.

“Are there farmers?” she asked, surprised.

“No,” Abacus said. “The sheep are wild now, but they stay around here. We cull the herd, try to keep the fences mended so they stay within a reasonable distance. They make a nice stew, those sheep do.” He strode off towards the village.

“Stew?” Neahle asked Clay.

“Good chops, too,” Clay said, hurrying after Abacus and laughing.

The motorcycles were in a small garage attached to a gas station. The whole thing looked like it had been built in 1940s, but it was clean and tidy, and the shelves were lined with parts.

“Looks like Samson’s been here,” Clay said.

“Samson’s in charge of all our vehicle Depots,” Abacus said. “Although it sounds like to me you can share that duty once this project is done.”

“I’d love to!” Clay said, running his hands over the line of motorcycles. There were twenty, and, like in Paris, they came in all shapes, sizes and horsepower. Abacus walked over to three Honda CL350s.

“These are old but pristine. I like them because they’re pretty quiet and very fast. Check them out real quick, will you, Clay? Make sure there’s fuel, the oil looks good, all that stuff. The log books should be in the office somewhere. We’ve got a long way to go—I want to make sure we can get there and
back.”

Neahle slid her leg over an orange motorcycle with a white stripe running down the body. Other than a few scratches in the paint, it was showroom quality.

“This is beautiful!” she said. “Where did all these bikes come from?”

“Rebels scouting around. You’d be surprised at what you can find when almost everybody on the planet is dead and the rest live almost exclusively in the cities.” Abacus sat on a deep blue bike, watching Clay as he checked the maintenance logs in the next room. “He’s pretty sharp, your brother.”

Surprised, Neahle looked up. “I guess,” she said.

Abacus laughed. “Trust me, I know how hard it is to see things in your own brother. But he’s smart and I think he’s onto something with this code theory.”

Thinking about it, Neahle nodded. “Yeah, me too. He’s always been good at mysteries and puzzles and things like that. I guess it’s why he likes working on engines. And he… Well, he listens to the stuff inside his head. I don’t know how to describe it exactly. But if Landon sent us here for a particular reason—I mean, other than just helping the cause—it wouldn’t surprise me if it were to solve a puzzle. Marty does it, too, in a different way.” She sighed. “I’m just along for the ride.”

Abacus reached out and patted her hand on the handlebar. “We all have our own part to play, not just as ballast for someone else’s ship. For one thing, your brother trusts you. But I suspect there’s more for you here than that. Just keep doing the thing in front of you and you’ll find it.”

Chapter Twenty-Four

N
eahle was enchanted with England,
even with the scattered drizzle and overcast sky. They flew through villages that were little more than a grouping of small houses. They drove through Cain, Marlborough and Hungerford without stopping. In Newbury, they pulled their motorcycles into a small park and rested for an hour, eating egg sandwiches Will had packed in a plastic box.

Abacus pulled out an old road map. He traced the thin lines with his finger as he talked. “We’re going to get off the A4 just past Thatcham. We’ve been far enough out til now that I haven’t been too worried about being seen. We’ll wind around on rural roads heading northeast from now on. I want to miss Reading all together since there’s a breeding facility there; there are some factories in Slough, so we want to give that a pass, too.” He tapped on both towns as he spoke. “It’ll add a good bit to the drive, but if you can do it, we’ll keep going through Henley-on-Thames, Marlow, Bourne End, cross the M40, then all the way up to Amersham.”

“That’s way north of Bletchley,” Clay pointed out.

“This is probably adding fifty miles to a direct route, I know. But I talked with Vasco, and we both agreed that, if we came this way, taking the extra time was worth it. Most of the First activity is in London proper, near Heathrow and stretching west, right where we’d pass. Saving a few hours isn’t worth the risk of going so close by. We’ll grab some fuel here; that’ll get us to Bletchley.” He put his finger on Amersham again, then ran it southeast to a tiny dot. “Bletchley is a tiny town; we’re going to Bletchley Park, which was originally a big manor house. We’ll spend the night there if all goes well and it’s quiet. If not, we’ve got options, and there are two more tunnels in the country if we need them and can get to them. They’re farther away but much more isolated.”