The Omicron Legion (33 page)

“How many, Indian?” Blaine asked Johnny, who still had not taken the binoculars from his eyes.

“Four men with her in the backseat, Blainey.”

“Can you make any outside the building or on the roof?”

“Two shooters on the roof. Five scattered about the garage entrance in various guises.”

“Makes eleven in all.”

“None of them
Wakinyan,
Blainey.”

“What else is bothering you, Indian?”

“She knew we’d see all her guards.”

“Of course.”

“And she knew we’d be able to get by them.”

“Equally true, Johnny.”

“Too much show, Blainey. She is making this too easy.”

“Then what do you say we take her up on her invitation?”

At ten-thirty, with the building residents settled in for the morning, Patty Hunsecker

drove the van up to the main entrance of the underground parking garage.

“Go right on through,” the guard told her, and just like that she was in.

The van belonged to the Virginia Air Filtration and Conditioning Company and had been appropriated by Sal Belamo the previous night. The building containing the Gap had permanently closed windows, relying totally on its internal system for proper air flow. Accordingly, the Virginia Company’s vans were common enough sights on the premises and, of course, anyone wearing the proper overalls would have easy access to just what Blaine needed.

Sal had obtained the overalls, too, although Johnny’s fit only as well as could be expected.

Blaine and Johnny leaped out of the back of the van as soon as Patty had put her foot on the brake.

“Wait five minutes and then drive the hell out of here,” he said when he had come around to the driver’s side window. Wareagle unloaded a pair of tanks from the van as Blaine gave Patty her instructions.

“Explaining to the guard—”

“That you left a tank back at your base. Just like we went over.”

“I’d rather wait for you.”

McCracken shook his head. “You know where you’ve got to be.”

“You sure you’ve got all this figured that perfectly, McCracken?”

“Close enough. Wish us luck.”

Before she could, Blaine and Johnny moved off, a walkie-talkie up against Blaine’s lips.

“Yo, Sal.”

“Got ya, McCrackenballs.”

“We’re in.”

“Okay, my watch is on. Eight minutes and counting, boss.”

“You’ll have my signal in three.”

“Ain’t we punctual.”

“Comes with the territory.”

Blaine accepted the tanks from Wareagle and stowed one under each armpit. They were about half the size and weight of a full scuba tank. He made his way to a door marked
AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY
, which was ten yards to the right, while Johnny moved to the door beyond which lay the Gap’s private entrance. McCracken picked the lock in twenty seconds, then stepped into a brightly lit, tiled corridor that wound its way to the air systems control bay that linked up with the central core.

“Who the fuck are you?” A thick voice assailed his ears when he was halfway there.

“Who does it look like?” Blaine shot back. The voice’s owner was a beefy man with olive skin who was chomping on a cigar.

“Some asshole in coveralls with a pair of tanks that don’t belong here.”

“Says who?”

“Building plant manager.”

“Oh.”

McCracken let the tanks drop. The resulting clamor took the building plant manager by surprise, and Blaine lunged at him. His first blow caught the man in the solar plexus and doubled him over. Blaine’s second cracked into the rear of his skull and the cigar went flying. The man crumpled, and McCracken caught him before he hit the ground. He dragged the unconscious form to the entrance of the air systems control room. He was returning to retrieve the tanks when he ran into Johnny Wareagle.

“That was fast, Indian.”

“Simple work, Blainey. The Gap entrance is sealed—the elevator leading to it rendered inoperative.”

“I ran into some complications.”

“No plan can account for everything, even when drawn by the spirits.”

“Well, this might turn out to be a blessing….”

Sure enough, Blaine found a set of keys in the manager’s pocket, which saved him the trouble of picking the lock to the much more secure door of the air systems room. He brought the tanks in with him while Johnny dragged the manager into the room.

McCracken had done plenty of work for the Gap over the years, but he’d never once been in this room. Somehow he was expecting it to be like the boiler room of an elementary school, yet he found himself looking at something that looked like it had come off of the starship
Enterprise.
Shiny silver and plain plastic tubing ran in neat rows from the walls and ceiling, linking up with a series of boxlike chrome devices that looked like home heating units.

“The main exchangers and pumps are built into the ground beneath us,” he said, remembering Sal’s words and starting to move toward one of those Belamo had indicated. “These are the filters that recirculate the building’s air. Highly efficient. Totally new air every thirty-seven minutes. Particles going out now will reach the whole building in two and a half.”

“We have under six left.”

McCracken found the first of the two filters and squeezed the walkie-talkie between his shoulder and ear while he went to work with his tank. Johnny looked his way to confirm he had found the second filter.

“The Indian and I are hooked in, Sal. Get ready to do your thing.”

“Tell the fuck-wads upstairs pleasant dreams for me.”

Blaine and Johnny turned their valves at the same time; instantly a potent form of knockout gas flew into the air pumps servicing floors ten through twenty. Though the Gap occupied only five floors within those ten, it was impossible to isolate them, so some innocent people had to be knocked out as well. McCracken checked his watch.

“Let’s go!”

They bolted from the room and rushed to the service elevator. The Gap could not be reached through any of the regular building elevators, but the single service elevator provided access to the fourteenth and lowest floor. Blaine and Johnny had already donned their gas masks by the time the elevator doors had slid closed again. Even though the effects of the gas were instantaneous, it would continue to pump for several minutes. Both masks had communicators built in, tuned to the same channel Sal Belamo was on. The service elevator reached the fourteenth floor, and Johnny squeezed his thumb against the Close Door button.

“We’re in position, Sal,” said McCracken. “Do your thing.”

Blaine knew he needed a final diversion to assure against unwanted entry or discovery of the sleeping workers on ten of the building’s floors. That diversion had been set through the empty building the preceding evening. Sal Belamo’s special smoke bombs would activate the fire alarms and a number of sprinkler systems. The elevators would automatically shut off, forcing the people inside the building to use the stairwells to reach the street. Even more importantly, no one would be permitted to enter.

When the alarms sounded, Johnny pulled his thumb from the button; the compartment doors slid open.

The Gap could have been a law or accounting office by the first look of it. Individual offices lined the corridor they stepped into, many with desks perched before them personed by now-sleeping secretaries. The five floors containing the Gap were entirely self-contained, linked together by open staircases joining one level to the next.

“Conference room’s three floors up,” Blaine announced as he started up the first staircase. “Maxie will be at the morning briefing.”

He and Johnny had to hurdle bodies several times during their rush upward. The Gap seemed to have simply frozen in place. Blaine saw spilled coffee in several places, imagined he could smell it in spite of his gas mask. The sound of his hard breathing echoed through his eardrums and added to the chaos generated by the constant wail of the activated fire alarm.

“In here,” Blaine said to Johnny finally, and they stepped into the conference room where the morning briefing would have been proceeding had its members not been gassed to sleep.

All the heads slumped over the table belonged to men.

“I don’t like this, Indian. She should have been here.”

“Late, perhaps.”

“Maxie’s never late. Let’s check her office. Next floor up.”

“I do not feel the
Wakinyan,
Blainey,” Johnny said on the way there.

“Good sign maybe.”

“I don’t think so.”

“Yo, boss,” Belamo called, and his voice reverberated through Blaine’s mask. “Fire trucks coming fast, lots of ’em. Time’s a-wasting.”

“We’ll pick up Maxie and follow the plan.”

The fifth floor up belonged entirely to her and the Gap’s senior staff. It was more isolated than any of the other floors to start with—and even more so now since several of its occupants were asleep in the conference room Blaine and Johnny had just left. McCracken stopped briefly at the door to Virginia Maxwell’s office.

“Morning, Maxie,” Blaine said to her shape, which was slumped over the big desk asleep. “Aren’t we looking chipper this morning!”

McCracken moved behind the desk and eased her head back. “We’ve got problems, Sal,” he reported over the walkie-talkie.

The woman behind the desk wasn’t Virginia Maxwell.

“We’ve been duped!”

“Come again, boss,” Belamo said.

“The real Maxie didn’t make it in this morning. What we got ourselves is a double.”

“A fucking trap!” Sal squawked into the walkie-talkie.

“Could be.”

“But nobody went inside after you, I tell ya! None of
them
went inside!”

“They might have been in already.”

“Jesus Christ, boss! Jesus Christ! You ask me, you boys better make time gettin’ out.”

“Plan B, Sal.”

“I read ya, boss.”

A sound reached McCracken and Wareagle at the same time, barely rising above the continuous screech of the fire alarm. Little more than a door opening, perhaps some furniture being disturbed as someone approached from the floors below. They looked at each other.

“We got company, Sal,” Blaine said hurriedly into the walkie-talkie.

“Oh, fuck.”

“Get away from here!”

“Hey, I’m—”

“I said get the fuck away!
Now!
” Blaine ordered.

Blaine looked at Johnny, who stood as rigid as a guard dog sniffing an intruder’s scent.

“They’re here, Blainey.”

McCracken drew his pistol an instant ahead of Wareagle. They carried identical 9-mms loaded with Splat exploding bullets. No sense bothering with anything else today. Johnny started for the door.

“No, Indian. I’ve got a better idea,” Blaine said. He looked up and pointed his pistol at the ceiling.

The first Splat he fired shook the entire room and showered him with rubble from what had been the center of the ceiling. The second Splat blew a hole straight through the crawl space containing the wiring and filtration ducts into the floor above.

“Going up, Indian?”

They slid Virginia Maxwell’s desk over so it was directly beneath the hole in the ceiling. Blaine jumped, grabbing hold of some ruined corrugated piping for purchase. Wareagle pushed him the rest of the way into a smoke-filled office on the nineteenth floor, which was directly above the Gap. McCracken was helping Johnny up when gunfire erupted in Virginia Maxwell’s office, just missing the Indian’s legs as Blaine hoisted him the rest of the way up. With Wareagle safe, Blaine dived to a portion of the floor that was still intact and tried to get off a shot through the hole. He caught a glimpse of a large figure garbed in a gas mask almost identical to his own and fired at it as it whirled.

The sons of bitches were ready for us, goddammit!

An explosion followed, but no scream. Blaine rolled again, and now it was Johnny who fired down through the jagged hole in the floor, his target Virginia Maxwell’s desk. The desk ruptured into a thousand pieces, effectively turning it into a massive grenade of wood fragments. McCracken was on his feet by then, and they moved out into the corridor together. McCracken looked in the direction of the elevator bank outside the glass entry doors.

“Switched off, Blainey, because of the fire alarm.”

“Thanks for reminding me.”

McCracken led the way through the glass doors and back-pedaled down the short hall as if expecting some of the disciples to charge at them at any second.

“You take the left, I’ll take the right,” he told Johnny.

Wareagle knew instantly what he meant. Not hesitating at all, the two of them pried open the doors to the shut-down elevators. The car on Johnny’s side had stopped eight floors down. The one on Blaine’s was in the lobby or possibly the garage. A straight twenty-story drop.

“Put your gloves on, Indian.”

“Not the shorter drop, Blainey?”

“With another door to pry open once we get down there? Not on your life. This’ll give us the head start we need.”

If Johnny had any doubts as to the necessity of that strategy, they vanished when a pair of dark, gas-masked figures—with machine guns firing—came at them from the direction of the glass doors. Blaine and Wareagle fired a pair of Splats each; the result was a chaotic symphony of exploding glass as the entrance blew inward. Flames blew back toward the retreating figures, then quickly gave way to black smoke. McCracken reached across the threshold of the elevator shaft and grabbed hold of the cable.

“Ready or not,” he said to the void beneath him, “here I come!”

The instant he dropped downward, Johnny leaped over the threshold after him, thick gloves digging hard against the cable as his slide began. The cable was well greased, which added to the blinding pace of their descent. To keep reasonably under control, Blaine found himself turning around the cable as he moved. He grew dizzy, and the shaft spun about him crazily. He closed his eyes, but the fear of dropping blind gripped him tighter than the dizziness, so he opened them again.

It couldn’t have been more than four seconds in all before the stalled elevator compartment itself drew dangerously close. Instinctively he wrapped his feet around the cable and twisted it tight between his calves and ankles. The impetus stopped his spin and drove him into a straight downward slide, the greased cable flying through his hands. He fought to slow himself at the end, but still hit the roof of the elevator with a thud. He went down hard, watching Wareagle land a foot from him with a mere flex of his knees. In unison they stripped off their gas masks.