Henchmen (19 page)

We’re squared off again. I’m low, knife out front, ready to cut anything that comes too close.  He’s upright, four tentacles holding him up, four waving around.  It’s actually kind of hypnotic.  I’m looking for an opening when a voice yells, “Duck.”

I immediately think, “Where?”

I look toward the voice just in time to see Eve kick Robinson’s desk at whatever Robinson has become.  I hit the ground just in time to see the desk fly across the room and smash into Robinson.  The desk pushes him into the wall, and I can see parts of his body swell as the blood moves around.

You know, I don’t think this guy has bones.

He picks up the desk with his tentacles, and flings it back at Eve, who punches it out of the air.

Eve’s in jeans and boots with a black turtleneck completing the ensemble.  Easy enough to move it, but not an outfit that screams “I’m up to something bad.”  Her hair is back in a ponytail and her eyes are angry gray.  She holds herself loose and ready for a fight.

“You stink of them,” Robinson says.

“I told you to use the Dragons,” Eve tells me.

“I did!” I tell her.  “It was a dud!”

“What?  You didn’t bring any more?”

“Of course I did.”

“Then use them!” Eve yells.

Yup.  Brain went to mush.

Eve charges Robinson and puts a fist between his eyes. He flies back into the wall, and rebounds like nothing happened.  He wraps tentacles around her arms and tries to pull them off, so she kicks him in what may or may not be his nuts. Whatever she hits, it works, and he unwraps her.

I’m honestly completely enraptured by this fight. 

“Get the gun!” Eve yells.

Shit, yeah.  The gun.  It’s in the corner and it’s actually clear for the moment, since the fight is on the other side of the room.  Getting between these two would be bad news.

I get the gun, eject the spent shells and reach into my right pocket.  Fire sets thing right, flechettes leave nothing left.  Both shells are still there, thankfully.  Since the flechettes didn’t do a damn thing last time I used one, I load both barrels with Dragon Breath rounds and snap the barrels back into place.  When I close the gun, it cocks it and I’m holding two barrels of fiery fun in my hand.

“Hey, Squishy!” I yell.

Robinson loses focus for a moment and Eve shoves him away.  When he’s clear of her, I pull the trigger, and a huge tongue of flame leaps out of the right barrel straight into Robinson.  Since Dragon Breath rounds don’t have a great deal of tactical value against regular targets, I pull the trigger again and watch another tongue of flame lick Robinson like a lover.

He goes up like a candle.  He’s shrieking like a siren and spinning around, a living firework.  Well, hopefully a dying firework.  I hope there’s no fire suppression system, but I know there is.  Maybe we’ll be lucky and it will be on a different line, but I’m not keeping my hopes up.

Yep, there it is.  The sprinklers go off and give us a nice little rainstorm inside the office.  Fortunately, the downpour doesn’t seem to affect Robinson, who is still pirouetting and spitting flames everywhere.  Unfortunately, a fire alarm is probably going off somewhere.

The rain doesn’t last long, but it does mean we need to get moving with a quickness. 

After Robinson finally dies out to a smolder I tell Eve, “I had no idea squid could catch fire like that.”

“He’s not a squid.”

I look at her, standing there looking extremely pissed off, glaring at the thing still squirming on the floor.  I’m soaked and this place smells like bad seafood.

“You knew what he was, didn’t you?”  I ask.

“Yes,” she says.  “I’m sorry I couldn’t tell you.  He would’ve known if you knew what he was.”

“What?”

“They just know.  They can always tell,” she says.

“OK, I think I just got lost somewhere,” I tell her.

Eve sighs.  “Don’t worry about it.  It doesn’t matter.  Besides, we need to get moving.  That fire may have set off alarms somewhere.”

I’d like to press the issue, but she’s right. Just because we don’t hear alarms here, that doesn’t mean they’re not going off loud and clear somewhere else.

Eve is bent over her phone, tapping something.  “See what you can do to get that elevator going.”

The elevator door is fairly obvious. They’re kind of hard to hide, unless you live in Wayne Manor.  What isn’t obvious, though, is how the damn thing works.  I’ve never come across an elevator that doesn’t have buttons somewhere.  Even if you need a key to turn it on, every elevator has at least one button somewhere.  This is just a blank wall with a couple of doors in it.  I hope the controls weren’t on Robinson’s desk, because that’s in pieces on the floor.

I find when my brain is frozen it’s usually best to step back, relax and smoke a cigarette.  I light up a smoke and revel in the fact that I’m not only smoking inside, but in a government installation.  Oddly enough, I’d probably be in more trouble for smoking in here than I would be for discharging a firearm, setting a man-like thing on fire, conspiring to kill two other guys, or any of the other myriad things I’ve done this morning.

“Are you smoking in here?” Eve asks.

Is this a trick question?  Eve’s normally pretty on the ball and I didn’t think this was difficult to figure out.  I give her my best perplexed expression; take a drag and say, “No.”

She shakes her head and tells me, “Just make sure you take the butt with you.  We don’t want to leave any more evidence than we already have.”

I nod and look closer at the doors.  With all the soot, and cracks from desks and monsters being thrown around, I completely missed a small hole near the top of the doors.

“Hey,” I say to Eve, “Come look at this.”

Eve puts her phone away and comes over.  She’s tall enough to see what it is.

“What do you make of that?” I ask her.

She looks at the hole for a moment, wipes her hand across the hole to brush away the soot and muck.  “Shit.”

She runs her hands through her hair, leaving a streak of soot on one side.  She’s stressed and angry, and that’s a bad combination for everyone around her.  She punches the gray cinderblock wall and shatters a few of the bricks.

“All this work and the damned thing is locked!  Fuck!” She yells, “Fuck!  Fuck!  Fuck!”

The hole is definitely some kind of keyhole, but the key is round and smooth.

“Maybe we can open it up and climb down,” I say.

She brightens up a bit.  “It’s worth a shot.”

Eve pushes her fingers between the doors and pulls them apart like they’re weightless.  The dark down in the bottom of the shaft is intimidating.  I grab a flashlight off Brance’s corpse and shine it down the hole.  The light doesn’t reach the bottom of the shaft.

“Jumping down is probably not a good idea,” Eve says.

I shine the light around. The sides of the shaft, save for guide rails, is completely smooth.  There’s not even a cable on the elevator cab.  I say a silent prayer to Odin that they didn’t just cut the damn cable, and call it good.  Usually they put ladders in these things, but apparently the low bidder saved a few bucks by not putting one in. 

Or maybe they just didn’t want anyone climbing out.

“Do we have any rope?” I ask.

“Nope, unless you’re hiding some,” she says.

“Nope.  Ropeless.  Think Frank could hack it?”

“Maybe, but he and the others are heading out.  It’s just us.”

“Damn,” I say.  “Let me look at that keyhole again.  Is Robinson’s chair still in one piece?”

Eve grabs Robinson’s chair and steadies it while I stand on it.  The hole is small, slightly larger than the diameter of a pen, and completely unremarkable when I shine the light in it.  I’ve never seen a key that could fit this kind of lock.  This is why standards in industry are so important.  If it was just a regular damned key, I’d still be out of luck, because I don’t know how to pick even a regular lock.

All this way, and all we needed was just a bit of luck.

Shit!  That’s it.  Luck.  I start grabbing furiously at my chest.  Eve thinks I’m having a heart attack and tries to grab me. As soon as she lets go of the chair, it decides to move, and I wind up on my ass.  Again.

Fortunately Jessica’s good-luck charm is still there.  The size is about right.  I grab the chair and pull it back over.  “Sorry,” I tell Eve.  “Steady me again.”

I put Jessica’s good luck charm in and it fits perfectly, but does absolutely nothing.

“Is it in all the way?” she asks.

I resist the temptation to be an ass.  “Yeah.”  I try turning it and it turns smoothly, but nothing happens.

“Damn it!” I yell and yank the charm out of the hole.

As soon as I pull it out we hear a motor start and the shaft shudders slightly.  I hop down and we look down the shaft together.  We still can’t see anything, but something’s definitely moving down there.

“Good job,” Eve says.

I look at her and roll my eyes.  “Yeah.  Totally meant to do that.”

She clasps my shoulder and smiles.  I clip Brance’s flashlight to my belt, and she grabs the other one. We take both the MP5s from Brance and his partner.  They won’t need them anymore.  I almost idly wonder what kind of man the other guy was.  Brance was a filthy savage, but who was this man?  What did he do to get stuck in this place acting as a hired gun for some kind of monster?

We grab the extra magazines, too and I forget about Mills.

After a couple of minutes I start to worry that the elevator’s broken.  Seriously, how long could it take to get an elevator up here?  It’s not like Albuquerque’s well known for its fabulous underground caverns.  This damn thing must be coming straight up from hell.

When it finally arrives we find ourselves staring at an industrial green box with failing lighting and tattered cloth walls.  Neither of us moves.

“You realize,” Eve says, “that this thing hasn’t been serviced in probably ten years.”

“Yep.  And when it was last serviced, it was probably done by contractors or government employees.”

“After you,” she says.

“No, no.  I insist.  After you.  You’re more likely to survive the fall.”

“Not from this height, I’m not.”

I decide to be a gentleman for once in my life.  I close my eyes and step into the elevator.  Hell, a quick death from falling is probably better than winding up in a cell in some Saharan shithole, which is what DHS will do with us if they ever catch up to us.

The elevator bounces slightly and my heart stops momentarily, and then it’s all over.  I open my eyes and Eve is staring at me.

“Wouldn’t you rather see what’s going to kill you?” she asks.

“Are you coming?” I ask her.

She steps in and the elevator bounces a bit but stabilizes.  There’s a duplicate keyhole on the inside, so I put Jessica’s key and pull it out, and say goodbye to the world as the elevator starts down.

It takes about five minutes to get to the bottom of the elevator shaft, and it’s perfectly silent the whole way down.  Part of me almost wishes there was at least a Muzak version of some horrid pop song playing.  Actually, a Muzak version of “We’re Not Gonna Take It” would come in handy right about now. Might help take my mind off of the fact that I’m in an elevator shaft going God only knows how far down, into a place that’s been shut off for God only knows how long, for God only knows what reason.

You know what the problem with God is?  Knows everything, but won’t tell you jack shit.

The elevator finally stops in front of two industrial green doors that grudgingly slide open part way before Eve pulls them apart the rest of the way.

“We’re in Hell,” I say, “I just know it.  Look at that couch.  No sane human would make a couch out of lime leather.”

We step out into poorly-lit lobby, complete with that hideous couch, ten-year-old magazines, and a receptionist’s desk behind safety glass.  The lobby is only slightly disorganized - a couple of magazines are on the ground, and the coffee table is obviously misaligned, like someone bumped into it.  About half of the fluorescent bulbs have failed, and a couple of them are flickering.

Ever since I saw the movie
Aliens
, flickering fluorescent bulbs freak me out.  At least whatever backup power supply they’re using is still running.  They probably tapped into the city’s power, and put in some kind of generator or another down here, too.

There are no signs explaining where we are, just the receptionist’s desk (complete with a name plate that reads “Bethany Daniels”) and a sign-in sheet, with a ballpoint pen chained to the desk.

Eve picks up the sheet and stares at it for a minute.  “Look at this. The last entry is date 9/3/05, some general or another.  He never signed out.”

Behind the glass I can see someone’s purse, a chair pushed into the middle of the office, and a computer.  The computer’s monitor is facing away from me, so I can’t see what’s on it.  There’s a door to the right that’s closed and latched from the inside with a sliding lock.  There’s also a bell on the ledge in front of the desk.  On a whim I ring the bell.  In the tomblike silence of the place, it sounds like I just rang the bells at Christ Church Cathedral in Dublin.

Eve looks like she’s going to smack me.

No one comes out to help us, which isn’t surprising.  I try the door and, of course, it’s locked.  “Eve,” I say, pointing at the door.

She puts down the sign-in sheet that she’d been flipping through, and turns the knob with ease – like it wasn’t locked at all.  The door opens quietly when she gently pushes on it.  We both wait with bated breath, but no alarms go off, and no guys with guns come running.

I check my MP5 - make sure the magazine is full and there’s a round in the chamber - and switch it off safety.  The weapon is well-maintained, and probably hasn’t been used much in its lifetime.  I pull the stock to my shoulder, take a deep breath, lean into the open door, and look into the hallway.  The hallway is empty and there’s no sign of anything or anyone.

The flickering of the fluorescent lights is messing with my head.  I keep thinking I’m seeing shadows flickering across the walls.  It’s got to be all in my mind, because there is not a damn thing moving down here except Eve and myself, and we’re not moving too much right now, either.

Time to nut up or we’ll be here forever. And I can think of an infinite number of places I’d rather be right now.

We both walk into the hallway and try the door to the receptionist’s cage.  Locked.  Not surprising.  In a place like this, all the doors are probably locked.  Secret installations still follow the adage of “minimal exposure.”  It’s likely that if there were multiple projects going on down here, people working on one project knew absolutely nothing about any of the other projects. 

Down the hall to left, behind the receptionist’s room are the bathrooms.  Across from those is the break room.

The break room still has someone’s desiccated lunch sitting on one of the tables, complete with a knocked over Coke can, a half-eaten sandwich, and a bag of chips.  The Coke is dry and sticky, and the mold growing on the sandwich has long since expired.  There’s a drip in the sink where someone needed to fix the tap. Apparently, no one’s been around to fix it, so drip, drip, drip, drip.

At the end of the hall are the secure doors.  Think solid steel doors, solid steel frames - the walls are probably steel, too.  Eve would probably have trouble with these.  The doors are just numbered 1, 2, 3, with the usual government warnings about trespassing and its terrifying consequences.

“Well.  Which one?” Eve asks.

Shit.  Each one has a keyhole, but if I know these people - and I do - if I put the key in the wrong one, the lock’s memory will erase itself.  You know how at some hotels if you put you key card in the wrong door the lock will erase what’s on the key?  This is the exact same kind of technology.  Under normal operating times if you accidentally erase your key you get a lecture about security protocols and they eventually reset the key.  If we choose the wrong door here and it erases this key, we’re are totally out of the game, since there is no one that will reset this key.  We get one shot, and it had better work.

“Somewhere around here there has to be a map, or something.  Can you open that receptionist’s cage?” I ask her.

Eve effortlessly rips the door handle off the receptionist’s cage, and pushes the door open.  There’s a slight ping as the latch on the inside gives up.  “Ta dah,” she says with grin.

Inside the receptionist’s cage we find our first body, presumably of the receptionist herself.  She’s collapsed under the desk, clutching a dead BlackBerry to her chest.  There are no real signs of struggle.  Her Diet Coke can is still on the desk. Her glasses are right next to a half-finished crossword and an open diary.  Whatever happened in here, it missed her completely, but she was too terrified to ever leave and probably died when something scared her quite literally to death.

There are two video monitors in the room: one showing the ground-level office above us, which was probably just the first layer of security for this place anyway. The other has a locked Windows XP display.  Fortunately, the upstairs is still quiet, although heaven only knows how long that will last.

Contrary to popular belief, hacking a computer when you’re sitting right at it isn’t the easiest thing in the world.  If this one is set up correctly, it will lock out the account after five incorrect attempts.  That lockout duration may be as little as fifteen minutes, or may last until an administrator unlocks the computer.  Since the administrator is either dead, or long gone, that would mean a permanent lockout.

If you’re sitting right in front of the screen, and have physical access to hardware, it’s possible to use any number of password reset utilities that circumvent Windows security.  Or, you could just go straight for the gusto, and boot another live operating system that will pretend Windows doesn’t even exist.  All that takes effort, and I’m fundamentally lazy and tend to prefer to use social engineering to hack a system.  Social engineering is great, because as hackers say, there is no patch for human stupidity.  Unfortunately, I don’t have any hacking tools or other operating systems with me right now.

So, how do you use social engineering on a dead person?  Simple.  You put yourself in their shoes and take a look around.  DSS would sweep a place like this frequently, so it wouldn’t be an obvious hiding place.  Under the keyboard is out; a Post-It note is out.

“Eve, can you look through her purse for anything looks like a password?  It might be on the back of a business card, or a Post-It Note or something like that.”

She rustles through the purse for a while, pulling things out, commenting on the dead woman’s lipstick (trashy color), wallet (Hello Kitty?  Really?), vibrator (bad design, weak motor), cigarettes (ugh, menthol).

Eve opens the wallet and pokes around.  “Her name is Bethany Daniels.  She’s 32.  I don’t see any pictures of kids or a husband, probably single and childless.  One picture of a dog.  Looks like a pit variant sound asleep on her back with her feet in the air.”

Eve flips through Bethany’s diary.  “The last entry is dated 9/20/2005.  It’s pretty shaky, but it looks like she wrote down her password and something that looks like ‘fuck you.’”  She shows me the diary.

“Let’s try it.”

I type in 14 characters and the screen unlocks itself.

In case you’re wondering, the password was mypassword0831.  Not terrible as these things go, but it could have been better: MyP@ssw0rd0831 would be just as easy to remember, and quite a lot harder to guess.

While I’m entering the password, Eve keeps flipping through the diary.  “This is terrible. She was down here all alone for over two weeks.”  She flips back until she finds September 3, 2005.  “Listen to this: Her co-workers bugged out, and told her someone needed to stay to let the rescue team in.  They left her here to die.”

Apparently Bethany kept her hopes up for a couple of days, until they cut the phone.  She had a little moment of joy when they sent the elevator back down - until she realized it was locked, and she didn’t have a key.  She spent the rest of the time avoiding the shadows and sneaking out to go to the bathroom and get water.  They left her down here to rot.

“Oh, no,” Eve says.

“What?”

“She had a date the night they locked her down here.  She was so excited.  It was her first date in a couple of years.  She had her dress all picked out and everything.”

“Does it say who the lucky guy was?” I ask her.

“No, why?”

“I was just thinking we should find the guy; tell him he wasn’t stood up.”

Eve puts the diary back where she found it and flips back to the last entry, like the room is a mausoleum, and she doesn’t want to disturb the dead any further than we already have.  She closes her eyes and says something under her breath.

The screen still has some kind of custom government software running on it.  You can always tell government-contracted software: it looks terrible, but it works most of the time.  This one looks like some kind of scheduling app designed to be more secure than Outlook.  Of course, secure software is only secure if you actually use it like it’s designed be used.

The day on the screen is September 3, 2005 and there’s only one appointment scheduled - room 3 at 2pm for General H. Hapablap.  Room 3 is referred to as “The Sleeper.”  Room 2 is “Angels Above,” Room 1 is “The Hole.”

“What do you think “Angels Above” is?”  Eve asks.  “Think it could be aliens?”

“Possible,” I tell her.  “They’re not that exciting, though.  Their weapons aren’t all that spectacular and we can’t recreate their power supply, so they’re basically useless to us.”

“Wait a minute.  There are actually aliens on Earth, and you know about them? And you never said anything?” she asks.

I look at her for a moment.  This is the one of a very few times I’ve ever seen Eve excited, and she’s giddy as a schoolgirl.  I never pegged her as the type to get excited over aliens.

“I’m sorry,” I say.  “It honestly never came up, and I don’t think too much about it anymore.”

“They’re real?” She asks.

“Yeah.  Great big eyes and everything.  They have a deep and abiding love of black licorice.”

“Why are they here?”

“They sent out ships in every direction, one of them stumbled across us.  Pure accident,” I say.

“Do they know anything?”

“They know they’re tired of deep space and they like black licorice.  Other than that, they’re basically long-haul truckers who’ve found a truck stop and though we’d be an easy conquest.”

I look her in the eyes and she looks crushed.

“I’m sorry.  It’s just how it is.  They just kind of do what they do.  They’re not all that different than us - same motivations, similar weaknesses.  Their technology is more advanced, but that doesn’t mean the average individual is more advanced.  Humans can make some pretty amazing things, but that doesn’t mean your average sofa slob knows a damn thing about making circuit boards.”

After all the build-up most people have about aliens, it’s disappointing to find out they’re not magical or wise or uplifting.  I was just disappointed I wouldn’t be able to fly their ship.

“Come on,” I tell her.  “Let’s see what’s behind door number 3.”