Adrienne stopped at the rear of the Windstar. “Are you up to handling them, Botha?” she asked sharply.
“Ja,” he said, and shook himself like a bear. “Yes, miss. It’s… I didn’t think anyone could buy Schalk. He was a good man, not slim, not clever, but a good soldier.”
“I don’t think anyone could buy him either,” Adrienne said, and put a hand on his shoulder in a moment’s odd gentleness. She looked about to make sure that nobody was within earshot. “Not with money. This is political; that’s why you’ve got to keep quiet about how it happened. As far as the official debrief is concerned, he was killed in the firefight. Now let’s get going.”
With their hands cuffed behind their backs, Tom and Tully needed help as they climbed awkwardly into the back of the van; the big Afrikaner’s hand had the impersonal strength of a mechanical grab. Tom evaluated him objectively as they passed close.
I could take him, he decided. He’s about my weight and plenty strong, experienced too, or I miss my guess, but I’m a decade younger at least and I’m not carrying any fat.
Of course, that was in anything like a fair fight. Being woozy from a dose of tear-and-puke gas, and having your hands fastened behind your back, did not count as “fair” under reasonable definition. As it was, Botha could crush his skull with a couple of blows of his massive fist.
The van had seats around the interior, with storage bins beneath them. It also had two wheelchairs fastened to the floor, facing backward and equipped with restraints on the legs and arms, the sort they used for violent patients in mental hospitals. Adrienne stayed on the road between the doors until they were secured, one hand under her suit jacket. Not many people could draw and shoot accurately in conditions like these; he was willing to bet she was one. Botha put Tully in his chair first, then Tom, working from behind the wheelchair, then took up a position behind them as the doors slammed shut and locked.
“There’s redundancy for you,” Tully said, and Tom snorted a bitter chuckle.
Yes; four-point tie-down on these chairs, a human-gorilla hybrid behind with a gun on us, and all of it all inside a locked vehicle.
“Shut up,” Botha said, and prodded him painfully in the back of the head with the muzzle of his pistol.
There was a spell of mixed boredom and rising tension; they couldn’t see much through the small dark-tinted windows in the back of the van. Roads, then alleyways between tall buildings, occasional halts. Then brilliant light. The doors were thrown open and the wheelchairs unfastened and rolled down a ramp by silent armed guards in standard rent-a-cop outfits. They were inside a building’s loading dock; then they were pushed down corridors of blank pastel, lit by overhead fluorescents. The place had the cold, deserted, silent feel of a facility where only the night shift was on duty.
Well, it is three-fifteen in the morning, Tom thought.
They stopped in a set of rooms that had the unmistakable cold, astringent smell of a hospital or clinic. A check-in desk was labeled DECON AND CONTAINMENT.
Tom’s ears perked up when a nurse in a white coat looked up from the desk and spoke; she had the same accent as Bosco and Adrienne. Rather stronger, if anything, as if she wasn’t trying to tone it down. She did not, he was interested to notice, have one of the platinum-and-gold thumb rings on her left hand.
“This clinic is under continual surveillance,” she said, indicating the cameras in the corners. “If you cause any trouble, the guards will be back here in seconds. The exterior doors are locked, and won’t open for anyone without the right retina and palmprint. Are you going to make trouble?”
“Ma’am, we wouldn’t dream of it,” Tom said.
“Good,” she said, getting up and undoing their restraints. “This is FirstSide Decon. You’ll be checked here, and then given sleeping space until the next available transit, which is scheduled for”—she glanced at a computer screen on her desk—“seven tomorrow.”
A shower followed, in hot water that contained some sharp-smelling antiseptic, and a few minutes in a chamber with UV lamps all around. The medical exam was thorough, and used all the latest equipment. They were shown to a small cubicle with a thick locked door, a single toilet and sink, and two bunks; he took the lower and sank into unconsciousness with a swiftness the thin lumpy pallet didn’t deserve.
“Kemosabe.” Tully’s voice brought him awake and sitting upright on the bunk. “Thought you’d want to cut the beauty sleep short.”
Tom shook his head and stretched. They’d lost their watches along with everything else, but his internal clock, not to mention his stomach, said he’d slept at least twelve hours. After the stress of the past twenty-four, that was only to be expected. Possibly shoving them in here buck naked was supposed to keep them subdued, which might have worked with ordinary civilians.
Not that the state of our morale makes much difference in a bare concrete cubicle with a steel door, he thought. And doubtless under constant remote surveillance.
“Anything in the way of food show up?” he said carefully.
“Couple of ration bars, sort of like pressed granola,” Tully said, and threw him one. “Being the sweet guy I am, I didn’t eat both. Also some munificent toiletries and fancy duds via the dumbwaiter there.” He jerked a thumb at the swivel-box arrangement in the plain steel door.
There were plain dark sweat suits, underwear, socks and sneakers, all smelling both new and cheap. Disposable razors, soap, toothpaste and brushes came with them, along with one plastic comb. After he cleaned up as best he could there was nothing to do but sit on the bunks and make desultory conversation, of the type you didn’t mind being overheard. Doubtless the boredom, without even a variation in the light or a distracting sound, was also intended to shake inmates. Neither of them had a problem with it; both police work and military service were good training for waiting. In the long spells of silence, he found his thoughts returning to Adrienne—humiliation at the thought of how he’d been duped, and an obsessive replay of each word and action since the fiasco at the meet.
Could I have played it better? he thought. Dozens of methods occurred to him, each crazier than the last; when he found himself doing the if-only-things-had-been-different daydream game and imagining she’d really been the dewy innocent he’d first assumed, he wrenched his mind away with a concentrated effort of will and did calisthenics instead, mostly isometric types, the sort you could do lying down on a narrow bunk.
When the guards came with the wheelchairs, it was almost a relief. Another stretch of corridor led to an echoing metal-box building with the look of a warehouse—most of the floor was great stacks of boxed goods on pallets, with forklifts whining about and the prickly ozone smell of heavy-duty electric motors. A people mover stood waiting, and Adrienne and Piet Botha stood beside it.
He looked as before, save for a rumpled and red-eyed look that argued sleeplessness. She was wearing a tight black uniform, cloth and gleaming leather, pistol and dagger at belt, and the stylized letters GSF on the shoulder. Despite himself, he looked her up and down and quirked an eyebrow.
“Don’t blame me,” she said with a shrug. “Sturmbanführer Otto von Traupitz had a big hand in designing the uniform—nobody else paid attention until it was too late to change things without offending him, and he had done a lot of the gruntwork setting up Gate Security.”