McGarvey stumbled as quickly as he could to the door and pulled it all the way open.
As he’d hoped, it was well-balanced, and swung easily.
Someone was coming down the stairs at the end of the short passageway, and McGarvey stepped back behind the door, out of sight.
A moment later Heidinora started through the doorway, his right leg first, his right hand on the doorjamb, and his head and shoulders bent forward.
McGarvey heaved the door closed with everything he had, the thick steel smashing into the Japanese killer’s face, driving him backward, and then catching the man’s leg against the jamb, crushing his kneecap.
Heidinora roared in pain and rage, and he shoved the door back, and tried to pull his way through.
McGarvey smashed the heavy door into the man’s face and forehead again, pulled it back, and shoved it again with all of his might, this time hitting the top of Heidinora’s skull with a sickening crunch, and then closing on his hand, severing all four fingers at the roots.
Heidinora was in trouble. His eyelids were fluttering and his breath came in big, blubbering gasps as if he were a drowning man trying desperately for one last breath of air. Blood pumped out of a wicked rent in his skull. The man’s chest heaved once, and then he slumped back. He was dead.
McGarvey hung on the doorframe for a long time, catching his breath, pain coming at him in waves, but the blurred vision and dizziness finally subsiding.
A plastic security badge was clipped to the lapel of Heidinora’s coveralls. McGarvey peeled off his drysuit, stashed it in a dark corner behind some machinery and back at the doorway took the security badge from the body and clipped it to his jacket.
The ruse would not stand up to close scrutiny, but all he needed was to get off the ship, across the dock and into the main building.
Careful not to step in the blood, McGarvey made his way down the corridor and painfully up the stairs to the catwalk where he retrieved the Geiger counter. Its case was cracked, but otherwise it seemed undamaged.
He found his gun in the upper passageway, and from there worked his way up to the main deck. He held up at the portside hatch. Ten feet away the rail opened to the boarding ladder down to the dock. The moment he started down he would be in plain view of everyone below, as well as anyone watching from the bridge. But there was no other way ashore.
Shoving the Walther in his belt beneath his jacket at the small of his back, he stepped across the covered passageway on deck, and started down the boarding ladder, making every effort not to limp or in any way show that he was in pain.
Two men in white coveralls, Uzi submachine guns slung over their shoulders, stood talking on the forward dock, near the ship’s bows. They looked up as McGarvey descended, said something to each other, then looked away, apparently uninterested, even though they could not have seen the security pass from that distance.
At the bottom, McGarvey crossed the dock without hesitation, and entered what turned out to be a ship’s stores and holding area within the main building. Someone was working with a forklift to the right, at the end of a long file, but there was no one else in sight.
Moving quickly now, McGarvey went to the far end of the warehouse, and through a door which led down a short corridor to a freight elevator.
The elevator was up one floor. He called it down, and then pulled out his pistol, switching the safety catch off, stepping to one side as the doors slid open on an empty car.
Inside, he studied the board. This floor was indicated by a light. There were four floors beneath it. He punched the button for the lowest floor and then moved back and to the side.
Something was nagging at the back of his mind. Something about the ease with which he’d gotten off the ship, across the dock and this far into the building.
The elevator opened on the fourth sublevel to a T-intersection of two corridors that disappeared both ways into the darkness. This place was deserted too; another fact that was somehow bothersome.
A few yards down the left corridor a pair of tall wire mesh doors led into a high-voltage electrical distribution cabinet. McGarvey glanced inside. This set up could accommodate the power needs of a big skyscraper, yet he didn’t think it was the main distribution center for the headquarters complex. No, this supplied power for some specific section of the complex. Some installation. Something that required a huge amount of amperage.
The elevator doors closed and the car started up. McGarvey turned and hurried back to the head of the corridor to watch the floor indicator. The car stopped one level up, and almost immediately started back down.
McGarvey turned and looked both ways down the corridor, but there were no doors, nowhere to run. Nowhere to hide.
In desperation he rushed back into the darkness to the electrical distribution cabinet, yanked open the door and crawled inside, taking extreme care not to brush up against any of the yard-long bus bars that carried so much power. He could feel the hair on the back of his neck standing up.
He closed the door and eased back into the deeper darkness as the elevator slid open and two men armed with Uzi submachine guns stepped out into the corridor, sweeping their weapons left to right, as if they’d been expecting trouble.
Moments later one of them said something into a walkie-talkie, and when he had his reply, said something to the other man who sent the elevator back up.
McGarvey could not make out what they were saying, but it was evident they were nervous. They kept a wary eye on both branches of the corridor.
The elevator returned and two white-suited technicians got off with a motorized cart.
Without hesitation the four of them started down the left corridor and as they came even with McGarvey’s hiding spot, his Geiger counter began to react, the volume just loud enough for him to hear the crackle.
He pulled the device off his shoulder and stared at the gauge. The needle was jumping well above ambient.
On top of the cart was an oblong metal box about one yard on the long axis and half that on the short side. It was marked in French: PORTSIDE SEWAGE LIFT PUMP.
As the technicians disappeared with the cart into the darkness, the Geiger counter reading rapidly subsided. Whatever the box contained, he decided, it definitely was not a sewage lift pump.
Chapter 74
Roland Murphy sat at his huge desk listening to what his Deputy Director of Operations, Phil Carrara, was saying. It was coming up on noon, and besides Carrara, the DCI had called Ryan and Doyle in to listen. The general was tired, and he had every right to be. He’d been going almost twenty-four hours a day since the Japanese crisis had come up, and he wasn’t as young as the others.
“She won’t do anything foolish, will she?” he asked his DDO.
“I don’t think so,” Carrara said.
“How’d you get her to stay?” Ryan asked.
Carrara sighed. “I told her a lie.”
“Her friend, Lana Toy?”
“We have her in protective custody. Told her that we needed her cooperation if we were going to save Kelley’s life.”
“What happens if they blow the whistle when this is all over?” Ryan asked.
“I don’t know,” Carrara said wearily. “But in the meantime Kelley is damned frightened.
I think McGarvey has made a believer out of her. She’ll stick, no matter what happens.”
“Which gives us just a few minutes before she calls back. What time is it over there now?”
“A little before 2:00 a.m.,”
Carrara answered. “Dawn will be in another three hours, which will put her in an exposed position if we order her back to Fukai’s perimeter.”