Another motion sensor.
She felt a surge of hope as she stepped into the room beyond. She was in a museum, or possibly an art gallery. The room was arrayed with pedestals and display cases, exhibiting artifacts ranging from the Paleolithic era to the Renaissance. The pieces were beautiful, as if chosen specifically for their aesthetic value. Many appeared to have religious significance. Yet, as she progressed through the room, her initial optimism waned. This was not a public exhibition but rather a private collection kept solely for the enjoyment of her captor.
Still, there had to be a way out.
An arched passageway took her to another gallery, but unlike the first, this room contained memorabilia from a more recent era in history. At first, she thought the room was devoted to medical history. The walls were lined with shelves displaying skulls and skeletal fragments, jars containing organs preserved in a liquid solution. Some were marked with a numerical code, handwritten on yellowed placards and adhesive labels. The room also contained pictures, dozens — perhaps hundreds — of black and white photographs.
Fiona now regretted having eaten before making her bid for freedom. The pictures were the stuff of nightmares. There were photographs of men and women of all ages. Children, too. In fact, a disproportionate number of the photographs were of children. They were all naked and helpless, staring bleakly at the camera. Many were emaciated; all looked defeated. Those were the easiest to look at. There were pictures of corpses, amputated limbs and bodies opened up for post-mortem examinations, but those were not the worst. The worst were the photos that showed what happened in-between.
Fiona quickly recognized the pictures for what they were, a record of ghastly medical experiments, carried out on living human victims. That was when she saw a large, freestanding trophy case at the far end of the room. In it, before a background of framed diplomas, awards and portraits of a dark-haired man with a gap-toothed smile, stood a mannequin dressed in an immaculate gray-green military uniform, replete with a peaked cap and something that looked like lightning bolts on the collar.
A Nazi uniform.
She gave the exhibit only a cursory inspection. The contents confirmed what she had already guessed. This was a very different kind of Holocaust memorial, one that celebrated the torture and murder of millions and honored those who had perpetrated such unimaginable cruelty.
There was a door just behind the display, a regular door with a handle that turned when she tested it. To her dismay, it opened into yet another large room. With stark white walls, overhead fluorescent lighting and a dull gray industrial epoxy floor, the space looked like a factory warehouse. Despite the fact that the room was far more utilitarian than the preceding galleries after the horrors she had just witnessed, it was a welcome change.
She hurried past row after row of work tables, trying to ignore the contents, lest she discover new horrors. One item, however, caught her eye.
It stood in the center of the room like a suit of medieval armor decorating the entrance to a castle keep. It was armor, in fact, but there was nothing antiquated about it. It looked more like something from a super-hero movie.
The suit was a full-body armored exoskeleton. Fiona had heard about the military’s intention to develop Iron Man-style battle suits for soldiers, though in her opinion, it looked more like the armor worn by Master Chief in the Halo games, right down to the bubble-shaped reflective visor in the helmet. As far as she knew, the project was still in the early design phase.
So how had Cerberus gotten their hands on it?
She recalled what Dourado had said about Cerberus providing anything for the right price. Had they stolen a prototype of the military exosuit? Or perhaps built this from leaked, classified plans?
The suit, which appeared to have been posed like the mannequin of the SS officer in the display case, offered no clues. She couldn’t tell if it was even functional.
But if it is…
Inspiration hit her like a lightning bolt. If the suit was operational, maybe she could use it to escape this nightmare. She took a step closer, searching for some way of opening the armored carapace.
There was a flash of movement, and something struck her in the side, knocking her backward. The blow stunned her, and the next thing she knew, she was lying in a heap on the floor, twenty feet from the exosuit. The pain arrived before she could even think about trying to rise, but in the corner of her eye, she saw the dull gray suit moving, advancing toward her.
She struggled to recover, attempted to roll over and push herself up, but her left arm refused to work, and she collapsed face down on the floor. As she lay there, trying to will herself into motion, she could feel the vibration of each mechanical footfall as the exosuit stalked relentlessly toward her.
Thump. Thump.
Move it!
She tried again, bracing her right arm in front of her. The adrenaline of pure panic flooded through her body, numbing her against the throb of pain and supplying almost superhuman strength.
But she wasn’t fast enough.
The exosuit loomed over her, and even as she tried to roll out of the way, an armored fist descended.
Then, she saw nothing at all.
29
Getting past her own front door had been hell for Cintia Dourado. Each step after that got progressively harder.
“I can do this,” she told herself, repeating the words like a mantra. The affirmation had gotten her across the city, all the way to the airport, but she remained unconvinced.
She had survived the taxi ride by keeping her head down, staring at the floor. But now, out here on the edge of the runway at the Val de Cans International Airport, with nothing but wide open sky above, the simple act of standing seemed as daunting as escaping the event horizon of a black hole.
Though she had never consulted a mental health practitioner or received a professional diagnosis, Dourado was well aware of her condition. Agoraphobia. An irrational anxiety associated with public places and wide open spaces. Her paranoia was almost certainly the result of psychological trauma sustained in early childhood. She had no memories of life before the debilitating panic disorder had clamped down on her like steel manacles, and in truth, she did not want to know. She had escaped the slums, and had no inclination to revisit them, even in her mind’s eye.
She had discovered computers at age twelve and quickly mastered cyberspace, roaming its vastness like a buccaneer, plying the deep web, trading in secrets and taking whatever she needed. Strangely, the possibility of being caught had not frightened her at all. Even though she had known that being arrested for her computerized transgressions would shatter her world, the risk did not trigger her agoraphobia. Rather, it had become her own version of an extreme sport, supplying an addictive endorphin rush that not only caused her to feel alive, but pushed her to new heights. Made her better. Smarter.
Smart enough to crack the Herculean Society.
That had been a transformational moment for her, making it possible for her to trade the squalor of her single room apartment in Tenoné for a luxury condominium in the upscale Nazareth neighborhood. Not that the surroundings mattered much. The digital landscape was her true home now, the only place where she felt safe and in control. She could go anywhere, know anything she wanted to know, without ever stepping outside. Everything she needed for physical survival could be ordered online and delivered to her doorstep, with a bare minimum of human interaction.