“Wasn’t my call.” Top’s voice was very calm and controlled. “Word came down from the big man. Said to afford every courtesy.”
The big man was my boss, Mr. Church, founder and head of the DMS.
Balls.
I knew that I was being unfair in my assessment that Violin was a civilian. She was hardly that. Violin was a fellow soldier, but not a fellow American. She was born in captivity to a mother who — along with many others — was forced breeding stock in the world’s oldest and ugliest Eugenics program. A group called the Red Order had been using captive women for centuries to ensure that they had enough male members of a weird genetic subgroup called the Upierczi. These were as close to actual monsters as Mother Nature was likely to cook up. They were offshoots of human evolution, unusually strong and fast, and hideous in appearance. They were the reason the myth of the vampire came into our collective consciousness. No, these guys didn’t turn into bats, sparkle, or sleep in coffins. They weren’t supernatural in any way. But they weren’t my idea of natural, either, even if they were technically human.
They were called the Red Knights.
The Red Order used them as assassins in a campaign of carefully orchestrated religious hate crimes going back to the Crusades.
Violin’s mother, Lilith, had escaped from the breeding pits. I don’t know that whole story, but whatever happened left a psychic scar on the Red Knights. They feared Lilith the way people used to fear vampires. She was their boogeyman. When Lilith escaped, she took other women with her — and their children. Violin among them. As soon as they were free, they formed a militant group called Arklight, and they began hunting down the members of the Red Order and their Upierczi assassins.
I met Violin while I was hunting down some rogue nukes in Iran. There was an interesting learning curve before we began trusting each other, but when we realized that we shared the same enemies and a similar agenda, we went into battle together. That one was a doozy. Lots of good people died, including some of my guys from Echo Team. Men who’d walked through fire with me time and again. Arklight lost some heroes — well, heroines, too. And when it was all over we’d formed a rather sketchy alliance. Nothing official, of course, because Arklight did not respect national borders in its relentless search for the surviving members of the Red Order and the Red Knights. The official U.S. stance was that Arklight was a terrorist organization.
My boss, Mr. Church, was working to change that, and so far no one from Arklight had ever spent a night inside an American jail cell. After what they’d been through, Church and I were going to make sure no one put those women into any kind of cage ever again.
All of which explains her, but didn’t explain why we were being Spider-Man and Spider-Woman in a bioweapons lab.
“Talk,” I told her.
“Let me get to the computer first.”
I gestured around. “We’re in an empty chamber, honey. Unless I’m missing something….”
She produced a spray can from a Batman utility belt. Shook the can. Sprayed it.
The gas inside was white and almost opaque. There wasn’t enough particulate matter in the discharge to trigger even the most sensitive motion sensor, but the opacity was usually great for revealing electric eyes and laser tripwires.
However, that wasn’t Violin’s purpose. She turned in a slow circle and emptied at least half the can into the chamber. The sluggish air from the shaft above us stirred the gas. All I could see were black stone walls. No hidden doors, no side tunnels, no electrical outlets.
Then I saw how wrong I was.
The gas expanded and diffused outward until it caressed the walls. Except that it didn’t.
It rolled out to touch most of the walls. But to my left, the gas swirled differently. The tendrils of gas seemed to rebound from empty air and eddy, as if confused. Violin ran a laser pointer over that section of wall.
The red beam ran straight for a few inches and then bulged outward at the same point where the gas had rebounded. Violin moved the beam slowly, and I could see that there was something there. The gas knew it, the laser light knew it, but my eyes didn’t.
“What the hell?” I murmured.
She grinned, enjoying my confusion. “Holograph,” she said.
And then I understood. The security system computer access panel was indeed bolted to the wall, but it was masked by a high-density holograph that made it look like empty wall. Without the gas and the laser, I would never have found it.
“Guess that answers the question as to whether this place is crooked,” I said. “Can’t work up any reason a legit lab would have that kind of security.”
“I never trust pharmaceutical companies,” she said with asperity.
I tended to agree. Sure, a lot of them are probably on the up and up, but in my trade I kept running into mad scientists cooking up bioweapons. Some of the most dangerous terrorists I’ve tackled have been pharmaceutical moguls or pharmacologists of one stripe or another. I’d have to watch that tendency toward negative bias, though. Subjectivity is a dangerous thing.
Violin adjusted the wires so that she tilted in the direction of the invisible box. It was slow work, and it took her some time to find the cover plate lock, disable it with a little electronic doohickey — that looked a whole lot like the doohickeys that only the DMS is supposed to have — and finally locate the USB port.
“Router?” she said, holding out a hand.
I sighed and handed it over.
Violin plugged it in, making sure not to touch any part of the panel with her hands. It probably had passive security, like contact and trembler switches. The router’s cable slid easily into the port and a tiny green light flashed on.
“Bug,” I said, “we’re—”
“Got it,” he said. “Acquiring the security system now. Hm, nice stuff. Too bad MindReader is going to bitch-slap it.” He actually sang that last part in a mocking falsetto.
I work with some pretty strange people.
We hung there and waited. The white gas swirled around us, obscuring the wires so that it looked like we were flying.
“So,” I said, “want to tell me what you’re doing here?”
Her mouth kept smiling but her eyes held no trace of humor. “Hunting vampires.”
My mouth went dry and my nuts tried to crawl up inside of my body. “Red Knights? You’re saying they’re here?”
“No,” she said. “But somebody who works here is helping them, and I—”
Bug cut in. “Okay, Cowboy…we own that place.”
“Copy that.”
I swung my feet down toward the floor and hit the cable release on the wires. A moment later Violin dropped silently beside me. The wires swayed around us like web threads from a giant spider.
The hologram projectors that hid the computer access panel clicked off, revealing a flat gray box the size of a hardback book. The router no longer looked like it was floating in midair. But when the holograms vanished, we discovered that there had been a second bit of misdirection. Right below us, set into the precise center of the concrete floor, was a steel hatch. It was very well made and was designed such that it was perfectly flush with the concrete. It had a touchscreen keypad that was currently displaying: “RESTRICTED ACCESS.”
“So far the intel is good,” I murmured. “We were told that this air vent was the way in. Looks like it is.”
Violin and I knelt on either side of it. I removed a flat gadget about the size of a pack of playing cards and pressed it onto the hatch. It connected to MindReader and began cycling through the hundreds of millions of permutations of the locking combination.