'Okay.' The man shrugged.
'So where'd they go?' the Team Three man asked. 'They made it out of here already? And left us the keys to the safe?'
'I don't know,' Collins replied. Then called up the Cobra team and diverted them from the lighting detail to sweeping the area, looking for vehicles snaking their way out into the outside world. 'Get that S&T woman for me. Maybe they set this thing on automatic and ran.'
'Damn,' the Team Three man said, and ripped off his goggles.
'Keep those fucking goggles on!' Collins yelled.
'Sir,' the man mumbled, and struggled with the eyepiece.
The radio buzzed in Collins's ear. 'We got some traffic thirty miles distant, couple of cars,' the helicopter captain said. 'Could be anybody, that far away.'
'Pick them up.'
Team Two came back from upstairs. The leader stripped off his goggles and said, 'Nothing — '
'Put those fucking gogg-' John Collins heard his own voice rattling around inside his head. It sounded shrill and stupid. 'Never mind.'
"What the hell's going on?' the man asked grimly.
'This well sure looks dry,' Collins muttered, and shook his head. He walked over to the nearest terminal. The monitor was flicking over on the screensaver: mindless geometric patterns repeating over and over again. He punched the space key. 'You believe that?'
The screen cleared and Gaia's Web site sat there. 'I think these people have got some kind of live Net connection here. A Ti line or something. Those Agency people are going to be jumping up and down with glee.'
'John,' the Team Four leader said. 'We got the okay from the explosives people. This place looks clean. They're running through the path to the dome too, but it's slow work. They wired up some IR burglar alarms on the way. They feed into an audible warning system. No signs of explosive anywhere so far.'
'That's good. These guys really did think they'd pulled this one off, huh? Or maybe they didn't want to hang around to see the consequences.'
'Guess so,' the Team Four leader answered.
'It is so. Pretty soon I'm going to sign this one off to those Agency people. Let them get the geeks in and see if they can bring this thing on-line.'
'We got the dome team kicking their heels already,' the Team Four man said.
'Well, tell them to wait. They need the go-ahead from their own boss first. So?' John Collins ripped off his flash goggles and glared at them.
'Sir?' someone said.
'So where the hell is she?'
CHAPTER 54
In the Desert
The night was more visible now. Helen could see Larry Wolfit clearly, a tall, slim shape, his outline blurred by the shadow of the rock ridge. He waved the gun a couple of times in front of her face. Then, too quickly for her to anticipate it, he stepped right up and punched her hard with his free hand. She fell back onto the hard, dusty ground, clutching at her cheek, trying to think, to make sense of this. Wolfit stank of sweat and fear but for some reason she felt more puzzled, affronted even, then scared.
'J — Jesus, Helen,' he stammered. 'This wasn't supposed to happen. None of it. Why the hell did you take the job? Why the hell do you keep working at it like this?'
Scrabbling in the dust, all she could think about was Belinda Churton. What she would do, would be thinking in a situation like this. And why even her reactions, in the end, were just not good enough.
'Get up now, will you?' he snarled. 'It's pathetic watching you squirm on the ground like that.'
She rolled over, curled into a ball, waited for the next blow. Then, slowly, so he understood this was her decision, not his, she got to her feet.
'There,' he said. 'Now, that's better.' She felt the side of her head again. It was tender, beginning to swell.
'Decision time, my dear,' Wolfit said miserably. 'Decision time.' He pulled back his fist again. She flinched. Then he dropped it. 'Hey, just testing reactions.' And was on her in an instant, had hold of her hair, pulled it hard, yanked her face into his, his mouth a vicious, taut line in the half-light.
'Why did they choose you, Helen? You going to tell me that? It was supposed to be me. To save us all this trouble.'
He wrenched her ear; she screamed. 'Shut up!' he shouted.
'You're hurting me.'
Wolfit let go, pushed her viciously, kicked out with his feet, took her legs from under her. Back on the ground, she thought, and still nothing working quite right in the head.
'You just overreached yourself, you know,' he said, a little calmer now. 'We spent too much time on this thing to have it go to waste now. What with you and your friend in Spain thinking you just might bust this all up, you just might have a good idea. You got no ideas. You understand me? None at all.'
She thought of Belinda, dying in a roar of homemade explosives. And Wolfit, always quiet, always watchful. He was waving the strange, overlong gun as if it had some kind of special power.
'Go on,' she said, not looking at him, not even thinking about anything except how strange this was, how odd a way to leave this existence. 'Get this over with, Larry. One more for your list.'
'Your fault, Helen. Your fault entirely.'
'Sure. That's what all you people get to think. If Charley told you to walk over a cliff I guess you'd do that too, and blame me on the way down.'
He was standing over her. The tiny crescent of the moon hung above his head, a curtain of bright, shining stars around it (and she wanted to think about the stars, not about him, not him at all).
'You scared? I guess I'd be.'
'Oh my.' She almost wanted to laugh.
"This funny or something? You asked that kid over there to join in the laughter?'
'You're pathetic, Larry. Even with that big gun hanging out of your hand like a limp dick. Pathetic.'
'Really? Maybe you should ask Belinda fucking Churton about that when you see her again.'
And then she did laugh. 'You should hear yourself. Is that what the new tomorrow sounds like?'
'Stupid, stupid. You don't understand a thing. This is all about bigger issues than you can ever understand. You got to burn sometimes. You got to cull.'
There had to be people, she thought. People at the helicopter. People at the farmhouse. If this went on long enough, they'd come, they'd be looking. If they knew where to find her. If they got there in time.
'So tell me,' she said, reaching down, rubbing her aching leg, feeling, through the thin fabric of the combat suit, the thin, slow trickle of blood starting to dampen the material. 'Make me understand. Tell me what Charley told you.'
'Nothing I didn't know already, except I didn't want to face it. You got to unmanage things. That's the point. Turn back the clock, just put in the status quo as close as you can get it. And don't close your eyes when the tough decisions come.'
She waited, wishing she could hear something.
'This can't go on,' he said, and there was some nervousness there, some pressure for time, she could sense it. 'We're just fucking up the planet, fucking up everything.'
'So what's new?'
'What's new is the chance to start over.'
'Won't happen. However bad it gets, Larry. You're smart enough to know that.'
'That's bullshit. We figured it out.'
'Tell me about the "we", Larry. Tell me about the Children, and how the hell they got to someone like you.'