The guards weren’t exactly cavalier about inspecting the wares, but they were certainly casual.
I stared at the last trailer in line. It was stacked high with concrete pipes twenty-five feet long and probably three feet in diameter. A long shadow fell across the back of the trailer as it inched forward and created a momentary blind spot between the driver and guards.
Sometimes an opportunity slaps you in the face, and either you recognize it for what it is or you pass it off as too good to be true. I opted for the former.
I shoved the digital telescope and iPhone into my jacket pocket, hoisted the suitcase, and started running. It wasn’t the weight of the suitcase that hindered my progress as much as the awkward shape, but I still managed a decent pace and rambled up behind the trailer. I took the suitcase in both hands and hoisted it onto the bed. I grasped a handgrip protruding from the rear of the trailer and vaulted onboard. I grabbed the suitcase and ducked inside the center pipe in the middle stack. Eleven seconds. A lot of time. In the old days, it would have taken me nine.
I kicked the suitcase into a pocket of gloom halfway down the pipe and settled in beside it, as flat as a man could get in a concrete pipe. I readied my Walther, just in case. If a guard discovered me, the last thing he would see was the muzzle of my silencer. All well and good, except that the odds of surviving the ensuing gun battle would not be great.
The truck advanced. Jerked to a halt. Advanced and halted. Advanced and halted once again, this time directly alongside the guardhouse. Light from the overhead lamps fell in bright stripes between the pipes. I fingered the pistol’s trigger and held my breath.
I heard the guards banter with the driver and suppressed the urge to shout, Just keep talking, boys. Maybe we’ll all live through the night. A flashlight beam splashed along the pipes from the rear. I held my breath and prepared for a firefight, but then realized the guard would have to mount the trailer to see into my pipe. This guy didn’t sound like the mountain-goat type.
Two very long seconds passed before he extinguished the beam and ordered the driver through. I let out a slow breath.
I heard the ugly sound of the driver grinding the gears and then the truck continued inside. I pictured the convoy of trucks crossing the open ground between the gate and the complex. Exactly fifteen seconds later, I heard the hiss of a hydraulic engine kicking in and the sound of a reinforced steel door rising. The truck inched forward. I could tell by the sudden hollowness of the sounds and a change in the light that we had passed through the door. We hit a downward incline and seemed to follow a tunnel a number of feet before we leveled off. The truck slowed, and I pictured the driver parking next to the other rigs. I expected him to shut down the truck’s six-hundred-plus-horsepower engine, but he didn’t. I heard his cab door open. Then I heard his feet hitting the ground as he jumped down. The next sound I heard was the grinding of metal and the whoosh of hydraulic release. And then it hit me: the drivers were helping one another unhitch their trailers. I couldn’t understand a word they were saying, but I understood when they all climbed back into their cabs and drove off.
I was in. A silence followed the departure of the trucks that was slowly filled by the low hum of a generator. I listened for voices or footsteps, but heard neither. I traded my Walther for my iPhone, texted Charlie a brief Inside, and traded back. I crept on hands and knees to the end of the pipe and lay stomach-down again. Listen and learn, get the rhythm of the place.
The trucks had deposited their loads in a cavernous warehouselike facility that would probably be overrun by laborers come morning. I saw what looked like a boiler room off to one side of the warehouse, and it struck me as a good hiding place for the suitcase. My other option was to leave it right where it was. That’s what I decided to do. If I was still inside the complex come morning, I was not leaving. And if I wasn’t leaving, the plan was to take down the facility with me. A one-kiloton nuke would do that and a whole lot more. Talk about a worst-case scenario.
I used the code Mr. Elliot had sent me to access the suitcase: a series of six numbers that caused the buckles to pop open simultaneously. I was surprised at the size of the device. Nestled in the case was a cylinder that couldn’t have measured much more than six inches by thirty inches. It lay diagonally inside the suitcase, surrounded by a circuit board and an arming switch. I ran a cable from my iPhone to the circuit board and used the keypad to enter the arming sequence, a twelve-character progression of letters, numbers, and symbols. The instant I punched in the twelfth character, a red light illuminated on the circuit board. The iPhone’s screen simulated the red light alongside two triggers: Activate and Disarm. Activation took thirty seconds. Disarming was instantaneous.
I used the third code to ready the self-destruct mechanism.
I closed the lid of the suitcase, pocketed my iPhone, and crawled to the end of the concrete pipe. I studied the warehouse and spotted two swivel cameras positioned along the ceiling. Rudimentary. There was a stairwell against the near wall and no more than a thirty-yard sprint away. I timed my jump with the panning of the cameras and hit the floor running. I stopped inside the stairwell, threw myself against a wall made of damp concrete, and held my breath for five seconds, waiting for an alarm to sound. When nothing happened, I took the stairs two at a time to a pair of swinging doors.
I peeked through a head-high window into a hallway lined with lockers. School lockers. There was also a stream of people marching down the hall, but they weren’t students. Some wore the casual clothes of office workers. Most were dressed like ordinary laborers. Clearly, the night shift.
When the procession ended, I ducked inside. It was a school all right. Classrooms, offices, labs, restrooms — and dosimeters hanging from the walls. What kind of school worried about radioactive contamination?
There was a bank of elevators farther down the hall, and that’s where everyone was headed; the building was a single story high, so I didn’t imagine the elevators went anywhere but down. There were two guards stationed at the elevators. They were checking ID badges.
I had to make a decision. There were doors on either side of the hall. The one to my right had a cutout of stairs on the front rising upward, which suggested a roof access. I made a quick turn through the door on my left, went down a wide hallway, and ran head-on into a man in a white lab coat coming out of a steel-framed door directly ahead. The door snapped closed behind him. I heard the magnetic lock engaging.
He stared at my face, and I stared at the ID card dangling from his neck lanyard. He did a double take and barked a question in Farsi. His gaze flickered across my chest in search of an ID badge.
Then his eyes went to the emergency alarm attached to the wall. He was reaching for it when I slashed an open hand across his throat. His cry ended in a gurgle. I punched him in the temple with a closed fist, and he crumpled to the floor.
I unclipped his ID badge and ran it through the magnetic card reader. The door clicked open. I dragged the unconscious man through the door with me. The door opened onto the landing of a staircase; I left the man there after deciding that another blow to the head wasn’t necessary.
The staircase traveled down four flights to a second magnetically locked doorway and a sign that indicated an emergency exit. I used the ID badge a second time. The door accessed a narrow platform high above a cavernous room that was convex, like an airplane hangar only twice as large. My eyes widened in astonishment.