Biowar

85

Lia pushed against the wall as she heard someone at the far end shout in Arabic. Two men ran from the front room into the hallway and then into the access chamber and outside.

The bunker looked more like the basement of a well-appointed middle-class home than a bomb shelter or backup military headquarters. A beige Berber carpet covered the floor; the walls were covered with plasterboard painted a muted damask.

The computers she had to tap were about midway down the hall. As Lia moved up the hallway she heard someone talking. Not sure exactly what was happening, she ducked into a nearby room, which turned out to be an oversize linen closet. Towels, sheets, and pillows filled the walls on the left. The rest of the room was empty.

Lia pulled a pile of the towels out, carrying them in front of her as if she were a housemaid. She took a breath, then went back into the hallway.

“Lia?” asked Rockman.

“Got it covered,” she said.

The door to the computer room was open. Lia swung inside, back to them, as a towel dropped to the floor. One of the two men inside got up, starting to question who she was. As she turned toward him the wall flashed and exploded — the result of a lipstick-sized mini-flash-bang grenade Lia had slipped into the towel.

Stunned, the man closest to her went down with a quick chop to the side of the head. Lia jump-kicked the second man as he rose, or tried to, from one of the desk chairs near the computer. A second kick rendered him unconscious. Lia went back to the first man, just rising from the carpet. Two sharp kicks from her heel ended the effort. Neither man had been armed, unfortunately, and there was no door to the room.

The computers were late-nineties PCs. One had just connected via modem to some other database; a prompt flashed on the screen requesting a password. Lia connected the dongles via the serial port, using a second adapter.

“Go,” said Rockman. “Get the hell out of there!”

But it was too late. As she hopped over the bodies and ran for the door, two of the Syrian bodyguards and the woman who had brought her here came down the hallway.

Dean and Pendleton were nearly to the pool when the ground in front of them began percolating with small-arms fire. They threw themselves down onto the patio, rolling behind a low wall that provided scant cover.

Chips of concrete flew around Dean as he hunted for a target. He pushed to his right, saw something move, and fired. The sky vibrated fiercely — Dean threw himself into the vibration, running to the pool building as he emptied the AK-47 into three figures in green running toward him. He dived behind the building, rolling on the ground and then scrambling back, swimming through the rumbling air that had enveloped the world. From the edge of the building he saw two of the guards advancing, their rifles flaring. He popped in a new magazine and took them with two presses of the trigger. But the magazine had been nearly empty and the gun ran dry after a pair of bursts.

“Cover me!” he yelled to Pendleton, launching himself back up across the patio toward the two guards. Just as he reached the closest one, another Syrian came out from the back of the house; Dean tried scooping up the AK-47 but dropped it, then threw himself down as well. By the time he got the gun in his hands and rose to his feet, Pendleton had burned though his own magazine. The Syrian lay on the ground, blood burbling from his neck.

“We have to get into the bunker there,” Dean told Pendleton. The SAS sergeant bent and grabbed two mags from the dead man, tossing them to him.

“More men, coming around the north side of the house,” warned Rockman.

“Come on back to the pool house and watch my back,” Dean told the sergeant. “There’s two guys coming up from around the side of the house there.”

“How do you know?”

“God told me.”

As Lia stepped out into the hallway, she saw that the Syrian woman had her handbag over her shoulder.

“I’d like that back, please,” Lia said.

“We’ll bury it with you, Jew.”

“Now do I look Jewish?”

One of the two men poked her breast with the nose of his gun and leered. Lia stepped back but didn’t make a grab for the barrel; the others were too far for her to be certain of getting the gun and shooting them in time.

“You’ll tell us exactly who you’re working for before we kill you,” said the woman.

Lia took another step back, her right elbow now at the doorjamb of the computer room.

“You’re getting all this?” she said to Rockman.

“On your signal.”

Before she could give it, the door at the far end of the hall behind her opened.

“Lia!” said Dean.

“No,” said Lia.

The guard nearest her started to jerk his rifle toward Dean.

“Now!” screamed Lia, grabbing the gun and throwing herself sideways into the computer room. “Duck, Charlie Dean!” she yelled.

In that instant, the hallway exploded, the bomb in her purse ignited by the Art Room.