Firebreak

7

It was turning out to be one of those days. Dave Rappleyea didn't like it when it turned out to be one of those days, and fortunately, here at the lodge, those days were infrequent. But this was turning out to be one of them.

By "one of those days," Dave Rappleyea meant a day with incidents in it. A good day, as far as he was concerned, had no incidents in it at all. A good day was one where he could sit quietly at his station in front of the bank of security monitors and play DoomRangers II from the beginning of his tour at eight a.m. through lunch at noon brought to him at the station by Myrna or Fred, till the end of his tour at four. A good day was also one in which the roster had not yet rotated back to him being the one to go up to the main house after dinner to flush all the toilets and walk through all the rooms so the sensors and monitors could make note of him, and the duty guy would therefore know that everything at the main house was still working the way it was supposed to.

Of the eight resident staff members here at Paxton Marino's hunting lodge in Montana, five of them, one of the women and four of the men, were simple obsessive geeks, happy with their own company and their own pastime, like Dave. For instance, one was an amateur naturalist, spending all his free time out in the woods, turning over rocks, collecting slugs and ants and all kinds of wriggly crap, while another one was Net crazy, lurking in chat rooms all her waking hours, adding her address to more and more monster mailing lists, receiving endless dumb jokes or chain letters through the ether and dutifully passing them on.

The remaining three staff, one woman and two men, were silent anti-social secret-hoarders, people who would have joined the French Foreign Legion if they spoke the language. Warily they guarded their personal stories from everybody else, none of whom cared. And none of them were aware that, in hiring them, Marino's personnel people had been following the guidelines they'd been given for this low-level job in this isolated place; self-sufficient compulsives who wouldn't get bored and, even more important, wouldn't get curious.

It was pretty much a democracy the staff had worked out here, developing their systems from scratch, none of them having known any of the others before they'd been hired on here. All had backgrounds in security and knew the role without having to be overseen. Greg was technically the boss, who could give them orders if he wanted to, but Greg was one of the paranoid three, and preferred no contact with other human beings at all.

So it was usually a good gig, this little house halfway up the mountain, an anti-community of solitaries. Dave Rappleyea had never been so content in his life. Except, of course, every once in a while, when there was one of those days.

This one had begun with a phone call, which Dave had logged in at 9:38 a.m. It was the duty man's (or woman's) job to deal with any incoming from the outer world, as well as to monitor security up at the main house, so when the phone rang, it was Dave's job to punch the outside-line button on the console in front of himself (very like a Star Trek control room), pick up the receiver, and say, "Lodge," the sufficiently minimal approved response on the phone that wouldn't give too much away.

"Oh, ello."

The call was from a snobby English-sounding woman who said she was calling from Texas, that she was the executive assistant of Horace Griffith, and that Mr. Griffith would be arriving at Great Falls airport at one this afternoon and would require to be met.

Dave knew who Horace Griffith was. A very fancy-schmancy art dealer that Mr. Marino bought pictures from, some of them on walls here at the lodge, over fireplaces or sofas, all of them European and old, all of them dull as anything, none of them as visually exciting as even one frame of DoomRangers II. Whenever Mr. Griffith came to the lodge, there was a certain amount of extra activity, but not normally too irritatingly distracting.

Dave agreed he'd have someone drive down to meet Mr. Griffith—that would be Fred, today—and the woman said there would also be a shipment coming up with Mr. Griffith, in a hired truck with a hired driver. "Mr. Marino has approved," she assured him.

Mr. Marino had to approve, that was the rule, he had to approve every single person who entered the property, and that went double these days, ever since that insane robbery attempt a couple months ago. These days, security at the lodge was tighter than ever, including those weird lights on all night, and added motion sensors, and all the rest of it.

And tightened procedures, as well. Being as diplomatic as possible, Dave said to the woman, "I guess Mr. Griffith will be bringing written approval from Mr. Marino with him. I mean for the truck."

The woman sighed, elaborately. "Is that really necessary?" She pronounced it nes-iss-ry.

"If I want to keep my job, ma'am, yes, it is."

That of course made it different; they were both employees, after all. "I'll arrange to have Mr. Marino fax the approval," she promised, and forty-five minutes later it did come clicking in.

It was legitimate, all right. It was on one of Mr. Marino's letterheads, it was signed with his usual cramped little up-and-down signature, and it had been sent from his fax number in Courmayeur:

Mr. Horace Griffith will be arriving today to spend one night, possibly two, at the lodge. Give him every assistance. He will be bringing with him a number of wooden crates, to be transported to the lodge in a vehicle rented from Big Sky Motor Transport. The crates will be unloaded at the lodge by staff, and the truck will depart. At a later time, to be determined by Mr. Griffith, the truck will return, and Mr. Griffith will oversee the loading of a second shipment of crates, to be taken away from the lodge.

Well, that was straightforward, and didn't seem as though it should create too much of a ripple in the otherwise placid circle of days at the lodge.

That's what Dave thought. At eleven-thirty, Fred left to pick up Mr. Griffith, Dave watching the white Blazer on the monitors as it swerved down the twisty road off the mountain, and it was still more or less a normal day. And it still was at quarter to three, when Fred radioed Dave from the Blazer: "ETA in five minutes, we'll go straight up to the lodge." "Roger."

Dave intercommed this info to Greg, then watched Greg and Bob and Wilma move from camera to camera through the house, then outside to climb into another of the Blazers and drive on up to the lodge.

And here came Blazer number one, back up the road, this time followed by a big boxy truck with a black cab but the body painted a bright pale blue; the big sky, maybe. Dave looked away from DoomRanger II, his thumbs still on the controls, to watch those vehicles come up, bypass the house, and head on up to the lodge.

Up there, Greg and Bob and Wilma stood by the open front door, and here came the other two vehicles. Fred and Mr. Griffith, a trim middle-aged man with a haughty manner and a thick crown of wavy white hair, got out of their car as the truck made a cumbersome U-turn to put its rear as close as possible to the front door.

Two men in work clothes got out of the truck, as Wilma collected Mr. Griffith's suitcase from the Blazer and carried it into the lodge.

The next few minutes were just people carrying things; no reason for Dave to look up from his battle. Wilma took Mr. Griffith's suitcase to his guest room, while the two men from the truck carried crate after crate into the front hall, each crate a large narrow rectangle, the smallest four feet square, the largest five by eight.

Inside, following Mr. Griffith, Greg and Bob and Fred, and after her other errand Wilma, carried the crates to the basement door and downstairs, the only place in the whole compound that wasn't covered by the monitor cameras. Dave supposed that was because, if any unauthorized person had gotten that far, they would already have been seen by half a dozen cameras elsewhere, so what difference would it make to see the same person in the basement? Not that it mattered to him.

His interest now was mostly in DoomRanger II, but his eye was naturally caught by movements on the screens, so he did remain aware of the steady routine of transferring crates from truck to basement, and then all at once his eye was drawn to a different screen, and he saw a different kind of motion.

A bus. Black or dark blue, coming up the road from the state highway. No, that was second, behind a black car. A car and bus coming up the road.

Dave was about to reach for his microphone, to alert Greg up at the lodge that they had interlopers, when his eye was snagged again, this time by another kind of movement, on four different screens, showing the steep wooded slope above the lodge.

Men. Men all in black, carrying guns, rifles, walking down the road there, and down through the woods. Men in bulky dark vinyl coats.

The car and bus approached the house from the south. The men in black approached the lodge from the north. It was DoomRanger II! But it couldn't be. Then what was it?

There were white letters on the backs of the black vinyl coats of the invaders coming down from the north. One of them passed close enough to a camera, moving away, on down the hill, so the letters could be read on his back: ATF.

ATF? Dave knew what that was, that was Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, one of the government police forces, like the FBI. Somebody'd had a joke about them a few years ago, Dave remembered: "Alcohol, tobacco, and firearms? Sounds like a party to me"

But this wasn't a party. What the heck was this? What was the ATF doing here? What could they possibly think was going on here?

Trembling, dropping DoomRanger II into his lap, Dave reached for the mike, thumbed the button, quavered, "Greg! We got— We got—" He stumbled, bewildered between saying we got visitors and we got company. "Greg! We got Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms!"

And that's when it turned into one of those days; big time.