Pulse

THIRTY-ONE

With a grunt, Queen pushed her body through the tight confines of the ventilation duct. With her arms stretched out in front of her body, she could only pull with her fingers and push with her toes. Given the cramped space it was only the smooth surface of the vent shaft that allowed her to move at all.

For the most part, darkness ruled the vent. Only when the occasional beam of light pierced the darkness where a screw was missing did she have a sense of how quickly she moved. And each time the experience was discouraging. Progress was slow. She moved until reaching a junction, then turned right. At the next she turned left, then right again, determined not to move in circles.

As she began to wonder why there were no vents in the shaft, she felt the floor beneath her hand disappear. Taking the edge of the dropoff in her hands, she pulled herself up to the edge and looked down. A pinprick of light greeted her more than one hundred feet below. She reached out across the drop and felt a bare, cold metal wall.

Only one way to go.

A breeze wafted up the vertical shaft. The air smelled of antiseptic. Like a doctor's office. Or a lab. That sealed the deal. She squirmed forward, leading with her arms until she was hanging over the edge by her waist. She looked down. The drop was a killer, but would take her at least three stories below the bottom floor of the main facility. It was her best shot. Her only shot.

Bracing herself, she squirmed forward, then launched downward like a torpedo exiting a submarine. She spread her arms and legs as her body became fully vertical, careful to only make contact with her cloth-covered forearms, legs, and the rubber soles of her boots. If a hand struck the metal, it might stick and be yanked up. If the arm didn't break, her body could twist within the vent and become lodged like an overweight Santa Claus.

Her arms began to burn as the friction between her arms and the vent wall grew. But her fall slowed only marginally. She pushed hard as the feet flew past. She began to slow as the light below grew in size and lit up the shaft with a dull glow. Forty feet from the bottom, still moving fast, Queen saw vent shafts branching off in either direction, both in the path of her bracing arms and legs. To avoid smashing a limb on the tunnel edges, she bought them close again and freefell past.

Having regained momentum, Queen pushed hard against the walls, making more noise than she cared to as the sudden slow jarred her UMP loose from her back. It smacked against the side of the shaft and scraped loudly — metal on metal — as she continued to fall. With five feet left to descend, Queen planted both hands against the walls and put her muscles to the task of stopping. Her arms bent and protested, but slowed her fall to a stop, inches from the vent. Sweat dripped from her nose, trickling between the slats and striking the dimly lit linoleum floor ten feet below.

As she worked on slowing her breathing, she listened to the sounds of the space below. There was the mechanical twitch of working hard drives and whine of computer cooling fans, but no alarms, shouts of concern, or stomping feet. Still, she wouldn't underestimate her enemy.

Bracing her feet against the walls, she removed her hands and placed them on the grate. She shoved. The grate stayed in place, but shook. Its hold on the duct was precarious at best. She shoved again, this time letting her feet go and put her weight into it. With a crack, the hinged grate swung open.

As she fell, Queen snapped her head up, spinning her body beneath her. At the same time she reached behind her back. She landed, ten feet below, in a crouch. A red dot of light from her silenced handgun's LAM shot back and forth across the room as she searched for a target. Finding none, she stayed silent and still, taking in the room. The space was massive and filled with an array of computer stations, laboratory equipment, and several long examination tables. Looking up she saw the vent she'd fallen through twenty feet up, in the ceiling. Across one wall she saw four large containers marked with warning symbols and the words "liquid nitrogen."

Stupid.

She spotted two security cameras at either end of the room. Luckily, neither was pointed in her direction, though both were headed her way. She jumped up, slapped the vent shut, then ducked beneath a desk. She watched as the cameras passed her position and then swung the other way.

She spied a discarded lab coat, slipped out from under the desk and threw it on over her black fatigues. She removed the black covering from her head, twisted her hair into a conservative-looking pony-tail, donned a pair of phony glasses and clipped a Manifold I.D. card to her shirt that might fool one of the scientists but would certainly alert security to her scam. With the lab dark and the time passing midnight, Queen had the lab to herself. She sat down at a computer terminal hoping to look like just another scientist working late, and took hold of the mouse. The screen blinked to life, casting her in a sickly blue glow. The cameras would see her now.

A prompt appeared on the screen, asking for a password, which could be a problem if someone was watching the video feed. She tried the most common password used on computer boot screens — none— hitting the Enter key. She smiled as the operating system booted and displayed a variety of folders, icons, and files on the cluttered desktop. But none of that mattered to her. The terminal was just a gateway for the little gem Lewis Aleman had provided the team with before leaving. "Hacker in a bottle" he had called it; a worm that sought out information on predetermined search patterns, slipping past security and erasing all traces of its existence along the way. Queen plugged the small device into the computer's USB port and with a feigned yawn of an overworked scientist began opening random files on the screen, giving the impression that she was hard at work.

An image appeared on the screen and made her pause. Spread out on a table was what looked like a serpentine head. Standing behind it was a man she recognized from photos King had shown her: George Pierce. He looked fine. In fact, he was smiling. Then she recognized the background. The photo had been taken in this very lab. Pierce had been here. Possibly still was. Queen stood and looked over the lab. She saw the lab table from the photo at the center of the room. But the table was as empty as the lab was devoid of life. Why was that?she wondered. If they were so close to a staggering discovery, why were they not working around the clock?

As the doors at the far end of the lab burst open with a sound like thunder, she realized why.