The Aegis Solution (35 page)

"Little den? Hey, that's my ‘batcave.' Besides, we won't know if we don't go."

Stone was still staring into the darkness of the retention basin. "How do you know about all of
these routes?"

Tillie gave him one of her trademark shrugs and said, "I like to explore and I've had twelve years
to do it."

"But don't any of the others know about all of these tunnels and channels?"

"People really don't," she answered in a matter-of-fact tone. "They take things on face value. They
are told ‘here's a room,' ‘here's a hallway,' ‘there's the bathroom.' That's all they need. I guess I've always
wondered what's behind things and underneath things and above things."

"Given a choice," Wilson joined in the conversation, "Tillie will travel three times the required
distance from point A to point B as long as she can use some secret passageway."

"I think I would have been happy living in one of those old castles in Europe – you know, one of
the places with all of the hidden doors and passages behind the walls."

Elias was beginning to get spooked listening to the echoes from all of their voices. "We'd better
get going. If Kreitzmann is getting more aggressive, I don't think dawdling is a good idea."

"10-4!" Tillie snapped back at him, saluting.

Stifling a laugh at her antics, he simply said, "Lead the way."

Still carrying her homemade sleeping-gas launcher, the duffel bag, and wearing her pack, Tillie
casually stepped out onto the ledge and began walking, as if she were strolling on a sidewalk.

"I can carry that bag," Stone offered.

She did not even bother to look back as a single snort came from her. With a sigh of resignation,
Elias followed her, carrying his rifle. Despite her example, he crab-walked along the ledge, keeping his
back against the concrete wall. Wilson came out next, mimicking Elias' method. Stone came out last,
doing the same.

"My dear Tillie," Wilson called in a raised voice after some minutes had passed, "I know that you
so enjoy showing off, but you are the one with the light."

Tillie stopped and looked back, swinging the lantern around behind herself and seeing the three
men about twenty yards back. "You're kidding me, right? Would you like me to install a handrail first
before you all come this way?"

Taking a deep breath and forcing himself to ignore the absolute blackness to his right, Elias turned,
faced her, and began walking.

"See, I knew you could do it," she teased with the inflection of a mother cheering on her
five-year-old who had just made it ten feet on his new bicycle with training wheels.

"Give me the damn duffel bag," he ordered as he caught up to where she was standing.

Without waiting for a reply, he grabbed the rope loop at the top of the bag and swung it off her
shoulder and onto his own.

She actually wavered on the ledge for a moment as the counterbalance was abruptly removed. Elias
started to reach out to steady her, when she slapped his hand away. "I'm good." Her voice was less even
than she had intended it to be.

With his free hand, Elias gripped her arm and softly said, "Tillie, you don't have to prove anything."

He felt her muscles tense and was certain she was going to shake off the contact. Then there was
a sudden change. She relaxed and, in the pale white light from the lantern, he saw her smile at him.

"You're right. I don't. That isn't the deal, anyway."

Elias could hear Wilson and Stone catching up, but asked, "What is?"

The smile frozen on her freckled face, Tillie answered, "The deal is…I came here to die, remember?
That was the point."

She glanced past him and saw that the two men were right behind Elias. "Can we keep moving
now? I promise to keep it slow."

She unceremoniously turned her back to Elias and began walking. He followed, and within a minute
or two they arrived at the first of the inlets.

"Anyone want a break?"

"Tillie, don't be a smart aleck," Wilson snorted testily.

"Just trying to be nice."

"You have to try?" Stone commented.

Tillie whirled around to face him and stuck out her tongue, blowing a raspberry in his direction.

"Children, please!" Elias exhorted.

Tillie turned back around and continued her pace on the ledge. The others followed quietly until
reaching the next inlet. Entering it, she announced, "The riser isn't far from here."

Within minutes they were standing beneath the round concrete drainpipe. At the top, the steel grate
was visible. Tillie grabbed for one of the access rungs; Elias beat her to it and, still toting the duffel bag
and rifle, climbed to the top, with her following right behind. There was no rust, but the grit from the
sand had packed into the tight space between the grate and the collar. It took three grunting shoves
before the lid broke loose, a shower of fine dust and dirt cascading down upon them. He slid it to the
side and climbed up another rung, poking his head above the collar.

"This doesn't look good," he barked, once again shouting to be heard over the din of the winds.

"What's wrong?"

Elias did not answer. Instead, he climbed the rest of the way out of the drainpipe, clearing the way
for Tillie to follow. When her head cleared the top, she quickly looked around and, seeing what had
occurred, muttered to herself, "Good God!"

Wilson, who was the next to come up, heard the exchange but did not inquire. Rather, he hurried
the final distance. Pulling himself out of the manhole and flopping onto the powdery soil, he took in
the scene with his own eyes.

As Stone crawled out right behind him, Wilson remarked, "It seems that the wind has picked up
a bit."

"What do you m…?" Stone stopped in mid-sentence as he also took in what had happened. "This
looks like the bottom of a dumpster on a construction site."

The atrium, without the benefit of Wilson's horticultural obsession, coupled with the absence of
any caretaking by the other residents, had been nothing but a desiccated sandbox. But now, instead of
four walls and a dirt floor, the area was filled with a jumbled pile of broken steel struts, millions of
shards of shiny black glass, twisted and mangled aluminum framing, and hundreds of yards of copper
wiring.

"What the hell happened?" Tillie gasped, barely audible above the whistling, rampaging wind.

"Those are the solar panels from the roof," Elias answered.

"It looks like some giant just swept them into the atrium with a swipe of his arm."

Wilson twisted around and sat upright, dangling his feet into the storm drain from which the group
had emerged. "I'm certain the entire solar collector system up there is…was tied together. The panels
would all be interconnected. One weak link, one vulnerable bolt not completely torqued down, would
be enough to start a chain reaction. It would violently lift, catching and tearing the adjacent panels as
it went. In effect, there would be an avalanche driven by the wind instead of gravity, crashing and
ripping more sections as it gathered momentum until it found this atrium, into which it all tumbled."

Elias stood up and slowly turned around, taking in the details of the disaster. As the others rose,
Wilson, his voice for the first time conveying something more than his steady academic tone, said, "I
believe we might be running out of time."

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

"We've lost two Accelerants! How is that even possible, Mr. Killeen?"

The young man, still in his twenties, and for the first time in his brief life feeling that he was in over
his head, answered, "I'm still not sure, sir. It's a little difficult to piece together exactly what happened."

"A little difficult? Maybe you could provide me with your best guess."

Stinging from the overt sarcasm, the subordinate began talking quickly. "They might have been
prepared for the visit. We found unburned remnants of netting on the perimeter of the area where the
shack had been."

"We already knew the old man was anticipating us, you fool. That's why he filled his little courtyard
with all the vegetation, to slow down our Accelerants!"

"Yes, yes. I know. But it looks as though there were other measures – the netting…defensive
barriers…and this."

Killeen stepped carefully over the heaps of debris and still-smoldering wood until he reached the
spot where the porch had once stood. Pointing downward, he explained, "They had an escape route."

The other man looked down at the opening to the storm drain and said nothing.

"We didn't discover this until after the fire was out, and even then, not immediately. We had
assumed they died in the blaze. The fire caused the roof to collapse, and we were digging through the
rubble looking for their bodies when we found it."

The man stared down into the manhole, feeling his blood pressure rise. "You still haven't told me
how we lost two Accelerants? Are you telling me Charon is that good?"

"No sir," the younger man replied hastily. "From what we can tell, I think it was a fluke."

"A FLUKE! We lost two subjects, who were both the result of years of the most advanced
immersion and training, to a fluke?"

Sucking in a deep breath, Killeen plunged ahead. "I guess that was an unfortunate choice of words,
but apparently one of the Accelerants was wounded from gunfire. The doctor said that the wounds
wouldn't have been fatal. The other had been knocked unconscious before this happened."

At the end of his sentence, the man had swept his arm around to indicate the overall area
surrounding them.

"Evidently, while both Accelerants were down, all of these solar panels crashed into the atrium.
With their speed and agility, they probably would have been able to outrun or outmaneuver the metal
and glass. But they were both incapacitated before it happened – one from the gunshots, the second
from some other cause. They were both crushed to death."

Before the older man could respond, they were joined by a third. "I may have your answer on why
the second Accelerant was unconscious at the time."

"That would be appreciated, Doctor."

"After we pulled the heavy steel frame off him…which was the cause of death, by the way…my
assistant and I put him on a field stretcher. This area was far too cluttered for us to use our gurney, so
we left it outside the atrium, in the corridor. I helped him carry the stretcher to the corridor, and it's a
good thing I did."

"Why, Doctor?" the older man inquired, trying to hide the edge in his voice.

Oblivious to his superior's testiness, the doctor resumed, "Out here it was far too windy for me to
notice it; however, as soon as we reached the corridor, the smell of Sevoflurane was unmistakable. The
front of his tunic reeked of it."

"Sevoflurane?"

"Anesthesia. One of the two compounds we use frequently."

"Anesth…! How could one of our Accelerants be anesthetized out here, in the middle of a
mission?"

"Really quite clever, actually. And this would explain a couple of other incidents which had us
befuddled in the past."

"Doctor, please…!"

Raising his hands in a gesture intended to calm his superior but having the opposite effect, the
doctor began, "The Accelerants have a hyper-metabolism. Their consumption of all things we normally
need – water, food, air – is dramatically pumped up, as it were. And when they are in motion, so to
speak, their hearts and all of their other muscles demand oxygen at a radically heightened rate."

"I know all of this. They pant like dogs, so what?"

"That same demand for oxygen would make them vulnerable to an anesthetic at levels which would
be essentially harmless to us."

"Do you expect me to believe that Elias, or one of his group, managed to sneak up on an
Accelerant and held a rag over his mouth until he passed out?"

The doctor shook his head. "That wouldn't be at all necessary. Sevoflurane or Desflurane, either
one of them loaded in a dispersal device, such as a tear-gas canister, would knock out an Accelerant, and
the people around probably wouldn't even need gas masks."

Killeen looked off into the distance, thinking. "That would also explain how Charon escaped from
our lab."

The doctor nodded.



Crossing the short distance from the storm drain to the nearest exit from the atrium proved to be
tedious and time-consuming, as the four had to climb over or occasionally move the twisted and
shattered solar panels. As they entered the corridor, Elias looked at the ceiling and noted, "I'm surprised
the lighting still works. I would have thought that what happened on the roof would have shut down
the electrical systems."

"We don't know yet if it has," Wilson cautioned. "Almost all of the daytime lighting in the complex
is from solar tubes, rather than electric fixtures. But I doubt that the rooftop calamity shorted out our
power. The systems would be isolated and protected by breakers. Anyway, the sun is setting. We'll know
soon enough."