Killer Dreams (10 page)

“Or I’ll go after you if you screw up.” He smiled faintly. “As you said, I can’t have you blowing Kelly’s cover.”

“I won’t screw up.” God, she hoped she was telling the truth. She hadn’t expected to be this frightened.

“Wait here.” Kelly was opening the gate and slipping inside. Two minutes later he was back. “The guard’s at the corner watching the loading. You stay here and keep an eye on him, Royd. I’ll get her inside.” He grabbed Sophie’s hand. “Keep low and run!”

She ran.

Ten yards to the basement door.

Jesus, the lights were so brilliant, if that guard even casually glanced back he couldn’t help but see them.

One yard more.

Inside.

She felt a rush of relief but Kelly didn’t give her a chance to catch her breath. He was pulling her toward the door of the emergency stairs. “Hurry. We have three minutes before the power goes down.”

They made it up the six flights of stairs in two minutes. Kelly took a quick glance around at the darkness of the glass-enclosed offices. “Empty. Step on it. With any luck we’ll get into the office before the circuit—”

Darkness.

Total darkness.

“No luck,” Kelly said as he put on his glasses and ran down the hall. “Stay with me. We may not have as much time as I thought. The timer might be a little off. We should have had another minute….”

Shit.

Royd rolled beneath one of the cars in the parking lot as he heard the shouts and saw the security guards running in confusion. He glanced at his watch.

The timer had to be off.

And if the timer wasn’t reliable, it could mean that the entire plan could go awry.

Should he go in after them?

No, there always had to be a backup man in a job this risky.

And he’d told Sophie she was on her own.

Face it, because he’d hoped she’d back out.

Not entirely. She had to know that if she committed herself then she was the one at risk.

Okay, don’t go in. Scout around. Find a way to get her away from the facility if she did make it out that door before the plant lit up like a Christmas tree. Kelly had done the best he could, but his responsibility ended when Sophie walked out that basement door.

And Royd’s responsibility began where Kelly’s ended.

He glanced at his watch again. Two minutes had gone by. Ten to go.

He started to crawl from beneath the car.

“Ten minutes to go,” Sophie murmured as she leveled the flashlight on the safe combination.

“Shh.” Kelly’s ear was pressed on the steel of the safe. His hands moved delicately, precisely on the lock.

Beautiful hands, graceful fingers, she thought absently. Weird to admire the hands of a safecracker. No more weird than being here and risking her neck with him.

For God’s sake, get it open.

Seven minutes.

That last minute had seemed to last an hour.

Six minutes.

She could feel her heartbeat racing in the hollow of her throat. Come on. Come on.

The door of the safe swung open!

Kelly moved to one side. “I cut it a little close. You only have a couple minutes to go through it if you’re going to have plenty of time to get out of here.”

“Thanks a lot.” Her hands were rifling, flying through the box of disks at the front of the safe. “It’s not here.” She reached for the second box of disks. “It’s not here either, dammit.”

“Time’s almost up.”

“It’s not—” Then she saw it at the back of the box. Sanborne’s encoding, which had been on the REM-4 disks.

“Did you find it?”

“It’s not the same one. I don’t know if—” She jumped to her feet, her glance moving frantically around the office. She had to find a laptop with battery power. She saw one in the corner and ran across the room. “I’m going to copy it.”

Kelly cursed. “You don’t have time.”

She looked through the desk to get a blank disk while the laptop powered up. She’d have to save it to the hard drive and then make a copy…. “I didn’t come here to go away empty-handed.”

“Then take the damn disk.”

“I will,” she said fiercely. “I don’t believe it’s the right one, but it’s Sanborne’s private stock. We may be able to use it.” She glanced over her shoulder. “Get out of here. You need the extra time to get back and remove that timer. I’ll erase the record from the laptop, put the original back in the safe, and spin the combination. I’ll be right behind you.”

He glanced at his watch and then ran toward the door. “Three minutes tops, Sophie. Otherwise you won’t have time to get out.”

He was gone.

Power up. Power up, dammit.

The screen suddenly lit up!

It took another three minutes to finish the copy process. She jabbed the button to erase the copy from the hard drive, replaced the original in the safe, and spun the combination. Then she was running down the corridor toward the emergency stairs.

Less than two minutes.

She was taking the stairs two at a time.

One flight.

Two.

Four.

Six.

She burst out of the emergency stairwell.

She still had a minute. She streaked toward the basement door and jerked it open.

The lights went on!

“Come on!” Royd grabbed her wrist and jerked her out of the facility toward the parking lot. He pushed her down and underneath the first car he came to. “You’re an idiot. Why did you cut it so damn short?”

“Shut up. I had to do it.” She couldn’t breathe. “And I sent Kelly ahead. He had enough time to disconnect the timer.”

“It’s not going to do any good if they catch us. We’ve just got to hope everyone is going to stream inside to check the facility out.”

“Can we get out the gate?”

“Can’t chance any of the gates. I watched them send security out to the perimeter to make sure there were no signs of intruders.”

“Won’t it help when they find the power outage was accidental?”

“It will take time to determine that it was.” He started wriggling from underneath the car. “Until then we’re going to have to hang tight and hope for the best.”

“In this parking lot?”

“No, too open. Keep low. I’ll go ahead to make sure the way’s clear. We’re going to let them drive us out of here in one of the moving vans.”

“What?”

“Do you have a better idea?”

“No.” But she remembered how many people had been buzzing around those vans earlier in the evening. “I’m not sure it will work.”

“Neither am I. It’s our best bet. We can’t go back in the facility and we’d get our asses shot if we tried to go out the gates. We have to hope that Kelly set up the power outage so that there’s no suspicion, and that you didn’t leave any evidence of tampering.”

Had she? She’d been in a hurry but she’d tried to be careful.

“I don’t like that silence.”

“I don’t think there should be a problem.”

“There’d better not be,” he said grimly as he crawled on ahead. “I don’t like the idea of being caught like a mouse in a trap.”

So far, so good, Sophie thought.

The area around the trucks appeared to be deserted. Well, why not? Supposedly there was nothing of importance in the vans and everyone was inside the facility trying to find out what the hell had happened.

“Up.” Royd gave her boost into the van and quickly followed. He glanced around at the pieces of furniture. “The metal cabinet.” He strode over to the six-foot metal cabinet and opened the doors. “Shelves, dammit,” he muttered. He reached in his pocket and pulled out a key chain with a number of tools hanging from it. “Keep an eye out the back of the van while I get rid of them.”

She crouched at the open door of the van. “What’s that? A Swiss Army knife?”

“A good deal more sophisticated but the same basic idea. What’s happening inside?”

“A lot of activity. Guards moving around….”

And one was opening the front door of the factory!

“Hurry!”

“I am hurrying. One shelf to go. We can leave the top one.”

“There’s a guard coming—No, he’s stopped and is talking to someone inside.”

“Got it.” He jumped to his feet and carried the shelves over to the leather couch in the corner. “Get in.” He put the shelves behind the couch. “No room to stand, but enough for both of us to crouch inside.”

“Not much room,” she said as she ducked inside the cabinet. She could still hear the guard talking. Keep talking. Keep talking. “And you’re no midget.”

“That’s an understatement.” He crawled into the cabinet and shut one door. Then he grabbed the hinges of the other door and swung it shut. “It’s a good thing you’re skinny enough to make up for it. Now be quiet until they start the engine.”

Pitch darkness.

Overwhelming closeness.

Helpless fear.

Her heart was beating so hard she was sure Royd could hear it.

“It’s okay,” he whispered. “These aren’t rocket scientists or they would have never left the truck unguarded. Chances are they won’t search.”

She nodded jerkily but didn’t reply. She didn’t want to do anything to lower those chances.

Time crawled by at an excruciatingly slow pace.

Five minutes.

Ten minutes.

Twenty minutes.

Thirty minutes.

Forty minutes.

The van door slammed with such force that their metal cabinet rattled.

Relief surged through her.

The next moment the engine roared to life.

Would they stop at the front gate?

No, evidently they’d been waved through.

She collapsed back against the cool metal of the cabinet.

“I told you it would be okay,” Royd said over the roar of the truck’s engine. “Kelly is an expert. The power-outage check probably came out without a hint of suspicion.”

“I hate people who say ‘I told you so.’”

“I admit it’s a fault of mine. I’m right so often that it can become really annoying to others.”

He was joking. They were confined in this tight metal coffin and he wasn’t bothered at all. She wanted to kill him.

“Actually, we should be grateful that they’re not following usual procedure in transferring these loads to the ship.”

“What?”

“Most of the time they just have sealed containers that they transfer to the ship by crane. In which case we would have been shit out of luck.”

“Why aren’t they doing that now?”

“You’d have to ask Sanborne. He must have told them he had to have very special hand handling.”

“And how are we supposed to get out of this van when we reach the destination?” she asked through her teeth.

“Play it by ear.”

“I don’t operate that way. You play it by ear. I need a plan.”

“Very well. Let’s plan. You, first.”

“They’ll find us when they start to unload. We’ll have to get out before that.”

“Good plan. And my plan is to wait until they open the door and either kill them when they jump up to start unloading or wait until they unload one of the other pieces of office furniture and then take the opportunity to get the hell out. In short, play it by ear.”

“I don’t have to ask which option you’d prefer.”

“Yeah, I’m such a bloodthirsty bastard that I can’t wait for the next kill.”

“No, I didn’t mean—You made me angry. I have no right to blame you for—”

“Oh, for God’s sake, shut up,” he said roughly. “You have the right to say anything you want to say to me without going into a guilt spiral.” He changed the subject. “Did you find the disk?”

“No, not exactly.”

“Either you did or you didn’t.”

“I didn’t find the REM-4 disk but I found another one with Sanborne’s special encoding labels and made a copy of it.”

“Why?”

“I wanted to see what it was.” She paused. “And it made me angry that I hadn’t found REM-4. Dammit, I
wanted
to find it.”

“That was pretty obvious. It could have been a disaster.”

“But you let me go for it.”

“And that should scare you. If there’s a chance of even a partial success, I’m going to let you try. In spite of the promise I made to you and to Jock. I’ll always worry about getting you out alive after the fact.”

“I never asked anything else. No, that’s not true. If you ever put my son in danger, I’ll kill you myself.”

“That goes without saying. We all have an infinity button that can be pushed.”

“Infinity button?”

“The one trigger that can release every evil and every good within ourselves. The Pandora’s box. An act or a person that can cause you to do anything you have to do.”

“And Michael is my infinity button?”

“Isn’t he?”

Every good or evil…

“I suppose he is. But I was willing to kill Sanborne in revenge for what he did to my family. So there must be other buttons.”

“In your case, they’re all connected with people you love.”

That was true enough. “And what are your buttons, Royd?”

“Pure hate.”

She felt a little ripple of shock. She was tempted to drop the subject yet was irresistibly drawn to probe further. “Hate is the product. What caused the hate? What was the trigger? Garwood?”

“Maybe.”

“Royd.”

He was silent a moment. “It took a long time for REM-4 to work on me. I fought it, and that frustrated Sanborne and Boch. They looked for all kinds of methods to enhance it as Thomas Reilly was doing with Jock. Boch came up with a great idea. They’d drawn me there by luring in my younger brother, Todd. They chained him to a wall at Garwood and every time I didn’t obey instructions they beat him and refused him water. It had a satisfactory psychological effect on me when paired with REM-4. In no time at all I was the zombie they wanted. But Todd was no use to them after that because he was on his way to dying of abuse and malnutrition. So they killed him before my eyes. It was supposed to be a final test. They were pretty confident of me by that time. God, they were stupid. It just goes to show you how little Sanborne knows about human nature. Todd’s murder was the first brick that toppled in the wall they’d built around me. It took another two months for the rest to fall, but it happened.”

“Christ.”

“I assure you that Christ had nothing to do with it. Neither Boch nor Sanborne is on speaking terms with any deity.”