Downtiming the Night Side Read online

  “Somebody’s going for the chamber!” Riggs shouted, drawing his pistol and moving off down a corridor that should have blocked their entrance. No passes were necessary now, though—the computer terminal was another smoldering mass of fused metal and plastic.

  Moosic recognized it as the corridor he’d come from only a few minutes earlier, the one that led to Silverberg’s offices and the time chamber.

  A bunch of uniformed and plainclothes security officers were near the elevator. They saw Riggs and rushed up to him, all talking at once. With a mighty roar of “Quiet!” he got them settled, then picked one to tell him the story.

  “Four of ’em,” said Conkling, the middle-aged uniformed man picked as the spokesman. “They knew the exact locations of everything, Joe! Everything! They had the password, knew the right names, and when the door slid open for the one who came into the entrance, the other three blew open the outer door. By that time, that first one had set off a mess of gas bombs from someplace. None of ’em had any masks I could see, but one whiff and you died while they walked through it cool as can be. They had some kind of gun that worked like a bazooka one minute and shot gas the next.”

  “What about the gas in the reception area?”

  “Didn’t bother ’em. They shot everybody up, then fried all the ceiling weapons with some type of laser gun. I tell you, Joe, I never saw weapons like that before from any country! Never! Right outa Buck Rogers.”

  “How many of ’em did we get?”

  “Uh—none of ’em, Joe. They all got down here—and, so help me, the damned elevator opened for ’em just like they had the pass and the combination. Took ’em down and stuck there.”

  Riggs nodded and turned to Moosic. “Inside job.”

  The younger man nodded. “All the way. Any way down there other than by this thing?”

  “There’s a stairway, but the panels are designed only to open from the other side.”

  “So were ours. Let’s blow them or get whatever it takes to blow them. I assume the whole level below was gassed?”

  “Knockout type. Real strong—six to eight hours. But if it didn’t get them up here, it sure won’t down there.”

  “Maybe not,” Moosic responded, “but it’ll get everybody else down there. You can’t tell me they can work all that stuff down there without anybody except their inside man.”

  “Hardly. The computer alone would freeze up without five different operators at five different locations, each of whom knows only part of the code. And one of those operators is at the end of a special phone line topside and a mile from here.”

  “Then we either wait for them or go after them. The Air Force thing is one way, but with the commotion they caused getting down there’s no way out short of hostages, and those they’ve got.”

  Riggs took complete charge. He ordered various security personnel to make certain all exits were blocked with heavy firepower, ordered another to establish an external command post, and still others to report to NSA and Pentagon higher-ups. Finally he put a heavy firepower team at the only stairway exit, and it proceeded to line the area with enough explosive to bring down the entire wing. Nobody was going to get out that way without Riggs’ personal permission.

  Then they walked back to the security command center, which hadn’t been taken or touched. It had been the key to the Air Force team’s success, but these people hadn’t touched it. They obviously had no intention of coming back out this way—or they wanted it intact for reasons of their own.

  The command center was impressive, with its masses of monitors and one whole wall showing a complete schematic of the entire installation, even the public parts, parking lots and roads, along with lights indicating the location of cameras, mikes, and defensive equipment. Much of the board was flashing bright red.

  The security personnel inside the center had remained at their posts, but it was clear that they were bewildered and frustrated. They had been attacked in a manner that the installation was designed to thwart, and the invaders had simply marched right through.

  A crisp, professional-looking woman with gray hair sat at the master controls and barely looked up as Riggs and Moosic entered.

  “Hey, Marge? What’s the story?” Riggs called.

  “Twenty-four dead, thirteen critical, about forty more with minors, give or take,” she responded. “They’re immune to all our gasses and pretty cold-blooded. I’ll put them up on number six for you over there. Three men, one woman. No makes yet, but give us time.”

  Riggs and Moosic went over to one of the monitor banks. A screen flickered and came on, then a whole series, showing every room below. Most had unconscious forms, lying about, a sea of limp forms in lab whites. In the central control chamber, though, the four were clearly visible. No—not four. Five. “Who’s that other one?” Moosic asked.

  Riggs ordered a zoom. She was in her late twenties or early thirties, short, fat, and dumpy, with big hornrimmed glasses, the lenses of which looked like the bottoms of Coke bottles.

  “Karen Cline,” Riggs told him. “There’s our insider. My career was already shot to hell, but I’ll still retire. Somebody back at the Palace is going to swing for this.”

  Moosic looked at the woman. “What’s her rank?”

  “Oh, she’s a top-grade physicist. I don’t know how they got to her, though. Conservative family, workaholic, and don’t let her looks fool you. She’s slept with so many guys they need a separate computer just to keep track of them. Just goes to show you.”

  “Got a make on two of them,” Marge called from the command console. “The young, good-looking boy is Roberto Sandoval, twenty-eight, born in Ponce, Puerto Rico. The girl’s Christine Austin-Venneman, twenty-four, born in Oakland, California.”

  “Terrific,” Riggs muttered. Christine Austin-Venneman was the daughter of one of the country’s most prominent liberal Congressmen, a very popular and powerful man. Her mother was the heir to a fairly large fortune based on natural gas, and had always felt guilty about it. If there was a liberal cause, she was in the forefront of it and usually much of the bankroll behind it. Christine had been on forty protest marches for twenty causes in half the states in the union before she was five.

  “More on Sandoval,” Marge reported. “Father unknown, mother a committed FALN member and revolutionary Trotskyite, trained in Cuba and Libya years ago. His mother was killed three years ago when a bomb she was working on blew up her and her safe house in Washington. Sandoval is suspected of being involved in several robberies and bombings, mostly in the New York area, since that time. Since Austin-Venneman’s mother organized the March on the U.N. for the Liberation of Puerto Rico from Colonialism last year, we can guess how the two got together.”

  Both security men nodded absently. The figures below seemed in no hurry, but all had nasty-looking weapons, except for Cline, and were making a methodical check of the area, room by room. A small status line at the bottom of each monitor indicated that gas had been released throughout the complex and that the elevator and stairway doors were sealed.

  Ron Moosic just stared at them and felt helpless. His first day on the job and this happened. He looked at the status line again and noticed that there were two small blinking areas in it on the right. “What are they?” he asked Riggs.

  “The area is far too dangerous to risk. Those are last-resort items. There is enough explosive in the walls to fry and liquefy the whole lower complex. They’re on a failsafe mechanism, though. We can fire them, but we can’t arm them. Only the President or the collective Joint Chiefs can do that. If the left one stops blinking, it means the system is armed and at our discretion. If both go solid, we have twenty minutes to clear out, or so they told us.”

  At that moment the left one stopped blinking.

  TIMELY DECISIONS

  Ron Moosic suddenly felt like the President faced with Armageddon on the day of his inaugural. He didn’t even know the names of most of these people or the way to the nearest men’s room, yet here he
was, facing what might quickly become the shortest job he’d ever had.

  Riggs looked over at him. “Well? What do you think?”

  I think I want to know the location of the men’s room, he thought sourly, but aloud he said, “You say there’s no way they can operate the time machine or whatever from down there?”

  Riggs nodded. “There’s no bypassing that outside code, and nobody down there or even up here knows what it is.”

  Moosic sighed. “Then all you’ve got here, when all is said and done, is a classic hostage situation. Sooner or later they’ll threaten to shoot the hostages one by one if we don’t come up with the code, but if we blow it we just as surely kill them all. They’ve trapped themselves, and even if they eventually go suicidal, we’re no worse off than if we push their button. I’d say let’s string ’em along and work at getting them. They have the counters for a lot of the nasty stuff, but they still have to get air down there from somewhere.”

  “It’s all super-filtered stuff from its own buried source. No way to get a man in there. Still—I’ll get a team working on tapping into it. We already have one working on bypassing the stairway seals. If we can just buy enough time, we can puke ’em to death. There’s some pretty nasty stuff near here I can get my hands on, stuff that’s absorbed by the skin and pretty ugly, but stuff with an antidote. I agree.”

  Riggs left to issue the proper set of commands, leaving Moosic alone to watch the monitors and think. He didn’t like to think much right now, but he did feel a little bit more comfortable with a classical hostage situation. He watched the tiny figures on the monitors and tried to figure out just what they were doing.

  Ron Moosic hadn’t started out to be a cop, not even the kind of high-tech one he wound up being. His greatgrandfather had come to the eastern Pennsylvania coal mines when that area was flourishing. The family name then was thirty-seven letters long and pure Georgian—the one south of Russia, not the one south of South Carolina. The old boy had heard that if you didn’t Americanize your name, the immigration boys would, so he looked at a map of where the Immigration Society had written he’d be living and saw, near Scranton, a little town that sounded reasonable to him, and he’d written in the name Moosic with no understanding of the jokes his descendants would have to bear because of it.

  Ron’s father had also worked in the mines, and the boy had grown up in the small town of Shamokin, Pennsylvania, a town whose biggest claim to fame was the largest slag heap in North America. It towered over the town, and it was on fire all the time. Still, it was a nice town in which to grow up, large enough for all the civilized amenities and small enough not to have many of civilization’s biggest penalties. One penalty for a miner was always injury, though, and his father had been hauled out of the mine when Ron was still small. A loader had backed into him, crushing him between it and the wall of coal. He’d lived a few more years, a permanent invalid with a strong spirit and sense of life, but complications finally took him when Ron was just eleven.

  Vic Moosic had been a big bear of a man, with bright eyes and walrus moustache. He looked a little like all those pictures of another Georgian, Joe Stalin, and always had claimed to be related to the Soviet dictator. “Old Joe got all the meanness,” he often said. Later, when Vic’s son needed an exhaustive security check, it was found that the Moosic family was not even originally Georgian, but rather Uzbeck. Young Ron had always rather liked the idea of being an Uzbeck. Nobody else he’d ever met could make that claim.

  Insurance and the union helped out a little—his mother had needed it, with six kids ranging from ages seven to fourteen—but they were not a wealthy family. His older brothers had gone into the mines, but he had not. He’d always been more intellectual and reclusive than his brothers and sisters, but he’d worshipped his father and his father had understood his peculiarities. “You’re not like them,” Vic kept telling him. “You got the family brains, boy. Don’t go into the mines. Find a way out. You’ll be the first one.”

  And he had found the way. It was called the U.S. Air Force, and it offered a smart, young high school graduate free college for a set number of years of service. He’d majored in geography at Penn State, with a minor in computer science, and done pretty well. The Air Force, at least, thought highly of him, and after graduation they assigned him to intelligence work.

  It sounded romantic, but it wasn’t. Nuts-and-bolts stuff, mostly—cryptography, aerial photo interpretation, that sort of thing. Still, at the end of twelve years he was thirty, a major, and on the right career track. He also, along the way, met and married Barbara.

  He never quite came to grips with splitting up. At the start, she’d been pretty and sexy and had a desire to see the world. She was a college graduate, but was never really on his intellectual level, something he knew from the start. Well, maybe that was unfair, but she read very little and watched a lot of TV, and she seemed to have not the slightest curiosity about his work, although he really couldn’t have told her anything specific anyway. She wanted kids, and he did, too, but after three miscarriages, the last of which almost killed her, the doctors told them that she could never have them. She’d changed after that, although he’d told her that it didn’t make any difference to him. Somehow, she seemed to blame him for her enforced barrenness, although it was clearly the fault of no one. Her irrationality became progressively worse and painful to him. It was his fault she could not bear children, yet somehow this made her, in her own eyes, less a woman, and she dreamed up all sorts of paranoid fantasies that he was having affairs all over the place. She became increasingly bitter, and frigid.

  Ultimately, he’d given up, inventing excuses not to be home, and, eventually, he’d had an affair. She never knew for sure, but when you’re accused of something incessantly, you don’t incur a penalty for really doing it. Ultimately, they’d had a final blow-up, and that had been that. The temporary alimony she’d been awarded had stopped three years ago, with the last check going to an address in San Francisco, and he had no idea where she was or what she was doing now.

  The funny thing was, he still loved her—or, rather, he loved the woman he’d married and hated what she’d become. He’d been faithful to her through all the good years, and if she’d accepted things, he’d have remained so, or at least he liked to believe he would have. He’d certainly had a series of strictly physical affairs since, but he found it impossible to get really close to another woman. He wanted some permanence, perhaps even a kid or two before he was too old to see them grow up, but he couldn’t take the plunge again. He was, he knew, just too afraid that it might all happen again, and that would be more than he could stand.

  Shortly after the divorce, he’d been posted to the NSA. He owed the Air Force no more service, and it didn’t take much genius to realize that he could take on the same sort of jobs permanently at a much higher pay level than the Air Force would give him, with all his service time counting towards government seniority and retirement. Despite a lot of pleading, he resigned from the service and took on a permanent job as a civilian. Within a year he did the usual, joining a reserve unit at Andrews, hiking pay and benefits still further. It was the way the government game was played, and he played it pretty well.

  Not that things were any more romantic at the National Security Agency. The massive complex, about halfway between Baltimore and Washington, was the real nerve center of U.S. Intelligence, happy to let the CIA take the publicity and the heat. Still, what it was was mostly dull, plodding, boring work, the biggest challenge being to sift through the enormous amounts of information pouring in at all times for things that seemed important or worth following up. Computers made it possible, but it still came down to the human element at the end. The tens of thousands of NSA agents employed there were, in fact, a highly paid infantry forever trying to take the paperwork hill—and losing.

  And now, thanks to some boredom and the ability to solve complex topological puzzles that were security problems, here he was, staring down at someb
ody else’s failure.

  “One of them’s calling for negotiations,” the woman at the control panel called out. “What do you want to do? Mr. Riggs is topside now, talking to the National Security Advisor.’’

  “Put it on here, if you can,” Moosic instructed her. “I’ll talk to him.”

  It was Sandoval, his handsome face and large, dark eyes telling the world how he got so many women to commit treason for him.

  Somebody came over and showed Moosic how to work the intercom. “Ron Moosic here, Sandoval. Let’s hear it.”

  The revolutionary could not repress a snicker. “Moosic?” He turned to Cline, the traitor within. “Who’s he?”

  She shrugged. “Never heard of him.”

  “All right. Who are you, Moo-sic?”

  A little edge. Not much, but something. “I’m the Security Director for this station.”

  “That’s Riggs.”

  “I’m his boss. I’m the man who decides if we can evacuate this place and I’m the man who can push the button that will make it a big blob of bubbling goo.”

  “You wouldn’t do it. Not with all these hostages here. Not with the brains you’d melt with us, and the money.”

  “Riggs wouldn’t do it, maybe. I would. And I already have the presidential authority. I don’t know those people down there, so it’s not as hard for me. Sort of like a bomber pilot who never sees who his bombs land on. I do know we were closing down this place and moving to a better one with more power, so we don’t lose there. Nobody down there is irreplaceable, either.” He checked the monitors and saw the drawn faces and nervous glances among the others there. He had drained them of their self-confidence, and that was a victory. Now it was time to drop a little sugar in the vinegar.