Drummond took the slain guard’s pistol and, leading with it, inched out of the conference room. With leaden limbs, Charlie followed, still clad only in boxer shorts-there hadn’t been time to locate the rest of his clothes. The chill of the cement floor bit into his bare soles and shot up his shinbones.
“We’ll sneak out through the old east tunnel, to the university campus,” Drummond said. “Less chance of running into guards.”
The corridor was still and quiet, save the drone of the ventilators. The bare concrete walls meant no recesses or shadows in which an adversary could hide; a mouse would have stood out.
“I need you to cover me,” Drummond said, passing back the Glock.
“I’ll try,” said Charlie. He took the gun with both hands, judging just one frail hand inadequate.
If Fielding or his remaining men were to shoot, they would likely position themselves at one of four corners-there were two corners at each end of the corridor. Charlie pivoted on his numb heels, swinging the gun barrel from one end of the corridor to the other, a motion like a metronome’s. He wasn’t sure whether it was a good system.
Drummond ran west, or so Charlie thought; his bearings had been scrambled along with the rest of him. He was certain, though, that the tunnel to campus was to the east.
Drummond beckoned from the corner, and Charlie sprinted. Concern that they were headed in the wrong direction took his mind off the pain.
Nearing Drummond, he asked, “Isn’t the campus the other-?”
Drummond shot a finger to his lips. “I said that in case anyone was listening,” he whispered. “Really we’ll go out through the tunnel to the Perriman subbasement.”
Again he was on the move, with Charlie left to supply cover fire. The next corridor was identical to the last, with the exception of a six-foot-high metal canister imbedded in the wall. Drummond stopped at it and signaled Charlie.
As Charlie reached him, Drummond pressed his right eye into the scanning module mounted on the wall beside the canister. A laser hummed within it.
Charlie wondered whether the Cavalry had taken Drummond off the guest list. Perhaps while shooting at him throughout the woods and mountains of Virginia all day and night, they hadn’t considered the chase would wind up back at the office. The answer came with a hydraulic hiss, as the canister rotated, presenting a compartment like that of a revolving door.
Drummond ushered Charlie in, then crammed in alongside him. The cylinder began to rotate again, groaning beneath their weight. The compartment was sealed by the circular wall, plunging them into total darkness. Halfway around, it reopened onto a galaxy of luminous dials, gauges, and displays. When the compartment was completely open, the conveyance stopped with a mechanical grunt.
Drummond reached out and swatted at a wall panel. Rows of lamps high overhead tingled on, revealing a white rubber-walled laboratory the size of a gymnasium. “For reasons that will become apparent straightaway, this is known as the laundry room,” he said, at normal volume.
Charlie followed him into a cityscape of gleaming machines and ducts. He recognized centrifuges, condensers, incubators, and robotic arms; there were exponentially more gadgets whose functions he couldn’t guess. On the back wall was a garage door big enough to allow through the motorized pallet truck parked beside it. By Charlie’s reckoning this door opened onto the tunnel to Perriman’s subbasement. He assumed the door was their destination.
Drummond stopped well short of it, at a row of washing machines. “I don’t think we’ll be able to sneak out or even gun our way out of here,” he said. “But if we arm one of these devices, then threaten to detonate it by remote control, Fielding will let us waltz out; he may even call us a car.”
“I thought these don’t really do anything.”
“The uranium doesn’t do anything, but the systems still operate like nuclear weapons insofar as they initiate with ninety-seven-point-eight pounds of penthrite and trinitrotoluene. That would be enough to blast apart a good percentage of this complex.”
“Sounds good to me, unless it’s at all hard to arm a nuclear weapon.”
“Yes and no.” Drummond popped open the top-loading lid of a Perriman Pristina model.
Inside, where clothing would go, was a cluster of electrical components. Unlike the nuclear weapons Charlie had seen in movies, this one had no display panel with illuminated digits that ticked down to 00:00. There was just a cheap, battery-powered alarm clock, held in place by what appeared to be wadded bubble gum.
Leaning into the machine, Drummond rummaged through a jungle of wires and tubes and cleared a path to three numeric dials, like those on safes. “These are permissive action links,” he explained. “In the Soviet Union, this sort of weapon would have been armed by three men, each knowing just one third of the code.”
“What if, hypothetically, you’ve forgotten the code?”
“If I input the wrong code more than twice, a capacitor will fry, leaving the system unable to detonate,” Drummond said. “But we don’t need to worry about my memory for once.” He pointed to a card adhered to the washer’s instrument panel, listing make, model, and energy usage information. From its base he peeled a strip of yellow tape imprinted with a sequence of one- and two-digit numbers. “This serial number’s not the actual serial number.” Carefully he maneuvered the first dial into place, then began on the second.
Charlie’s eyes bounced between the cylindrical entryway and the garage door, anticipating Fielding and company would at any second send one or the other blasting inward.
“Okay, done, except for the clicker.” Drummond jogged toward a tool cabinet across the room. “While I find it, why don’t you put on a uniform?” He indicated a hanger rack of royal blue Perriman Appliances repairmen’s coveralls. On the floor were pairs of rubber boots. “You’ll be conspicuous in it once we’re out of the complex but not as much as in what you have on now.” He meant Charlie’s boxers.
As Charlie dressed, a staccato movement sucked his eyes back to the bomb. The second hand on the alarm clock was ticking counterclockwise. Every hair on his body shot up.
“Dad!”
“Sorry, should have mentioned that. I’m intentionally running the timer down to about ninety seconds-too little time for them to retrieve the PAL sequence from the computers and dial in the numbers in reverse, to disarm the device.” Drummond crumpled the strip of yellow tape with the “serial number” into a ball no bigger than a pea, then dropped it through a drain grate. “But it will be plenty of time for us to trigger the device, if it comes to that, then get out of harm’s way.” From the tool cabinet, he dug out what appeared to be a TV remote control. Aiming it at the washing machine, he pressed a button. The conic bulb on the gadget’s head glowed red.
The second hand on the alarm clock ticked to a stop at the 6. The hour hand was slightly left of the 12 and the minute hand pointed halfway between the 10 and the 11.
“Ninety seconds on the nose,” he said with satisfaction.
Charlie mopped perspiration from his brow. “After all we’ve been through, it would be a shame to die of a heart attack.”
Drummond smiled. “Well, what do you say we go for a boat ride?”