Brain Jack Part 8

He watched on one of the security monitors as the gates began to grind their way open.

He marked his watch. Plenty of time, but he had better not hang around. The gates would automatically shut after two minutes if left open.

He ran back along the short corridor and headed for the cage.

The gates were wide open by the time he got there. Heavy, metal, and open like a 7-Eleven.

Sam burst through the inner door to the cage and made at least five or six yards toward the gates before he heard a click from behind him.

He faltered, then stopped dead as the low tones of Warden Brewer came from near the door.

"Goin' somewheres?"

Sam stood motionless, breathing heavily, before turning to face Brewer.

The warden's cap was pulled low, casting his face in shadow, but his eyes caught the glare of the incandescent bulbs at the end of the cage and glinted like cat's eyes from under the peak. His fleshy jowls pulled up into a menacing smile, his teeth bared like a wild animal.

Brewer had a gun in his hand. Some kind of pistol. Sleek, black, and deadly, and aimed right at Sam's chest. At this range, he couldn't miss.

Sam took a step backward. A step closer to the gates.

"That's about as far's you get," Brewer said, rising off a wooden seat by the delivery dock. "Fire alarm at this time of night seemed just a mite convenient to me. And all the phone lines going dead? Very suspicious."

Sam glanced at his watch. Over a minute was gone already.

Brewer saw the movement. "About a minute left," he said, "before them gates close. After that it won't matter what kind of trickery you got up to in the watchhouse. They won't be opening again."

Sam didn't doubt it.

"I guess you 'n' me'll just wait it out," Brewer said. "Seeing as you don't seem to feel much like talking."

Sam remained silent, and Brewer continued, "Police'll be here in a minute or two. I dunno how you cut off the phones, but you forgot about the emergency radio."

He must have seen the expression on Sam's face, because he whistled softly and said, "You didn't forget about the radio, did you? What'd you do to it? Don't matter, I guess."

All Sam had done to the computerized radio system was to change the frequency. As simple as that. No doubt someone somewhere would have picked up the transmission, but not the police or anyone else who would understand what it was.

"Don't matter," Brewer said. "'Cause the fire department gonna be here in a coupla minutes anyways. They'll have their own radios in their trucks, and I don't s'pose you figured out a way to screw up their radios, now, did you?"

Sam took another step backward, a couple of feet closer to the gates. His eye caught the security camera above Brewer's head, and a plan started to form in his mind.

"Don't you move," Brewer said, raising the gun, but Sam did move. He raised his hands high in the air and slowly turned around.

"Better," Brewer said. "Now you're getting the idea."

In front of Sam the gates began to close.

He took a step toward them.

"Next step is your last, boy," Brewer said.

"I don't think so." Sam found his voice. "You won't do it."

"I don't think you wanna find out," Brewer said.

"See the camera?" Sam said, nodding toward the camera to the left above the gates. "CNN. Live feed. I wired it right into their network." It wasn't true, but how would Brewer know? He gestured toward the one on the right. "Fox News, and the two at the back are BBC. You want to be seen all over the world shooting an unarmed teenager in the back?"

He took another step and there was no shot. He took one more. The gates were a quarter closed now. The gap was narrowing rapidly.

He sensed rather than saw Brewer holster the pistol, but he heard the heavy, hasty footsteps behind him.

Sam dropped his head and sprinted toward the gates.

Brewer was older, fatter, and slower than Sam. Sam would have easily beaten him if he hadn't caught his left shoe behind his right ankle and gone sprawling across the tarmac four or five yards from the gates.

He was up quickly, though, and actually through the gates when a meaty hand latched on to the collar of his jacket. Sam was stopped dead in his tracks. He turned around to see the sweating, scowling face of Brewer just an arm's length away.

"Gotcha!" Brewer said triumphantly.

"Not unless you want to lose that arm," Sam noted.

It was true. Sam had slipped through the slenderest of gaps, and Brewer was too large to get through behind him. The gap had already narrowed even more, and there was no way Brewer would be able to pull Sam back inside.

Only his arm was through the gates now, and the heavy metal edges were closing in fast.

Brewer swore violently and s.n.a.t.c.hed his arm back inside, just as the gates slammed shut.

Sam didn't wait around for any clever repartee. He just ran. He had allowed himself ten minutes to get to the intersection of MacArthur Boulevard and Little Falls Road. He had already used three.

Sam ran. A strong, gusty breeze buffeted him, alternately pus.h.i.+ng him backward and helping him along. He stayed off the boulevard with its inconstant stream of headlights and ran on the gra.s.s of the reservoir park alongside, staying in the darkness by the high safety fence.

Sweat streamed from his face. His chest ached, his knee also. He must have hurt it when he had tripped inside the cage. He ignored it and ran.

Kiwi would have sent the "false alarm" message by now. The one thing Sam had needed him to do. It would take only a minute for the fire controller to relay that to the fire trucks, and they would turn around at the first place they could-the MacArthur Boulevard and Little Falls Road intersection.

He had to get there first.

Sam ran.

He wondered what kind of confusion he had left behind him at Recton. The codes no longer worked. The phones and radios were inoperable. The cell-phone jammer was still operating, though; he had made sure of that.

The guards were captives in their own prison and unable to tell anyone about it.

He would have laughed out loud if he had had the breath. But he didn't.

He ran.

The flas.h.i.+ng red lights of a fire truck appeared along the boulevard in front of him, partly obscured by the trees in the narrow strip of parkland. Even as he watched, the truck slowed and the lights ceased.

It was only a few hundred yards away now, but the truck slowed further, signaled, and turned left, not right as he had thought, heading down the other side of MacArthur Boulevard rather than taking the shortcut back through Little Falls. No matter. As long as he got there in time.

Eighty yards to go, that was all, and the second truck, a large pumper unit, clearly visible in the glare of the intersection streetlights, turned and moved away in the stream of traffic heading south down the boulevard.

A third fire truck turned and was gone, and then the fourth and last truck signaled and turned while he was still twenty yards away.

The last truck stopped in the through road, giving way to an eighteen-wheeler and a succession of sedans before making the turn.

Sam caught the truck as it was just starting to move, grabbing a chrome bar with one hand and swinging himself up onto the back running board, hanging on, barely, as it accelerated away.

Wind whipped at his hair and threatened to knock him off his perch, but he clung tightly to the round metal bar and pulled himself as close as possible to the body of the truck.

There was no traffic behind him, for which he was grateful, as it might be a bit hard to explain what he was doing there if an alert motorist noticed him.

The traffic was light heading back along Dalecarlia Parkway to Friends.h.i.+p Village, and the trip pa.s.sed without incident.

He stepped off the back of the truck at the first intersection they came to in the town center, seeing the lights of a taxi stand at the end of the street.

He heard sirens now, not fire but police sirens, only a few blocks away, without doubt sounding for him. Brewer must have found a way to raise the alarm.

Sam strolled casually along to the taxi stand, opening the door and sliding into the backseat of the first cab at the stand.

"Where to, guv'nor?" the driver asked, sounding just like a London cabbie, or at least what Sam's impression of a London cabbie was like from TV shows and movies. He had a pa.s.sing feeling that he had seen this driver before, but that was surely impossible.

"The train station," Sam said calmly. He didn't want to sound like a prisoner on the run, even if he was one.

"Bethesda or Silver Spring?" the driver asked. "Bethesda is closer, but the express goes through Silver Spring."

"Bethesda," Sam answered. He'd checked that out too. The express didn't run this late at night, but Bethesda was on the red line, and he could catch a train to Union Station. From there he could disappear anywhere he wanted.

"Rightio, Bethesda it is, then, guv," the driver said, turning around to face him.

He was surprisingly young for a cabdriver, Sam thought. No more than eighteen and completely bald under a peaked cap. His face was long and thin, but there was a glint of a chuckle in his eyes. Sam had never seen him before in his life, and yet...

Then he got it. It was the voice. The accent, it was unmistakable.

The driver grinned, a slightly macabre, almost demonic, smile, even without the face paint. He tilted back his cap, revealing the tattoo of a biohazard symbol on his forehead.

"Skullface!" Sam cried out, and the driver laughed.

"Took your bleedin' time gettin' out, ya muppet," he said. "Another day an' we'd have had to send you home."

REVELATIONS

12 SILICON VALLEY

"You're Sam Wilson?"

The man in front of Sam was tall, his back straight, his head erect. Ex-military, Sam thought. A scar ran sideways across his face, crossing just below the bridge of his nose.

"Yes. Yes, sir," Sam managed, trying not to stare at the scar.

"Come with me, son."

Sam stood up from the chair in the waiting area and tried to keep up with the man as he made quick yards down a long, featureless corridor.

A woman was waiting for the man at the end of the corridor, by the open door to an office. She was short and plump and less than five feet tall, but with a huge frizz of orange hair that added another six inches. She glanced briefly at Sam before handing the man a folder.

It was only for a half second, but in that time he felt as though he had been x-rayed. That her small, black eyes had burned their way through to his soul.

The tall man opened the folder, reviewing its contents.

"How good is the intel?" he asked the woman.

"As good as it gets," she said. "We just don't know when. It could be this afternoon, or it might not be for months."

The man nodded and returned the folder. "Okay. We'll raise the threat level. Go to lockdown."

"I'll tell the team," the woman said, glancing again at Sam.

"Thanks. I'll be along shortly."

The woman disappeared back along the corridor with the folder as Sam followed the man into the office.

"Sit down, Mr. Wilson," he said, taking a seat behind a large desk.

Sam sat on a chair on the other side. A photo of the man in a marine uniform sat on a bookshelf to his right, confirming the military background. The man in the photo had no scar, though.

"My name is John Jaggard. Welcome to Homeland Security," the man said.

"CDD?" Sam ventured, and Jaggard nodded.

Cyber Defense Division.

"I don't quite understand why I'm here," Sam said carefully. "Am I in trouble?"

"You should be," Jaggard said, punching something on his keyboard that brought up Sam's file on a screen they could both see. He handed Sam a thick sheaf of papers. "But as it happens, we need people with your skills. We want you to work for us."

"Work for you?"