Elliot pointed the gun at him. “Don’t move.”
But the young guard was the heroic type. He was wearing a sidearm—a monstrous revolver—and he was fast with it. He drew, aimed from the hip, and squeezed the trigger. Fortunately Danny came through like a prince. The revolver refused to fire.
Elliot didn’t want to shoot anyone. “Your guns are useless,” he said. He was sweating in his Gore-Tex suit, praying that Danny wouldn’t let him down. “Let’s make this as easy as we can.”
When the young guard discovered that his revolver wouldn’t work, he threw it.
Elliot ducked, but not fast enough. The gun struck him alongside the head, and he stumbled backward against the steel door.
Tina cried out.
Through sudden tears of pain, Elliot saw the young guard rushing him, and he squeezed off one whisper-quiet shot.
The bullet tore through the guy’s left shoulder and spun him around. He crashed into a desk, sending a pile of white and pink papers onto the floor, and then he fell on top of the mess that he had made.
Blinking away tears, Elliot pointed the pistol at the older guard, who had drawn his revolver by now and had found that it didn’t work either. “Put the gun aside, sit down, and don’t make any trouble.”
“How’d you get in here?” the older guard asked, dropping his weapon as he’d been ordered. “Who are you?”
“Never mind,” Elliot said. “Just sit down.”
But the guard was insistent. “Who are you people?” “Justice,” Tina said.
• • •
Five minutes west of Reno, the chopper encountered snow. The flakes were hard, dry, and granular; they hissed like driven sand across the Perspex windscreen.
Jack Morgan, the pilot, glanced at George Alexander and said, “This will be hairy.” He was wearing night-vision goggles, and his eyes were invisible.
“Just a little snow,” Alexander said. “A storm,” Morgan corrected. “You’ve flown in storms before.”
“In these mountains the downdrafts and crosscurrents are going to be murderous.” “We’ll make it,” Alexander said grimly.
“Maybe, maybe not,” Morgan said. He grinned. “But we’re sure going to have fun trying!”
“You’re crazy,” Hensen said from his seat behind the pilot.
“When we were running operations against the drug lords down in Colombia,” Morgan said, “they called me ‘Bats,’ meaning I had bats in the belfry.” He laughed.
Hensen was holding a submachine gun across his lap. He moved his hands over it slowly, as if he were caressing a woman. He closed his eyes, and in his mind he disassembled and then reassembled the weapon. He had a queasy stomach. He was trying hard not to think about the chopper the bad weather, and the likelihood that they would take a long, swift, hard fall into a remote mountain ravine.
37
THE YOUNG GUARD WHEEZED IN PAIN, BUT AS FAR as Tina could see, he was not mortally wounded. The bullet had partially cauterized the wound as it passed through. The hole in the guy’s shoulder was reassuringly clean, and it wasn’t bleeding much. “You’ll live,” Elliot said.
“I’m dying. Jesus!”
“No. It hurts like hell, but it isn’t serious. The bullet didn’t sever any major blood vessels.”
“How the hell would you know?” the wounded man asked, straining his words through clenched teeth.
“If you lie still, you’ll be all right. But if you agitate the wound, you might tear a bruised vessel, and then you’ll bleed to death.”
“Shit,” the guard said shakily. “Understand?” Elliot asked.
The man nodded. His face was pale, and he was sweating.
Elliot tied the older guard securely to a chair. He didn’t want to tie the wounded man’s hands, so they carefully moved him to a supply closet and locked him in there.
“How’s your head?” Tina asked Elliot, gently touching the ugly knot that had raised on his temple, where the guard’s gun had struck him.
Elliot winced. “Stings.” “It’s going to bruise.” “I’ll be all right,” he said. “Dizzy?”
“No.”
“Seeing double?”
“No,” he said. “I’m fine. I wasn’t hit that hard. There’s no concussion. Just a headache. Come on. Let’s find Danny and get him out of this place.”
They crossed the room, passing the guard who was bound and gagged in his chair. Tina carried the remaining rope, and Elliot kept the gun.
Opposite the sliding door through which she and Elliot had entered the security room was another door of more ordinary dimensions and construction. It opened onto a junction of two hallways, which Tina had discovered a few minutes ago, just after Elliot had shot the guard, when she had peeked through the door to see if reinforcements were on the way.
The corridors had been deserted then. They were deserted now too. Silent. White tile floors. White walls. Harsh fluorescent lighting.
One passageway extended fifty feet to the left of the door and fifty feet to the right; on both sides were more doors, all shut, plus a bank of four elevators on the right. The intersecting hall began directly in front of them, across from the guardroom, and bored at least four hundred feet into the mountain; a long row of doors waited on each side of it, and other corridors opened off it as well.
They whispered:
“You think Danny is on this floor?” “I don’t know.”
“Where do we start?”
“We can’t just go around jerking open doors.”
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