“People are going to be behind some of them.” “And the fewer people we encounter—”

“—the better chance we have of getting out alive.”

They stood, indecisive, looking left, then right, and then straight ahead. Ten feet away, a set of elevator doors opened.

Tina cringed back against the corridor wall. Elliot pointed the pistol at the lift.

No one got out.

The cab was at such an angle from them that they couldn’t see who was in it. The doors closed.

Tina had the sickening feeling that someone had been about to step out, had sensed their presence, and had gone away to get help.

Even before Elliot had lowered the pistol, the same set of elevator doors slid open again. Then slid shut. Open. Shut. Open. Shut. Open.

The air grew cold.

With a sigh of relief, Tina said, “It’s Danny. He’s showing us the way.”

Nevertheless, they crept cautiously to the elevator and peered inside apprehensively. The cab was empty, and they boarded it, and the doors glided together.

According to the indicator board above the doors, they were on the fourth of four levels. The first floor was at the bottom of the structure, the deepest underground.

The cab controls would not operate unless one first inserted an acceptable ID card into a slot above them. But Tina and Elliot didn’t need the computer’s authorization to use the elevator; not with Danny on their side. The light on the indicator board changed from  four to three to two, and the air inside the lift became so frigid that Tina’s breath hung in clouds before her. The doors slid open three floors below the surface, on the next to the last level.

They stepped into a hallway exactly like the one they had left upstairs.

The elevator doors closed behind them, and around them the air grew warmer again.

Five feet away, a door stood ajar, and animated conversation drifted out of the room beyond. Men’s and women’s voices. Half a dozen or more, judging by the sound of them. Indistinct words. Laughter.

Tina knew that she and Elliot were finished if someone came out of that room and saw them. Danny seemed able to work miracles with inanimate objects, but he could not control people, like the guard upstairs, whom Elliot had been forced to shoot. If they were discovered and confronted by a squad of angry security men, Elliot’s one pistol might not be enough to discourage an assault. Then, even with Danny jamming the enemy’s weapons, she and Elliot would be able to escape only if they slaughtered their way out, and she knew that neither of them had the stomach for that much murder, perhaps not even in self-defense.

Laughter pealed from the nearby room again, and Elliot said softly, “Where now?” “I don’t know.”

This level was the same size as the one on which they entered the complex: more than four hundred feet on one side, and more than one hundred feet on the other. Forty thousand or fifty thousand square feet to search. How many rooms? Forty? Fifty? Sixty? A hundred, counting closets?

Just as she was beginning to despair, the air began to turn cold again. She looked around, waiting for some sign from her child, and she and Elliot twitched in surprise when the overhead fluorescent tube winked off, then came on again. The tube to the left of the first one also flickered. Then a third tube sputtered, still farther to the left.

They followed the blinking lights to the end of the short wing in which the elevators were situated. The corridor terminated in an airtight steel door similar to those found on submarines; the burnished metal glowed softly, and light gleamed off the big round- headed rivets.

As Tina and Elliot reached that barrier, the wheel-like handle in the center spun around. The door cycled open. Because he had the pistol, Elliot went through first, but Tina was close behind him.

They were in a rectangular room approximately forty feet by twenty. At the far end a window filled the center of the other short wall and apparently offered a view of a cold- storage vault; it was white with frost. To the right of the window was another airtight door like the one through which they’d just entered. On the left, computers and other equipment extended the length of the chamber. There were more video displays than Tina could count at a glance; most were switched on, and data flowed in the form of graphs, charts, and numbers. Tables were arranged along the fourth wall, covered with books, file folders, and numerous instruments that Tina could not identify.

A curly-haired man with a bushy mustache sat at one of the tables. He was tall, broad- shouldered, in his fifties, and he was wearing medical whites. He was paging through a book when they burst in. Another man, younger than the first, clean-shaven, also dressed in white, was sitting at a computer, reading the information that flashed onto the display screen. Both men looked up, speechless with amazement.

Covering the strangers with the menacing, silencer-equipped pistol, Elliot said, ‘Tina, close the door behind us. Lock it if you can. If security discovers we’re here, at least they won’t be able to get their hands on us for a while.”

She swung the steel door shut. In spite of its tremendous weight, it moved more smoothly and easily than an average door in an average house. She spun the wheel and located a pin that, when pushed, prevented anyone from turning the handle back to the unlocked position.

“Done,” she said.

The man at the computer suddenly turned to the keyboard and started typing. “Stop that,” Elliot advised.

But the guy wasn’t going to stop until he had instructed the computer to trigger the alarms.

Maybe Danny could prevent the alarms from sounding, and maybe he could not, so Elliot fired once, and the display screen dissolved into thousands of splinters of glass.

The man cried out, pushed his wheeled chair away from the keyboard, and thrust to his feet. “Who the hell are you?”

“I’m the one who has the gun,” Elliot said sharply. “If that’s not good enough for you, I can shut you down the same way I did that damn machine. Now park your ass in that chair before I blow your fuckin’ head off.”

Tina had never heard Elliot speak in this tone of voice, and his furious expression was sufficient to chill even her. He seemed to be utterly vicious and capable of anything.

The young man in white was impressed too. He sat down, pale.

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