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Del Ray stood looking at the floor for a moment, then straightened, some of the panic suddenly gone from his face. "Hold on. I don't think I left it in the kitchen after all. I think I just left it outside the elevator on the top floor of our part of the base. I stored most of the water bottles and the extra generator up there, and I think that's where I took my jacket off."
"I will get it," said Long Joseph brightly, but both men turned on him.
"Shut up."
"Yes, shut up, Joseph."
Del Ray started off toward the stairs. "It's too bad we had to seal off the elevator at both ends—it would be nice if we could keep it to use just down here for dragging stuff up and down."
"Too noisy," Jeremiah called after him. "If we are lucky, they won't even know there are more rooms down here." He suddenly realized how loud his voice was.
Too noisy, you say, and listen to you! What if they're up there with stethoscopes or something, listening to the floor, looking for us. . . .
The idea of the faceless mercenaries—Jeremiah alone of the three had not seen them—crawling along the floor, tapping on the concrete like woodpeckers, was deeply disturbing.
We don't even know they're inside, he told himself. Maybe they can't get through that big front door, like a bank's vault. It took Renie and her hacker friends at least this long to get it open.
Still, the vision would not go away. He looked at Joseph, who was sucking a measured amount of Mountain Rose with a face full of wounded dignity, and decided he had better find something with which to keep himself occupied.
Del Ray had levered open the console and its array of security monitors, revealing a mare's nest of cables that looked like something from an ancient telephone switchboard. Jeremiah sat in the chair the younger man had vacated and meditatively flicked switches. The console had power—all the monitor screens had little red lights glowing beneath them—but the screens themselves were blackly empty.
Joseph was right. If Renie was here she'd have this ru
He tugged at the bundle of cables. All but a few were co
Excited, Jeremiah pulled the end of the trailing cable free and began to touch it to the open co
Before he could tell Long Joseph of his triumph, something caught Jeremiah's attention. One of the monitors displayed a rectangle of trees and scrub brush, framed by blackness. Puzzled, he stared at it for long moments before he realized what he was seeing.
It was the base's massive front gate, seen from a camera just inside. The gate was open.
Three loud cracks came from somewhere above Jeremiah's head. Long Joseph leaped up, swearing, so startled that he dropped his squeeze bottle of wine to the floor. Jeremiah's skin turned cold.
"Del Ray!" he shouted. "Del Ray, is that you?"
For once Joseph kept his mouth shut as they both listened. Nothing came to them but the echo of Jeremiah's own voice.
"Is he shooting that gun?" asked Joseph in a hoarse, nervous whisper. "Or someone shooting at him?"
Jeremiah felt as though his own cry had emptied all the air from his chest: he could only shake his head. For a moment he stood, frightened and confused, trying to decide whether they should shut off the lights and hide. He turned to the console and tried to make sense of the almost monochrome images, seeing what he thought were flickers of movement here or there, but never able to make out anything definitive.
Which one shows upstairs, where Del Ray went?
He recognized the elevator bay at last—not by the elevator itself, which was only a dark shadow along the wall, but because of the old sign posted beside it, a stern warning about the weight the elevator could handle that he had seen so many times he sometimes found himself muttering it under his breath.
He only had time to think, for the very first time in all the weeks he had been immured in the underground base, Seems fu
Dear Mr. Ramsey,
The first time you walked into my house, I thought you were a very nice man. I know it may not have seemed that way, that I may have seemed suspicious. Just listening to me without letting your thoughts show on your face was a kind thing to do, because I am sure you must have thought I was a crazy old woman.
When you read what I have to tell you now, you will be very certain that you were right. I don't mind. When I started to get old, I used to feel bad because men didn't look at me the same way any more, that I wasn't a young girl. I was never pretty, but I was young once, and men do look. When if stopped I felt a little bad, but I thought at least they will take me seriously now. Then when all the things happened to me, the headaches and the problems and my ideas about this Tandagore disease, people stopped even looking at me like I had a brain in my head. But you treated me like a real person. You are a nice man, I was right about you.
I am doing something that is hard to explain and if I am wrong I will wind up in a jail somewhere. If I am right, I will probably be killed. It is a long distance to go to prove a point, I bet you are saying.
But this letter is to tell you that if I am crazy, it doesn't feel like it to me, and that I am doing this with the knowledge that it doesn't seem to make sense. But if you heard the voices I hear in my head, or that I used to hear, you would do what I am doing too. I know you would, because I can tell what kind of man you are.
Before I tell you the other things, that reminds me of something I wanted to say to you. I feel very light now, as if I have taken off a heavy coat and am walking through the snow. Later I may freeze, but for now I am just happy to have that heavy weight off my back. The weight is pretending, you see, and instead I am telling the truth. So I will tell you something that I would never have said to you otherwise. You should get married. You are a good man who works too hard, always in your office, never at your home. I know you will say, what is this crazy old Polish-Russian lady talking about, but you need to find someone to share your life with. I don't even know if you like men or women, and you know what? It doesn't matter to me. But find someone to live with you, that you want to go home for. If you can, have children. Somehow children make sense out of life.
Now I will tell you the rest, about the voices and about Obolos Corporation and Felix Jongleur. Then even if you still think I am crazy, you will understand why I am doing what I am doing. I am telling you just so that someone knows it.
Do you know, if my baby had lived, he would have been just about your age? I think about things like that too much.
And when I have finished explaining there will only be one more thing for you to do. I think there is something called a power of attorney? And since you are an attorney, you would know about this. If I disappear, then please will you sell my things? Mostly only small things and not worth the trouble,-but there is Obolos stock and my house. I have no living relatives and that stock now feels to me like something unclean—"treyf," as my mother would have said. Will you sell them both, please, and give the money to the children's hospital in Toronto?