Which was how Chesterfield ended up wearing her chains, with handcuffs added to keep him in a hog-tie position, and his own socks stuffed in his mouth with his belt wrapped tight to hold them in place.
“Can you breathe okay?” she asked him.
He nodded, and Suarez, armed with the gun, an extra clip, his radio, and his keys, opened the door to her cell very slightly and looked cautiously left and right. If there were cameras, they were not in evidence. Which did not mean they weren’t there.
Nothing you can do about that but move fast, Suarez told herself. Down the hallway, which carried the ridiculous medieval dungeon theme forward. A door. She cracked it slightly. There was a sort of control room—monitors and swivel chairs and two women chatting as they watched the screens. Panic buttons were large and prominent. She winced. There was no room for error or pity.
“Hey,” she said, stepping into view, and with two head shots dropped the women. One was clearly dead. The other rattled her shallow breaths in and out until Suarez covered her mouth and nose and waited for the final spasm. No point wasting ammo, and no point risking a third shot attracting attention.
Her immediate goal was simple: to find and take the sleigh she’d ridden in and get the hell out of there. But that would require some intel. She dropped into one of the dead women’s seats and began cycling through the camera angles, one of which did in fact show the hallway outside her dungeon. She had been lucky they hadn’t spotted her.
This monitoring station appeared to have only limited access to cameras, concentrating on the dungeon and what appeared to be extensive storerooms. Really quite impressive storerooms, too large to be in any of the aboveground buildings. She saw other people, some armed, some not. Some doing mundane tasks with iPad inventory systems, others driving forklifts, still others …
A man walked toward the monitoring station, holding three disposable cups and a paper sack in a recyclable cardboard holder. He might easily have been coming from a Starbucks.
“Hey, coffee!” he said as he stepped into the room. Suarez grabbed his hand, yanked him forward, slammed the door shut, and blew out his brains.
One of the coffees survived the fall, and she took a sip before getting back to her research. Surely there must be a way to break out of this limited protocol and access more cameras.
She was beginning to regret having killed all three of them—she could have used some help. But then she stumbled upon an open link that led her helpfully to a schematic of the base. The schematic had green dots for camera locations.
The first was password protected. She tried the usual combinations, and none worked. So she rifled the pockets an
d wallets of the dead, and finally found a tiny slip of yellow legal pad.
“Thank God for unreliable memories.” Moments later: “And bingo. We are in.”
The sun was just millimeters above the horizon, and the weak light left the valley in darkness. Stadium lights cast a circle of eerie orange across the main buildings, excepting the house, which cast its own warm, buttery light.
Plath was shaking with cold and fear by the time she had descended the long ramp and then crunched her way across the gravel to the house. She did not spot—indeed did not look for—the sniper who watched her through his telescopic sights.
She climbed the few stairs and stood on the porch of the impossible house belonging, she was certain, to Lystra Reid, also known as Lear.
She pulled off her glove and knocked.
The door flew open to reveal an attractive young woman wearing white yoga pants, shearling boots, and a blue down vest over a sheer white tunic.
Plath pushed up her goggles and slid back her hood.
“Oh. My. God.” Lear said. “It is you.”
“May I come in?” Plath asked, feeling an absurdity in it all that went beyond the merely surreal.
“Mmm, not just yet. First, I should tell you there’s a very good shot watching you, yeah, and ready to fire at any excuse. So. Shrug off the coat, keep your hands where I can see them, and don’t move.” In order to emphasize her point, Lear pointed with one hand at the gun in the other.
Plath complied.
“Now, turn around slowly.”
This, too, Plath did.
“Ah! There we go. You do have a gun. I thought you might.” Lear pulled the gun from Plath’s waistband and tossed it out onto the ice. It came to rest by a lawn ornament, a pink flamingo that must have been someone’s idea of witty commentary on the climate.
“Now, come on and warm up,” Lear said. “Bug and I are drinking excellent bourbon, would you like some?”
“Bug?”
Plath looked past Lear and saw a badly battered Bug Man, sitting on a couch and looking miserable and humiliated, and perhaps just a little hopeful.