40
GIDEON STARED AT her in disbelief. Surely he must have misheard or misunderstood something. “Alida, what are you doing?”
She turned to him, poised and collected. “I’ve been waiting for my opportunity. I told you I couldn’t wait to turn you in. Remember?”
For the moment he was too shocked to feel any anger.
“You almost had me believing you back there,” she said. “But when I saw those emails—”
“They were planted!”
“Yeah. And all those FBI agents, all those choppers, everyone shooting at you—I suppose that’s all just a mistake, too. It’s just too much to believe, Gideon. I’m not that gullible.”
Gideon heard footsteps pounding down the corridor. He quickly drew the six-gun, fired it once into the air. Then he grabbed Chu’s arm, turned his arm behind his back, and put the gun to his head. “Out,” he barked. “Into the hall.”
With a gasp of fear Chu scrambled to obey.
“The gun’s a fake!” Alida cried, chasing after them.
“Trust me, it’s real!” Gideon said. “Don’t make me kill him!”
Gideon pushed Chu ahead of him, at a jog. The high-security checkpoint to the inner labs was just down the hall. They rounded the corner and came to the checkpoint, with two metal detectors and several guards—all of whom had their own weapons drawn.
“He’s a dead man if you stop me!” Gideon shouted, shoving Chu through the metal detector, which went off with a shrill alarm.
“It’s a stage gun, you idiots!” Alida yelled.
“You want me to prove it’s real? If you follow, I shoot!” He continued on, thrusting Chu down the hall to the emergency stairs. He slammed open the door with his shoulder and dragged Chu down the stairs with him. The only person to follow was Alida.
“Bitch!” Gideon said as Alida threw herself on his back and tried to grab his gun. He knocked her aside but she came back at him again, punching him, again trying to rip the gun out of his hand.
“Stop it!” yelled Chu.
Gideon twisted away, pushing Chu through the doors at the bottom of the stairs and into the particle accelerator control room. Two operators stood there, at the large semicircle of monitors and instrumentation, staring in shock.
Gideon again heard the pounding of feet in the corridor outside.
“On the floor! Everyone!” He fired the gun into the ceiling.
The operators dove to the floor. Funny, Gideon thought grimly, how the makers of some of the world’s most fearful weapons were in reality a bunch of rabbits.
Seconds later half a dozen security officers burst in, weapons drawn. They were not Los Alamos security—they were all wearing NEST uniforms.
“Drop the gun!” one shouted as they all leveled their weapons at him.
Gideon pulled Chu around as a shield, the gun pressed to the man’s head. Chu issued an inarticulate croak.
“He’s got a fake gun, damn it!” Alida cried.
The lead security officer swiveled around, leveling his gun at Alida. “You!” he yelled. “On the floor! Now!”
“Me? What the—”
With a jerk of his head, the officer signaled to two others, who immediately tackled her, slamming her to the ground. They began searching her roughly.
“Son of a bitch!” she screamed, writhing on the ground.
“Quiet!” One of the men struck her in the face.
Gideon couldn’t believe it. They really thought she was a terrorist, too.
The NEST leader turned his gun back at Gideon. “Drop your weapon and release your hostage—or we open fire.”
Gideon realized that, Chu or no, they weren’t kidding: they would shoot right through Chu to nail him, if necessary.
“All right,” he said.
It was over. He lowered the gun from Chu’s head and held it out, letting it drop to the floor. Chu scrambled up and away, behind the guards. Slowly, Gideon raised his hands.
The two guards jerked Alida back up, their search completed. Blood poured from her nose, spotting her white shirt.
“Cuff her,” the NEST leader said. “And you: Crew. Facedown on the ground. Slowly.”
“Morons!” Alida yelled, trying to kick one of them. One of the guards struck her in the stomach, doubling her over.
“Leave her alone, she had nothing to do with it!” Gideon said.
“On the ground!” the man shouted at Gideon, leveling his gun.
Keeping his hands out, Gideon began to kneel—and that was when he saw an opportunity. As he went down, he steadied himself with a hand on the accelerator control console, laying it casually over a small switch covered with a red plastic cap—the emergency power cutoff switch. He rested one knee on the ground, then the other, while beneath his cupped hand he worked off the cover to the emergency switch, grasping it tightly.
“Hurry up and get down! Flat on the floor! Flat!” the NEST leader shouted impatiently, twitching the .45.
Gideon steadied himself. Then he said in a quiet voice: “If I pull this switch, we’re all dead.”
There was a sudden silence.
Gideon turned to the operators. “Tell them.”
One of the operators glanced at Gideon, saw his fingers gripping the switch. The man turned white. “My God,” he said. “That’s the emergency power cutoff. We’re at full power. If he pulls that… Jesus, don’t do it!”
Nobody moved.
Thank you, my friend, Gideon thought. Aloud, he said: “Tell them what will happen if I do.”
“It will shut off the power to the magnetic beam corridor. The beam will decollimate, and a whole lot of us will be blown to bits.”
“You heard him,” said Gideon calmly. “Shoot me, I fall, the switch gets pulled.”
The security officers seemed paralyzed. Six pistols remained pointed at him.
“I’m a desperate man,” Gideon said, his voice low. “And I have nothing to lose. I’m going to count to three. One—”
The head officer glanced left and right. He was sweating like hell, clearly certain that Gideon would do it.
“Two…I’m deadly serious here.”
The leader laid his gun down, and the others quickly followed.
“Good decision. Now release her.”
They released Alida. She fell to her knees, then got up again, breathing hard. She wiped the blood from her nose.
“For the record,” said Gideon, “both of us are innocent. This is a frame job. And I’m going to find out who did it. So I’m sorry, gentlemen, but I’m going to have to leave you. Alida? Whether you like it or not, you’d better stick with me. Please collect their guns from the floor and hand them to me.”
There was a long, smoldering hesitation. Their eyes met. Gideon could still see doubt, hesitation, and anger.
“Alida,” he said, “I don’t know how else to convince you except to appeal to your intuition. Please, please believe me.”
After a moment’s hesitation, Alida went around and collected the pistols from the floor and brought them over to Gideon. He ejected the magazines from all but one and stuck the magazines in his pocket. Then he unloaded the weapons of their chambered rounds, put these in his pocket, and dropped the empty firearms to the ground. He jammed the gun with the blanks into his belt. All the while he kept one hand on the cutoff switch. Finally, with the one loaded pistol in his hand, he took his hand away from the switch and, covering the men, went over to the door into the hallway, shut it, and turned the bolt.
Just in time—he could hear the thunder of feet in the hall outside.
A moment later he heard them at the door, trying to get in. There were shouts, pounding. Another alarm began to sound, this one louder.
“Everyone on the floor—except you.” Gideon pointed the gun at the hysterical operator.
The man raised his hands. “Please. I’ll do whatever you want.”
“I know you will. Unlock the door to the accelerator tunnel.”
The man scurried to the back of the room, hastening to obey. Using a magnetic key, he unlocked a small door in the rear wall and opened it. A faint green glow emerged. Beyond the door, a curved, tube-like tunnel stretched ahead, going almost to the vanishing point. To the right was a catwalk. To the left was a complex cylindrical device, stretching on into infinity, covered with wires and tubing, like the stage of some monstrous rocket. A deep humming sound issued from it. It was a small, straight-line accelerator, some two thousand feet long, but Gideon knew the accelerator tunnel connected to much older tunnels, dating back to the Manhattan Project. Where those tunnels went he had no idea—they were blocked off behind locked doors.
And yet they remained his only chance.
Gideon motioned Alida through the door. Then he took the magnetic key from the operator, relieved the second operator of his key, and followed Alida into the tunnel.
The door shut and locked behind them.
Gideon turned to Alida. “I need to know: are you with me or not? Because if you’re not one hundred percent convinced of my innocence, this is as far as you’re going. I can’t risk another Judas moment like that.”
The silence was interrupted by a flurry of pounding on the door, shouts, and the sound of a third alarm.
She stared back at him. “My answer to you is, we’d better start running like hell.”