“Secret Diary of a Cold War Conscientious Objector.” It was the first title that came into my head.
“She can’t open her mouth without lying,” Curly said. “Maybe it’s in these papers here. Go through ’em before we burn them.”
“Don’t burn them!” Martin begged. “They’re irreplaceable, they’re Martina Saginor’s work.”
“You’ll be in a federal prison for stealing national defense secrets, so I don’t think you’ll have to worry about them,” Curly said, not really paying attention to him. He was sifting the papers he’d taken from Martin, dropping them on the floor as he finished with them.
“Mr. Breen needs to look at these,” Durdon announced. “He wants to see any other patents that might have been filed around the same time as the one for our first Metargon computer.”
“We need a box to carry all this crap,” Moe said to Dorothy. “Where do you keep them?”
“They’re in the basement,” Dorothy said in a dull voice. “On the other side of the wall.”
“Show us how to open the door,” Moe ordered her.
“You shot out the electric release,” Dorothy said in the same heavy voice. “I tried to tell you when you started to shoot it that it has a dead man’s switch. The panels lock into place if someone tries to break in.”
“You can go around via the stair ladder.” I nodded my head toward the exit up to Martina’s observatory.
“Someone should have taught you to shut up when you were still young enough to learn,” Durdon said. He swung a fist at me again, but I ducked under it and rolled out of the way. “You, old lady, you live here, you have to know another way to get the panel open.”
Dorothy looked from his gun to Lily. “There’s a button under the table. I don’t know if it will still work, though.”
“You.” Durdon pointed the gun at me. “Do something useful for a change. Push the switch.”
I crouched down under the table to look for the button Martin had been going to push. If there hadn’t been so many people to look out for, if one of them hadn’t been a terrified four-year-old, this would have been my chance.
As it was—as it was, next to the button was a master switch. I pushed the button and the switch at the same time.
The room went dark. Durdon swore and fired, but over the noise from the gun I heard a groaning from the wall panels. Keeping low, I moved toward the sound.
“Meg! Dorothy! Get Lily up the back stairs. Move!” I bellowed. “Alison, Martin, follow me.”
Someone crashed into the worktable, knocking a spool of wire onto my head. A hand lunged at my shoulder. I rolled away from it, kicking wildly, but only connected with air.
The opening in the panels let in a pale light from the basement windows. I could see the big shape of Moe looming over me. There was fighting behind me; a fist connected with skin, followed by a deep groan. Moe grabbed me by the hair. I kicked again, hit a kneecap. Moe jerked my head back.
“I’ve got the boy,” Durdon said. “I’ll shoot him right now if you don’t get the light back on in five seconds.”
The Homeland agent released me with a kick to the back of my knees. I limped to the table and fumbled for the master switch. When the lights came back up, Durdon was holding a half-conscious Martin upright with an arm across his chest. Curly had grabbed Alison at the bottom of the stair-ladder. Tears left white tracks in her dirty face.
Dorothy was still sitting on the daybed, but Lily and Meg had disappeared. When Durdon realized he’d lost two of his hostages, he swore.
“Let’s get what we need and get going,” he said to the Homeland agents. “We can prove we have a right to be here if a local LEO shows, but it would leave us with a lot of loose ends.”
Namely Dorothy, Alison and Martin. And me.
“And cuff the detective bitch to the table. She can die in the fire.”
“Can’t do that,” Curly objected. “If they find her after the fire, they’ll be able to tell the cuffs came from Homeland Security.”
Durdon made an ugly gesture. “Cuff her to Alison. We’ll figure it out later. Get the papers and the gadget the kid’s been building.”
Curly yanked me over to Alison and cuffed us together. Moe went through the open panels into the basement. We heard him flinging things to the floor; in a minute he returned with a couple of empty cartons. He dumped Martin’s ferromagnetic grid into one of the cartons and swept all the papers into another.
Martin had recovered from his half-swoon, but he was bleeding around the left eye. He watched in misery as Moe and Curly jammed a chisel into the device he’d been building so painstakingly, but he didn’t say anything.
“You go first with the Binder kid,” Curly said to his partner. “Durdon and I will follow with the other three.”