Glasshouse - Charles Stross [162]
“Merge with the crowd, then when they head for the auditorium doors, break left under the door labeled FIRE EXIT. Meet me on the other side.”
Purpose. Tension. Beating heart, nervousness. A faint aroma of mineral oil on my fingertips. The usual heightened awareness.
Cohorts and parishes of regular citizens—inmates—are gathering on the front steps and in the open reception hall of the biggest building on Main Street. Some I recognize; most are anonymous.
Jen looms out of the crowd, smiling, converging on me. My guts freeze. “Reeve! Isn’t it wonderful?”
“Yes, it is,” I say, slightly too coldly because she stares at me, and her eyes narrow.
“Well, excuse me,” she says, and turns on her heel as if to walk away, then pauses. “I’d have thought you’d be celebrating.”
“I am.” I raise an eyebrow at her. “Are you?”
“Hah!” And with a contemptuous smirk, she wheels away and latches on to Chris’s arm.
A cold sweat prickles up and down my spine—sheer relief, mostly—and I head toward the FIRE EXIT sign, which is conveniently close to the rest rooms. I pause for a second to glance around and check my watch (T minus three minutes) then lean on the emergency bar. The door scrapes open, and I step through into a concrete-lined stairwell.
Click. I glance round. Liz lowers her gun. I’m too slow today, I think hopelessly. I mute my mike. “Two minutes,” I say, backing into the corner opposite her niche. She nods. I reach into my bag, pull out my gun, stuff the spare magazines into my pockets, and drop the bag. Click. That’s me.
One minute. Sam and Greg and Martin, the latter looking slightly harried. I key my mike. “Follow me.”
A couple of weeks ago, wearing Fiore’s stolen flesh, I explored this complex—extremely cautiously, taking pains to be certain that Yourdon was occupied elsewhere at the time. The first floor contains the lobby and a big auditorium, plus a couple of things described on the building map as “courtrooms.” The second floor, which we pass without stopping, is wall-to-wall office space. The third floor . . . well, I didn’t spend much time there.
We reach the door and pause. “Zero,” I say, tracking the sweep of my watch hand.
A second later there’s a chime in my headset. “Go!” says Janis.
“Now.”
Greg opens the door fast, and Martin and Liz duck through, then pronounce the bare-floored corridor clear. I lead us along it, then there’s another door, and Greg forces the exit bar from our side. Carpet. A short, narrow passage. Yourdon must have left by now, surely? I rush forward and find myself in a boringly mundane living room, furnished in dark age fashion except for the smooth white bulge of an A-gate in one corner. “Here,” I say. “Spread out.”
We’re not experts at house searches. Doubtless if there was armed resistance waiting for us, we’d be easy prey. But the house is empty. Three bedrooms, a living room, an office—there’s a desk and an ancient computer terminal, and books—and a kitchen and bathroom and another room full of boxes. It’s empty. Empty of personality as well as anachronisms like a longjump gate.
“What now?” asks Sam.
“We check out front.” I walk up to the front door of the apartment, then Greg squeezes past me and unlocks it. He pulls it open and steps out, then I follow to see where we are, and the ground leaps up and whacks me across the knees with a concussive jolt too deep to call a noise.
“Panic one,” Janis says in my ear, a prearranged code for Team Green. That was a bomb, I think dizzily.
There’s a click behind me, then a scream of pain. I whip round and that saves my life because the short burst of gunfire hammers past me and catches Liz instead, bullets slapping into her body as she spins round. I keep turning and drop to one knee, then fire a continuous burst that empties the magazine and nearly sprains my wrists.
“* * *,” says Janis,