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betray you. The things you will need and all instruc-tions are buried in a
chest in a grove approximately eight hundred meters due north of the house in
the woods. It is marked by three white-painted stones, is about two meters
down, and has been there since before the emergency. Understandably, the
things are still the standard blue, so be careful when transporting them to
the house. A single stray individual seeing people carrying blue anything will
get you lynched. Anticipating this, materials in a subbase-ment of your house
have been left to change the ma-terial into more unobtrusive form, along with
in-structions. When the transfer is completed, call this number again and
report it so. The subbasement is reached by trapdoor under the coal pile. That
is all." There was a click and the line went dead. She stood there a
moment, thinking, while the others clustered curiously around. It had
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obviously been a tape recording.
Sam and two of the others who were muscular made their way into the woods with
shovels found in the basement. It didn't take them long to find the spot;
they'd been walking the woods anyway, and most had casually noticed the
stones.
"Something's really fishy here," Sam told them.
One of the others, a younger man who said his name was Carl, looked up. "What
do you mean?"
he asked.
Sam pointed to the ground. "Anything buried here was buried a hell of a long
time before the emer-gency. A year at least. Look at the trees and
shrub-bery. I just find it hard to believe that this could be so well
advanced."
The others shrugged. "So? It was 'cause here it is. Come on! Let's get
digging! If we don't find it before dark we'll be chopping each other's heads
in."
It was at least two meters down, a huge coffin-shaped box four meters long and
over a meter deep. It even had handles on it, but it took them until well
after dark, with some of the others holding flashlights, before they
cleared all obstructions away and brought it up. It took ropes and
their combined muscle power to do so; the box weighed over 450 kilograms.
They opened it anxiously but carefully. The clamps had almost all rusted shut
and took some nervous taps with a hammer to undo. Finally the top came off.
Inside, packed in cotton, were six baby-blue cylin-ders with complex valves
and nozzles at one end sealed with a waxy compound. To some they looked like
single tanks, but they also resembled fire ex-tinguishers with rounded
bottoms.
And they were heavy. They weighed almost fifty kilos each.
Also in the box there was an ordinary looking attaché case with a ten-digit
touch lock. It was also heavy, but not extremely so, and Suzy took it while
the three stongest men each gingerly lugged a blue cylinder back to the
house guided by a companion with flashlight, then went back for a
second. There was an anxious moment when one was dropped, but there seemed to
be no damage and no hissing sounds. They kept going.
Finally they had the worst job. "We have to rebury the box," Sam told them.
"Even if somebody came by and saw a freshly dug area, which is unlike-ly,
they'd hardly be willing to dig all that way.
If we tamp it down and there's one decent thunderstorm, there'll be no more
signs."
The others protested, but Suzy agreed completely, and she was the boss.
It was past two in the morning when they finished, dead tired.
Suzy made the call. To her surprise there seemed to be a live voice on the
other end, not a tape.
She could hear the breathing. It wasn't the same voice, but they were all
being distorted anyway, she knew. "The combination is the complete phone
number," the voice told her, then hung up.
She went to the briefcase. Suspecting some kind of explosion if she tried and
goofed, she'd just left it there. The cylinders were all in the kitchen,
stacked like wood and covered with a blanket, and the oth-ers had all gone
exhaustedly to bed after eating.
She punched the number on the keys. One-500-555-2323. There was a click and
the lid opened as if on a pneumatic riser.
Inside was a foam rubber insert covering the whole inside. Spaces had been cut
out, and small bottles, three of them, holding some clear liquid, were
strapped in. A cutout below them held a wooden box which, when opened,
revealed two dozen wrapped and sealed disposable syringes, some cotton, and
a sealed plastic bottle of alcohol. When she took the box out she saw that
under the rubber was a thick Manila envelope, and she reached under, having to
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pry it up where the foam rubber had stuck, and got it out.
The next morning, when they came downstairs for breakfast, a Suzy too excited
to sleep greeted them.
"Guess what!" she said excitedly. "We're the ones who get to hit Washington,
D.C.!"
Sam Cornish's heart sank. "When?" he asked her. "On the sixteenth," she said.
He looked with the others at the wall calendar. It was September ninth.
A week from today, he thought.
Seven more days.
Now what do you do, Sam Cornish?
TWENTY-THREE
The phone in Braden's den rang. Alton got it, talked for a few minutes, then
called the self-exiled security man.
"Yes, sir?" he said crisply.
"The Edelman team is on to you," The Man told him. "They raided
Martha's Lake and have ev-erybody out. They know the whole story. It will
only be a matter of time before they're there now. I had hoped for six more
days, but we can live with this. Give O'Connell the treatment, get her out,
then you get out, fast."
Braden nodded absently, fear creating a knot in his stomach. "Yes, sir. At
once." Suddenly he heard a whirring of rotor blades and panic rose. "I hear a
chopper now. Do you suppose...?"
"That's for O'Connell, from me," The Man as-sured him. "You get out by boat.
Time is short.
Move!"
Braden hung up the phone and went out to the dining room. Alton was waiting
with two of the oth-er men, Gurney and Stone.
"I talked to him before you did," Alton reminded him. "Gurney and Stone know
where to take her, and the bird's down and waiting. Shall we?"
He nodded, and the four of them mounted the stairs. The other agents were also
busy around, destroying anything that might be of use to the in-evitable
raiders, shredding and incinerating papers and the like. One of the women was
hauling out the firebombs and checking their clocks and fuses.
Sandra O'Connell was in her room, relaxing listen-ing to a Cleveland radio
station. She was really depressed; after so much rapid progress over the few
days after her escape, she hadn't improved at all in the past week or more
she'd been here. She was beginning to fear that her condition was now at its
best state, and the somewhat clumsy attempts to cheer her up by Braden and the
staff hadn't helped but just made her dwell more and more on the
drug and its effects. What good was a forty-two-year-old illiterate
doctor to anybody?
The four men hurriedly entering the room sur-prised and startled her. She
looked puzzled. "What is it?" she asked apprehensively. She'd heard the
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