Beatrix, scrambling to get to Ella, half-fell on her. Ella staggered under her weight.
“Oh!” The typic guard ran toward them. “Sir, are you all right?”
“Charlie horse,” Ella croaked, righting herself and hobbling toward the opening. “I’m fine! Thank you very much for your important work!”
Once they were through, Beatrix slid off with a whispered“sorry!”Her hands shook. The thought of going through all that again to get out …
But what mattered was that she was in.
“Apologies for the holdup,” Ella called to the sizable group of military officials clustered around the vice president. “I like new technology, you know, and I was fascinated by the X-ray machine.”
“Then you’ll enjoy the tour before the speech, Freddie,” said a typic with salt-and-pepper hair and an important-looking uniform. Beatrix stared at him. Was this Whitaker? “But we’d better get a move on—you need to be out the door by three-forty, don’t you, Mr. Vice President?”
As Draden said that unfortunately he did, Beatrix reflexively looked at her watch, but that was just as invisible as the rest of her. She found a clock on a wall that announced the time as three-fifteen, and she stopped caring who the man was.Twenty-five minutes—less, really, because they’d need to allow time to get through security. She and Ella had thought Draden intended to stay at least an hour.
What could she hope to find in fifteen or twenty minutes?
The group went left down the main hallway. She headed right, hugging the wall, looking over her shoulder every few steps until she realized that everyone was walking the other direction—no doubt gathering for the vice president’s speech. She tried yet again to recall the layout of the place, but her borrowed memories were impressionistic and disconnected. She passed by the mess hall and “remembered” smuggling a sandwich out for Martinelli indefiance of a no-food-in-offices rule. She saw a poster on the wall that declared “A Patriot Keeps His Country’s Secrets” and had a flash memory of walking by in Peter’s body, snickering at the drawing of the pompous-looking man holding his finger to his lips.
Not in the least bit helpful.
She stopped in an out-of-the-way corner, closed her eyes and focused. Hadn’t Peter found her at the League’s conference all those months earlier because he had an instinct about where to go? Granted, they were tied together by the Vows at that point. But what if they were still connected in some deep-seated way? What if the Vows forged a conduit to lay the cable between them, so to speak, and even with the cable snapped, there was still the conduit to call between? What if that explained why she was so certain he was here?
Where are you?she thought, hard and insistent.Peter—tell me where you are!
She opened her eyes, ready to follow her instincts, however faint. Forward or back?Forward.Left or right?Right. No, left.She walked for several more minutes—a clock on the wall told her it was three twenty-three—and came to a halt at a door that called to her more strongly than anything in this building yet had.
Carefully, oh so carefully, she opened it. Inside was an office that seemed to be no one’s—walls bare, a wooden desk with a scratch down one leg and no papers or photographs on it. A desk she knew. She’d sat at it and walked around it and banged her fist into it as she relived Peter’s memories.
But he wasn’t in his old office. Naturally.
She inched the door open, looked up and down the corridor, and slipped out, finally admitting that she’d convinced herself she had a chance of finding him in this complex only because she’d had nothing else to pin her hopes on. He probably wasn’t here at all. Even if he was, how could she find him in the time she had left? She looked for a clock, saw it was three twenty-five and knew with a sick jolt that she had to get back to the checkpoint.
She took a single step that direction and a flash of red stopped her cold. Someone was coming around the corner.
The same someone—unless she was very much mistaken—who’d laid in wait for her at the hospital.
She pressed against the wall and held her breath as he went by, the edge of his scarlet coat coming within an inch of her. When he reached the end of the corridor, he opened a door and disappeared behind it, giving her a glimpse of stairs.
Stairs.She’d forgotten that most of the complex was underground. If she followed the wizard, he might lead her right to Peter.
If she followed the wizard, she’d be stuck here, no maybe about it.
She turned and rushed back the way she’d come—not to leave but to alert Ella she wouldn’t be going. That was the system they’d worked out so Ella would know she had not been captured.
She made it back to the main corridor with what she hoped was time to spare. But as she rounded the bend, athrong of men strode at her, taking up both sides of the hallway.
She leapt into an office with an open door and anxiously watched soldier after soldier passing by. The vice president’s speech must be done. Come on, comeon!
As soon as the hallway cleared, she darted out and ran for it.There—there was Ella—she wasn’t too late?—
“Go to the john when you get home,” Morse growled. Beatrix watched in dismay as he shoved Ella through the archway to the guard waiting inside the checkpoint. The hole in the shield closed.
Beatrix tried to think of a way to communicate to Ella, without alerting Morse, that she was all right. She came up empty. What if Ella fought the guard and burst back in? What if she got herself arrested?Go through, she thought.Please.
To her relief, Ella did.
Morse turned—for a horrible second he seemed to look right at her, as if he knew she was there—and strode off into the complex instead of leaving with the vice president’s party. He was headed the way she’d just come. Heart rattling, she set off after him, letting a soldier get between them so his footsteps would cover any sound she made. How long should she wait before following Morse down the stairs? If she jumped the gun and he heard her …
