overheard enough to realize that they didn’t yet know about Ellie’s murder, and perhaps the fact that Gavrila was loose.
He decided not to tell them. They would know soon enough. There might be something in the delay that he could turn to his advantage.
Because he wasn’t going to just stand around and let these lunatics wreck the military. He had to stop them, and he knew exactly where to go.
Through the migraine haze that kept him from communing with these misdirected idealists, some real information did bleed through. Like the identity of General Blaisdell, and his powerful position.
Blaisdell had the power to neutralize Building 31 with a phone call. Thurman had to get to him, and soon. “Gavrila” might do as a code word.
* * *
when we got back to our billet, there was a message on the console for Amelia, not me, to call Jefferson immediately on the secure line. He was in his own motel room in Guadalajara, eating dinner. He was wearing a handgun in a shoulder holster, a dart-thrower.
He stared out of the screen. “Sit down, Blaze.” She eased herself slowly into the chair in front of the console. “I don’t know how secure Building 31 is supposed to be. I don’t think it’s secure enough.
“Gavrila escaped. She’s left a trail of bodies leading to you. She killed two people at the Clinic, and one of them she apparently had tortured into giving up your address.”
“No . . . oh, no!”
Jefferson nodded. “She got there right after you left. We don’t know what Ellie might have told her before she died.”
That may have hit me harder than it did her. Amelia had lived with Ellie, but I had lived inside her.
She turned pale and spoke almost without moving her lips. “Tortured her.”
“Yes. And went straight to the airport and took the next flight to Portobello. She’s somewhere in the city now. You have to assume she knows exactly where you are.”
“She couldn’t get in here,” I said.
“Tell me about it, Julian. She couldn’t get out of here, either.”
“Yeah, all right. Are you set up to jack?”
He gave me a cautious doctor look. “With you?”
“Of course not. With my platoon. They’re standing guard here, and could use a description of the bitch.”
“Of course. Sorry.”
“You tell them everything you know, and then we’ll go to Candi for a debriefing.”
“All right . . . just remember Gavrila’s been jacked with me two-way—”
“What? That was smart.”
“We thought she’d be in a straitjacket for the duration. It was the only way to get anything from her, and we got a lot. But you have to assume she’ll retain a lot of what she got from Spencer and me.”
“She didn’t retain my address,” Amelia said.
Jefferson shook his head. “I didn’t know it, and neither did Spencer, in case. But she knows the broad outline of the Plan.”
“Damn. She’ll have passed it on.”
“Not yet. She has a superior in Washington, but she won’t have talked to him yet. She idolizes him, and combining that with her rigid fanaticism . . . I don’t think she’ll call until she can say ‘Mission accomplished.’”
“So we don’t just stay away from her. We catch her and make sure she doesn’t talk.”
“Nail her into a room.”
“Or a box,” I said.
He nodded and broke the circuit.
“Kill her?” Amelia said.
“Won’t be necessary. Just turn her over to the medicos and she’ll sleep past D day.” Probably true, I thought, but pretty soon Amelia and I were going to be the only people in this building physically able to kill.
* * *
what candi told them was frightening. Not only was Gavrila vicious and well trained and motivated by love and fear of God and His avatar, General Blaisdell—but it would be easier for her to get into Building 31 than Julian would have supposed. Its main defenses were against military attack and mob assault. It didn’t even have a burglar alarm.
Of course she first would have to get onto the base. They sent descriptions of her in the two modes they knew of, and copies of her fingerprints and retina scans, to the gate, with strict detention orders—“armed and dangerous.”
There were no security cameras in the Guadalajara airport, but there were plenty at Portobello. No one who looked like her had gotten off any of the six flights arriving from Mexico that afternoon and evening, but that could just mean a third disguise. There were a few women her size and shape. Their descriptions also went to the gate.