Free Element Zero by James Knapp Page A

calling my supervisor. . . . ” she began, but her voice trailed off. Al reached across and switched off the speaker to the waiting area. He leaned in close to her and spoke in a low voice.
    “That won’t be necessary. Just relax and wait here.”
    I opened a connection to their computer system and began sifting through their logs as I looked down the short hallway that connected the reception area to the rest of the clinic. A man with a grizzled beard and a frostbitten face sat in a chair, a blood pressure cuff around his right arm. The nurse attending to him didn’t look up from the gauge as she pumped the rubber bladder. A doctor stood nearby, and he frowned when he saw us.
    “Can I help you?” he asked, but stopped short as two SWAT officers crept in from a side hallway. His eyes widened.
    “Calm down,” Van Offo said. The man’s eyes relaxed but remained wary. “Everyone stay calm and quiet.”
    “Sir, we’ve tracked a suspicious data stream to this site,” I said to him. “We have reason to think—”
    “What do you mean ‘suspicious data stream’?” the man asked. “Look at this place . . . ”
    His voice fizzled in midsentence as Van Offo approached him.
    “Sleep.”
    His eyelids fluttered and closed. He wobbled on his feet a little, and Van Offo steadied him.
    “We know there is someone else here,” he said to the man. “Where are they?”
    The man’s face changed then. The look of confusion had been an act, and when it fell away there was anger in his eyes.
    “You’re too late,” he said in a low voice. Several staff members glanced nervously at us, not sure what to make of what they were seeing.
    “What makes you say that?” Van Offo asked.
    “They’re not coming back,” he said. “I heard them.”
    “Answer me,” Van Offo said. “Where are they? Don’t lie.”
    I processed the last of the system’s logs and found that no significant data had been stored in their system in the past twenty four hours.
    “It’s not here,” I said.
    “It’s here somewhere.”
    I looked around and saw confusion and fear. Whatever Fawkes’s men were up to, these people didn’t know anything about it.
    Except the man Van Offo had. He knew. Even while being controlled, there was a spark in his eye and I could tell he’d been converted, in more ways than one.
    SWAT, have you found anything? I asked.
    Not yet. We’ve got the perimeter secured.
    I signaled to the two officers to check the examination rooms. They moved down the hall and began opening doors. From one, I heard a woman gasp.
    Van Offo’s pupils dilated as he stared at the doctor, who began to speak in a slow, quiet voice.
    “The basement,” he said.
    “Basement?”
    Even while his face remained slack, I could see the intensity in his eyes. The man wrestled with something internally, but as many had before him, he failed. His eyes became sleepy and docile.
    It always unnerved me to see it. It was eerie how quickly people could be made to abandon their beliefs. Al was particularly good at it.
    “The basement level is flooded,” a woman said, not understanding. “It hasn’t been used in years.”
    “What’s down there?” I asked her.
    “Look,” she said. “I know it’s out of code, but it’s locked up. We don’t use it. This place serves—”
    “How do we access the lower level?” Van Offo asked the doctor. He pointed down the hall robotically toward a wall of metal shelving stacked with boxes.
    SWAT, this place has a basement level that wasn’t on the schematic. We’re headed down.
    Got it.
    “Come on,” I said. Van Offo and the officers followed as I passed the examination rooms and shoved the rack aside. There was a door behind it, secured with a heavy padlock. Several more SWAT members approached from the connecting hallway.
    “Open it,” I said. One of them used an arc cutter to slice through the lock, and it trailed smoke as it thumped to the floor. He flipped open the latch.
    I opened the door and