David Dun - The Black Silent

They pushed the door all the way open and stepped back. Two men, both in the uniform of the San Juan Sheriff's Department, lay sprawled on the floor, unconscious.

"Gas," Sam said. "But I don't know what kind of gas would knock someone out this way and keep them down."

Nelson Gempshorn and American Bayou came to mind. The company manufactured all sorts of medical equipment and could easily administer a heavy sedative. But to take out this many men?

They waited and watched for a moment; then Sam hurried in and opened windows around the first floor, holding his breath the entire time. He returned, and this time they waited for three or four minutes on the front doorstep.

They went back in. As they walked through the first floor of the lodge, they found a back bedroom with four more men on the floor. The men looked rough and ready, even in repose: definitely Frick men.

"It's odd that four men were all right here," Sam said. "I wonder what they were looking at?"

Sam looked around, searching the walls and the floor. Haley followed, doing the same.

The men lay near a heavy large trunk. Closer inspection of the men and the floor revealed that they probably were gassed, shot by a Taser, and then anesthetized with a hypodermic in the neck. It was elaborate.

Haley pointed at the trunk, and Sam nodded in agreement. Together they pushed on the trunk, but it wouldn't move. It took a moment to realize that it was affixed firmly to the floor. They tried opening it, but it was locked.

"This trunk is curious," Sam said.

"Yes, it is," a voice said. It seemed to come from inside the trunk.

Sam smiled. Such incredible surprises amused him.

"Would it be…?"

"Ben Anderson and company."

The trunk slowly began to open. Sam and Haley stepped back in disbelief. Ben Anderson stuck his head out. Oddly, he wore handcuffs.

Without another thought Haley leaned forward and hugged him long and hard.

"Oh, thank God you're all right," she said.

After they had hugged again, and reproclaimed their joy at seeing one another, Sam cocked his head and pointed at Ben's handcuffs.

"Oh. Yes. If you want to come down, you'll have to put these on. My friends are the anxious sort. Very anxious, actually."

"Where would we be going?" For some reason Sam felt less anxious than he knew he ought to.

"Under this lodge is a very large hollowed-out vault in the rock, and below that an exit out to the sea, as well as tunnels leading to other exits above ground. It's a big place down here."

"These islands are all glacial till," Haley said. "You taught me that yourself. How can there be a cavern?"

In place of an answer Ben held out two sets of cuffs. "I know I haven't been… truthful with you." He was directing his comments at Haley, but he glanced at Sam as well. "You can trust me, if that's what you're wondering."

Sam wondered about Ben's "friends," but he didn't see a choice in the matter. First he moved the bodies away from the trunk in hopes of keeping the trunk's secret a secret.

Then he accepted the cuffs, along with Haley.

Ben led them down a long set of stairs. Sam closed the trunk over their heads and latched the strong but simple lock.

"Miners around the turn of the century made part of this," Ben said, belatedly answering Haley. "So in that sense it's not truly a cavern. For some reason there's limestone in this granite and that's a riddle that the geologists can debate. Now you'll get an idea just how giant these rocks can get. One of them had a hollow in it, as you'll see below."

Sam shook his head silently. This had become surreal, a sort of mix of Alice in Wonderland and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, with Ben playing the role either of the white rabbit or the chocolatier, take your choice.

There were stairs and lots of them, a new test for Sam's legs. For twenty feet or so the steps had been carved in the rock; after that, they were made of wood, going down in a square-edged spiral. Twenty to thirty men stood at the bottom, all gazing upward as they descended. One of them was Lattimer Gibbons. Two were younger men armed with no-nonsense Uzis, both bulky, with backs straight and shoulders squared, obviously the sort whose business was protection. Sam didn't see the two women mentioned in the documents.

As they reached the cavern floor, Sam noted a silver-haired man with a mustache and a bruise on his cheek, who seemed to be calling the shots. He had a perpetual slight smile as a regular part of his expression, as if none of the ironies of life were ever lost on him.

Of the group he seemed the most confident, speaking in short, clipped sentences when he wanted one of the Uzi fellows to move.

"Nelson Gempshorn," Ben said.

Sam and Gempshorn nodded at one another.

As Sam and Haley stood for introductions, they took in the whole of the cavern, which was larger than Sam had expected, and carved from gray stones with occasional white streaks in the walls. In the middle of the man-made cave, and nearly filling it, stood a structure that looked like a typical upper-middle-class house, complete with siding and windows-except that the roof angles were shallow and the shape was rather boxlike.

The floor around the building was stamped concrete that Sam recognized from one area of the Sanker lab complex. Coming from the top of the building, and disappearing into the side of the cave, ran a very large duct pipe.

Another extraordinary feature of the place was a giant copper tank, the size of a two-car garage, in the shape of an ellipse, with all manner of tubes and wire about it. With its hand-crafted look, the contraption appeared to be something out of a nineteenth-century science-fiction story.

"What on earth is that?" Haley asked. "Don't tell me, let me guess. You grow Arcs under pressure and with no oxygen in it."

"Very good," Ben said, stepping closer to hold her hand. He indicated the general space.

"We imported labor to do the rock work and build the lab. Most of the workers, I'm embarrassed to say, were in the country legally but working illegally. We took the best of some Mexican crews building condos for Americans in Baja. When they were down here, they didn't even know where they were. We built the whole thing in ten weeks. No one left the compound during underground construction. It was a phenomenal effort. Of course, the copper vat was built by some very curious metalworkers in a metal-fab shop three states away."

Sam looked around, wondering at both the physical plant and the well-preserved, older gentlemen standing around him.

"We have a great shaft down to the base of the cliffs that comes out in the sea.

Originally we used it to house a large conveyor that moved some of the broken-up rock out to the sea bottom. It also served as an underwater test bed for our research ideas.

That was, and is, its most important function. Today its third and final use comes into play: it's a useful hidden entry to the lab, and an emergency exit."

"How did you fund this project?" Sam asked.

"All courtesy of American Bayou Technologies."

Haley and Sam shared a look, wondering how that worked.

"I'm astounded," Haley said. "All those times you said you were going to Seattle, you were coming here, weren't you?"

Ben looked a little sheepish and Sam knew that Haley was getting heated up.

"I don't see how you could do this…," she began. "Haley, there is a special calling for you. It is a very important position of leadership. In the coming days you will understand why I had to tell you nothing."

To Sam, Ben's words were a great illumination of the twilight that surrounded the grand plan. But his attention returned to Ben's wrists. Of all the scientists in the cavern, Ben was the only one wearing handcuffs. Ben anticipated Sam's question.