So far, so good…

David scanned the shadows around them as John scaled the outside, his heart pounding, all of his senses on high alert. There was no sound but the gentle clank of the fence, no movement in the black– ness. He glanced back as John thumped to the cold and dusty ground, then nodded toward the front struc– ture, the smaller one. If he were to design a false cover, he'd hide the real entrance somewhere no one would look – in a broom closet at the back of the last building, through a trap door in the dirt, but Um– brella was cocky, too smug to worry about such simple precautions.

It will be in the first building, because they'll believe they've hidden it so cleverly that no one will find it. Because if there's one thing we can count on, it's that Umbrella thinks they're too smart to be caught out…

He hoped. Staying down, David started for the building, praying that if there were cameras watching them, there was no one watching the cameras.

It was late, but Reston wasn't tired. He sat in the control room, sipping brandy from a ceramic mug and idly thinking about the next day's agenda. He'd make his report, of course; Cole still hadn't managed to fix the intercom system, although the video cameras all seemed to be in working order; the Ca6 handler, Les Duvall, wanted one of the mechan– ics to see about a sticking lock on the release cage -

– and there was still the city. The MaSKs couldn't exactly shine if the only colors were tan and brick… have to get the construction people into Four tomorrow. And see how the Avis do with the perches.

A red light flashed on the panel in front of him, accompanied by a soft mechanical bleat. It was the sixth or seventh time in the last week; he'd have to get Cole to fix that, too. The winds sweeping off the plain could be vicious; on a bad day, they rattled the doors to the surface structures hard enough to set off all of the sensors. Still, good thing I was here… once the Planet was fully staffed, there'd always be someone in control to reset the sensors, but for the time being, he was the only one with access to the control room. If he'd been in bed, the soft but insistent alarm currently going off in his private room would have forced him to get up. Reston reached for the switch, glancing at the row of monitors to his left more for form's sake than because he expected to see anything…… and froze, staring at a screen that showed him the entry room nearly a quarter mile above where he sat, in a view from the ceiling cam in the southeast corner. Four, five people, turning on flashlights, all of them dressed in black. The thin beams of light roamed over the dusty consoles, the walls of meteoro– logical equipment – and illuminated the weapons they were holding in flashes of metal. Guns and rifles.

Oh, no.

Reston felt almost a full second of fear and despair before he remembered who he was. Jay Reston had not become one of the most powerful men in the country, perhaps in the world, by panicking. He reached beneath the console, reached for the slender handset tucked into the slot next to the chair that would connect him directly to White Umbrella's private offices. As soon as he picked it up, the line went through. "This is Reston," he said, and could hear the steel in his voice, hear it and feel it. "We have a problem. I want a call put in to Trent, I want Jackson to call me immediately – and send out a team, now, I want them here twenty minutes ago."

He stared at the screen as he spoke, at the intruders, and clenched his jaw, his initial fear turning to anger.

The fugitive S.T.A.R.S., surely…

It didn't matter. Even if they found the entrance, they didn't have the codes – and whoever they were, they would pay for causing him even a second of distress. Reston slid the phone back into its slot, folded his arms, and watched the strangers move silently across the screen, wondering if they had any idea that they'dbe dead within half an hour.

SEVEN

THE BUILDING WAS COLD AND DARK, BUT there was the soft hum of working machinery to break the silence, to listen to over the pounding of her heart. It wasn't too big, maybe thirty feet by twenty, but it was a single room, big enough to feel unsafe, vulnera– ble. Small lights blinked randomly all around it, like dozens of eyes watching them from the shadows.

Man, I hate this.

Rebecca trailed the tight beam from her flashlight over the west wall of the building, looking for any-thing out of the ordinary and trying not to feel sick at the same time. In movies, private detectives and cops who had just crashed someone's house were always strolling calmly around, looking for evidence, as if they owned the place; in real life, breaking in some– where you were absolutely not supposed to be was terrifying. She knew they were in the right, that they were the good guys, but still her palms were damp, her heart hammering, and she wished desperately there were a bathroom she could get to. Her bladder had apparently shrunk to the size of a walnut.

And it'll have to wait, unless I want to go wet the dirt in enemy territory… Rebecca didn't. She leaned in to take a closer look at the machine in front of her, a stand-up device the size of a refrigera-tor and covered with buttons; the label on the front read, "OGO Relay," whatever that was. As far as she could tell, the room was full of big, clunky machines awash in switches; if all of the other buildings were similarly equipped, finding Trent's hidden code panel was going to be an all-night operation. Each of them had taken a wall, and John was going over the tables in the middle of the room. There was probably a surveillance camera set up somewhere in the building, which made the need to hurry even greater – although they were all hoping that the mini– mal staff meant no one would be watching. If they were very lucky, the security system wouldn't even be hooked up yet.

No, that would be a miracle. Lucky will be if we get in and out of this alive and unhurt, with or without that book…

Since they'd walked away from the van, Rebecca's internal alarms had been ticking down to a full-blown case of the nerves. From her short time with the

S.T.A.R.S. she'd learned that trusting her gut feelings was important, maybe even more important than having a weapon; instinct told people to duck bullets, to hide when the enemy was near, to know when to wait and when to act.

The problem is, how do you know if it's instinct or if you're just scared shitless? She didn't know. What she knew was that she wasn't feeling good about their late-night raid; she was cold and jumpy, her stomach hurt, and she couldn't shake the belief that something bad was going to happen. On the other hand, she should be scared – they all should be; what they were doing was dangerous. Something bad might actually happen, acknowledg– ing it wasn't paranoid, it was realistic -

– Hello. What's that?

Just to the right of the OGO machine was some– thing that looked like a water heater, a tall, rounded device with a window in the front. Behind the small square of glass was a spool of graph paper, covered with thready black lines, nothing she recognized, what had caught her eye was the dust on the glass. It was the same finely powdered dirt that seemed to be on everything in the room… except it wasn't. There was a smudge across the dirt, a damp streak that may have been caused by someone's finger.

A smudge on dirt?

If someone had run their hand over the dusty glass, they would have cleared a path. Rebecca touched it, frowning – and felt the pebbled surface of the dust, the tiny ridges and whorls like sandpaper beneath her fingers. It was painted or sprayed on – that is, fake. "Might have something," she whispered, and touched the window where the smudge was. The window popped open, swinging out and there was a sparkling metal square behind it, a ten-key set into an extremely undusty-looking panel; the graph paper was also fake, just a part of the glass. "Bingo," John whispered from behind her, and Rebecca stepped back, feeling a flush of excitement as the others gathered around, feeling the tension com-ing from all of them. The mist of their combined breath made a small cloud in the freezing room, reminding her of how cold she was.