“I think you may just have found the way in,” she said.

Cooper turned to see that he hadn’t fallen into a hole at all-more of a dry canal bed. Infested with weeds and stunted pine trees, the depression was shallowest on the end Cooper had fallen into, and graduated to ten or more feet below the surface over the course of the length of a school bus. At the canal’s deepest point, Cooper saw what Laramie meant: a set of 4' x 8' plywood sheets, one nailed to the next, covered some sort of door. Cooper counted four sheets of the wood, not a single one of which was holding up worth a damn, all four boards stained a moldy brown-green and covered in moss and mushroom bursts.

Laramie was already in the canal and pulling at the plywood wall as Cooper grunted his way up and limped over. He joined in, reaching under one of the sheets of decrepit wood and pulling. A chunk of the board broke off from its host and crumbled from his hands. He did it again, pulling off a larger chunk this time. In a matter of minutes, they had enough room to walk through the opening.

Cooper deployed the Maglite he’d brought along in the backpack to reveal that beyond the plywood barrier, a short length of tunnel ran away from them, partially interrupted along the way by something resembling chicken wire. Behind the chicken wire there stood the wide, inert blades of a massive fan. The housing for the fan appeared more solid-state than the exterior section of the tunnel. It had wide spaces between the blades-wide enough for them to crawl through.

The chicken wire moved aside with little resistance, its footings long since rusted out. When Cooper got to the fan, he unstrapped his backpack, got down on all fours, and crawled under one of the blades, pushing the backpack ahead of him on the floor of the tunnel as he went. He had the sensation of crawling into the belly of a submarine, passing the vessel’s propeller as he snuck into the engine room.

Aided by the beam of the Maglite, Laramie followed him in.

They could walk upright in the tunnel. They hit a fork and Cooper chose a direction at random. He attempted to keep track of the fastest way out; he heard Laramie’s footsteps shuffling behind him. There was grit, mud, and the occasional puddle at their feet, and a kind of consistent, moldy stench. The walls were made of thin concrete, Cooper aiming the flashlight at the wall while he poked around a few places to find that the substance crumbled apart as easily as the plywood had. He wondered how grave was the risk of a cave-in.

Then they turned a corner, and Cooper caught a glimpse of blue.

It hadn’t exactly been a light at the end of the tunnel-when he dropped the beam of his flashlight and waited for his eyes to adjust, there was nothing to be seen. But when he raised the flashlight again, he saw it again-a shimmer of blue, almost the color of the sky on a clear day.

“You’re seeing it too, then,” Laramie said.

“I am.”

In twenty steps, the sky blue glow became more pronounced, and when Cooper raised the beam of the Maglite they could see a louvered panel up ahead-the end of the line, and the source of that sky blue glow.

He moved the flashlight around some more, trying different angles, but it was always the same: it seemed no light was coming from beyond the louvers, but when he pointed the light in the direction of the panel, a blue glow would hit them. Soft-muted-but definitively sky blue. There were no sounds coming at them through the louvers.

Cooper brought the light around so they could see each other’s faces.

“May as well have a look,” Laramie said.

They hunched down at the base of the panel, listening. But there was nothing to hear.

Cooper reached up and tilted one of the louvers. He held the flashlight up and pointed the beam through a space between slats, and the two of them raised themselves to their elbows, more or less in unison, and had a look.

That was when they found themselves staring at the oddly displaced sight of an American strip mall.

42

Facing them was a full-size, brightly painted 7-Eleven sign, below which stood the store, beside which store stood a crop of surrounding businesses built on opposing sides of a main drag. The street came complete with left-turn lanes and accompanying traffic signals.

The source of the blue glow, she saw, was the color the walls had been painted above the buildings and street-sky blue, to duplicate the sky. Every store along the boulevard appeared to be fully stocked with merchandise; in fact, everything appeared to be picture perfect, at least outside of the fact that it seemed utterly lifeless. The power had been shut down, and not a single person was in sight.

After what might have been five minutes of silent observation, Laramie got a hold of herself. She turned and looked at Cooper.

“It’s Disneyland,” she said, “inside out.”

Cooper considered what she meant. “A theme park,” he said, “featuring the parts of Anaheim you find outside the park.”

“Or Orlando,” she said.

“Or anywhere.”

They stared through the panel at the odd view for a while longer.

“I’ll be goddamned,” Cooper said.

“So will I.”

Laramie considered the meaning behind what they’d just found. Despite the facility’s being abandoned, the apparent lengths to which the builders had gone in their attention to detail was staggering-or, she thought, disturbing. You’re the leader of a cell, or nation, or faction intending to lay your wrath upon the Great Satan, and you certainly don’t erect an underground suburban-America adventure ride to train one deep-cover sleeper agent.

“More like an army of them,” she said.

As Cooper turned and eyed her, she realized she’d spoken her thought.

“Come again?”

“Just trying to comprehend this,” she said.

“Far as I can tell, it means your ‘counter-cell cell,’” Cooper said, “has got its work cut out for it.”

“It’s your cell too, Mr. Operative.”

“Suppose you’re right.”

Laramie watched as Cooper worked his flashlight around the rim of the panel, her operative and onetime island-hopping companion examining the anchors that held the panel in place. He turned to dig through a pocket of his backpack, came out with an ordinary Swiss Army knife, and used the screwdriver tool to unscrew the panel’s fasteners. He managed to detach the panel without dropping it the twenty feet or so down to the street, and with Laramie’s help got it turned sideways so they could pull it inward. Laramie cringed as it scraped loudly, then made a noisy metallic bang on the concrete floor of the tunnel as they brought it in and released the grip they had on the thing a little early.

No follow-up sounds came.

Laramie poked her head over the ledge and discovered that a ladder was built into the concrete wall of the interior, rungs painted blue like the wall. She climbed out and started down the ladder.

After ten minutes of strolling wordlessly around the shops along the street, they came to stand in the middle of the 7-Eleven parking lot.

“It wouldn’t be too expensive to pull this off,” Laramie said. “I just can’t believe nobody stumbled across it in the ten or fifteen years it’s probably been here. Maybe it’s Fidel who’s behind this after all.”

“Maybe,” Cooper said.

He suddenly wondered whether his cash-paying participation in Castro’s invitational Texas Hold ’Em poker challenge hadn’t been the best of ideas. Then his thoughts of regret made him consider why Castro operated the poker tournament-and why Castro did just about everything he did, outside of rant and rave about the capitalist pigs ninety miles to the north:

For sheer profit.

“He rented it out,” Cooper said.

Laramie, who’d been stealing a look at the “sky,” looked down from the ceiling at Cooper.