"This is what you call a safe house?" asked Light, peeking through the open door of the aircraft and contemplating the majestic three-story Elizabethan-style mansion, surrounded by an eternal wasteland crowded by barracks and soldiers carrying out drills amid the sunset.
"For people like me, all houses are safe," replied Atticus, "but this is the safest one I have."
"How safe?"
"Let's just say that if the devil came down to Earth, this would be his hiding place. Welcome to Safe Haven, a place anyone can call home."
Ericka and Atticus went down the air stairs and stepped onto the tarmac.
"Who lives over here?"
"Part of my army, political refugees, double and triple agents, POWs I've met along the way, former comrades in arms who need a place to hole up, businessmen who are passing by to trade with me, rogue intellectuals...I guess you fall into that last category, although you're not exactly rogue."
"I see there's no shortage of conversation topics here."
Atticus nodded in an attempt at a smile.
"'Go to Heaven for the climate, Hell for the company,' someone said. This place may well be a demographic sample."
Light paced quietly alongside Atticus, recalling what a bodyguard had told her secretly during the flight. Rumors said the place was a gift from the dictator of that country to Atticus for killing an opponent and his family. The legend also stated that the opponent controlled the reserves and traffic of blood diamonds in the area and, unable at the time to extract and transport the goods to reliable buyers, Atticus had been planning to hand over all that business to the dictator, who in gratitude gave him those acres, promising him he would personally keep that place in the most mortuary secret. From the moment Light saw that huge piece of marble thrust like a fang into the ochre earth, she promised herself she'd never question Atticus about the veracity of that story.
When she turned her eyes straight ahead, they were already climbing up the entrance stairs, reaching to the lobby. Halfway through the corridor, they entered a lift, where Atticus pushed the lowest underground button.
"A basement?" she asked.
"Yeah, why?
"You sure we'll get all the power we need down there?"
"Don't worry. This place is like a giant battery."
Once the doors slid away, they met a bright and spacious room scattered with operators stacking piles of sealed parcels and carrying half-assembled pipes and plumbing around.
"All you asked for is in the boxes," continued Atticus, giving her a clipboard with all the allotted materials. "I told them not to start building the lab until you got here to give them the guidelines."
"How many people do I have?"
"Fourteen for now, most of them with degrees in electrical engineering or computer science. They're ready to start whenever you tell them what to do. Plus, you can request more materials as you go."
"Thanks, so kind of you."
"You up for the task already?"
"Oh yeah, don't mind me. I'm gonna be here for the better part of the rest of the day. That's my way to decompress."
Light took off her jacket and put it on a pile of boxes, leafing through the pages on her way to meet the men. Atticus saw at that moment his chance to put his hand in one of her jacket pockets, where he palpated a hard, rectangular object. To his great surprise, he opened his hand, meeting a Zippo, tough and old, made at the very least twenty years ago. He put it in his pocket and, without saying a thing, went up the stairs and returned to the garden. He knew it would be a whistle-stop trip, and she would be so engaged in analyzing her new workspace that she wouldn't notice his absence.
YOU ARE READING
King Acid
Historical FictionA young man wakes up in the desert. The wreckage of an ambulance lies smashed against a boulder and charred to a crisp. By the stitches on his head and face, he assumes he was the patient. But why was an ambulance driving through a desert? Where wa...
