Anarchy of the Mice

Chapter Thirty

Right after texting Quaid, Durwood got the tickle.

It always started behind his ears. In Rome, talking to that fidgety cardinal who betrayed them. Rolling up in a dune buggy on that Saharan dig, first whiff of the Pestilence Project. That little tickle. Little instinctual discomfort.

Something was off.

Durwood pulled a headphone cup over the side of his head. The audio had a new, background intensity. He checked video. The feeds looked unremarkable at first glance.

At second and third, though, he noticed shadows—darkening, shifting.

He worked the cam-joystick with his index finger. He pulled up a wide shot of the engine factory, scanned to the corners, to the rafters.

Was that door leaning ajar?

Had that bulb been lit before?

Sue-Ann labored to her feet and shook.

Durwood cycled through the other eleven factories, eyes keen, watching for anomaly. Surveillance was a patient art. Quaid, on rare occasions when he sat in, had no taste for it. If Durwood pointed out a curtain pushed too far to one end of its rod, he'd say, "Curtain's gotta be someplace, right? It's just coincidence."

But Durwood knew coincidence explained nothing. Every last occurrence on God's green earth could be understood—if you had the time and wherewithal to study it.

A noise from the tubing factory pricked his ear. He switched to its video and saw the shapes.

Human-sized shapes.

He dialed out the zoom, tweaked the infrared settings. Two figures came into focus. They were skulking about the perimeter, placing small...what, boxes? Communicating by walkie-talkie.

He checked the engine factory again, the lumber plant, the sugar refinery—which he hadn't even covered with mics, distant as it was from Steed's office, where they expected all the action to occur. Every last factory showed similar operations in progress.

Saboteurs.

They were not boxes, but explosive charges. Twelve factories, and none of AmDye's security measures had been tripped.

Durwood stood from his bank of monitors to fetch the frequency scanner. He tuned slowly through the ranges known to be favored by military and paramilitary forces, and sure enough, found chatter in a lower frequency.

Voices urgent but calm. Not speaking English. Durwood heard French first and thought they'd stumbling upon a French outfit, but the second exchange the scanner found was German, and the third Scandinavian of some kind.

They were commandos, fixing to blow these factories sky-high.

American Dynamics was halfway bankrupt as it was; destroying the Pittsburgh facility—"Ninety-nine percent of our manufacturing, right here in the U.S. of A.," as Steed was fond of saying—would finish the job.

Only the steel factory differed. There, pipes were being playing like bongos and machine belts sliced. Loud, showy damage. But damage that didn't amount to much. Youngsters. He assumed they belonged to the Blind Mice, though he didn't see Molly or Josiah.

Switching to Jim Steed's office, he saw why. The lead group, the Algernons, had just burst in. Josiah stood nose-to-nose with the CEO.

Durwood pushed his hat up his forehead.

It was beyond his tactical capabilities to intercede everywhere. The two situations in the steel factory involved the Mice, and the third must be linked too.