Alternities Read Free Page A

door marked EMPLOYEES ONLY, and came out in the high-ceiling, Greek-columned lobby.
    A few steps away was the entrance to the research annex, formerly the Hunt Room restaurant. There should have been a dozen analysts in the annex, slaving over tables filled with newspapers and books being screened before being taken through the gate. The books and papers were there, but the analysts were not.
    Nor could Wallace find any sign of the stationmaster or his staff in the complex of field offices. The entire station seemed deserted, but, curiously, not abandoned. There was no more than the usual disorder, most of which was purposeful camouflage anyway. It looked for all the world that everyone had simply decided not to come to work that day.
    Except that a gate house was never, ever, left unattended.
    Checking the Broad Street entrance, Wallace found the doors locked securely. He could see what seemed to be a paper sticker plastered across the crack between the doors on the street side, like a butterfly bandage across a laceration. He could not have opened the doors without tearing it. The building had been sealed Emptied and locked up.
    What’s the matter, Joel? he asked the stationmaster in absentia. Forget to pay the taxes?
    Whatever the reason, Wallace was determined not to let it stop him. Though he hadn’t been directly briefed, he knew the importance of the drugs he was carrying. Three North Coast agents had already come down with the Widowmaker virus, and two were near death. Everyone else in the dirty zone was in hiding, breathing triple-filtered air in safe houses, waiting out the bug’s three-week viability.
    There was precious little the local medical community could do to protect the healthy or ease the pain of those already infected. That was why the biological terrorism of the nihilists who called themselves Les Miserables was so effective.
    Bastards! The Soviets have got to be supplying them—and sitting back and laughing —
    But the Rho 7 antiviral reagent Wallace carried could do much. A gift from the advanced medicine of Alternity Yellow, at worst Rho 7 would put the Guard’s agents back in the field. At best it might clean out Barnes and Nilsson before their lungs were so severely damaged that death seemed the better choice.
    No, he had to complete the run. He could not miss the contact. If he couldn’t find another way out, he’d just have to break one of the seals and risk whatever fallout that act engendered.
    Leaving the station pouch in one of the safe deposit boxes behind the front desk, Wallace went looking for a way out. The street entrances to the one-time pub in the basement were locked up tight, and the hotel’s service and delivery doors were sealed as well. Every possible exit on the ground level was stickered, locked, or both.
    But when he climbed the stairs to the second floor, Wallace found an escape. In a room overlooking the cantilevered hotel marquee, Wallace removed a tight-fitting sheet of black-painted plywood from the window frame and found only a few jagged fragments of glass poised to keep him from leaving.
    He also found a street unnaturally quiet. No trolleys crawled along the tracks down the center of Broad Street. There was no traffic on either sidewalk as far as City Hall Square, no doorman across the street at the Gentleman’s Cafe, no purring cab at the Ritz-Carlton’s taxi stand.
    Odd as that was, it was a relief to Wallace. It meant that what happened had been citywide, that the gate house hadn’t been singled out. And the most obvious answer to what had happened was something Wallace could deal with: the Brats bringing the terror to yet another city.
    If they had blown a bomb here, it would be the first for Philadelphia. There had been numerous threats, most of them bluffs, a few real but thwarted by the hard-nosed city police—who were good enough at their business to have forced the Guard to take extra precautions with operations here.
    An evacuation was the only