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“All the scientists and engineers at the campus stay here, all the security and logistics and food service and sanitation people.” Wren shrugged. “Yeah. About ninety.”
Zack asked, “Anyone show up recently? New hires?”
“None. I double-checked as soon as all this killing kicked off. Nobody new.”
“What about the off-property locals who do business with you?”
“Nobody gets past the army outside unless they let them. Our private security inside the building is just another layer of the onion.” He slapped Zack on the shoulder, then turned to the bartender. “Dos cervezas, por favor, Estephanie.”
She began drawing a light lager from the tap.
Wren said, “Drink up, then I’ll take you downstairs.”
•••
Three floors below ground level, Zack and Gareth stepped out of the elevator into surroundings dramatically different from those he’d left behind above.
The basement was dark, dank, and labyrinthine. They encountered a couple of elder Cuban maintenance men carrying large bundles of wiring who greeted Wren with a hearty welcome, then crossed through a large warehouse, passing rows and rows of shelves holding thousands of bins of black crates.
“What’s all this?” Zack asked as they walked.
“This is everything for one hundred people to live comfortably here for a year.”
“You’re kidding.”
“My doing. I told Anton we needed to be ready for anything. Hurricanes, insurrections, pandemics, we even need to be prepared to weather the storm in case we fall out of favor with the Cubans. With all the equipment down here, we can lock the blast doors and hunker down, hopefully wait out any trouble. Food, water, medical supplies, tools.”
“I’m impressed,” Zack said. “I know a lot of preppers, but not one with thirty billion dollars to spend.”
Wren laughed at this, then took Zack down a long, dark, and narrow corridor.
They stopped in the armory, where Wren showed Hightower cages of rifles, pistols, and ammo for the security staff. After that, Wren paused at another hall. “You’ve got two storerooms down there, and an old service elevator that was sealed up by the Soviets after it quit working. We just use the main elevators to bring equipment down to storage now.”
Indeed, a wooden panel had been erected over a large elevator entrance, and a metal grate was in front of it.
“It just goes up?”
“Yeah. This is as low as you go.” The Englishman held a finger up quickly. “One more thing while I have you down here. You ready to shit your trousers?”
“Always.”
With a laugh that echoed in the hall, he put his hand on Zack’s back and led him down yet another dark hallway, but only about fifty feet or so before they came to a door.
Turning to Zack, Wren said, “I’m not showing you this to scare you. I’m showing you because you might wander down on your own one day and find it for yourself, or you might hear one of the security men make mention of what we have behind this door.”
“What the hell is it?”
Here Wren tapped a code into the door lock, and the big door opened.
“After you,” he said.
Zack entered, and when Wren stepped in behind him and flipped on banks of fluorescent lights on the low ceiling, Zack saw several long rows of items lined up on a concrete floor covered with plastic tarps. The items were six feet tall or so, and roughly the width of a full-sized man.
Wren walked up to the first tarp and pulled it off.
Zack took a half step back, and his right hand rose towards his appendix as if he were going for his gun.
A humanoid robot stared straight ahead, almost directly into Zack’s eyes.
