I smelled something familiar, acrid, musty—couldn’t remember what I knew it from. Light glowed dimly behind me, showing that the ladder I’d been carted down ended in a concrete anteroom. I was facing a closed door. With an effort I turned my head. The lights were coming from behind a partly open door about ten feet away.

I shut my eyes and felt a wave of nausea sweep through me. I needed to sit up. I tried for deep breaths that would feed my quivering arms and legs, but deep breaths pushed the points of the darts against my skin.

When I exhaled, the darts released. I was wearing a windbreaker over my sweater; my clothes had protected me from the fullest force of the tase. I worked an arm out of the sweater. Bare arm and breast on freezing concrete: an ice bath. It roused me into a frenzy of action—namely, I forced myself to sit up. Shrugged myself free of the jacket. Pulled off the sweater.

Good job, Vic. You’re ready for the Olympics. I still had my flashlight and my phone. I shone the flash on the jacket. Five darts. I pulled them out, dropped them on the floor, and worked my arms back into the sweater. I tried my phone, but the concrete bunker blocked any hope of a signal.

I grabbed the bottom rung of the ladder and pulled myself to standing. Walked on unsteady feet toward the lighted doorway, supporting myself by leaning on the rough concrete wall.

The musty, tangy smell grew stronger. When I pushed the door open all the way, I saw why: I’d found a lab, which looked and smelled like Dr. Kiel’s. I’d smelled it the first time I came to the silo but hadn’t connected the scent to Kiel. Another demerit on the detective’s performance review.

A countertop held a dozen canisters—fermenters, like Kiel’s—with hoses that snaked into a hood where an exhaust fan ran. A cylindrical machine against the facing wall was rotating slowly, making a clacking sound as an external set of rods moved up and down.

Three computers stood on the countertop near the door. Two seemed to be logging what the fermenters and the clacking machine were doing. The third monitor showed what was happening in the world aboveground. The room where I’d been talking to Baggetto and Roswell appeared in one quadrant, empty now except for one of the men in black, who was playing with his phone. The other quadrants showed the entrance to the silo grounds, the exterior of the launch-control support building, and a view of the Sea-2-Sea fields. I’d never had a chance of getting out of the building unscathed.