Wint woke up. The room was dimly lit. His head buzzed ferociously. No, it wasn’t his head, the sound was coming from outside. What was it? Explosions? Thunder?
He arose and got his bearings. The room was few meters on each side, boxed in by barren, chipped concrete walls. The room was chilly and smelled ever so slightly of damp, though no more than his own bathroom at home. The bed he’d slept on was narrow and hard, and Wint could feel his hip and shoulder bones ache from the application of his weight to the firm surface. He looked at his watch. 7:45am, Sunday morning. The morning after he’d shot a man at close range, after he was nearly shot himself. Albeit, with rubber bullets, but he’d only learned about that after the fact.
Who was the man he had shot? How had they learned about his Bitcoin so quickly? How had they followed him? How did Ada know they’d be onto him and put up the cloak and dagger security measures? Why hadn’t they worked? What was this place? Was it safe here?
He sat up on the bed and rubbed his arms to generate a bit of heat to wake himself up. He looked at the metal security door, similar to the one they had walked through to enter the tunnel that had led them here. The door was slightly ajar. Had they really walked for hours in the long, narrow concrete tunnel, or had he just lost his sense of time?
A big booming explosion rang from the outside. His concrete bunker put Wint in a mindset of war. Had the tunnel been some kind of inter-dimensional portal to another place, another time, a time of war? Or had the Irishman woken up, called for reinforcements, and were now fusillading their safe house with cannons? Both were equally unlikely, but so was the noise being thunder, that’s how regular and frequent the booms were.
All his answers were out there. In here was the cold comfort of not knowing. In case the sound of explosions coming from the outside turned out to be a war zone, he’d rather go back to bed and pull up the weird crinkly synthetic blanket back over his head. This is what he might have done, if the smell of damp hadn’t gotten a new scent… a whiff of coffee. If someone had the time and wherewithal to brew a pot of coffee, the situation couldn’t be that dire. Besides, he could really use a cup.
He rose from his bunk and wandered into the hallway. The tunnel they’d used to escape the old library the previous night had eventually led them through another symmetrical security door at the other end and into a complex of bare rooms, similar to the one he’d slept in. In the night, only dim red lights had illuminated the space, giving him a broad understanding of the size of place, and virtually no hint of its contents. Now he could see that even his estimation of its size had been wildly off.
What. The. Hell?