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Show Acting Alone Page 351 Sanhedrin sealing off the Holy Sepulchre. Mr. Cicerone either knew about meteorology or knew a friend who knew about meteorology, and had explained to everybody that, when and if a freak mountain-climbing tornado came, even if it were to miss the encampment altogether, it could still wreak total destruction by running over one or two tunnel exits on the outside: in doing so, it could very well transform the whole subterranean network into a giant vacuum cleaner and suck every trace of the encampment to hell. Or the tornado could possibly even do something freakish like borrow a lion or tiger or crocodile from Cheyenne Zoo downslope, shit it right back up into the Companions' laps, and transform the whole mountainside into a coliseum full of screaming, chewed Christians. Just so. But the Companions could've let Axelrad pass before closing off the tunnels. He'd been forced to carry his bundle overground, to move snail-like under the dripping, screaming thunderheads, for every nun in the combined regions of Eastern Colorado and Western Kansas to see and identify him. Of course, even if he'd had to go by hot-air balloon, his bare butt painted radioactive chartreuse and hung out the side of the basket blowing bebop out the anus on a silver cornet, Axelrad would have gotten out of that encampment today. Because the old man had warned him over the radiophone this morning that there was going to be a raid. Not just a forest ranger boyscout litter patrol raid, or even a vice squad raid (fruitless as that would be): Mr. Cicerone said there was going to be an honest-to- God military or paramilitary raid with weapons and everything. Mr. Cicerone's voice had sounded so strange when apprising him of this. |