“How’re things looking inside, Julia?” I whispered, knowing we needed her feedback before we attempted entrance.
“Um, pretty still right now,” her voice came back. “Then again, people could be sitting in chairs and working, or even resting, so keep your wits about you. I’ll keep you updated.”
I inhaled. We still knew very little about who these people were, or what they might be doing in this place. We also didn’t know what they might do to us if we got caught. I just knew that we couldn’t afford for that to happen.
Winter and Zion reached the skylight just as Julia ended her transmission, and positioned themselves on either side of it. Jackie handed them the cutter she had been carrying in her belt, and I pressed my lips together. We weren’t sure if the windows way up here were rigged to the alarm system, but we had to hope that cutting through the glass itself wouldn’t trigger it even if they were. Otherwise, we were basically screwed.
Winter grabbed the cutter and set to work, her metal hands gripping the object hard. I watched with a tight stomach as she slowly, painstakingly cut around the edges, making the glass looser and looser, until the pane became dangerously close to caving in and shattering on the floor beneath.
But she paused just before that could happen. “Okay, I figure we’re thirty seconds away from the glass breaking, if I continue cutting,” she muttered. “Team Decoy, do you hear me?”
The deep voice of Cloyd, who had volunteered to manage the backup team, came back. “Yup. And we’re ready.”
“Okay, you need to activate in thirty seconds, counting from NOW.”
Winter immediately switched the cutter on again and pressed it once more to the shaky glass. My gut clenched harder as she continued slicing, and I counted down the seconds in my head. Twenty-five. Twenty. Fifteen. Ten. Five…
BANG.
BANG.
BANG.
A series of explosions erupted from the parking lot, so loud I didn’t even hear the glass shattering when it dropped, and we all froze, listening to the sounds of confused voices drifting up from the compound. Then came the noise of hurried footsteps. I was just thankful that the sounds hadn’t been accompanied by a blaring siren; it meant shattering the window hadn’t triggered any alarms.
Julia’s voice swiftly returned to the line. “Okay, I got good news and bad news. Bad is, there are definitely people inside the building. Good news is the decoy seems to have distracted them. I see at least three figures on… varying levels… moving away from your end of the building and toward the parking lot. So now’s your chance. Go. I’ll keep you updated on their movement.”
We didn’t need telling twice. Winter was the first to drop through the hole, followed by Zion, Jackie, Kory, Austin, and the twins, with Jace and me taking up the rear, due to our natural positioning in the line. We found ourselves landing on a solid, dusty cement floor, in a low-ceilinged attic that seemed to span the entire length and breadth of the building, and was scattered with piles of discarded hardware, from cracked monitors to broken keyboards to ancient-looking hard drives. I noticed everyone eyeing the heaps as we passed them, as if each of us might be wondering the same thing: whether there might be any evidence up here in the attic itself. If there was, we might not need to venture downstairs. But the equipment looked more or less like trash, so we hurried past it.
Suddenly Zion came to a stop up ahead, causing the rest of us to slow down. “We’ll take this trapdoor down,” he grunted as he bent down and heaved at a hatch, attached to which was a foldable ladder.
Winter knelt to help him, though the door seemed to open without much trouble. They lowered the ladder, and then the man and woman were disappearing through the open hole, and the rest of us were moving to stand around it and gaze down into what appeared to be a dark hallway.
Zion and Winter had their guns out in front of them as they looked left and right. And then, apparently satisfied that the coast was clear, Zion nodded and gestured for us to climb down after them.
Jackie lowered herself first, being closest to the top of the ladder, and the rest of us followed quickly afterward, trying to make as little noise as humanly possible. I went before Jace, then watched as he climbed down after me, nervous at the noise he might make, but the rubber modifications on our soles really did seem to be doing wonders, and he made it down with minimal sound.
I turned my attention to the front of the line, which had already begun to move—Zion, Winter, and Jackie taking point, with Austin trailing them, while the twins, a few steps behind him, had begun to film again. None of us knew how long our decoy team was going to be able to keep the guards and other occupants of this building distracted. The plan was for the cherry bomb explosions to lure as many people outside as possible, to investigate, at which point the team was supposed to set off a round of smoke bombs laced with sedative gas, to cause further confusion and ideally take out a few men in the process. Which would hopefully give my team the time we needed to discover and retrieve evidence.
But the strategy was a shaky one, to say the least. We had to hope that a) nobody in the surrounding area saw the smoke from the building, assumed there was a fire, and decided to call the fire department, and b) nobody in the building itself saw our setup for the decoy that it was, evaded the smoke, and called for backup. We were banking on nobody being ballsy enough to call the cops, given what we suspected went on in this building, but either way, we had to hurry. Especially since there were CCTV cameras dotted about the ceiling.
We just had to hope that nobody was monitoring this floor right at this moment.
I hung back from everyone for a second to throw a glance over my shoulder, needing to reassure myself that nobody was following us, even though Julia was supposed to be alerting us to any movement coming our way. The hallway was still empty, though, so I set my sights ahead again.
We had a backup plan for how to deal with people who evaded the sedative and either returned to, or remained in, the building, but I really hoped we could avoid that. In any case, until we heard back from Julia with an update on movement, all we could do was focus on our next step: getting to a computer terminal. One that would have the kind of data we needed.
The front of the line came to a sudden stop, with Zion, Jackie, and Winter peering into two open doorways, one on either side of the wall, before spilling into the one on the right. I glanced through at both rooms as soon as I reached them, and saw that they were empty offices. I entered the right-hand room and watched tentatively as Austin did a sweep of it, examining monitors and ducking beneath desks. He stopped when he reached a bay in the center of the room that held a large CPU, which seemed to be hooked up to multiple monitors.
“Let’s try this one,” he murmured, taking off his backpack and kneeling. He pressed the power button, fumbled in his bag for a mini drive, and plugged it into the machine, before pulling out a clunky-looking handheld device.
We all waited around him, watching tensely. My eyes flitted between his fingers punching the handheld’s small rubber buttons and the lines of coding spilling across its narrow screen—and the open doorway. We wanted to avoid closing it, not just for fear of it creaking, but because we needed to hear any noises coming from the hallway.
“I’m starting to see movement coming in your direction,” Julia’s voice suddenly crackled through, making my skin crawl. “Looks like two people. They seem to be on a lower floor, so probably not an immediate threat, but yeah. Hux, Robin, and Jackie: you’d better follow through on that backup plan, pronto.”
“Got an ETA, Austin?” I asked in a strained whisper, a pit of dread opening up in my stomach. I’d prayed it wouldn’t come to this. That we’d be able to swipe the evidence we needed before people in the building became a problem. But I couldn’t say that it was unexpected, either. I’d known the chances of all of them venturing outside and getting caught by the sedative were slim.
But that didn’t stop my palms from sweating. If Austin thought he was going to be longer
than another couple of minutes, it meant we had to take them out ASAP. If they were going to call for backup, we were most likely already too late to stop them, but we were hoping backup wouldn’t be immediate. And with Alexy monitoring the surrounding roads, we should have ample warning of approaching vehicles. In the meantime, we could neutralize anyone inside the building, so Austin could complete his work without any immediate threat.
At least, that was the theory. One that was based on a few more “shoulds” and “hopes” than I was comfortable with.
The wiry man at the computer gave no response to my question, but his thumbs started working faster. He was under enough stress as it was, and likely didn’t appreciate me laying on more pressure, but I couldn’t help it.
After a long moment, he finally replied in a hoarse whisper, “Okay, good news and bad news. Bad: security is a lot stronger than I’d hoped. No way I can breach the system with this handheld. Good: I’ve managed to establish a remote connection to Nelson, so she can take it from here.”
His voice then cut off in my earphones, and I quickly flipped my visor open to change channels on the comms, realizing that was what Austin was doing, to connect with Nelson.
“Nelson, you got my transmiss—?”
“Yup, I see what you’ve done,” Nelson’s voice cut through his question. “Will deploy all the horsepower I got and try to breach ASAP. Switch on a monitor so you can follow my progress. I’ll relay whatever data I find, and Abe can film.”
With that, she cut off, and I switched back to our communal channel before closing my visor. Austin immediately moved to do as Nelson instructed, switching on the screen of the monitor nearest to us, but as much as I wanted to stay and watch Nelson begin to dig through their system, Jace, Jackie, and I had to go. This process sounded like it was going to last more than a couple of minutes.
Which meant we had to take care of the people who might be coming straight for us. Preferably before they could make trouble. I just hoped there really were only two of them.
Jace’s visor was already tilting in my direction, telling me he understood. We headed to the door, Jackie—and one of the twins—following swiftly on our heels.
I whirled on the twin, raising my eyebrows, even though I knew he couldn’t see them through my visor and mask. “Abe?” I asked.
“Ant,” he muttered.
“What’re you doing?”
“My job,” he remarked. “Abe can more than cover what’s going on up here. I want to capture more of this place on film. Who knows, we could even come across some low-hanging fruit.”
I sucked in a breath, knowing that his words made sense; we weren’t expecting there to be low-hanging fruit in this place in the form of physical evidence, like documents lying around, but it would be shortsighted to completely discount the possibility. And once we managed to take down the remaining hostiles, we might have a bit of time to look around, while we were on the lower levels of the building—and Ant could record it all, in case we did stumble across anything pertinent.
Still, I didn’t exactly feel comfortable with the idea of Ant tagging along. It was one extra person exposing themselves to the line of fire, because I didn’t doubt that the people in this building would be armed. And the fact that half of his brain was going to be distracted by filming didn’t help my nerves.
But I wasn’t his mom, and it wasn’t my place to try to dissuade him. So I pushed the worry away and walked the rest of the distance to the door’s threshold, where Jackie and Jace were waiting. Jackie’s visor fixed on Ant for a moment, as if she shared the same concerns as me, but she didn’t comment, and then the four of us were stepping out into the hallway.
“Let’s switch to our own channel,” I murmured, as tense whispers from the room we’d just left entered my ears. I figured we could all do without the distraction of their nervous conversation now that we were venturing into unknown territory. We could check back again in a bit to gauge their progress, and Julia and Alexy had the ability to override all of our channels, so we weren’t in danger of missing an important announcement from them.
My companions nodded, and we briefly flipped open our visors to make the switch to channel three.
“I see four of you moving,” Julia’s voice crackled in our ears as we began to walk again.
“Ant’s tagging along with us,” I replied.
“Okay. Developments: the two people I spotted earlier seem to have convened in the same room. Which should hopefully make things easier for you. Hard for me to tell exactly which floor, but judging by how blurry and obscured their forms are, I’m guessing the bottom floor. Possibly even the basement.”
“Okay, got it,” Jackie replied, and then Julia disconnected again.
There was a pause as the four of us looked at one another, knowing that this was it. And, in spite of the tense atmosphere, I suddenly wished that we’d kept our visors open, that I could get a true read on their emotions in that moment. Particularly Jace. I’d been in my fair share of life-threatening situations since I started going out with Nelson’s group, and although we wore masks, I’d gotten used to always being able to look into their eyes—and hadn’t realized how important that was until now. Even if they only reflected my own anxiety, it felt like an important human part of the equation when heading into uncertain danger. To be able to sense that we were all in this together, to see that we were all going through the same emotions. Staring into a bunch of dark, flat visors seemed horribly impersonal, and left me feeling needy for a sense of grounding.
But this was seriously not the time to get melodramatic, and if anyone else was feeling the same, they didn’t comment on it, so I shoved it aside and kept moving.
We walked slowly down the corridor at first, but after half a minute, as if all remembering at once that our targets were supposed to be way downstairs, we dared to speed up a bit, at the risk of making a touch more noise, until we reached a staircase and an elevator about three quarters of the way down the hallway.
And I thanked God for the option of a good, old-fashioned staircase, because there was no way I would’ve wanted to risk taking an elevator—not just from the noise of the cables, but from the fear of who might be standing there when the doors opened.
Jace took point, and I followed right after him, then Jackie, with Ant at the rear with his camera. We crept down the stairs more painstakingly than we’d walked along the corridor, since they were trickier to navigate quietly, and when we reached the bottom of the flight, on the next level down, we found that it connected directly to the next set of stairs. The pattern repeated itself all the way down the building, until there were no more stairs to climb, and I realized that we had unwittingly reached the basement already.
We paused at the bottom of it, our ears as alert as they could be within our suits. It was dark, except for a handful of dim service lights punched into the ceiling at intervals. The corridor here was also shorter than that of the levels above, and overall it seemed a little too quiet. I was about to suggest we check the floor above us first, but then Jace suddenly started moving, away from the stairs and toward the right-hand side of the corridor.
As we followed him, I realized that his gaze was set on a metal door that had been left ever so slightly ajar, about seven feet down. A soft white light, almost imperceptible beneath the ceiling lights, was escaping through the cracks around its edges. He stopped in front of it, gesturing with one hand for us to approach with caution. As he placed his head near the crack, we followed suit, and I realized what Jace had somehow heard: a faint murmuring drifting through from the other side.
Given that none of the rest of us had noticed it from the staircase, I was highly impressed by his sense of hearing, even through the suit, and wondered if it was a side effect of having been brought up in the wild. But now wasn’t the time for irrelevant questions, so I refocused on the matter at hand.
I squinted in concentration, trying to make out the words of the conversation, but the voices were to
o indistinct. The only thing I knew for sure was that they were men, due to the depth of their tones.
I bit my lip and leaned back so I could face my colleagues. “Definitely men in there,” I breathed. “Suggestions for how we approach this?”
Jackie reached for one of the smoke/sedative bombs that she had strapped to her belt. “One of us pulls the door open, and I throw it in,” she whispered. “We hope it disables them before they can shoot, but keep sheltered out here until we’re sure. Then we go in and disarm them.”
I nodded, my mouth feeling dry, and looked to Jace, hoping that he’d be comfortable with that—I mean, it seemed like the quickest and safest option, given the circumstances.
If his curt nod was anything to go by, then he was.
And then Jackie turned to Ant. “As for you. You just… do your thing back there, okay?” She pointed vaguely toward the staircase. “Don’t come near the door. You’ll only get in the way and probably end up getting shot or something.”
“Well, thanks.” Ant scoffed.
“What Jackie’s saying is don’t try to multitask,” I cut in. “If you wanna help, put the camera down first. Otherwise, stay back.”
He gave a huff but did as we advised, moving back until he was level with the staircase, before defiantly pointing his camera at us.
Exhaling, I resumed my focus on the door—and Jace’s hand, which was inches away from opening it.
32
Gripping my gun, I shoved my back against the wall while Jackie prepared the bomb. Once her index finger was firmly looped through the ring, she pulled the pin and hissed to Jace, “NOW!”
He yanked the door open with one firm tug, and Jackie hurled the bomb. It left her hand, disappearing from my view, but before she could take a step back for Jace or me to push the door closed again, the sound of sharp popping erupted from the room. Bullets sprayed out through the doorway within a split second, and the next thing I knew, Jackie was clutching her gut and staggering backward.