by Jim Heskett
She stole a quick kiss, rolled off him, and then sat back. Yorick breathed hard for a moment, his lungs empty after the wind had been knocked out of him.
“You okay?” she whispered.
When he could speak, he said, “All good.” Then, he closed his mouth, because the ground guard passed in front of the outside window. Young guy, not much older than Rosia and Yorick. His eyes stayed forward, and in half a second, he was gone again.
Yorick closed his eyes for a few beats, trying to adjust to the total darkness. When he opened them, he could see this room was a medium-sized storage area. Shelves stacked with boxes and stray bits of mechanical things like coils of wire and garage tools. Plus rows of file cabinets. Did the White Flames keep documents in file cabinets? Bookkeeping didn’t seem like the kind of thing they would do.
So many nameless boxes. No clear way to know if any of them contained anything useful.
Rosia must have been thinking the same thing, because she roamed the room, opened various file cabinet drawers and peeking into those boxes. Yorick moved to the opposite side of the room to search along with her.
But, Yorick’s eyes landed on one box that had been stamped 9mm on the side. He crossed the room and gingerly removed the tape securing the top closed. Inside, he found a rack of handguns, magazines, and boxes of ammunition.
Yorick checked the weapons for anything like biometric sensors or other roadblocks but found none. These were classic machines, with no electronics to complicate them. He loaded bullets into two magazines and then handed Rosia a pistol.
Yorick stuffed a box of ammo and a few empty mags in his back pocket. Being armed did give him a confidence boost. He nodded toward the door, which he could now see was five meters away on the west side of the room.
At the door, he pressed an ear against it. No light came out from underneath, but that didn’t mean the hall or area outside was empty.
Yorick could hear the faintest warble of ambiguous voices emanating from somewhere. But nothing that sounded like it was nearby.
“You ready?” he said.
She nodded.
Yorick listened to the pace of Rosia’s breathing increase as he reached for the door handle. He met her eyes and gave her a wink before he opened the door into a dark hallway.
Pistols pointed down, they scooted out and gave the door a soft ride back to shut, so it made no noise. Yorick could now tell right away where the voices were coming from. Down the hall and to the right, light spilled out of a door. At least five or six voices drifted from inside that room. By the sound of it, they were playing the card game Fours in there. Loud, drunken men and women, carrying on with no clue they’d been invaded. This late at night, they shouldn’t be expecting anything.
They had too much faith in their guards outside. Too cocky, and that’s why this was going to work.
Yorick wished he had a communicator to give Hamon an update. But, he had to trust in his friend. Hamon would know what to do if it came to it.
Yorick flicked his head in the opposite direction, and he led Rosia to a staircase. There were lights up above on the second floor, and Yorick moved with care as he ascended each step. He squinted, waiting to duck back down the instant he saw any part of a body.
But he saw nothing.
At the top of the stairs, they found a hallway lit only by a single dim bulb overhead. Closed doors on both sides indicated names like Bunk Room 1 and Bunk Room 2. Sleeping quarters for resident members. How many? Yorick had heard only a dozen lived here, but there seemed to be room for a lot more than that.
Either way, it didn’t matter. Time to push on and get what they came for. It’s not as if they would take the time to do a head count. A single shot fired would still change everything.
Yorick and Rosia skulked down the hall until they came to a door with no name. Yorick leaned against it and heard nothing. Then, he tried the knob and found it locked. Good sign. He used the lock picker device Hamon had given him and picked the lock within ten seconds. A darkened office on the other side. He and Rosia got to work, opening drawers and rifling through anything that looked secretive.
After a couple minutes, they gave up. Maybe they would come back to this room if they had to, but there was no time for a deep dive now.
They moved on to the next room, another locked door. Yorick broke into it, and they found another storage room, but this one had a safe sitting in the corner. The safe sat open, and Yorick crouched in front of it.
“Anything?” Rosia asked as he picked through the contents. Her back was to him, watching the door.
“No,” he said. “Some gold, jewelry, random papers. Not our chip.”
Their time was quickly running out. Sooner or later, those White Flames downstairs would retire to bed, and Yorick hadn’t seen an alternate way to exit this floor aside from the staircase back at the other end.
There was only one more door to check on this floor. Otherwise, they’d have to search the ground floor. A lot more dangerous to be on the same level as the ones playing Fours.
When Yorick peeked out into the hall, he noted the writing on the last door. MM. That had to stand for Manuel Menendez.
Would the White Flames leader keep the chip in his bedroom? Yeah, probably. Maybe even sitting out in the open, depending on the size of Menendez’s ego.
Yorick tilted his head at the door, and Rosia raised her pistol at it. Yorick pressed his ear against the door and heard nothing. He tried the knob and found it unlocked.
Inside the room, Yorick saw what he’d expected: a bedroom. Video screen on a stand, bed, dresser, nightstand. There were two side doors in the room, one dark, and one with a band of light underneath it. Probably the bathroom. But, Yorick didn’t hear any sound coming from the lit room.
“There,” Rosia whispered. Yorick followed her gaze to the nightstand, where the control chip sat, next to a pile of gold coins. Waiting for them to snatch it. It really would be as easy as that.
Yorick’s heart raced. He crossed the room. Shaking fingers picked up the chip and slid it into his pocket.
Just then, the bathroom door opened and Menendez emerged, a toothbrush jutting from his mouth. He was wearing a bathrobe.
Menendez reached up to pull the toothbrush from his clenched teeth. He took in a breath, opened his mouth.
Yorick shot him in the chest before he could yell.
Chapter Twenty-Four
Yorick watched as Manuel Menendez staggered back, a bullet wound in his chest. The large man slapped one hand on top of the wound. In the other hand, he was still clutching his toothbrush.
When he bumped into the wall, the bath towel around his waist slipped. There he was, reputedly one of the most dangerous gangsters in Denver, naked, wet, toothpaste on his lower lip, dying from a gunshot wound to the chest.
Yorick had just killed the most revered White Flames leader in Denver, right in his home, surrounded by the man’s loyal gang members.
“Move!” Rosia said, snapping him out of his paralysis.
Yorick patted his pocket to make sure the control chip was still there. Then, he stampeded toward the door. Rosia was already one step ahead of him in the hallway. She lifted her pistol and squeezed off a shot.
When Yorick emerged into the hallway with her, he saw two White Flames members down the hall. One was running up the stairs. The other had apparently emerged from one of the dorm rooms along the hall. Rosia had shot him in the thigh, and he was trying to stay on his feet, but failing. He slid down the wall, leaving a trail of blood behind him.
With so much chaos, Yorick had to suck in a breath to think.
He ignored the injured man since the guy had no weapon in his hands and appeared more occupied with survival than attack. Instead, Yorick blasted a couple of shots in the direction of the man at the top of the stairs. Yorick missed, but the bullets made the guy duck back down, out of sight.
But, more voices were coming from that direction. Yorick thought of the half dozen or more people wh
o’d been playing Fours downstairs. They were probably all armed. Or, they were stopping by that storage room to grab weapons.
A door to the right opened, and a man stood there in his underwear, raising a hand to block out the light coming from the hallway.
Another door opened. A man leaned out, pistol in hand. He blasted a shot that took out a chunk of the wall next to Yorick’s head.
An escape back the way they’d come in would not work. There were eight doors between them and the stairs. The rest of the downstairs crew would be coming up to this floor at any second. And who knew how many others were in the dorm rooms.
A flash of memory hit Yorick. A few months ago, during one of the first of the daily summer battles on the plantación. He and Rosia had escaped into one of the buildings in the block quadrant when a large number of Reds chased them. Up the stairs, they’d had to divert onto a floor when the stairwell up had been blocked. They entered the hallway, and the Reds in pursuit cornered them. Trapped, no other way out. Yorick had regarded the window overlooking the quadrants, and for a moment, considered jumping through the window. That would have been crazy, though. Five stories up, no way would they have survived the fall.
Yorick now knew what to do. The office where they’d searched. There was a window in that room. It was the second story, but there wasn’t a better option. The quickest way to flee from all the bullets inside this building was to bypass the stairs and go straight to the ground.
“Here,” Yorick shouted at Rosia, as a man leveled his pistol to take aim. Two more appeared at the top of the stairs.
Rosia turned, and Yorick ducked into the office. He pointed his arm at the window and pressed the trigger a few times, punching out most of the glass. Rosia seemed to understand, as she headed in that direction. Long strides, arms swinging at her sides.
“You first,” she shouted as she turned and fired a couple shots back out into the hallway.
No time to debate. In two steps, Yorick met the window. He closed his eyes and leaped, arching his back as his body passed through. Within a second, the cool night air met his exposed skin. He felt wetness on his arms. Must have cut himself on the glass, but that didn’t matter now. He was tumbling in space, and at the last possible moment, he told himself to curl into a ball to minimize the impact.
It mostly worked, and he managed to land in a patch of dirt. He hit shoulder-first, then rolled forward. Rosia landed next to him a half second later, with considerably more grace. Her feet touched down and then she sprang forward. Both of them were in the dirt, face up, staring at the stars above.
The sudden change from the deafening boom of repeated gunshots to the silence of the night air filled Yorick’s head with white noise. Pain radiated from his shoulder, down into his chest.
And then a patch of dirt next to them exploded as the sniper above shot at them.
Yorick launched to his feet, grabbing Rosia by the arm. They didn’t have to speak. They knew the way to go. Anywhere but here.
As they raced toward the junkyard beyond the compound, more bullets zipped through the air around them. The sniper’s rifle cracked against the night air, thunder as bullets blew chunks of the earth to bits. From the dirt pile to the east, Hamon squeezed off a few shots from his sniper rifle. Bullets whizzed above Yorick’s head, toward the building. Cover fire to open up a path for them to escape.
One of those bullets took out the exterior roving guard. More shots aimed higher, trying to neutralize the roof guard. Yorick didn’t know if Hamon got her, or if she ducked down to avoid his fire. Either way, it didn’t matter. Hamon’s cover saved their lives.
And Yorick and Rosia didn’t quit running, long past the point of safety.
Chapter Twenty-Five
Seven hours later, Yorick and Rosia again found themselves approaching the trail next to Cherry Creek. Hearts still racing. Maybe they had escaped from the White Flames compound with the chip and their lives, but they were far from safe and would stay that way from now on.
The hacker Camila had described Menendez as one of the most powerful White Flames bosses in the city. That implied he wasn’t the only one. And, even if taking him out had done a favor for other up-and-coming gang bosses, they would still feel obligated to hunt down Menendez’s killer.
“I don’t see her,” Rosia said as they descended the bike path and could see the underpass ahead.
Yorick looked around and found no sign of the same woman disguised in shabby robes as they had seen the day before. No one at all out this early in the morning, actually. They kept their heads down as they neared the underpass.
He pulled Rosia into the shadows under the bridge. “I guess, we wait for her.”
“Our breakfast shift starts in an hour.”
“I know. Let’s give her a little more time before we give up. This has to work. We don’t have another choice.”
So they waited. Sitting in the dark, Yorick’s nerves vibrated like waves. Still no message from Tenney, Diego often appearing at the brothel, the king still persecuting a kingdom full of serfs, the soldados after them.
And now, the White Flames would be on the lookout for them, too.
He sighed, a long and slow grunt of air. Rosia put her arms around his shoulders and leaned her head against his neck.
“I know,” she said.
“It’s a lot.”
“Yes, it is. But we’re going to get through this.”
He pulled back to look at her. He couldn’t tell if she believed it or if she was trying to make him feel better. And, ultimately, it didn’t matter. They had started down this course. They had a chance to disrupt the government and help the serfs all across the kingdom.
No matter the cost, they had to take it.
“Let’s think it through,” Yorick said. “We give the chip to Camila. She gives it back to us, all fixed up and ready to go. It’s programmed to do this thing that somehow unlocks all the plantación gates in the kingdom by tapping into this… network thing.”
“Right.”
“That solves for us the third of three problems, as I see it.”
“What are the other two problems?”
He extended his index finger. “Problem number one is getting into the building.”
Rosia nodded. “We’re working on Diego for that angle. We don’t know how yet, but he seems like our best bet for access.”
“Maybe. Or, maybe we can work our way into the building some other way. Impersonating someone who has a legitimate reason to be there.”
“True. If we can not involve Diego, then it seems to me that’s the best way to go. We can’t control him.”
“Okay,” Yorick said as he held up a second finger. “We can keep that open as an option. The second problem is one I don’t know if we can plan for. How do we find the place we’re supposed to insert the chip?”
“Only the stars know. We might have to figure that one out only after we’re inside. Unless we can find someone who has knowledge of the building and can tell us where to go.”
He didn’t like the sound of that but didn’t know if he had a better plan at the moment. “We’ll have to deal with these things when they come up, maybe.”
“We need to find Tenney today,” Rosia said, after a pause.
“I know.”
“I’m getting worried about him, out there on his own.”
Yorick nodded. “Me too.”
“I mean, you and I have each other, at least.”
He put a calm hand on her shoulder. “I understand, Rose. We’re going to find him. It’s all going to be okay.”
She gave him a smile that said she wasn’t sure if she believed him but also didn’t want to start an argument about it.
A moment later, a figure in long brown robes strolled along the bike path under the bridge. This person held a chain with a metal device on the end of it, like a large egg. Holes dotted the side of the egg, and sweet-smelling smoke poured out of the holes. Incense.
As this person strolled,
the robed figure chanted something. Sounded like religious words, possibly, although Yorick didn’t know much about religion beyond what he’d read in the books. The person stopped chanting and looked at them. Camila in a new disguise.
“Good morning, brother and sister. Have you found Jesus?”
“Who?” Rosia asked.
Camila set the incense egg on the path and knelt in front of them. “Please tell me I have not exposed myself to risk two days in a row for nothing.”
“You haven’t,” Yorick said.
“Okay, then let’s see it.”
He hesitated. “Hamon vouched for you, and that was good enough for us to meet. But, how do we know we can trust you with our most valuable possession?”
Camila shrugged. “I’m not sure what to tell you. Hamon and I met through a mutual friend. None of us are fans of the government. And, if I can help cause some chaos, I’m all for it. What else do you want to hear?”
Yorick and Rosia shared a look. Probably, that was as good as it would get. He drew the control chip out of his pocket and held it out.
Camila’s eyes widened like a child given a choice between a thousand different pieces of candy. “It’s real? That’s a genuine Ramirez?”
Yorick nodded.
“Oh, wow,” she said. Practically salivating. “I have always wanted to play with one of those.”
“You know what to do with it?”
“Of course. Hamon already explained what you want. I need about four hours to program it to enable remote mechanical control. Maybe five, depending on the encryption. It’s important for you to understand that once it’s reprogrammed, it’s single-use only. Uploading and installing the completed the virus will burn out the chip. Got it?”
“We understand,” Yorick said.
“When do we come back?” Rosia asked.
“Meet me here this afternoon, and it’ll be ready. Then, you’ll need to find a terminal, somewhere high up in the capitol building. It needs to be marked as a royal terminal. Those are the only ones with widespread network access.”