No Exit

by LENA DIAZ,

  “Yes, sir. They went to the attic to get some old files. But when I brought up a snack tray they were gone. I look through the house, nothing. But the black car, Mr. Jace’s car, is still out front.”

  He stood and jerked his suit jacket into place. “Thank you for calling. I’m sure they’re fine, probably out touring the property, and they forgot to let you know. But I’ll come home and check, just to be sure.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Cyprian.”

  He hung up the phone and headed around his desk.

  “What’s going on?” Sebastian asked.

  “I’m going home for a late lunch.”

  Sebastian arched a brow. “You don’t mind if I go with you, do you?”

  Hell, yes, he minded. But until he finished dealing with this Council situation, he had little choice. Without a word, he headed out the door, with Sebastian following behind.

  Chapter Twelve

  Jace stood at the bottom of the steps with his gun out, aiming it up in the direction of the stairs even though he couldn’t see them in the pitch-black room. Behind him, Melissa waited in silence, her hands curled into the top of his belt. But after a full minute passed without hearing any sounds or the trapdoor sliding open, Jace shoved his gun into his holster and used the flashlight app on his smart phone.

  He aimed the light at the ceiling, casting a small halo around the two of them. “Having the lights switch off must have been some kind of security feature in case someone who has no business being here found their way down here.”

  “Like us?” She pulled her hands from his belt and stepped beside him.

  She sounded dangerously close to insisting they give up their search before it had even begun, so he didn’t respond to her remark. “If we split up, we might find a light switch faster. Does your phone have a flashlight app?”

  “Yes. But it won’t help.”

  “Dead battery?”

  “My phone’s in my purse. At home.”

  “Well, I can see why that might make it difficult to use. Come on. We’ll figure this out together. I can’t imagine that your father would work in the dark down here. There has to be a light switch.”

  After searching the desk area again, which seemed the logical spot for a light switch, Jace pulled her toward the left side of the room. But when she looked back toward the desk, without the phone flashlight pointing that way anymore, a green speck of light caught her attention.

  “Wait, I see something.” She pulled her hand from Jace’s and felt her way down the one part of the wall not covered by bookcases, right above the desk.

  His light swung toward her.

  “No, turn your phone away. I can’t see it in the light.”

  He aimed the phone at the ceiling instead. “See what?”

  “A tiny green circle, glowing, like an LED light.” She bumped into the desk. There. About a foot up. She ran her hands up to the circle, covering it with her fingers. It was small, but she could definitely feel the outline of a button. She pushed it, and the fluorescent lights overhead flooded the room with light. She grinned triumphantly. “Found it.”

  Jace was already putting his phone away. “You did indeed.” He joined her at the desk and felt the button. “It blends right into the wall. I never would have seen it. Good catch.” He checked his watch. “We’ve already been gone from the attic longer than I’d hoped. Let’s keep an eye out for the door mechanism while we’re searching the files. We don’t want to be gone so long that Silvia goes looking for us.”

  A FEW MINUTES later, Jace stood in the middle of the room, scanning everything around him. What was he missing? Something wasn’t right.

  Neither of them had found a way to trigger the trapdoor, or even any useful files. The desk, bookshelves, and filing cabinets contained only official tour-company documents—probably decoys in case anyone ever managed to find this room. That certainly fit Cyprian’s personality and went along with having the lights switch off. But assuming that his true purpose in building this room was to store files from the enforcement side of the company, where would he hide them? And where would he put that damn trapdoor mechanism?

  The answer to those questions probably rested with the person who knew Cyprian a lot better than he did.

  “Mel, we’re going about this all wrong.”

  They met each other in front of the desk.

  “What do you mean?” she asked.

  “You figured out how to open the trapdoor upstairs because you put yourself in your father’s shoes and did what he would do. That’s what you need to do here. Talk it through. You’re Cyprian. What’s the most logical area to put a mechanism to open the door? And how would you hide documents down here? Or something important enough to warrant building this space?”

  “The boxes. There are so many. It makes sense that he’d . . . that I . . . would hide critical documents in at least some of them. Or maybe in the bottom, beneath tour documents.”

  “Maybe. Probably. But that wouldn’t make it easy for quick retrieval if he wanted to come down here and work for a short amount of time, like on a lunch break. Think like him. Be him. What would you do down here? How would you trigger the door?”

  She put her hands on her hips and studied the desk, with its wall of bookshelves behind it. “I’m my father. I like things simple, easy. And I’m not a fan of technology even though I have to use it. At work, I have a Rolodex on my desk. The only reason I have a smart phone and know how to use it is because my daughter forced me into the current century a few years ago. But whenever feasible, I use an old-fashioned landline phone instead.”

  He nodded. “That’s it. So what would you do, given those parameters?”

  She glanced around the room. “The only good work space is this desk. And I want to be comfortable. I wouldn’t stand to look through any files. I’d definitely use the desk, and this chair.” She pulled out the chair and sat down, scooting it in just like she had upstairs.

  “Economy of movement,” she said. “And no more technological gadgets than absolutely necessary.” She glanced up at Jace. “There’s no phone. And nothing remotely electronic except for one thing.”

  A slow smile tilted his lips. “The green button.”

  “Yes, but that turned on the lights.”

  “Yes, it did. When you pressed it the first time. You said he likes simplicity.” He cocked a brow. “Let’s find out what happens if you press it again.”

  She shrugged. “Here goes nothing.” She pressed the button.

  A faint hum sounded, but not from above. The bookshelves split in the middle and slid back into the wall like pocket doors, revealing another layer of shelves behind them. Those shelves moved forward into place, and the humming stopped.

  She shook her head, her eyes wide with wonder. “I’d like to go on record that I’m jealous that my father never showed me this. It’s way too cool to keep to himself.”

  “I’ll agree on one thing. It’s certainly cool. I’ll bet that if we press the button again, the shelves will switch back, and the trapdoor will open. But let’s wait before we try it. We may have hit the mother lode, and I want to see if there are any key files that we can use.”

  The shelves contained row after row of half-inch-thick binders with names and dates on them. Jace moved around the desk, walking down the length of the bookcases, reading the spines. Most of the names and dates meant nothing to him. But since Mason had told him the names of the Council members—information that he and Devlin knew from their recent dealings with the Council after the Hightower debacle—he was mostly on the lookout for binders with those names on them. If he could find files showing that the Council leader—Adam Marsh—or anyone else on the Council knew of and had approved the loss of innocent lives, acceptable collateral damage of civilians, he could use that as leverage to get a “good” Council member to turn. Eventually, the whole Council might follow, a domino effect, until the foundation between the government and EXIT collapsed.

  Or if that failed, he
could use the information to approach current enforcers. As they learned about the corruption at EXIT, more and more would agree to fight against their employer instead of for him.

  He pulled out several promising-looking binders and shoved them into the box of folders they’d taken from the attic. “We can’t take very many, or they might be noticed,” he warned, since she had a sizable stack on the desk in front of her as well. “They might be noticed anyway, as meticulous as your father seems to be. But hopefully not before it really matters. I recommend that you choose three or four and put the rest back.”

  She looked a little pale as she held up one of the binders. “This probably trumps anything you found. And it explains why my father hired two assistants instead of just one.”

  He paged through it, then let out a slow whistle. “A full background on Sebastian and Tarek. Looks like they’re badass enforcers. Marsh probably assigned them to shadow your father as part of his probation.”

  She shot him a strange look. “Marsh?”

  “Adam Marsh. The head of the Council. Why?”

  “I’ve heard that name before. I’ve seen him, too, from a distance. That’s the man who met with my father on the top floor of EXIT.”

  His stomach dropped. But he kept his expression carefully blank so he wouldn’t alarm her. He didn’t have to ask if Marsh had seen her. Because if he had, she’d already be dead. The realization that she’d come so close to being executed by EXIT’s top brass scared the hell out of him.

  She flipped through another binder, as if the news about Marsh wasn’t a big deal. “He’s the one who appointed this Watcher guy that you mentioned back at my house, right?”

  “I imagine so, with the consensus of the Council.” Devlin Buchanan used to be “The Enforcer,” Cyprian’s main guy, who executed enforcers who went rogue, enforcers who were deemed a threat to the nation’s security. Because of that role, he was privy to a lot of insider information about EXIT that most enforcers weren’t—including details about the Council. And he’d passed that information to Jace. That gave Jace a considerable advantage to offset the fact that he’d never personally been an enforcer. He knew a hell of a lot about how EXIT operated. But the more Jace knew, the more he was worried about what could happen to Melissa.

  “Do you think Sebastian or Tarek could be the Watcher?” she asked.

  “I’m sure they report on Cyprian’s activities at work. But it’s doubtful they’re watching him all the time or that either of them is the official Watcher. The idea of a Watcher is someone you never see, or if you do, you wouldn’t suspect that they’re the person assigned to keep tabs on you. The Watcher is keeping an eye on your father at all times, either through remote surveillance or by being part of his inner circle without your father even realizing it. Or both.”

  After putting the binder in with the folders, he noticed an odd emblem on the spine of another binder. “This looks strange. A snake coiled around a dagger.”

  Melissa blinked at him and stared at the binder. “Oh my God.”

  “What is it?”

  She pressed her hand against her throat. “Open it. I need to see what’s inside.” She abandoned the pages she’d been looking at and stepped beside him.

  He frowned but pulled the binder out and opened it on the desktop. When he saw the word printed at the top of the first page, he drew a sharp breath. Serpentine. The terrorist group that had killed Melissa’s mother and brothers. He shot another look at her, but she didn’t notice. She was too busy reading.

  Together, he and Melissa skimmed the first few pages, then flipped through the rest of the folder. It was surprisingly thin for what he imagined was supposed to be an in-depth investigation into the terrorist organization.

  “From the dates on these pages,” he said, “it looks like your father has spent years trying to find out more about the organization that blew up your mother’s plane. But other than this one unconfirmed airport-witness account of a man with a tattoo of a serpent around a dagger on his arm who might or might not have spoken to the terrorists before they boarded the plane, there’s not much here.”

  She flipped a few more pages. “The last note is dated less than a year ago. He’s still searching for information on the hijacking, after all these years. I can’t believe it.”

  Jace put his hand on her shoulder. “Maybe that’s his way of coping with the loss.”

  She closed the binder. “That and leaving cards in a mausoleum, right?”

  Her voice sounded bitter, which surprised him. She’d been so intent on protecting her father earlier and had defended him back at the cemetery. Why the change all of a sudden?

  As he shelved the Serpentine binder, Melissa took a few binders she’d had on the desk and shoved them into the box, spines turned away from him.

  “Did you find something else interesting?” he asked.

  She shrugged. “Nothing special. Notes about missions and enforcers, like you’ve said all along. I figure I’ll read them later to get a better understanding of what you’ve been trying to tell me.” She picked up the other binders she’d taken and started reshelving them.

  Jace studied her posture. He’d watched her for months. He knew her smiles, her frowns, her mannerisms. He knew that her back went ramrod straight when she was angry, that she gestured a lot when she talked, that running her hands across the textures around her was second nature, something she didn’t seem to realize she was doing. And he knew that when she was upset, she avoided eye contact, got very quiet, and went into what he thought of as her OCD mode—straightening everything around her as if her life depended on things being neat and orderly.

  And she was definitely in OCD mode right now.

  She’d finished reshelving the binders. Now she was straightening the ones already on the bookshelves, making them perfectly flush with the edges of the shelves. And this meticulous attention to detail had started the moment she’d put that last set of binders in with their folders from the attic.

  He reached for the box.

  She whirled around, grabbing the binder he’d just taken out, but not before he saw what was written on the spine.

  HIGHTOWER.

  She hugged the binder against her stomach, her face pale, her eyes wild.

  And his heart ached for her. “Mel—”

  “Don’t.” She held out her hand to stop him. “Don’t tell me I’m better off not knowing. It’s killing me to even suspect him. But I need to know. I’ve seen enough in the last five minutes of browsing these files to realize you’ve been right, that I’ve been living in a bubble, and that I’ve been naïve and stupid to think that my father isn’t far more involved than I’d hoped. Well, my eyes are wide open now. I have to know the truth. And you’re not going to take that away from me.”

  “You’re not naïve, and you sure as hell aren’t stupid. You’re a daughter who loves her father. But Mel, I know the truth. And I promise you, knowing isn’t going to make you feel enlightened or better in any way. Please, put it back. You don’t want to read it.”

  “You know? Then will you tell me what really happened?”

  He hesitated.

  “I didn’t think so.” Her mouth tightened into a hard line, and she shoved the binder into the box. As she closed the flaps, she stared at him with a mutinous look, as if daring him to stop her.

  He backed off for now. Later, once they got out of here, he’d try to reason with her again. Or hide that damn binder before she could read it. But not now.

  “I think we should get out of here, don’t you?” he said.

  She blinked, apparently surprised he was giving in so easily. “Yes, okay.” She poised her finger over the tiny green light. “Ready?”

  “Ready.”

  She pressed the button. Just as they’d hoped, the low hum started again, and the shelves shifted and moved, restoring them to their original position.

  “Now press it again.”

  The door above them began to slide open.

 
His gaze jerked to hers. “Did you press it?” he whispered.

  She shook her head. “Not yet.”

  Footsteps sounded on the floor above them. The trapdoor clicked into place.

  Ah hell. Jace swiped the box off the desk and grabbed Melissa’s hand. They raced across the room and crouched behind a row of boxes in the far corner just as a pair of shiny men’s dress shoes stepped down onto the top stair.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Trapped.

  Melissa crouched behind some boxes beside Jace, waiting to see who was coming down the stairs.

  Before she’d skimmed through files about enforcer missions, and read notes in her father’s own handwriting about his involvement in those missions, she would have been worried, maybe even a little scared, about his finding her and Jace down here. But now, she had no desire to test the strength of their father-daughter bond if he was the one coming down those steps.

  Jace peered through a crack between two boxes, his gun clutched in his right hand. Melissa watched the stairs through another crack, wishing she had a gun, too. Not that it would have mattered if that was her father—because she didn’t think she could ever shoot him, not even in self-defense, if it came to that.

  Before the man descending the stairs came into full view, she knew it wasn’t her father. He would never wear an off-the-rack suit. But when she saw the man’s face, she clenched her teeth together so hard they hurt.

  Sebastian.

  Beside her, Jace tensed, every muscle in his body coiled, ready to spring. Without taking his eyes off the assistant, he held a finger to his lips, warning her to be quiet. The warning wasn’t necessary. She’d been hunted by Sebastian once already. She certainly wasn’t going to make any noise that would tell him where they were hiding.

  “Sebastian.” Her father’s voice called out from above. “What are you doing in my private office without me?” Another pair of shoes appeared at the top of the stairs. Her father was coming down.