by Mark Henwick
I nodded thanks and squiggled an unreadable name in their log. The package went through the scanner and I walked to the elevators.
A glance around showed me nothing that was out of the ordinary, and the relaxed guys on the door were just everyday guys you’d find in half the office buildings in Denver. Either they knew of nothing going on in the building, or they were top actors. Security was a bit stronger than other companies like this, but that was their marketing angle here.
On the second floor, there were locked doors leading to the corridors. The pass opened the right-hand door and I walked down to 209, looking outwards into the central atrium. I could see a couple of people walking along corridors on the third floor, but there was no movement on the fourth and fifth.
The door was opened as soon as I knocked, and Victor’s team looked the part with reports, plans and flow charts on the desks. They had their jackets off and their ties loosened. They introduced themselves as Steve and Bud.
I grinned at them. “Good businessmen, guys.”
I took Victor’s comms device out of my pocket and clipped it over my ear. “Vic, I’m in.”
“Good,” he grunted. “We’re in place and ready.”
I covered my courier uniform with maintenance coveralls and Steve changed into a courier uniform, both having arrived in an earlier package. I fitted a Kevlar vest beneath the coveralls, something that Victor had insisted on.
Bud opened his briefcase and took a pass card out of the machine in there. “Your friend Matt says that should be good for all floors and it’ll give you access to the service stairwell too. We haven’t seen any maintenance people in the customer elevators, so the stairs would be better.”
“You on the comm, Matt?” I asked.
“Yeah,” he came back immediately.
“Any problems you can see with the pass card?”
“It’s difficult to tell, Amber. If I were designing this coding system, I’d make readers able to take the code out of the standard sequence.”
“In English, please, Matt.”
“I’m sure it’ll work for the service doors on your floor. It may trigger an alarm on the fifth floor.”
“Roger that and thank you. Stay off the comm now—it’s for Vic and me.”
I turned back to Steve and Bud. Steve was checking their diversion and Bud gave me the last package, a set of folding steps made of plastic. He tore the SAMPLE stickers off it. Beneath the stickers it said MAINTENANCE. A few tools in a belt completed the outfit.
Steve looked up and nodded. “We’re good,” he said, and they both shook my hand.
We left the office together. They turned towards the elevators and I turned the other way. If their timing was right, they would arrive in the lobby just as an incoming group started an argument over reservations.
I was on my own now. The adrenaline started pumping. I looked at my watch: 10:52. The door to the service stairwell opened to my pass and I heard no alarms.
“I’m good. Wind it up, Vic,” I said to the comms unit.
“Roger,” he replied, and added something under his breath that might have been ‘crazy woman.’ I turned the sound down. The gravelly voice was comforting, but I didn’t need a distraction.
Getting to the fifth floor was easy; I simply went up the stairs. Getting into that corridor was my worry. I had some fallback options, but I really didn’t want any alarms raised until I was ready.
I stood in front of the doors. Behind me, the bare concrete stairs went on up to the roof and down to the basement. Deliveries came in to the basement and these stairs would provide a way to bring in things that they wouldn’t want anyone else to see. If I were running something in this building, I would have the electronic locks set up differently top and bottom.
I shrugged and set the steps out. This was an office building, not a bank. If you can’t go through a door, go over it.
Above me the ceiling was a high spec office structure, with a metal crawlspace providing maintenance access for the air conditioning units and a lightweight grid to hold square ceiling panels. I was in luck. I pushed the panel out of the way and climbed up into the crawlspace, hooking the steps with my foot and hauling them up after me. With the panel back in place, there was no sign that I had been in the stairwell.
It was dark and dusty, full of the quiet hum of venting systems. I didn’t need light; I could see down the corridor in the gloom. Assuming that there was an air conditioning junction for every office, I could make out the approximate layout of the offices.
It was too easy. I knelt there in the crawlspace and peered into the gloom. I was on a tight schedule, but setting off alarms wouldn’t help at all.
My eyes picked out a regular pattern of boxes attached to the main supporting columns, with wires traveling down, the nearest one between me and the first office, pointing at a matching box fixed on the outside wall. I gathered up some dust from the crawlspace and blew it towards the box.
The dust glittered as it passed through a beam. I checked again until I was satisfied that there was just the one beam and then I carefully clambered over it and crawled down to the next one. I should have taken time to change into sneakers rather than my boots, but it was too late now. I’d just have to be careful. I left the steps behind. It limited my options if I went down into the offices, but it saved time.
Luckily, each office had just one beam. My eyes adjusted and I could almost see the beams.
The first section was a row of empty offices. I turned the corner and started working my way along the base corridor, sweating and aching from the cramped position. It had taken fifteen minutes to get this far and I didn’t want to get Victor to stand down yet, but things could overheat if it took too long. I began to feel uncertain; maybe this was just an empty office floor and we were in completely the wrong part of town.
Victor’s voice came through my earpiece asking for a check. I clicked the mike with my nail in the agreed signal, and he acknowledged.
I passed two more offices before I heard voices.
The expensive office suites of the base corridor were on either side of the elevator section, and each was comprised of two interconnected offices and a storeroom. The voices were coming from the middle one—suite 502, I estimated.
I crawled carefully till I was over the storeroom for 502. I reached down and eased up the edge of a ceiling panel. It was dark and the door to the office was closed, possibly locked, so there was no way to sneak in, which is what I had been hoping for. I was about to drop the panel back when I realized there was something wrong. There was someone in the room, and I could smell blood. Very slowly and quietly, I lifted the panel a little more. I could see three people, one chained to a bed, two tied up on the floor with bags over their heads. At a guess, it was Troy on the bed, Morales and Verdoon on the floor. Both men on the floor had been bleeding. Damn.
I let the panel slip quietly back and sat up. I clicked the mike with the signal, three clicks, pause and repeat, three times.
Victor’s voice came back, the stress blurring his voice. “Confirm you have sight of hostage or hostages?” I clicked once. “Confirm to roll?” I clicked once again. “Rolling.”
I checked the time: 11:16. I had between five and ten minutes before all hell broke loose. The countdown clock was up and running in my head and the adrenaline started up again.
I crawled along until I was over the main office. The heating fans were running in this office, which gave me some cover for the noise as I lifted the edge of a panel near the air vent junction.
I could see two men in the room. One sitting in an easy chair at the break-out section, with his feet on the coffee table and a gun on his lap, the other at the desk talking on the phone. It was his voice I had heard and he was still speaking, quietly but forcefully.
“I understand, Mr. Tucker, really. However, the deposit is not refundable, even if you cancel. It doesn’t matter to me if you authorized it or not.”
There was a pause. “No, I
’m not here to do that. You’ve got people here to do that for you. I’m here to take out Farrell, and if you’re canceling that, I’m gone.”
Another pause. “She’s not with Kingslund and basically you have no idea where she is. So I’m here because, from what your son told me about her when he hired me, this is where she’ll turn up.”
Tucker’s son? Shit. That had to mean Onebrow, Frank Hoben, was Tucker’s son. I couldn’t see any other way around it. The whole damn thing revolved around Tucker.
Victor’s voice came over the earpiece, harsh against the deep thumping noise in the background. “Amber! Group with Tucker goin’ into the delivery area now. SWAT will engage in sixty seconds. Expedite. Confirm.”
I clicked the mike once and crawled over above the desk. The guy in the easy chair had a gun, but there wasn’t a crawlspace on that side. The other guy might have a bazooka for all I knew, but I couldn’t tell and I had to get the show going. Everything was moving. My gut feeling was that Mr. Hitman there was dead when Tucker’s men got up here from the delivery area, but the same feeling said that so were the others in the storeroom. Not something I could risk. I felt my chi gather. I became intently aware of the two men and my muscles lost their cramp. My whole body felt loose.
At the desk, Mr. Hitman stood and motioned the other guy over. “Your boss wants a word with you.” He handed the phone over.
“Yes, sir? All of them?” His eyes flicked to the side and I knew. “I understand, sir.”
He put the phone down and started to lift his gun. At that point, the hitman punched his larynx and I dropped through the ceiling on him. Life’s like that sometimes.
The guard collapsed, but his gun had fallen beneath the desk. I didn’t dare go for it after I’d seen the hitman’s move. This was someone who knew what he was doing. I vaulted the desk and got into clear space.
He was big and strong. It had been difficult to gauge him from peeking around the ceiling panels. He was very big, very strong. Within reach of his arms I would be dead, and we both knew it. I moved my position from standard attack to a more balanced form where I could get the hell out of the way quicker.
His lip curled as he watched me move and he didn’t bother looking for the gun beneath the desk.
He strolled forward, not bothering with any defensive posture, not even bothering with any preparation, his eyes narrowed, absolute confidence in his steps. The sheer size of him meant that he was going to be able to meet anything I threw at him and brush it aside. Then, once he was close enough, those plate-sized fists would crack or crush and end it. That was his style, the way he fought, overwhelming through his bulk and relying on his huge strength.
Except that his overconfidence might make him vulnerable.
“You know Tucker’s got men downstairs now,” I said. “You’re not going to make it out of the building alive.”
He ignored me. I edged around and away, overplaying the Kung Fu moves. His lip curled more, but he didn’t otherwise respond except to follow me until it was too narrow to get past him and there was no way out behind me. He knew that.
With him barely a step away, gunfire sounded from below just as I feinted a punch at his face. He lost concentration; the gunfire distracted him for the smallest moment. He blinked and raised his hand to swat my fist away. All his weight was coming down on his left leg. That was all I was going to get and that was all I needed.
I went low and hard with my boot, nothing fancy, nothing in any pretty style of martial arts and too low for him to block. A simple way for him to discover suddenly that my toecap was much stronger than his kneecap, and just like that, he was down to one working leg.
To give him his due, he realized immediately he was in trouble and lunged forward off his good leg with his arms spread wide to sweep me up into his grip, where I would die.
But he lunged to where I had been, and unfortunately for him, I was a step and a half to the side already. With his arms out to try and grapple with me, he left his whole side unprotected, and this time I did Master Leung proud. A perfect, full side-on snap kick, with all my force concentrated into the small, hard hammer of my boot sole. I yelled out as it went home and felt his ribs splinter like rotten wood. He screamed and went down hard, hands flailing, too late to protect his ribs or to catch my foot. His face hit the floor with a sickening crunch.
He was tough. Even with a busted knee and broken ribs, he tried to get up. Just the ribs must have been excruciatingly painful, let alone any other internal damage. For a moment I regretted that I’d never had him in my squad, but he wasn’t that kind of guy and I didn’t have a squad any more. I broke the hat stand over the back of his head and he collapsed like a poleaxed bull.
“Amber, what’s goin’ on?” said Victor in my earpiece.
“Dealt with guards, back to you in one.”
I got the gun from beneath the desk. Yup, another Glock. Tucker must have gotten a real bulk discount on them. I checked the guard, but with his windpipe and neck arteries crushed, he was already dead.
There were keys for the storeroom on the table.
Morales blinked as I pulled the bag off his head.
“Farrell?” he groaned, trying to sit up. The movement opened a stomach wound and started it bleeding again.
“Lie still for now,” I told him, and cut the rope tying his hands and feet before checking on the wound. It wasn’t as bad as it might have been. It was in and out on the side and it would hurt like hell, but he could walk.
Verdoon had no bullet wounds, but they’d worked him over. His face was broken and bleeding and starting to swell. He could barely speak. His leg was broken.
The man chained to the bed was Troy, still in his cycling clothes, and thankfully he seemed unharmed.
“Oh Lordy, have we been looking for you, Troy,” I said as I ran through the keys until I found the right one and unlocked his chains. “Are you okay?”
“Yuh,” he said weakly, swinging his legs around and wobbling upright. “Dizzy. I thought they were going to kill me. Thank you. Thank you.” He was trembling and tears ran down his cheeks, but, other than that, he seemed steady. I was impressed. “I’m not hurt,” he finished.
“Good man,” I said. “Now, I need your shirt, please.”
He frowned in confusion, but took off the smelly yellow and black cycling top. I used it and Morales’ shirt to create a basic compression bandage for Morales while I spoke to them. “Guys, we need to go. There’s a SWAT team outside, but there are armed men in the building and I think their orders are to kill you. Bernard can’t walk, so I’m going to need you two to help him. We’ve got to get down the corridor and up the stairs. Let’s move.”
Morales seemed most in control of himself, but he was limited in what he could do. Troy had been a captive for two weeks and would be disoriented and weak. Verdoon was going to be unable to help with anything. But I had to be free to keep Tucker’s men away.
“Victor,” I said into the mike, “I have Morales, Verdoon and Huber. Two wounded. No sign of anyone on this floor yet, but I can hear gunfire below. We’re moving now.”
“Roger that,” he replied. “We’re ready for you. SWAT team engaged in delivery area, holding for reinforcements before coming further in.”
I stuck my head out the door. There was still nothing on this floor, though I could hear shouting below and the firing continued. I risked a quick look into the atrium. People were running around on the other floors, trying to get into the elevators or down the main client stairs.
We headed for the service stairwell, limping along at the pace the three of them could make while I kept a lookout.
The door at the end was locked. Rather than try my pass, I broke the nearest fire alarm. Bless those building regulations; the doors opened and we were through into the stairwell.
“Up!” I caught them, turning to go down automatically. “Up to the roof.”
Morales understood and Troy followed his lead. I waited on the landing, looking down an
d listening. Our luck had run out; there were people coming up the stairs. Not as many as there would have been without the SWAT team in the delivery area, but there was only one of me.
I dived back into the corridor and retrieved the fire extinguishers stacked beside the door. In the stairwell, I checked out the types and got the foam one ready.
Troy came back down from the roof. “The door up there’s locked,” he said.
I tested the door behind me to the corridor, and that had now locked as well. Someone had overridden the fire precautions and we were trapped in the stairwell with the bad guys only a floor or two away.
I thrust the spare fire extinguisher into his hands. “Use that to break the lock.” It was a CO2 extinguisher for electric fires, smaller and lighter than the foam one, but I needed that. He stumbled back up while I waited for the first person to come into sight.
Tucker’s lead man was trotting up the steps, panting and waving his gun around. They hadn’t realized the hostages had escaped yet, but the point man recovered quickly and fired wildly. I shot him, a single bullet through the chest, and then I walked down the stairs, firing into the group behind him. Men in suits. Tucker’s elite troops rather than his ZK muscle.
There were screams and someone more alert than the others started firing back. I heard the vicious sound of the ricochets off the walls behind me. In my left hand I triggered the foam extinguisher, pointing it down into the mass and following it with another shot.
“Amber, sitrep,” called Victor.
“The hostages are trying to break out the roof door,” I shouted. “I’m in the stairwell, engaged. Where are you?”
“Comin’ in on the roof,” he said over the thudding of the chopper blades.
“Freaking A, Vic,” I whispered as I retrieved guns from the first two bodies on the stairs and retreated back upwards. Someone was firing up blind, which was a smarter move than it sounded like. In the cramped concrete stairwell, ricochets were as deadly as straight shots. Something smacked into the wall right next to me and I felt a sting of concrete chips across my cheek.