by Sam Sisavath
While Mack listened for a voice on the other end, Porter asked, “You have someone on the outside?”
“A couple more volunteers as lookouts,” Xiao said. “We lost contact with them as soon as the fun began. But that’s to be expected. They’re not just going to let us waltz out of here without putting up a little token resistance.”
“You call this token resistance?” Quinn asked, looking at the damage around them.
“Token-ish?”
“Whoever’s out there won’t be able to answer. They’re jamming signals in and out of the building,” Porter said.
“The police?” Quinn asked.
“They wish they had the technology,” Xiao said. “I think we all know who’s calling the shots out there. Maybe some of your old feeb buddies will show up. Wouldn’t that be nice? A little impromptu reunion.”
Quinn sighed. “I wouldn’t call the possibility of that nice, no.”
Mack took his hand away from his earpiece and shook his head at them. “You’re right; still no contact with the outside world. They isolated us as soon as they knew we had taken the building.”
“How long before they try to take it back?” Jack asked.
“We’ll find out soon enough,” Xiao said.
“You don’t know?” Mack asked.
“Hey, if I knew everything, what would be the fun in that? Besides, Aaron already came up with a way out of here.”
“Aaron?” Porter said doubtfully.
“You wouldn’t believe how useful he’s been these last few days.”
“Wait,” Quinn said. “You said these last few days? How long have we been held captive in this place?”
“You don’t know?” Xiao asked.
“She was in a chair,” Porter said. “I was in a re-sequencing tank.”
“Had a nice swim?”
Porter grunted. “Not exactly.”
“Xiao,” Quinn said, interrupting them. “How long have we been down here?”
“They took you and Porter at the warehouse three days ago,” Xiao said. “What exactly did they do to you in that chair?”
Chapter 30
It was a good question—there were a lot of good questions swirling around inside her head—and there was only one man who might have the answers to them: Hofheinz.
Why, what, who, when?
The whole thing would have been paralyzing if she wasn’t currently moving through a building that had been turned into a war zone, and there were people out there waiting to either kill her or strap her back down into the chair.
The only saving grace was that the pain had subsided. Porter’s magic pill didn’t so much as numb her left arm as it pushed the idea of pain into the background. She didn’t know how any of that was possible, but she was barely aware of the broken bones as they moved through the corridor. She was also moving faster, lighter on her feet, and suddenly understood how Xiao could have been up and about just hours after having a staff run through her shoulder. It was truly some kind of miracle drug, and the Rhim had been using it ever since Porter was one of them.
“That kind of science doesn’t exist,” she had said to Porter.
“There are a lot of things that exist that you couldn’t possibly imagine,” Porter had said. “That’s what makes the Rhim so dangerous. That’s what makes them so lethal to their enemies.”
Dangerous. Lethal. Able to take four bullets and bounce back like nothing had happened.
Unless, that is, you shot them in the head. Even the Rhim, with all their impossible tech, couldn’t come back from that.
“Hofheinz,” Quinn said. “Did you see him out here?”
“There were a lot of people,” Xiao said. “A lot of suits with guns. What did this Hofheinz character look like?” After Quinn described him as best she could, and Porter chimed in, Xiao shook her head. “Doesn’t ring any bells, and he would have stood out from all the gun-toting blokes we had to deal with. He must have found another way out.”
“Is that possible?” Quinn asked Porter. “Is there another way out of here except through the front door?”
Porter thought about it for a moment. Then, “Not that I know of. But then, it’s not like I ever needed to use anything other than the front.”
“I’m telling you, he didn’t get past us,” Xiao said.
“What are the chances he was hiding in one of the rooms?” Quinn asked.
“Pretty good,” Porter said. “You feel like going back down there to look for him?”
She thought about JS, about all the others she had left behind, all the while telling herself that she couldn’t do anything for them. That excuse was palatable as long as she couldn’t see their faces.
Finally, she shook her head.
“That settles that,” Porter said.
No, it doesn’t, but it’ll have to do for now.
She forced herself to let everything behind her go (Until next time, Ringo, when it’ll be the last time, I swear it) and focused on what was in front of her instead.
Xiao and her Sons of Porter had made a mess on their way down from the lobby, with scarred walls and bullet casings everywhere, along with explosive residue that clung to the air. Quinn and Porter followed their saviors through a long hallway to the way out, stepping over bodies and around cratered damage from the running gun battle.
There was an unsettling quiet about the place, and Quinn was glad for the sounds of their footsteps and occasional conversation. Mack and the other two SOPs led the way, going around turns first in case a Rhim operative had managed to survive their onslaught. Quinn gripped the gun in her right hand, its weight giving her confidence that had been sorely lacking when she just had the stun baton to rely on.
According to Porter, the data and re-sequencing wings were limited to the south end, which they had already passed. The rooms they walked by now were all lounges and offices, and the fact that there were even lounges and offices at all, as if the Rhim was just another business with employees, took some getting used to.
I wonder what they put on their tax returns?
“One of ours,” Xiao said as she nodded at a thirty-something man dressed similarly to Mack and the other SOPs. He was lying next to two suited figures.
Mack walked around the SOP instead of going over it, and Jack and Kyle stopped for just a second apiece to give the body one final look before moving on. Xiao didn’t tell her the dead man’s name, and Quinn didn’t ask. She made a mental note to do so later, but right now, in the company of Mack and the others, it didn’t seem appropriate.
“How many did you lose?” Porter asked.
“Two,” Xiao said. “One down here, one up there.”
“How did you take the lobby?”
“We caught them by surprise after a little diversion.”
“What kind of diversion?”
“The ‘hey, you got a bomb in your building’ kind,” Xiao said with a grin. “I would have brought more, but I opted for quality over quantity. Plus, I figured we probably didn’t have a lot of time to waste, what with you in the process of having your brains scrambled and all.”
“How long does that re-sequencing tank usually take?” Quinn asked.
“It’s usually effective within forty-eight hours of the process beginning,” Porter said.
“Xiao said we were down here for three days, but you’re…still you.” Mostly, she thought about adding, remembering how confused and weak Porter had been when she first fished him out of his tank.
“Porter didn’t tell you?” Xiao asked.
“Tell me what?” Quinn said.
“He’s a special case. The Old Men wouldn’t dream of rushing his conversion. Gotta get it right the first time, right, Porter?”
Porter sighed, but didn’t say anything.
“What does she mean, ‘special case?’” Quinn asked him.
“Long story,” Porter said. “I’ll tell you when we get out of here.”
That’s not all you’re going to tell me, Quinn
thought, but she nodded, accepting his excuse. She wasn’t sure she wanted or needed to know anyway. At least not while they were still stuck down here.
Three dead suited Rhim operatives greeted them as they turned into the final corridor. Each body had multiple bullet wounds and a final finishing gunshot to the head. Whenever she found herself feeling even a little bit sorry for them, all she had to do was remember the look in Ben’s eyes as they shot him down like a dog in his own apartment, just to pin the crime on her, and she got over it.
You asked for this. You all signed up for this…
They skirted around the bodies to the elevators at the end. They were flanked by two stairwells, one—at the right—currently propped open by a dead body. Instead of taking the elevators, Mack turned to the right stairwell door.
“The long way?” Porter asked.
“I, uh, sort of knocked out the elevators when I took out the security room,” Xiao said with just a little bit of a smile. “Besides, stairs are good for your health.”
Mack stepped over the body and led them into the stairwell, his submachine gun always moving ahead of him. Quinn didn’t have to ask if he’d done any of this before. By comparison, Jack and Kyle still looked hesitant with their movements.
Once they were all inside the stairwell, they proceeded up, with Mack occasionally whispering into his throat mic. According to Porter, there was nothing between the lobby above them and the service center below except for an intermediate floor made of solid concrete, with the elevators and stairwell connecting the real floors. The extra floor made the service center something more akin to an underground bunker.
It didn’t take long to reach the top, where another door awaited them. Mack opened it for Jack and Kyle, who rushed through first. Quinn followed them out, with Porter and Xiao bringing up the rear.
She stepped into a security room filled with the pieces of equipment that had been destroyed by a direct hit from an explosive device. The place looked like any office building staffed by security personnel—except, of course, for the charred and dented but still-intact back door they had just come through.
Quinn walked around the bigger chunks of metal and electronics, then spent half a second looking down at two bodies on the floor, the tattered remains of security uniforms clinging to their burnt forms. She couldn’t tell if they were male or female.
“Xiao didn’t have a choice, they wouldn’t have surrendered the entrance to the service center,” Jack, standing in front of her, said.
Quinn looked up at him and nodded, then followed the young man across the room and out the remains of another door.
The shockingly ordinary sight of office décor and plain tiled flooring outside the security room caught her off guard. The lobby was wide open, with glass walls at the other end, and an information desk that once sat in the very middle of the generous space before someone took it out with an explosion. Pieces of gold block letters that was supposed to spell out WILSHIRE OFFICES littered the area.
There were bodies in the lobby—two that she had to step over as she came out of the back room, and two more between them and the front doors. They were wearing security uniforms and were riddled with bullets before being finished off with single headshots. She didn’t have to think too hard about which gunshots came first.
Quinn was able to compartmentalize what she was seeing: They were the enemy, and she had little sympathy for them.
You signed up for this…
But it was a different story when she saw the others.
There were three of them, including a woman in a pencil skirt surrounded by spilled coffee with an empty cup still clutched in her right hand. The coffee was mixed with blood, producing a strange pinkish color under her still body. She looked young—early twenties, if that—and so was the man in the suit and tie about ten feet from her. A third body looked as if he had been caught in the blast that took out the information station, but thankfully he was lying on his stomach and Quinn couldn’t see his face.
They were civilians. She knew that much just looking at their clothes and the lack of weapons anywhere near them. The woman, especially, lay with one cheek on the floor, blank eyes looking across the lobby in her direction.
The truth was Quinn had expected more non-Rhim casualties, and a part of her was glad there were only three, but as soon as she gave life to that thought, the guilt hit her like a freight train.
Is this what I’ve become, Ben? Cold and calculating? Compartmentalizing casualties?
God help me.
Quinn glanced back at Xiao coming out of the security room behind her. Before she could even ask, the other woman said somberly, “I don’t know. Everyone was shooting.” She shook her head. “We called in a bomb threat to clear the building before we came in, but not everyone got the word. It could have been a lot worse.”
Quinn didn’t know how to respond to that—With anger? Frustration? Confusion?—so she opted to keep quiet instead. The FBI agent in her wanted a better answer from Xiao, but the Quinn Turner who had been running for her life, fleeing strangers who seemed to know a hell of a lot more about her than she ever did, was able to push it aside.
Or tried her very best to do so, anyway.
She looked beyond the lobby instead, and the sight of the waiting army was enough to get her past her pangs of guilt and growing self-doubt.
There was enough law enforcement outside the Wilshire Offices to invade a small country. Quinn couldn’t look in any direction without seeing either a Harris County deputy, a constable, or a city police officer staring back at her from behind a parked squad vehicle. They had carved out a huge swath of the street and sidewalks to set up directly opposite the front of the building. She could see them just as easily as they could see her, thanks to the curtain glass walls that made up the front and sides of the lobby.
Quinn searched for the suited figures she knew would be out there, but couldn’t locate them among the throng of heavily armed law enforcement. But she had no doubts they were out there right now, somewhere. Some of them were probably like Ben—honest, unattached to the Rhim—but there would be sleepers among them. The problem was telling them apart.
The slight whup-whup-whup of helicopters occupying the airspace above them slowly ebbed through the ceiling above her. There was more than one up there, and unlike back in the alley, no one was calling these off. Given how long it had taken Xiao and the SOPs to fight their way down to her and Porter and the brazen way in which they had assaulted the building, Quinn imagined that every media—local, national, and even Internet bloggers who could get a car or Uber ride—were crowding around just outside the police cordon at this very moment.
Mack had gone on ahead of her with Jack, while Kyle disappeared down the back hallway. The older man was now crouched behind the guard’s desk in the middle of the lobby, where a woman was already camped out on the floor and chewing on a stick of beef jerky. An UMP 45 submachine gun hung nonchalantly from her shoulder, and she had a white scarf, half of it already soaked in blood, wrapped tightly around her right arm. Jack was flanking the still-standing structure with his own submachine gun at the ready.
Quinn walked over to them, noting that the woman was wearing similar garb to Mack and the others (Not all Sons of Porter, then), though the assault vest didn’t look quite as comfortable on her. She was in her thirties, and the woman watched Quinn’s approach with a combination of curiosity and surprise.
She was halfway to the station when she saw a body on the floor to her right. It was covered in some kind of white tablecloth, but one of its hands and legs stuck out, revealing black clothing and a combat boot. The other dead SOP that Xiao had mentioned earlier.
“This is Abbie,” Mack said when Quinn reached them. “She’s been up here the whole time, making sure the local fuzz doesn’t try to bust in on us while we were down there looking for you guys.”
“Nice to meet you,” the woman named Abbie said, sticking out her hand. “I’ve seen you on the new
s. I thought we were just rescuing Porter.”
“I wish I wasn’t here, either,” Quinn said.
“I don’t blame you. What happened to your arm?”
“Someone broke it.”
“Did you get them back?”
“Yeah.”
“Nice.”
Quinn glanced around. “Where did Kyle go?”
Mack nodded toward the back. “Watching the back door with Gaines.”
“You have the front and back covered. What about the roof?”
“They’re not coming through the roof,” Abbie said.
“Why wouldn’t they?”
“We told them we have bombs rigged to the rooftop access door, along with the back and front.”
Quinn raised both eyebrows. “You put bombs on the doors?”
“Well, yeah,” Abbie said as if she had just heard the most ridiculous question. “How else were we going to keep them back until you guys could get back up here? We’re not exactly swimming in manpower, as you can tell.”
Quinn peeked just enough over the counter until she could see the front doors, keeping her profile as low as possible even though she was certain there was no real threat of being shot. She had no doubts there were snipers already perched in high positions all around the building at this very moment—some of them might even be HRT—but there was very little chance any of them had the green light to shoot.
She hoped, anyway.
Quinn hadn’t spotted them before, but now that she was staring at a very specific part of the lobby—the doors—she could see them clear as day: a half dozen or so bricks of C4 attached to the glass doors, with detonator cords linking them to some kind of metal box resting on the floor.
“Motion-sensitive trigger,” Abbie said. She sounded very proud of it, which made Quinn think she was the one who had rigged the device up. “They try to open the door and boom.”
“Do they know that?” Quinn asked.
“We told them about the bombs, and I assumed they have eyes and can see for themselves. So if they want to send people through anyway, I’m not responsible for any more widows.”