by Jack Heath
“What the…” The other agent stared. The aluminum handrail had been bent at ninety degrees and twisted on its joints so it depressed the door close button. But other than that, there was no evidence that anyone had even been in the elevator. The boy they had seen enter less than a minute earlier had vanished into thin air.
Six listened at the lid of the maintenance trapdoor, concealed in the darkness of the elevator shaft. He knew that while he hadn’t left behind any evidence of his escape route, it wouldn’t be long before the Spades eliminated all the other options and figured it out. But he knew their protocols. They would check the corridor again before deciding they’d lost him. It was always embarrassing to call in a lost visual, so they’d want to be sure he hadn’t somehow crept past them first.
And while he had to move, and soon, it wouldn’t be smart to do it right now. Not with one of them inside the elevator, listening for the revealing scuffle that would put them back on his trail.
Six heard the clumping of boots as the Spade left the elevator. “Suspect is not inside,” he confessed after a moment. “We’ve lost him.”
Now! Six pushed himself off the elevator’s roof and slapped his palm around a pipe welded horizontally to the shaft wall. Hauling his body up to stand on it, he sprang off the wall and swung around the elevator cables before landing froglike on a supporting beam above.
Unfortunately, he thought as he bounced up into the darkness, I’m on the wrong side of the elevator. I need to be below it, climbing down, not above it, climbing up. I need to escape from the building, and I can only do that from the ground floor. The choppers on the roof will be well guarded or decommissioned.
Six was horrified that the Deck, the one place in the City he’d thought was safe, had finally turned against him. When soldiers from the Lab had broken in and abducted all the agents, that had been different—it was an attack by external forces, and it had been happening to everyone but him. Now it was the reverse; the Deck was still functioning, but he had been excluded.
He tried to put the fear and confusion out of his head and focus on his current goals. His watch read 17:33:17—he had less than an hour and a half until the drop-off. That meant getting out of the Deck, getting the bugged money into the kidnappers’ account, and then making it to the rendezvous point and hoping they were willing to give Kyntak back.
But even now, Six thought, the Spades would probably be working out where he was. They’d seal off all the elevator doors except the ones at the top, and send some Spades down the shaft to corner him or flush him back out the way he came. He had two options: force open the first door he found and escape onto that floor, or race them to the top to see if he could reach the maintenance tunnel under the roof.
But, Six realized, neither of those options was guaranteed to work. They knew how he thought, just like he knew how they thought. Even if they didn’t all necessarily work under the same roof all the time, they followed the same Code and operated in the same way. They’d seen the schematics of this building, so they knew about the maintenance tunnel and they’d have the individual layouts of every floor. Whichever way he tried to escape, they’d be prepared for it and they’d be on him well before he could figure out an escape route.
Okay, Six thought. I know their strategies, and they know mine. But do they know how well I understand theirs? Just running won’t be enough, but maybe I can trick them.
He stopped at the first door he found—the floor above King’s. It’s where they’d expect him to escape the shaft, because his ultimate goal was to reach the ground. He wrenched a piece of narrow pipe off the shaft wall. It came free with a grinding squeal, showering him with cold water. Jamming the point between the elevator doors, he braced his feet against a support beam and pulled. After some initial resistance, the doors slid wide open, flooding the inside of the elevator shaft with light.
Six didn’t climb through the opening. He knew that in the Spade command center, the QS had just watched an alert light flicker, telling her that the doors on Floor 12 had been forced open. They’d scour Floor 12 and stop searching the elevator shaft.
He let his improvised lever fall into the shaft. Hopefully it would clatter against the ceiling of the elevator and trick the agents on King’s floor into thinking he was still on the roof of the elevator. Confusion would be created. Some agents would think he was on Floor 11, some would guess Floor 12, and no one would be checking the maintenance tunnel.
It was time to leave. Six resumed his upward climb.
While Six had never been inside the elevator shafts of the Deck before, the tunnel wasn’t hard to find. He’d spent hours examining the schematics of this building when it was first constructed, preparing for a situation like this. He knew the length of every corridor, the width of every tunnel, and the size of every room. On paper, his opponents should know as much as he did—they had access to the same information and more—but normal human memories were unreliable and, unlike Six, the Spades hadn’t been here every day for the past three years.
And whether you’re in a five-star hotel, Six reflected, a prehistoric apartment block, or the headquarters of a vigilante agency, the inside of an elevator shaft always looks pretty much the same.
The lid of the maintenance tunnel was marked with a yellow triangle of aluminum, featuring a picture of a stick figure crawling between two horizontal lines. Six slid his fingers into the seam between the lid and the wall and pulled until the seal broke. The lid swung open on a hinge at the bottom, and Six caught it with one hand to stop it from clanging noisily against the shaft wall.
The tunnel was circular, with a diameter of almost one meter. Not enough to stand in—barely enough room to crawl on all fours. Six slipped into the tunnel and pulled the lid shut behind him, letting the suffocating darkness swallow him up.
The shuffling of his hands along the warm metal floor seemed deafening in the enclosed space. His breath filled his ears, rumbling like the snores of a sleeping tiger. He knew that the sounds he was making seemed loud because they were bouncing back at him off the walls but he was still unsettled—he couldn’t hear anything else. There could be Spades waiting at the other end of the tunnel, or crawling behind him, gaining ground with every second…
Six stopped himself from thinking about that. The chances that they’d be onto him already were minimal, and imagining them behind him would make him breathe more loudly.
This is why humans have been afraid of the dark for so long, he thought. It makes your imagination so much more convincing. Reality and nightmares in stereo.
Six grunted in pain as his fingers banged against something on the floor, then he slammed his hand over his mouth in panic at the sound he’d made.
There was no sign that the noise had caused anything other than a dim echo. The tunnel was as quiet as a tomb. Reassured, Six began to cautiously touch the object he had struck.
It was a square trench, only a few centimeters deep, with a floor made from the same metal as the shaft. Six’s knuckles had hit the opposite side of it. He felt around the surface of the trench floor. There was a rectangular piece of metal at the edge…a hinge. This was a hatch, an opening to a room below.
Six was confused. The schematics he’d read stated that there was no exit from this shaft until more than halfway along its length, and there was no way he’d gone that far already. He’d crawled about 350 paces, and each pace of crawling was about forty centimeters, so he was approximately 140 meters from the elevator shaft.
What room would be on the other side of this hatch? Six wondered. He’d passed the Floor 11 bathrooms, the offices of Diamond agents Five to Ten…
This hatch must have been installed after the schematics were made, he thought. Therefore the Spades wouldn’t know it was here. The magnitude of Six’s good fortune hit him. No matter how quickly they worked out that he’d escaped into this tunnel, they wouldn’t post guards in the room below him, because they didn’t know that it was an option. They’d have to send agents into
the tunnel after him to find it.
Six opened the hatch. It was dark below. He dropped down and landed on a tiled floor. He listened. There was no scuffling, no breathing—no indication that the dark room contained anyone but him. He rose to his feet, stretched his arms out forward, and walked. The room was small—two seconds later he could sense a wall in his path. He touched it with his fingers—shelves. A storeroom? He walked parallel to the wall until he found a door.
Where there’s a door, he thought, there’s a light switch. He ran his fingers over the surface of the wall until he found it—a cold plastic ridge surrounded by the polished ceramic. He switched the lights on.
As the room was illuminated in a sudden harsh glare, Six realized that he couldn’t have picked a better place to drop into. He was surrounded by rows and rows of shelves, packed with firearms, gadgets, and disguises.
He was next door to Jack’s office.
He was in the armory.
MISSION THREE
17:49:04
OUT OF REACH
Six quickly sealed the hatch with a miniature welding torch he’d found on the armory’s shelves. When the QS sent her agents into the tunnel to look for him, he didn’t want his escape route to be obvious, and if the hatch was permanently sealed, not only would that make him hard to follow, but it would be a plausible explanation for its absence from the schematics. It would be impossible to tell in the darkness how recently the soldering had taken place, provided the metal had had time to cool. They wouldn’t follow until they’d exhausted every other alternative. And Six hoped to be long gone by then.
Of course, he thought as he put the welding torch back on the shelves, the QS wasn’t stupid. She’d still have guards on every exit to the building, the elevators would still be frozen, and there’d still be sentries on the stairwell doors.
Escaping was going to be tricky. But the more he stretched her resources, the safer he would be.
Looking at the shelves, Six felt shivers run up his spine. The selection of potentially useful gizmos was enormous. There were bombs disguised as cameras, cameras disguised as phones, and phones disguised as pens. There were parachutes ranging from small BASE-jumping webs to huge airplane traction canvases. There were racks upon racks of Hawks and Eagles, and even an oversize Condor super–machine gun in the corner.
Six knew he couldn’t carry it all, so he compromised. He took one tranq gun and a small AM-77, which he slipped into a hip holster. He took a lump of Detasheet plastic explosive, bent it into a half cylinder, and strapped it to his forearm. He found a detonator for it and put it in his pocket, along with a beacon, a locator, and a pair of earplugs. He put a small glider-type parachute in a thin backpack and found a lock-release gun underneath it, which he took as well.
Mixed in with the guns, Six saw a katana—an eighty-centimeter samurai sword. He picked it up and felt its weight. It was short for its type, but long enough to do the job. He unsheathed it; it was slightly curved, and single-edged. He placed his hands on the rubber-lined grip as far apart as possible and tried a few practice swings. The blade cut silently through the air of the armory.
Quiet, but intimidating, and easier to use with nonlethal force than a gun, particularly given the single-edged blade. Done deal, Six thought as he sheathed it under the parachute backpack, ready for an over-the-shoulder draw.
As a last thought, he grabbed an Eagle automatic as well. He wouldn’t use it on ground troops, but automatic weapons were good for dealing with hostile vehicles.
Six switched off the lights and slowly opened the door into Jack’s office. It seemed empty, the only sound the humming of the computer. The door leading to the corridor was closed.
He crossed the room and listened at the door. Nothing. He opened it, turned into the corridor outside, and walked straight into Jack, who stumbled backward.
“Excuse me!” Jack spluttered, before looking at Six’s face. “Oh my god, Six! It’s you!” He glanced nervously over his shoulder. “The Spades are looking everywhere for you. They’re searching the building!”
“Do you—” Six began, but Jack cut him off.
“Don’t talk, just listen,” he said. “There are dozens of Spades in the foyer. You can’t get out that way. That leaves the choppers on the roof, which will be guarded, and the basement access into the sewers. That’s your best shot at getting out. The west stairwell on this floor is guarded. Maybe try the south.
“They’ll be monitoring your phone. Not only can they listen in to any calls you make or receive, but they can trace your location through your SIM card.” He tossed Six a phone—a silver DigiCall ultra. “Take mine, throw yours away or destroy it. The Queen of Hearts went off to stake out some suspicious warehouse a couple of hours ago. She was outside when the lockdown came into place, so call her. Maybe she can help you.”
Six pocketed the phone. He should have thought of that. His phone was probably a blinking light on a Spade computer screen somewhere.
“I don’t know what’s going on here, Six,” Jack said. “But I know that you’re on our side. So go. Run.”
Six needed no further encouragement. He sprinted away down the corridor towards the south stairwell.
Unlike Jack, Six didn’t think that the QS would have forgotten the basement as a possible escape route. She would have guards down there too. And even if she didn’t, he was currently on the top floor—Floor 14. How was he supposed to get all the way down to the basement with every elevator frozen and guards at most stairwell doors?
But Jack was probably right about everything else. The foyer was not an option; nor was the roof. The building was sealed up tight. He looked at his watch: 17:55:02. His usual tactic would be to hide until his opponents were forced to assume that he’d escaped somehow and let down their guard. But that would take longer than an hour.
Six stopped running and leaned against an emergency fire hose wheel, pushing his palms to the sides of his head. There was always a way—always. After all he’d been through today, he wasn’t prepared to give up, not even when his own organization had turned against him.
A cleaning robot buzzed past him on the floor, polishing the linoleum with furry treads. Six bent down and unzipped its dust bag, dropping his mobile inside. The Spades can chase a robot for a while, he thought.
He opened his eyes. A plan was forming in his head. The only windows in the Deck were near stairwells, so he’d need to take out some of the stairwell guards. He’d need something that weighed slightly less than he did, and he’d have to rig up a pulley. But it was possible.
Six was sure that the QS would have ordered her agents to do a radio sound-off regularly—that was standard operating procedure whenever quarantining a building, because it was imperative to know as soon as the integrity had been breached. He should deal with the stairwell guards as late in his preparations as possible, so the Spades weren’t warned of his location too soon.
Six spun the fire hose wheel and caught the steel nozzle as it fell. Thick, tough hose spooled out onto the floor, coiling like a beige, leathery snake. The Deck was about sixty meters high. The Floor 14 windows were about five meters from the roof. He would need fifty-five meters of hose. Six walked backward down the hallway, holding the fire hose nozzle until he was fifty-seven meters away from the wheel—that would give him some extra slack to tie the knots with. Leaving the nozzle on the floor of the corridor, Six jogged back to the wheel and drew his katana. The blade sang as he swung it. He slashed through the hose where it met the wheel, and the end flopped to the floor. Six now had fifty-seven meters of fire hose to work with, which he coiled and hung over his shoulder.
He tried the door to the nearest office—it belonged to the Queen of Hearts. Locked, as he had expected. Deck agents weren’t in the habit of leaving their offices unlocked, even before Lab soldiers had broken in and abducted everybody.
“Sorry, Queen,” he muttered. He leaned back, took aim, and kicked the door in.
No alarms sounded, and no soldie
rs came running. Six entered the office, looking for something that was the right weight.
Six was heavy for his height—seventy-three kilograms. Adding two kilograms for the katana, another two for the AM-77, three for the Eagle, one for the parachute, one for the Detasheet and one for his clothes, he was currently a little more than eighty-three kilograms. And two kilograms for the lock-release gun, he thought.
He wanted something just under eighty-five kilograms to act as his counterweight. Too light and he would fall too fast. Too heavy and he wouldn’t fall at all, or he’d be dragged upward.
Queen’s PC would be too light, Six thought as he scanned the room, not to mention fragile. Her desk was about the right weight, but too bulky. The smaller his counterweight, the better.
He hesitated as he looked at her filing cabinet. Eighty centimeters high, sixty deep, fifty wide—not too big to use. He put his hands on either side of it and lifted. About eighty-two kilograms, he estimated. He kicked one of the legs of the desk, breaking it off at the top. He picked it up and snapped it in half over his knee, then opened the bottom drawer of the cabinet and stuffed the pieces inside. Eighty-four kilograms—perfect.
Now he needed some way to attach the fire hose to the cabinet. There was no handle, nor any bar of structural significance that could be substituted for one. He was going to have to punch some holes in it.
Queen had left her coat hanging on the back of her chair—a knee-length grey cloak with a black grid pattern. Six folded it up and wrapped it around the muzzle of his Eagle, switching the safety to semiautomatic.
He pressed the gun against the center of one of the filing cabinet’s sides, and listened carefully. No noise from outside—it was probably safe. He pulled the trigger.
Queen’s jacket muffled the shot, which punctured the metal shell with a dull thunk, zipped through the papers in the drawer, and drilled through the other side. Six sat perfectly still for a few seconds. No noise from the corridor.