Kim makes her way deep into the warehouse and feels momentarily safe. She checks the gun she grabbed from the Russian who almost certainly would have killed her, and looks around, knowing that there has to be someone in the warehouse. Why else would the overhead door have been open? Kim sees a dingy white panel truck and a pickup parked side by side. To her right is a high cube warehouse sixty feet tall with a steel girder system supporting an aluminum roof. The ceiling is dotted with plastic skylights and high intensity sodium vapor lamps. A hundred feet away the warehouse’s rack storage rises six levels, all the way to the ceiling. Down front pallets are being sorted using a currently unattended orange forklift.
Kim immediately sees two men in yellow jackets carrying a pad and a clipboard walking away from her on the other end of the sorting lines. She makes it to the nearest line and hides behind the pallets, sticking her head up just enough to watch as the Russians appear. They stop behind a wheeled cart filled with trash to take a careful look about the warehouse. They don’t see her but they do see the two warehousemen disappear into a line of high cube storage racks.
Kim backs up along the line of cellophane wrapped boxes, keeping her head down, until she reaches the end of the row farthest away from the Russians. She slips from one row to the next, just as the Russians split up, one of them heading to the sorting area and Kim. The Russian approaching her walks slowly down one of the center aisles, scanning in every direction. Kim watches him and times her movements, reaching the tall racks and running down a corridor next to one of the building’s outer walls.
While she does this, she looks back, but it is too late. Somehow the Russian standing amid the rows of boxes in the sorting area has seen her and is now coming, his gun pulled. Kim slips into the next row of racks, waits a second, and then emerges just long enough to fire the gun she has, two fisted, in the direction of the man. In no way does she expect to hit him, intending only to make him duck for cover, but to her horror the man suddenly stops and falls heavily to one knee. He looks at her with surprise, a hand rising to his side.
Kim takes no time to consider. As the man looks down at his side, she runs into the space between the racks and the side wall, trying to get further away. All she knows is that she wants to leave the sound of the gun behind her as fast as she can. She is now unable to shake the feeling of having a huge target on her back. The building appears to go on and on forever, but Gu and the Russians have to be narrowing down her location based on the noise of the shot.
The shoes she picked to bike with and to climb the stone steps of Notre Dame with were a good choice. Now they let her rip down the long racks, the polished concrete floors just the right traction for her to fly. The rows of racks are interminably long and she can’t see how they’ll catch her before she makes the other side of the building.
But then something happens. The lights in the warehouse go out and Kim slows to a trot to keep from careening into the sides of the racks. How did they get the lights turned off, she wonders? Could they have done it on their own? Or did they find the warehouse guys and make them turn off the lights? She reasons that as long as she stays between the racks she is in the most invulnerable place in the warehouse.
Or is she? Can she find any offices? Wouldn’t that be a better hiding place? Maybe a corner of the building has offices or maybe there are offices she overlooked back toward the front where she came in? Thinking about having to go back there makes her legs feel heavy and tired.
Kim decides to go for the nearest corner at the front of the building. She is already near the outer wall on the other side of the warehouse from where she began. She just takes the next aisle, dashing her way to the front. Far to one side she sees a flashlight being swung by someone and knows she is still being hunted.
Kim is in luck. Ahead she sees a double story office next to one of the closed overhung doors. The outer walls of the offices are painted white, the steel railings and stairs are a dark blue. She runs across the open space, grabs the railing and vaults up the stairs two at a time. The door to the office on the second level is open and she is soon inside, looking out through windows over row after row of full storage racks from above. She can see the silver light cans of the sodium vapors up close, lines of them disappearing into the distance and darkness beneath the sallow glow of the few scattered skylights.
Kim hears shouting on the floor of the warehouse, as if the searchers are trying to locate each other by their sounds, but mostly it’s quiet. Quiet. Dark. Kim reasons they must be on cell phones to one another, that they must have developed a pattern to search with by now. She needs an alternative to going back onto the floor and turns around.
There are desks, chairs, cabinets, a bathroom, and a kitchen. She looks up and sees a ceiling door above. It’s not high and she can get to it if she can push one of the desks. Perfect. Or at least the best she is going to do.
The desks are heavy. Moving one under the ceiling door turns out to be hard work, making more noise than she would like. Kim gets winded moving the desk, taking a second to catch her breath before clambering onto it. It is an easy reach from on top of the desk though, and she punches the ceiling door out of the way without effort.
Kim gives the entry a good look before jumping, grabbing hold of the edge, and pulling herself up. She struggles with it, swinging in the air, discovering quickly that it is the hardest pull up she has ever done, but she makes it and crawls exhausted into the tiny space between the drop ceiling of the office and the roof of the warehouse. Kim finds she has to sit on metal rails from which the ceiling is suspended, anything but comfortable. If she drops a leg, it can go right through the ceiling panels. Sleeping is out of the question and she’s not going to be able to stay up here for very long, it’s just too uncomfortable. But it’s safe for now and it could save her life, she reasons, hoping against hope that the lead Russian, what did they call him? Sergie?, and his men, will tire soon and give up.
Kim looks around the space she is in. The back wall of the warehouse against which the offices have been constructed is not far away. If she can crab her way across the metal rails she can at least rest her back against the warehouse’s outer wall. Worth the effort.
She pulls the gun from the waist of her pants, afraid to drop it, and slowly makes her way across the railings. The roof meets the concrete wall of the warehouse, and provides a shelf behind her. She places the gun there, leans back, and gets herself as comfortable as she can for the wait that stretches ahead of her. She pulls her knees up and wraps her arms around them.
Kim knows they have every intention of trading her. She is really of no use to them. She has no way of giving them direct access to what they want. She hasn’t got the UBS device. Zak has it. It’s the only copy. Somehow, she has to shake these guys. Her body involuntarily shivers and she resolves that she will.
Chapter 70
On Fire Page 69