Sleight of Hand (44 page)

“So you thought we’d need to take a look. What did you plan?”

“Hold on, got something on my cell.” There was silence for a minute, and then he was back.

“Amber, listen up. There’s more activity down there now, maybe more special deliveries.” He paused. “When this was the chef, that’s one level of bad. They got Morales there as well, that’s a whole different game.”

“What did you plan, Vic?” I repeated.

He grunted and blew a breath out. “I got a couple guys in there rentin’ a temporary office. They’re there right now, just called in. But everyone who visits goes in through scanners—like an airport. They make a thing about security. We got no weapons inside, but I thought maybe we could go in and see if we can look around.”

“Vic, I’m going in there. I’ll call you back in fifteen and we’ll discuss how. Keep this cell free.” I ended the call and looked up. Right into Alex’s eyes. My stomach lurched. How many times could I get away with jerking him around?

I started to apologize and he waved it away. “You go fix what needs fixing, whatever it takes. Then we’ll sit down and, yeah, we’ll talk.”

I grinned—that kinda talk, oh yeah. I had half turned to go when he growled, caught my hips and spun me back. It was so fast, so shocking, that my hands came up automatically to push him away. But he was grinning back at me, and he just kissed my nose. The unleashed wolf looked out at me with his eyes—hot, hungry and promising. This was going to be
so
interesting later. I kissed his nose back. Must be a wolf thing.

He let me go and I ran out of his house and back to my car, still parked outside David’s. It wasn’t even four hundred yards, however difficult it had seemed last night.

Once I was in and driving, I called Edmunds and filled him in on Tucker’s building, as quickly as I could. He agreed to get a SWAT team on a training exercise at Lincoln Station, next to the business park. If it came to it, and there were more ZK people than they could handle in the building, they would do containment and a bigger team would be called in. All of which we agreed we didn’t want to do until Morales and Verdoon and any other potential hostages were out of the building. The increasing desperation of the behavior didn’t sound like we wanted to be in a hostage situation. Edmunds asked how sure I was that this was where Morales was. I had to admit it was our best guess at the moment. He just grunted.

I signed off and said a quick prayer of thanks for whichever guardian angel had sent Edmunds my way.

I called Tullah and told her briefly what was happening. I promised to update her when I could. Then I called Victor back and told him what I wanted.

He didn’t like it at all.

Chapter 53

A little after 10:30 that morning, I trotted up the steps to Tucker Beacon’s Nexus Office Complex.

The building’s wings looked like some enormous layer cake, alternating brick and reflective glass. I was interested in the main block, the five-story office complex centered around an atrium and hidden from the outside by a sheer cliff of smoked green glass.

I was dressed as a courier and I was carrying the fourth package of the day for Victor’s fake company, who were renting an office suite on the second floor. Every package had come in on a chain of custody signature form, and had to be signed for by the recipient in person. After arguing about the first and getting someone to come down, the door security had let the other couriers in, content to put the packages through a scanner and let the couriers take them up.

“Jaysus, another one,” said the guy on the door. “Here, Frank, gimme the last pass.”

He handed it to me. “You’ll need this for the elevator and the door to the wing where the office is. Second floor, office 209.”

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.