Sunfail (17 page)

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

INSIDE, JAKE WAS CONFRONTED BY ANOTHER PROBLEM: locating the actual relays. The basement made the most sense.

He was in a hallway that ran the full length of the building, front to back, like something out of
The Shining
’s Overlook Hotel, only without the hallucinatory carpet. The corridor just went on and on. To his left was a door, presumably into the shop at the front of the building. Past that was the elevator bank, three sets of heavy brass doors with the same sort of stylized wheat design embossed on them as the building’s exterior carvings. Past that he saw a row of mailboxes. And beyond that, at the far end of the passageway, were two more doors.

He walked toward them.

The first one had a company name on it, and the number 1c.

The last door didn’t have a number or a name.

Jack fucking pot
, Jake thought, and moved quickly.

Some do-gooder would have called the gunshots in to the cops. That would have made the clock start ticking. Soon this place would be a hot zone. A black guy caught breaking-and-entering in the vicinity of a pile of dead bodies in the back of a silver minivan? Case closed, judge.

The door was unlocked and opened onto a flight of plain concrete stairs that headed down into darkness. It wasn’t the kind of place you wanted to get stuck when the fecal matter exploded all over the fan.

There was emergency strip lighting hooked up to a battery system the killer’s men had presumably put in place.

He shut the door behind him. It was quiet. The air was musty, as if it was breathed less than other air, older, which could account for the peculiar acridness to it—a sharp, bitter, metallic tang that tasted of electricity.

The stairs ended at another steel fire door. The bolt had been cut using an arc welder. There was nothing subtle about the break-in. They obviously didn’t care if anyone noticed it after the lights came back on, much like the killing in the stock exchange itself. They weren’t worried about cleaning up after themselves. What did that say about their operation?

Jake eased the door open, making sure it didn’t topple inward in the process. Beyond it, he saw the glow from several computer monitors.

He closed the door behind him, and before he could turn around someone wrapped an arm around his neck and clamped their other hand over his jaw. One savage jerk would break his neck.

Jake responded instinctively. His muscles tensed. He grabbed at his attacker’s forearm and twisted it hard, dropping his shoulder so the guy rode his hip as he flipped him onto his back. He came down hard on the bare concrete floor. There was no finesse to the move, or to his downed attacker’s response. The bastard didn’t know when to quit. He lashed out with a kick that Jake barely avoided, then clambered to his feet, safely out of range of Jake’s clubbing fists. The haunting light of the computer screens transformed him into a wraithlike black shadow.

Jake looked around for something he could use as a weapon. Aside from the computer screens there wasn’t much of anything close to hand. Judging by the air currents, this relay station was
big
, possibly even the entire height and width of the building.

Jake focused back on the dark shape moving toward him. There was no stealth this time. No element of surprise. The guy was bigger than Jake. Meatier.

Feet, hands, it didn’t matter; this did not look to be a fair fight. Jake kicked out, landing a crunching blow somewhere close to the guy’s hip.

But the guy was
fast
. Before Jake could pull his leg back and get his balance, his attacker grabbed his ankle with his left hand and delivered a jarring punch to Jake’s kneecap, then yanked up on his foot and sent him sprawling.

The pain was blinding. Jake barely felt the impact from the floor. He tried to push himself up, but his leg gave out beneath him.

“
Fucker!
” It was a war cry. Purely primal. Filled with rage.

The shadow man moved in to finish him off.

Jake lashed out with a clubbing fist, but swung hopelessly wide. It was deliberate. He wanted his attacker to think he was dealing with someone who couldn’t handle himself. He wanted any advantage he could get, even if it was just being underestimated. “
Come on!
” Jake bellowed.

His attacker didn’t say a word.

Jake swung wildly again, this time overreaching so he appeared to be off balance. As the heavy lunged forward, Jake launched three punches to the face, followed by a leg sweep, knocking the man back on his heels, putting him on his ass. He wouldn’t underestimate Jake again.

The downed man grunted.

Jake couldn’t give him the time to get up and shake off the effects of his fists. He rushed in, kicking out at the guy’s head, then levered himself upright. His booted foot slammed into the fallen man’s jaw, lifting him six inches off the concrete floor before he fell back, the only sound beyond the crack of his skull on the ground the soft exhalation that escaped his lips. A tiny whimper. It didn’t sound good, but Jake didn’t care. Survival of the fittest. He hadn’t started this and he knew full well his attacker wouldn’t shed a tear if their roles were reversed.

Jake winced as he put weight on his knee. A stabbing pain lanced through his damaged nerve endings. He moved tentatively, hobbling toward the bank of screens. It could take his weight, so he didn’t think it was broken. Just battered like the rest of him.

He heard someone else moving around in the darkness—too heavy for rats. He tried to place the sound in the secret geography of the darkness—only to reel from a sudden hammer blow to his right temple that took the world out from under him.

Jake swung wildly with his right arm, hitting something. He couldn’t tell what, or even how hard.

It earned a grunt of pain and a shuffle of feet.

That bought him a second, but he had no kind of hold on the world. His vision swam and the darkness didn’t help. He had nothing visual to fix on. He tried to use the light from the screens but he wasn’t sure he could take much more of this. He needed to end it fast. He raised a hand to his head, touching the soft skin where the second attacker had slammed his fist, and swayed slightly as pain flashed across his eyes.

His opponent took the bait and rushed forward. Too late, Jake saw the glint of a blade in his hand. His attacker slashed rather than stabbed; left, right, left, in three blisteringly fast arcs. Jake felt the bite of the blade through his clothes as he threw himself backward, desperately trying to get out of the way before his guts were unravelling like a bloody yo-yo.

The man came at him again, slashing wildly. Jake ducked inside the backhand of the swing, and threw both fists, bringing them down on either side of his attacker’s temples, every ounce of desperate strength behind them. It was a massive, crushing blow.

The lights went out in his attacker’s eyes and the knife clattered to the floor.

Jake kicked it away. He didn’t need to, the guy was out cold. He wanted to slump down onto the ground himself, but as he turned away from the second attacker, he saw where the knife had stopped spinning—a few feet from where the first man was slowly trying to rise again.

“Why the fuck don’t you just stay down?” Jake said, ready to take another beating.

The guy stumbled as he tried to stand, but managed to retrieve the knife without falling. He shouted something at Jake, who didn’t understand a word of it.

Before Jake could move, the man brought the knife down hard, slamming it into his stomach and twisting, opening himself up.

Jake just stood there, stunned, as the guy dropped to the ground.

Dead.

What the fuck was going on?

He checked the other guy, hoping he might spill a few answers when he woke up. Jake was shit out of luck, but then, so was the other guy: a sliver of bone had broken free of his temple and speared through his frontal lobe. He wouldn’t be talking again.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

“SOPHIE!” THE SHOUT ECHOED UP THROUGH THE EMPTY SPACE, reverberating through the glass walls around the vast foyer. “Sophie Keane! We know you’re in here!”

Sophie stayed where she was, pushing back even harder against the wall of the hallway, as if it might open up to welcome her.

She was two steps away from the interior balcony rail that circled the foyer. Her heart raced. Her mind was faster.

She ran through her options, discarding them. Head down there? Madness. The team leader wasn’t an idiot. He’d stationed men to intercept her if she made a break for it. The second floor would have been a smarter choice than the third; she could have broken a window, clambered out the walkway roof, swung down, and been on the ground before they had a clue what was going on. Third floor, the drop to the walkway could be damaging if not fatal. It didn’t even have to be broken bones. A turned ankle would be the death of her. It was too big a risk. Up? Head for the roof? Or just keep moving floor to floor and hope to get behind their line and confuse them?

“Don’t make this more difficult than it needs to be, Sophie,” the man below continued, repeating her name. Keeping it familiar. He remembered his training. It was exactly what she would have done in his place. “Come on down. Let’s be civilized about this. Talk. It’s good to talk to me. No one else has to get hurt.”

No one else, only me
, she thought. It was a clever choice of words. He wasn’t lying, and he made it sound like he was doing her a favor. She knew better than that. The only difference is she’d never have risked being overheard if she had issued the kill order a few moments before. He’d learn the hard way.

She couldn’t go down, it was suicide. She couldn’t stay where she was, it was only a matter of time before they reached her floor next. Which, like the old song, meant the only way was up. The instant she decided that, Sophie was on the move.

She crossed the nine steps to the door between her and the nearest fire exit onto the emergency stairwell, yanking it open. Without power there wasn’t an alarm, only the echo of booted feet rushing up to her position.

She shut the door again. That was one dead end, and her options were rapidly diminishing. She moved quickly down the hall, looking for a second set of stairs.

She passed the first pair of double doors because they led to the stairwell closest to the foyer, where Cabrakan had deployed his kill squad. She needed to move deeper into the building. It was a warren of stairways and elevator shafts. There was no way they had the manpower to cover every one of them, or every entrance and exit—unless they had snipers positioned outside with perfect vantage points over the building’s four walls. That was unlikely, given the short notice, and didn’t bear thinking about. One problem at a time. Right now, all she had to do was get to a secondary stairwell before the hit squad reached this floor.

She raced down the glass-walled interior, using the moonlight peeking through to guide her toward the other side, ignoring the first bank of elevators she came to, and the door marked
EMERGENCY EXIT
beside it. Too close to the main foyer. She needed to get to the other side of the building if she was going to have a chance. And she needed to get there fast.

Up ahead she saw another fire door. She didn’t slow down; she hit the door hard, banking on the hydraulic arm to stop it from slamming into the wall behind it.

She was greeted by echoing silence and pitch-blackness as she let the door close behind her. She retrieved a small flashlight from her bag and shone it down the stairwell, tempted, but started climbing, moving as fast as she could. There was no hope of stealth—concrete and steel reflected sound. Yet unless the enemy had already breached the stairwell, staying completely motionless and listening, they wouldn’t hear her ascent.

But now she had a new problem: she didn’t have an exit strategy planned for when she hit the top floor. She was operating on pure instinct, putting as much distance between herself and the kill team as she could. There was no pretending the unit had been deployed for any other purpose than to find and eliminate her. That sharpened her thinking. But no amount of sharp thinking was going to be enough. She needed to know where she was going. Running blind would get her killed. She needed a plan in place.

She ransacked her mind for images of this building, anything she’d seen since coming in that might be of use, anything she remembered from the past about its layout. Anything that might save her life. Tripping any of the security sensors wouldn’t help, nor would setting the sprinklers off or summoning the guards. She knew what would happen to them if they tried to come between predator and prey.

The fifth floor had a terrace, which was really the top of the fourth where it jutted out farther. But that terrace faced Paternoster Square, which meant it was isolated. There was a lower office block across the square from the far end of the terrace, though the two buildings were more than a hundred feet apart. There was no way to bridge the gap between them.

Atop the fifth floor was a second terrace, also facing out onto the square, but this time it overlooked the monument in the middle. Again, a dead end unless she learned how to fly. The sixth floor was smaller than the fifth by more than half, since most of the fifth’s roof was exposed and open, though part of it was taken up by ducts and air-conditioning units. Still nowhere reachable from there.

But the top floor had a sloping roof around a central square that was used as a helipad in emergencies. The nearest building, off to the side, was maybe forty feet away, its roof a little lower than the stock exchange’s.

She was thinking fast, and not liking the direction her thoughts were heading: forty feet was still one hell of a jump. Even with enough space to run and sufficient motivation, she’d be looking at damn near breaking the world record to make it, even with a tail wind and the downward trajectory.

But it beat the alternative.

Barely.

So, roof it was. She climbed all the way to the top, double-time. Not exactly silent running, but she needed to be aware. Someone could enter the stairwell at any time.