Unforgettable - eARC (18 page)

Chapter Twenty-Seven

The possibility that the door could not be unlocked from the inside except by the hand scanner set into the wall had not occurred to me. It made a terrible kind of sense, though: the brothel’s customers could open the door to get out, but if one of the women tried to escape, she would be trapped.

And now I was trapped, too. There was no lock to pick and no way brute force was going to punch through that reinforced steel.

“Nat, you have plan, yes?” said Yelena.

“Finding you was my plan.” I looked down at the lockpicks in my hand, not wanting to face her disappointment in my lack of professionalism.

“So is time for new plan,” she said, with no trace of scolding in her tone. “Hand scanner is electronic lock. Can we rewire?”

“We could, maybe,” I said, “if I hadn’t cut the power by blowing up the transformer station.”

“So that is what happen,” she said. “You stop computer?”

“I certainly hope so,” I said. “This lab doesn’t seem to have a backup generator online, at least not yet.”

She pointed up at the strobing light on the ceiling. “Then what power these?”

“They must work off of”—I saw her smile and realized she was ahead of me—“some sort of local battery. Let’s boost someone up to get it.”

“No,” she said, “need this one here. We get one from back there.” She recruited two of the taller women to help her and went back into the brothel, leaving her two sisters behind.

With my lockpicks, I set to work on opening the panel of the hand scanner.

“You are American,” said one of the twins.

“Yeah,” I said.

“Yet you come to rescue us,” said the other. Their Russian accents were less pronounced than Yelena’s. “Why?”

Because I’m in love with your sister
was what I wanted to say, but since I hadn’t told Yelena that, I didn’t think it was a good idea to tell her sisters. “Your sister helped me, so now I’m helping her.”

“She told us someone would come,” said the first, “but we did not believe her.”

Yelena returned, holding a flashing strobe light with dangling wires. “We have battery.”

“Just a sec,” I said. With my lockpicks, I applied a little pressure and jiggled, and the scanner casing came loose.

While poking around the wires inside, Yelena and I discussed how to proceed. Finally we hooked up the battery to a couple of wires. No luck.

After trying a half-dozen combinations, the door look buzzed briefly. Several of the women pushed on the door, and it swung outward.

“Wait,” I said, as women and girls streamed out into the hallway. “Don’t just run off!”

They ignored me.

“We have to stop them,” I said to Yelena. “If they evacuate through the tunnels, they’ll just end up back here when the fire’s out.”

“Where else can we go?” she asked.

“Up,” I said.

It took a couple of minutes of shouting in various languages, but everyone gathered into one group—twenty-five women and girls in total. The alarms stopped sounding as we were trying to get organized, but the emergency lights continued to strobe.

I took the lead going up the stairs, with Yelena and her sisters right behind me.

The stairwell was empty all the way to the top floor. But as I looked out the door into the hallway, I saw about a dozen men clad in yellow firefighting garb gathered outside the doorway to the generator room. The door was open, and the men didn’t seem like they were in a rush to fight a fire, so the automatic extinguishers must have done the job. I had hoped that with the fire out, we could climb up into the facility above, but that wouldn’t work with the men there.

“We’ll need to distract the men,” I said.

“Why?” Yelena asked.

“Because that’s our way out,” I said. “In that room, there’s a shaft with a ladder that goes up to a building on the surface.”

“And shaft is only way to get there?”

“That I know about.” I shrugged. “Parham didn’t mention the building above when he drew the map, so I think any connections are hidden.”

Some of the women and girls behind us on the stairs began panicked chattering in various languages. Yelena shushed them.

“The elevators,” said one of Yelena’s sisters. “One of the men told me there were secret floors on the elevators.”

“The power is out,” I said, before remembering that many modern elevators had their own backup power supplies. “But it might work, if we can distract the men so they won’t—”

“That is silly,” said Yelena. “We try elevators on other floor.”

On the next floor down, we punched the elevator buttons, but they didn’t light up, and nothing came.

“It was a good idea,” Yelena told her sister in Russian.

“It still might work,” I said. “The elevators are probably in fire mode, which means they went to the evacuation floor. That’s two floors below us.”

As we descended the stairs again, Yelena said, “If fire is out, then people may come back.”

“I know,” I said.

On the third floor down, the elevators sat waiting with their doors open. I entered one, along with Yelena and her sisters.

“Any idea how the secret floors were accessed?” I asked, looking at the elevator panel. There were the usual assortment of buttons: door open, door close, emergency stop, and the floor numbers—1 through 8, although they were ordered with 1 at the top and 8 at the bottom. That corresponded to the floors we knew about. There was also a keyhole for firefighter operation.

“No,” said one of the twins. Maybe I would learn to tell them apart someday, but for now that wasn’t high on my priority list.

“Do you see anything that looks like a secret panel?” I asked Yelena.

She shook her head.

“Still, it makes sense there would be an easier way than climbing the ladder in the shaft,” I said, trying to talk my way through figuring things out. “It makes sense to use the elevators. Maybe punching in the right combination of floors allows access.”

“It will take too long,” said Yelena. “And is not secure—could take people by accident.”

“True,” I said. “It would be better to just have a key to…” I raised my lockpicks to the firefighter control keyhole. I turned the lock from Off to the second marked position, On. I clicked it over to the last marked position, marked Hold. And then I turned it farther, and it clicked into an unmarked position.

The doors began to close.

Women and girls began pushing forward into the elevator.

“We can’t take everyone in one trip,” I said. “I’ll come back for everyone else.”

We managed to squeeze eighteen people on board, more than double the maximum capacity listed on the placard. I figured so many of them looked undernourished, we were probably still okay for the weight limit.

“I’ll come back for you,” I said to the eight women left outside. Then I realized the round trip might take more than a minute, and I could risk them forgetting me and panicking. “Yelena, say you’ll come back for them.”

“I will come back for you,” she said. “Stay here and wait.”

The elevator doors closed, and we went up. The floor indicator lit up with 3, then 2, then 1. And we kept going up.

The indicator changed to 0 and we stopped. The doors opened.

“There’s an armed guard, if he hasn’t evacuated,” I said. “You may have to get past him to get to the cars outside.”

“But I must go back for the others,” said Yelena.

“No, I can handle it,” I said. “I just needed them to remember someone was coming back.”

“We will wait,” she said.

I nodded. I pressed the 4 button, and the doors closed between us.

When the doors opened on level four, one of the women shrieked on seeing me.

“Yelena sent me,” I said. “Come with me, hurry.”

The women looked at me, then each other.

Down the hall, beyond where I could see, I heard the pound of boots on tile. A man yelled something incomprehensible.

That decided the women. They entered the elevator and huddled in the back.

I turned the key switch back to the secret setting. A man with a rifle appeared in the hallway. The doors closed as he swung his rifle up. The elevator rose. There was a loud
bang
. A hole appeared in the elevator door, and searing pain erupted in my left calf.

Surprised screams came from the women in the back.

I turned to look at them. “Are any of you hurt?”

None of them were.

“At least you know I’m on your side, now,” I said. The pain actually wasn’t as bad as what I remembered of my burst appendix, but I began reciting the Vice Presidents of the United States anyway.

The elevator arrived at the top floor. Ignoring the women as they got off, I lifted my pant leg to see how bad the damage was. A round hole in the flesh next to my shin oozed blood. I checked the back of my leg—no exit wound. The elevator door must have slowed the bullet enough that it didn’t go all the way through my leg.

“Nat!” Yelena entered the elevator and knelt to look at the wound. “We must stop bleeding.”

“I can handle it,” I said. “You need to get everyone out of here and safe. The guard who shot me saw the women—he knows they’re escaping.”

“Come on, then,” she said, rising to her feet and taking my arm. “We get you outside.”

I shook my head. “I have to go back for Parham.”

“But—”

“Your escape will be a diversion to help me. Now go!”

In a movie, this would have been the point at which she confessed her love for me, and then we had a long lingering kiss before she finally went. But Yelena was professional enough to know that each second of delay made it more likely the guards could organize to stop her and the others from escaping.

I watched her go, knowing it was the right thing to do and wishing she’d kissed me anyway.

Standing here with the elevator door open wasn’t a good idea, so I hit the button for the seventh floor down. Once I was between floors, I pulled out the emergency stop knob. I sank to the floor, which relieved the pain in my leg a little.

Using one of my lockpicks to help tear the fabric, I ripped off my left pant leg from the knee down, then tore it into strips. Through gritted teeth I named off Secretaries of the Treasury, starting with Alexander Hamilton, as I bound up the wound, knotting the cloth tightly enough to keep pressure on it without cutting off the circulation in my leg.

I clambered to my feet and continued to the seventh floor down, where Parham’s quarters were located. As a high-value prisoner, he had probably been evacuated during the fire alarm, so I would wait there for his return.

Along the way, I tried a few doors at random, and found the quarters of someone who wore pants approximately my size. I swapped my torn pants for a pair of khakis.

I picked the lock on Parham’s door. As I had guessed, he wasn’t there. His quarters were fairly spacious, with a living room, a bedroom, and a bathroom. I went through the medicine cabinet in his bathroom, hoping to find a pain reliever, but there was nothing useful.

As I stepped back into the living room, I heard a key being inserted into the lock. I stepped back into the bedroom so I couldn’t be seen from the front door.

The door opened. Parham spoke in Farsi, and a man replied. The door closed. After a few moments, a flash of the emergency lights revealed Parham approaching the bedroom. He must have seen me in the same flash, because he let out a yell.

“Quiet,” I said in the darkness after the flash.

The front door opened.

And the regular lights came on. Power was back online.

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Eyes wide, Parham stared at me. There was no recognition there.

The guard asked him something in Farsi, and Parham answered, reaching down to rub the toe of his left shoe. The guard replied, and I heard the door close, but I couldn’t tell if the guard was still inside.

Parham straightened. “I told him I stubbed my toe in the darkness. Explain yourself now or I will call him in again.”

“I’m Nat Morgan, a friend of Yelena.”

“And how is she?” he asked.

“Gone,” I said. At least, I very much hoped she was by now. “I just helped her and her sisters bust out of here.”

“And why should I believe you?” he asked. “Yelena never mentioned she had an American friend who was coming to rescue her.”

“Even if she had,” I said, “you probably wouldn’t remember. Do you have a notebook you’ve been taking notes in recently?”

“I did, but the guards took it away.”

I winced. That was going to make it more difficult. “Do you think you could get them to bring it back?”

“Perhaps. Why? And what happened to your leg?”

“I got shot,” I said. “And the notebook would help because you were working on a theory about me.”

He scoffed. “A theory about you? I’m a quantum physicist, not a psychologist.”

“You called me a fluke of quantum mechanics—Schrödinger’s cat burglar—because no one can remember me after not observing me for a minute. You talked about superpositions and probability waves that collapse so that it’s like I was never there.”

“Schrödinger’s cat burglar? That’s a good one,” he said. “But your story doesn’t add up. You claim to be Yelena’s friend, but how can you have any friends if no one—”

“Yelena’s the only person who can remember me. You said we were entangled by a laser in Barcelona.” I had to make him believe me. “I was with you during your whole escape, except you don’t remember me. I was with you by the side of the road when Yelena drove off with your cell phone and came back with the Mercedes. I was with you in the hotel in Ahvaz, and on the Grasshopper, and when we met with Edward, and when we tried to sneak into the warehouse.”

“All details you could have found out from questioning Yelena.”

“Do you think she would break so easily? And what would be the point of my lying about this?” I asked. “I came with you because you said we needed to destroy the core of the Prophet, otherwise it would control the future. I managed to delay things by taking out the power, but they’ve obviously worked around that. If I can get you access to the network, can you still disrupt the core’s operating code?”

“I’m sure my security codes are no longer valid,” he said. “But if we could access a terminal with someone else’s login, if they have high enough clearance, then yes. Entangled, you say? How did you become entangled with Yelena?”

“Doesn’t matter right now,” I said. “Where’s the most likely place we could get you access?”

“Over in the lab wing, I should think, since people will be getting back to work.”

“Okay, that’s where we’ll go.” I looked around the room for something that could be used as a weapon, and focused on a floor lamp. “How many guards are outside your door?”

“Two.”

I picked up the lamp. The metal base was hefty enough to pack a wallop. “Do you think you could get just one of them in here?” With the element of surprise, I figured I could take out one armed guard at a time, but not two simultaneously.

“I can try,” Parham said. “But if they’re suspicious, they might both come in.”

I nodded. “We need to get one of the guards to leave. What if you wrote a note to Jamshidi and asked one of the guards to take it?”

“Can’t hurt to try,” Parham said. He strode to his desk, wrote a short note on a piece of paper, and stuffed it in an envelope, which he then sealed. “I’ll say it’s for Jamshidi’s eyes only.”

Parham opened the door and spoke in Farsi with the guards. He closed the door and grinned at me. “One of them’s taken the bait.”

“We’ll give him a minute to get out of the way, then get the other guard to come in,” I said.

“Right.”

I began counting off the seconds in my head.

“How did you get entangled with Yelena?” asked Parham.

Briefly, I recounted the story of the laser in Barcelona and what he had theorized about it.

“Of course, the Quantum Zeno effect,” he said. “What a fascinating real life application.”

“You mentioned the Quantum Zeno effect before,” I said. “What is it?”

“Basically, it’s the idea that you can stop a quantum state from flipping to another state if you keep measuring it. Because Yelena is, in a way, constantly measuring your existence through the entanglement, she can’t forget you.”

The conversation had distracted me, and I realized more than a minute had passed. “It’s time to—”

I heard the key being inserted into the lock. “He’s coming.” Brandishing the lamp, I moved into position so the door would block me from the guard’s view as it opened.

The door swung open.

Parham’s mouth gaped.

“Hello, Parham,” said Yelena. “Is Nat here?”

“Yelena?” I said, coming around the door to see her. Still dressed in the black silk robe, she was dragging an unconscious guard inside. “What are you doing here? Where are your sisters? Did they get recaptured?”

“With Edward. I take them to rendezvous point,” she said. “He will take them to CIA warehouse. I think he is glad to have them as leverage to make sure I come back with Parham.” The door closed as she got the guard’s body fully inside. “Since you are wounded, I think you might need my help to get Parham out and sabotage supercomputer.”

“I can’t believe you came back.” Truth was, I was flabbergasted that she would be willing to leave her sisters to come back for me. Maybe she really did care about me.

She flashed me a smile. “Believe. Now, put on guard uniform. Attract less attention as we go to the surface.”

“But we’re not escaping yet,” I said. “Parham and I are going to destroy the core.”

“Then I come with you,” she said.

“I’m glad to see you again,” I said, “but you should go be with your sisters. After everything they’ve been through, they need you.”

She looked at Parham. “If we do not destroy supercomputer, and Jamshidi controls future, he can bring my sisters back?”

“He could arrange events to make that happen,” Parham said. “And I’m afraid he is quite vindictive enough to do just that.”

“Then my job is not done until we destroy core,” Yelena said.

While I changed into the guard’s uniform, which was a little loose around the shoulders and had sleeves too long, Yelena tied up the guard using the electrical cord from the floor lamp.

“Do you have clothes I can change into?” she asked Parham when she finished. “Robe attract too much attention.”

He pointed to the bedroom. “Help yourself. Closet’s in there.”

She emerged a couple of minutes later wearing a white shirt with the sleeves rolled up and a pair of loose jeans, cinched at the waist by a too-large belt. “Sorry, I poke new holes in belt,” she said.

“Think nothing of it,” said Parham.

“I think you look great,” I said. She did. “Unfortunately, that means you’re still going to attract too much attention in the halls.”

“I got down here while wearing robe,” she said. “This will not be so bad.”

“This is the residential section,” said Parham. “People dress casually here sometimes. In the lab wing, you would stick out. And if the guards aren’t looking for you soon, they will be.”

“I really think it would be best if you went to join your sisters,” I said.

“You think it too risky for me because I am woman?” she said. “Tell me, Nat, which of us is more skilled, if we do not count your talent?”

My face flushed. “You are,” I admitted. “But it’s not because you’re—”

“And if you are with Parham, how will your talent help?” she asked.

“It won’t,” I said. “But Yelena—”

“Then best chance of success is with me, even if I am a woman.”

“It’s not because you’re a woman,” I said. “I want you out of here and safe because you’re the woman I love.”

She stared at me for a moment. “You think you love me just because I can remember you.”

“No,” I said. “I mean, it helps, but I fell in love with you because you’re smart and brave and competent and beautiful and passionate—I mean that in the way that you care so much about things, not the romantic way. Why would I not fall in love with you?”

Parham said, “This is all very touching, but we have a mission to do and time is ticking away.”

“He is right,” said Yelena. “We can talk about love later.”

I’d just poured my heart out, and now she was back to the cool professional. If she could do it, I could. “We still have the problem that you’re too noticeable.”

“We improvise,” she said. “You are good at that.”

The condescending compliment did not make me feel any better. But I wasn’t going to let my annoyance show. “I’ll play the part of your guard. Of course, if anyone expects me to speak Farsi, the jig is up, and we’ll have to…improvise.”

We left Parham’s quarters. He led the way, with Yelena beside him, and I followed behind carrying the guard’s rifle. I did my best to keep from limping, but the pain in my left leg was a constant throb in the background.

We passed various people who were still returning to the residential section after the evacuation. Nobody gave us more than a cursory glance, so I began to feel a little more confident we might actually pull this off.

“Around the next corner is the entrance to the lab wing,” Parham said. “There are usually two guards on duty.”

“Stop and let me take a look,” I said. I passed Parham and Yelena, and peered around the corner. About twenty yards away, two guards stood on either side of the hallway, which continued beyond them.

I turned back to the others. “What do you think? Can I just march you past them like I’m under orders to take you somewhere in there?”

“It might work,” said Parham. “Usually I just give them a nod as I walk past when going to work. But circumstances are different now.”

“It is bold strategy,” said Yelena.

“In other words, you think it’s a stupid risk, but you’re trying not to hurt my feelings right now,” I said.

“I did not say that,” she said.

“But you thought it,” I said. “And you’re right. I may have a guard’s uniform, but they won’t recognize me, so they’re not just going to let me waltz past them with a couple of prisoners.”

“Give me rifle,” said Yelena. “I will take them out.”

“Shooting could just draw more guards,” I said. “But I’ve just realized my talent is not entirely useless in this situation.” I pointed to a door in our hallway. “You two hide in there. I’ll draw the guards after me, and after they’ve gone past, you two go on. I’ll lose them and they’ll forget about me. Then I’ll come join you.”

I had to pick the lock on the door to let them in. It turned out to be a room filled with boxes of copy machine paper, pens, and other office staples. I guess even a billionaire like Jamshidi had to worry about employees stealing supplies.

“How do I say, ‘Follow me! The prisoners are escaping!’ in Farsi?” I asked Parham. I was still in a guard’s uniform, so I might be able to fool them long enough.

He told me, and I practiced it a few times.

“They will not believe you are Iranian,” said Yelena.

Parham said, “There are a few Russian guards. Try saying it with a Russian accent.”

“I can’t even speak Russian with a Russian accent,” I said, but I gave it a try.

“Okay, see you on the other side,” I said.

I left the supply room and went around the corner. I beckoned to the guards and yelled, “Follow me! The prisoners are escaping!”

It took them a moment, but they started running toward me. I wasn’t sure whether they believed me or thought I was an intruder. Either way, they were following me.

I turned and started running back around the corner. And the pain in my leg, which I had pushed to the back of my mind, pushed itself to the forefront. My left knee collapsed, and I tumbled to the ground right in front of the door behind which Yelena and Parham were hiding.