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 soldiers 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.
Six peered through the hole he’d made. Excellent—he could see out the other side. He jammed the barrel of the Eagle into the opening and pushed the gun from side to side to widen the hole. Then he twisted the fire hose into a tight tube, forced the cut end into the hole, and pulled it out the other side of the cabinet. He locked the bottom drawer so it wouldn’t fall open, grabbed the hose on either side of the cabinet, and pulled. Nothing broke—neither the sides of the filing cabinet nor the fire hose, and the cabinet lifted into the air. Six put it back down and pulled the hose the rest of the way through, stopping only when the nozzle clanked against the hole—it was too large to fit through.
Six tossed Queen’s bullet-torn coat back onto her chair and carried the cabinet out into the corridor, shutting the door behind him. A pulley is easy, he realized—I’ll just wrap the hose around the guardrail in the stairwell. Now it’s time to get over there.
He took the cabinet as far as the corner in the corridor, then put it down again. I can’t fight a Spade while carrying a filing cabinet, he thought.
He peered around the corner. The corridor was a cul-de-sac, with the stairwell doors on the left wall and the window on the right. There was only one Spade in sight. She was standing by the window, facing Six but watching the stairwell door. I must have them confused by now, Six thought. They’ll have checked the elevator, Floor 12, and maybe even the maintenance tunnel, and they have no idea where I am. That’s why she’s watching the stairwell door. She thinks I’m just as likely to come up from behind her as down the corridor.
He quietly drew his AM-77 and aimed it at the Spade. The dart would knock her out quickest if it hit her in the jugular vein—the sedative would be secreted almost directly into her brain. However, aiming for that spot would risk puncturing her trachea and seriously wounding her. Instead, Six lined the muzzle up with her left thigh, where the femoral artery was.
Crack! He pulled the trigger, and the anesthetic dart zipped along the length of the corridor. But the guard was already moving, drawing her weapon, and the dart broke as it slammed into the wall.
No one reacts that quickly, Six thought as he charged into the corridor towards her. She must have known I was here. She was just waiting for me to make the first move.
Six drew his katana from its sheath as he ran. The Spade already had her gun up. “Freeze,” she roared.
Six jumped into a half flip, landed feetfirst on the ceiling, and kept running. The Spade stepped back and tried to readjust her aim, but Six was almost above her, and he jumped again, soaring back down towards the floor, blade first.
The Spade dived aside, as Six had expected, but her gun hand was the last part to move. Her Hawk 9-millimeter was slicked in half by the blade, and the shock of the impact knocked the stock out of her grip. She reached for a combat knife with her other hand, but Six was already on his feet, and the katana was at her throat.
“Don’t,” he said. Her hand had frozen, fingers resting lightly on the handle of her knife.
“Who do you work for?” she demanded.
“We’re on the same side,” he replied. Her question seemed unusual. If the Spades knew he was a ChaoSonic weapon, wouldn’t they assume he worked for them?
“If you had nothing to hide,” the Spade said, “you’d surrender.”
“When this is over,” he said, “I will. And I’ll want a written apology from the Queen of Spades. Take your knife out. Slowly.”
She did.
“Drop it,” Six said. “In front of you.”
The knife clattered to the floor. “Kick it away,” he continued. “Right back down the corridor.”
“I’m willing to die for what I believe in,” she said. It sounded like a warning.
“I don’t care,” Six said truthfully. “You’re going to call in and say everything’s fine. You just heard a rattle in the air-conditioning.”
“You’re on the top floor,” she said. “You’ll never get past all the guards between here and the ground.”
“That’s not your concern,” Six said. “You—”
He hesitated. Something in the woman’s voice wasn’t right—it sounded staged. He saw that her earpiece was not in her ear. He looked down. It was in her gloved hand, and the TRANSMIT button was depressed.
He drew his AM-77 and shot her in the thigh. She cried out and staggered to the side, reaching down to touch the injury, but already her fingers were limp.
“Sorry,” Six muttered.
With his free hand he grabbed the woman’s arm and caught her as she fell, then put her on the floor in the recovery position.
He was already running back towards the filing cabinet by the time her eyes were shut.
Six assumed he had only minutes before more Spades showed up. They knew that he’d taken out the guard on a Floor 14 stairwell door, and this would now be the first place they would come looking.
Six opened the double doors to the stairwell and pressed them against the magnetic discs in the walls so they stayed open. He looped the fire hose around the guardrail on the stairs twice, knotted the free end into his belt, and placed the filing cabinet about a meter from the rail. He kicked the window opposite the doors until its hinges snapped, and then pried it out of the frame, leaning it against the wall next to the unconscious Spade.
The plan was to climb into the window frame and tug on the hose until it ran out of slack, dragging the filing cabinet under the guardrail and causing it to fall into the stairwell. Fire hoses were always frictionless so they could unspool quickly, so his pulley should work smoothly. When it reached the bottom, Six could simply jump out the window. The cabinet would slow his descent to a safe level as it was lifted through the hollow in the center of the stairwell. He could untie the hose when he was close enough to the ground to fall safely, and then he’d get as far away from the Deck as he could.
Six still had his parachute on his back, of course—and he would have much preferred to use it. But BASE-jumping from a window was often fatal. The parachute usually became caught on the building and didn’t open properly, leaving the jumper to fall to his or her death. Six would need more momentum than he could build up by just leaping out the window. The pulley-assisted abseil was by far the safest option.
Six paused in his preparations and listened. He thought he’d heard a scuffle—the sound of a carelessly placed shoe in the corridor behind him. He peered into the fluorescent light.
Nothing. It was empty, and he couldn’t detect any further noises from beyond the corner. He climbed into the window frame and prepared to pull on the hose, sending the filing cabinet down into the stairwell.
“Agent Six of Hearts!”
The voice had been artificially amplified. Six’s first thought was that it was being channeled through the Deck’s PA system. But it was coming from outside the building. He leaned out into the void and looked down. Fog and darkness. He looked up and fell back through the window in surprise, landing with a thud on the floor of the corridor. A fighter jet had taken off from the roof of the Deck, and was descending towards the window. Six could feel the heat from the blazing thrusters as they burned fuel to keep the plane in the air.
A halogen spotlight snapped on, blinding him, and he ducked below the frame of the window.
“Agent Six of Hearts,” the loudspeaker boomed again. “You have ten seconds to stand down. I repeat: You have ten seconds to stand down.”
Six heard the clattering of boots and the clicking of safety catches being adjusted. He turned and saw that there were Spades rounding the corner of the corridor, guns raised.
“You have nine seconds—” the voice began. But Six heard no more; he was already racing down the stairs.
He heard the chattering of gunfire as the walls of the stairwell raced past in a blur. The guardrail hummed and pinged as bullets sparked off it, and chunks of brick and plaster plummeted through the hollow in the center like dusty raindrops. Six gave up trying to put his feet on the stairs—he just jumped from one landing to the next, his right hand sliding down the rail to keep himself from falling into the well or crashing into the walls. The fire hose twisted in the air above him; he was lucky that he hadn’t knocked the cabinet into the stairwell yet, or it would be slowing his descent. The Spades were crashing down the stairs a few flights above him, but he was widening the gap every second. One person could go down stairs more quickly than twelve at the same time.
The gunfire had stopped—they could no longer see him. But Six knew that this was only temporary. There would still be guards on the other side of every stairwell door, plus the ones in the lobby, and now that the QS knew where he was she would know where to concentrate all her forces. Perhaps I can still make it to the sewers, he thought. But I’d have to leave the stairwell somehow and get across to—
He skidded to a halt on one of the landings. A desk had been put in his path, lying on its side, with fire doors propped up against it—a crude roadblock, designed to stop him from going any farther down. He was on the third floor, only fifteen meters from the ground, so he prepared to jump into the stairwell and free-fall the rest of the way, but then he remembered that he was still tied to the fire hose, and therefore the filing cabinet on Floor 11. He reached to untie the knot…
“Freeze!” Once again, he heard the sound of guns being cocked. Lots of them.
Six looked to his right, into the corridor extending from the landing. He didn’t bother doing a head count. The number of Spades pointing guns at him exceeded thirty. Too many to fight. Too many bullets to dodge.
“Hands where I can see them,” the leader said. A badge on her shoulder read Queen of Spades. She tapped her earpiece with her free hand. “All units to Floor 3. Air support, return to base. We have the suspect.”
Six let go of the hose, leaving the knot tied. “You’re making a mistake,” he said as he put his hands up.
“If I were, you wouldn’t have tried to run,” the QS said icily.
All you did was run. His brother’s voice echoed through Six’s head. All you ever do is run.
I’m sorry I let you down, Kyntak, he thought. Part of him was relieved that he wouldn’t have to risk his life. Now that he had been captured, he might spend the rest of his days in a cell, safe and alone. But he was immediately horrified that such thoughts had entered his head. He had failed, and now Kyntak was as good as dead. Even if Vanish didn’t dissect him, ChaoSonic would.
“Take out the sword slowly,” the QS said, “drop it, and kick it over here.”
The katana glided smoothly across the linoleum, and the QS stopped it with her boot.
“Now the pistol,” she said, gesturing at the AM-77. “With your right hand—keep your left in the air.”
Six took out the tranq and dropped it. It clattered to the floor.
Seventy-nine kilograms, said a voice in his head. Without the katana and the pistol, you only weigh seventy-nine kilograms.
“Now the Eagle,” the QS said. “You know the drill.”
Six pulled the Eagle automatic off his back and dropped it to the floor. Now seventy-six kilograms.
“You’ll regret this,” Six said as he kicked the rifle across the floor.
“Are you threatening me?” the QS hissed. “Not a smart move. Now the other gun on your belt.”
“It’s a lock-release gun,” Six said. “It’s harmless.”
“You think I’d send you to your cell with a lock-release gun? Take it off.”
The gun clattered to the floor. Now seventy-four kilograms. The Spades behind the QS watched Six impassively, weapons still raised.
“What’s that around your arm?”
“Detasheet,” Six said.
“Plastic explosives?” She raised her eyebrows. “Planning on some sabotage, Agent Six?”
“I can’t take it off one-handed,” Six said.
“The detonator, then,” the QS said. “Turn out your pockets.”
The detonator and the locator bounced onto the floor. A little less than seventy-four kilograms. He kept Jack’s mobile phone concealed in the palm of his hand and slipped it discreetly back into his pocket.
“You’re violating the Code,” Six said, walking slowly towards her. The fire hose tightened behind him. “I have done nothing wrong.”
She stepped backward. “Stop right there. What’s that behind you?”
“A hose,” Six said. “I was going to use it to climb out the window.”
One of the agents snorted, and the QS raised her eyebrows. “Untie it,” she said, “and drop it.”
Six reached slowly behind his back and started to untie the knot, keeping a firm grip on the end of the hose. He tugged, and felt that the slack had almost run out.
“I’m very disappointed in you, Six,” the QS said as he worked. “You had an outstanding track record.”
“I’m disappointed in you too,” Six said. “You normally get your man.”
He pulled the hose with all his might, and jumped backward.
The filing cabinet—now almost ten kilograms heavier than Six—was pulled into the stairwell and fell. Even as the Spades opened fire, Six was dragged backward and sucked up into the stairwell, a human counterweight for the cabinet. He held the hose tightly with both hands and shot upward past flight after flight of stairs.
The Spades reached the landing, and some started racing up the stairs in pursuit, but Six was rising faster than they could climb. A few others stayed on the landing and fired up at him, spitting bullets wildly into the stairwell. Six dodged by shoving off guardrails on his way up and rebounding from wall to wall, adding to his upward momentum with every push. When he was almost halfway up, the filing cabinet appeared out of the darkness above. He punched it as it swept past him, breaking the lock on the bottom drawer and spilling hundreds of papers and files into the well. The gunfire stopped abruptly as a blizzard of flying paper concealed Six from view.
Six looked up again, squinting against the air rushing past his face. In only a couple of seconds he would reach the top floor, where the hose went over the rail for his improvised pulley. He gave one last shove off a rail, increasing his speed so much that the last few flights of stairs were a blur as they shot past him, and curled his body into a ball. He squeezed his eyes shut. Vision would only confuse him for the next few seconds, and this trick was difficult enough already.
When he hit the rail that was acting as the pulley, his guts lurched as the momentum dragged him over the top with a snap. He let go of the hose. Flying horizontally now, still curled up like a cannonball, he rocketed through the double doors, crossed the corridor with the sleeping Spade, and shot out of the window he’d opened earlier.
Six opened his eyes. Grey fog rained down from the night sky all around. The Deck was already vanishing into it behind him. He spread his arms as if they were wings, keeping his legs straight and his feet together as he flew into the darkness.
The fighter jet seemed to have obeyed the order to return to base. Six was finally beyond the reach of the Spades. Satisfied that there was no aircraft nearby, and aware that he was falling faster and faster, he pulled the cord on his parachute. The chute exploded into shape above him, snapping his torso backward as his falling speed was cut ten kilometers per hour.
Six reached upward and found the control handles hanging above him. Unlike a hang glider, a parachute couldn’t have a control bar because it had to be folded into a backpack. But this chute had handles that performed a similar function. Six pulled the right-hand one, and the chute swept into a seventy-degree turn above him. He looked at his watch: 18:19:49. Time to head to the rendezvous point.
He pulled the parachute into a swoop and flew into the night.