The surveillance program hesitated before allowing Thorp to pull it up onto his ordi’s screen. That or the ordi was doing the hesitating. But after a moment, Thorp had the surveillance camera feeds—all one thousand and fifty-six of them—on his monitor, fanning out like the million-lens eye of a bug. He twisted his hand in a peculiar way and placed it on the keyboard to hit six radically spaced keys at once. In a blink, all the feeds were dead, gone to fuzz.
Thorp gathered his ordi and wedged it into his rucksack. While his arm was still submerged in the bag, he withdrew an assault rifle. He snapped in the clip and extended it toward Brody.
Tearing his gaze from the smoking wreckage burning on the glassy surface of Lake Michigan, Brody stared at the butt of the gun. A gun he had known so well. So many days spent with an identical rifle, sleeping with it in the bunks, carrying it from place to place—it was like a steadfast companion through his years in the service. He knew the weight of it, the feel of it. He could tell if it was loaded or not just by holding it in his arms. He didn’t make a motion to take it from Thorp.
“This is going to get hairy,” Thorp reminded him. “You need this thing. If we’re going to get out of here alive, you have to do this with me.”
Instead, Brody took up the Franklin-Johann Thorp had resting on Ward’s desk. He looked into Thorp’s eyes and said nothing, forcing himself to keep his fingers wrapped around the grip of the pistol.
“Fine,” Thorp said. “But you better be good with it.”
They went to the office door. Beyond, in the stark white lab, there was still no activity. The security team may not have been alerted yet. They could be in the break room, swapping stories and downing coffee just as well as they could be donning their flak jackets and stop-gel-equipped vests.
“What’s the plan? Try to make it out the front?”
“Well, we could go up to the roof and jump, but I don’t think that will get the results we’re after,” Thorp said. His cold and distant demeanor had shifted yet again. Here he was, like he’d been when Brody knew him in Egypt. A secret second personality waiting to be swapped in when needed, Jekyll and Hyde with no serum required.
“I don’t want to kill anybody,” Brody said.
“You probably won’t even hurt anybody with rubber bullets,” Thorp commented. “These guys will probably be wearing some high-grade stuff. Rubber bullets are just going to bounce off them like tennis balls. I have another rifle if you change your mind. Armor-piercing rounds, a few clips with incendiary rounds—”
“No,” Brody said firmly. His still-swirling guts from the Darter ride reawakened, and he felt the urge to get sick again. No matter how he held the gun, no matter which hand it was in—it felt uncomfortable.
As they crossed the lab, Thorp pulled the assault rifle to his shoulder and walked with the barrel pointed out ahead of him, peering down through the scope with one eye. As he trod softly across the polished white floor, he said, “We don’t want to get boxed in. We’ll keep using the stairs. You keep the rear, and I’ll make sure we don’t get stuck anywhere. With any luck, we can just scoot right on out before they even know we’re here.”
Brody followed, his heart a shuddering lump in his throat. He felt like he had those first few weeks on the training course. Running up staircases that led nowhere. Doing drills. Firing with only the laser target at cardboard men that’d pop up in windows of plywood façades, receptors in their chests and heads, flashing their eyes like a midway game when hit with a “kill shot.” Those kill shots, his only ones.
He couldn’t help but shake his head as he followed Thorp to the stairwell. It had all gotten so fucked up so fast. He compared now to the original Operation Ceramic Groom. Going up to the roof and lifting off carefree, jubilant and high-fiving the men in his squad for a job well done. This was the alternative it could’ve easily taken all those years ago. Stranded, having to go down, diving headfirst, unsure as to what lay ahead, praying that everything would turn out okay. But the overwhelming knowledge that it wouldn’t be all right was as present as the knot in his guts.
They made it down to the seventy-eighth floor without altercation.
They took a moment at the wide landing and listened to the infinite stairwell spiraling down to the ground floor. No noise, no commotion, no banging boots on metal stairs coming up to meet them. Nothing.
Just the sound of their own labored breaths.
Brody checked the stairwell behind them and saw no flitting shadows, heard no sounds at all.
Growing suspicious that it was all too easy, Brody reached out for the door of the seventy-first floor to make sure it was unlocked. It opened freely. The thought that they were being bottlenecked subsided. But still, it was too smooth; they had made nothing but noise since arriving. Someone should’ve come along by now, or some indication they’d been detected as a presence within a building that needed to be purged. “This seems strange, doesn’t it? There’s no one here.”
“Oh, they’re probably putting up blockades and trip wires in the lobby,” Thorp said. “They’ll start to move up this way when we don’t show in the next half hour or so.”
And with that last two-letter word having passed through Thorp’s bandanna, every light in the stairwell shaft darkened.
Thorp went to his rucksack for the flashlight. Brody retrieved his phone and was clearing the flashing stopwatch to select the flashlight when the shaft lit up again, except instead of the soft white it’d been casting before—it was a harsh red akin to that of a darkroom.
Brody looked to Thorp.
“It’s for their infrared. The red light cuts the flare and makes us easier to see.”
“So they’re onto us,” Brody said. “Great.”
“Looks like we’ll just have to do what we can to get out of this shit.” Thorp pulled the rifle stock in tighter against his shoulder. He clicked on a flashlight attached to the muzzle of his gun.
Brody had a sudden thought. “The train.”
“What about it?” Thorp said.
“It runs right past this building. I remember seeing it on the way in.”
“Those trestles are three stories high. We’ll have to get down to at least the fifth floor.” He shifted the rifle. “Is that what you want to do?”
“I don’t see many other options. Break out a window and jump for it,” Brody said.
“All right, here we go,” Thorp said and charged ahead.
They began their descent. Being quiet was impossible, so they decided to make up for their volume with speed. Brody couldn’t resist but aim his pistol every time he caught his own wide-shouldered silhouette running up alongside him on the stairwell wall. The nerves were mounting, and his heart hadn’t slowed since they had made the leap from the Darter over fifteen minutes ago. He held his phone out in front of him, a train schedule on the screen. “The ‘L’ goes by here at one thirty.”
“What time is it now?”
“Ten to one.”
“Guess we might have to hole up somewhere and—wait, wait. Stop, stop, stop.” Thorp choked, Brody nearly running into the back of him.
On the landing for the sixty-third floor, they stopped, listened.
Foggily, ringing hollow and distant—barely audible—rhythmic, heavy footfalls.
Brody laid his hand on the landing railing. It gave a faint tremble. “How many do you suppose there are?”
Thorp closed his eyes. “I don’t know.”
“They’re down there a ways,” Brody whispered. He leaned over the railing, and in the red light nothing could be seen beyond a few floors down.
The rabble of boots was increasing an octave every second—they were moving quickly.
A sudden screech sounded, a ragged breath, and then a voice overamplified to a deafening volume came across the tower’s loudspeaker system. “Please put your weapons down. We will not use deadly force if you are cooperative. When our task force comes upon you, if you are facedown with your hands behind your head and your weapons down, we will not use deadly force.”
Thorp grunted, shook his head. “Right. Sure.”
Brody nodded at the door for the sixty-third floor. “Dodge?”
Thorp yanked the door open.
They found another sea-foam green cubicle farm, a carpeted cavernous space with every inch packed with empty workstations.
They cut to the outermost wall facing south, pressing their faces against the glass to see straight down to the elevated trestle below. An eight-car train had just careened the bend out of sight, allowing them a glimpse of its chrome rear.
“That’s the one o’clock,” he said.
Beyond the hum of all the idle work space machines, they heard the security team in the stairwell drawing near.
Leaning against the warm plastic hull of a copier, Brody ducked inside a cubicle. Thorp did the same across the aisle—after noisily advancing the first round.
Regretting every cigarette he’d ever had, Brody pressed his palm against his chest to force his ragged breathing to quell—each sharp intake through the nose pulled in the smells of burned coffee and dusty electronics. He coughed, sputtering, lowering his damp face covering to spit. When he heard the approaching clamor against the stairs ringing hollowly, his breathing seemed to snuff itself.
Beyond the plain white door with the stick figure placard walking on the zigzagging serrated blade of stairs, the guards moved by.
After it had quieted, Brody slowly stood up, watching the handle of the door. “How secure was that hack you did?” he whispered.
“It was an ugly one. I’m sure it set off their firewall. But that was when we were just going to be fifteen minutes.” Thorp stood as well. “We should get a move on while they’re still heading up there.”
They crept out onto the landing and listened to any sound permeating the cherry-colored chamber. Soundless. They looked up and saw no flashlight beams, nothing at all. It was as if the guards had materialized to give chase, and once they knew they had been foiled turned back to a cloud of microscopic dust to make the return trip more expedient.
Moving as quietly as their boots would allow, Brody and Thorp subtracted another ten stories. Then another and another. They paused when Brody thought he heard something, held their breath to listen, and then continued.
The handgun’s grip became loose, slick with sweat in Brody’s hand. Sweat dripped from his chin, the tip of his nose, his elbows, darkening the collar of his shirt. Another flash of basic training came to him: running the circuit in the summer sun and collapsing at the end. He never considered the taste of water so fantastic in his life. The chants that without fail began, “I don’t know but I’ve been told …”
The fourth floor came upon them. Carefully shouldering the door aside, Thorp walked in staying low. Brody followed, scanning the cubicle farm with his pistol equipped with rubber bullets, still not having looped his finger over the trigger yet. All clear.
“We’re good,” Thorp said and let the rifle dangle by its strap across his chest.
They went to the far side of the floor and looked down. The trestle was there, but it looked like quite a fall. Not like the one they had done in the not-so-recent past but still a daunting distance. And this time, there’d be the chance of landing on an electrified rail.
“We have to time it pretty good,” Brody said. “Don’t want to jump too late and miss it.”
“Or too early and land in front of it,” Thorp added.
Thorp ducked out of his rifle’s strap and turned the gun around to ram the butt against the window. He had it wrenched back in both hands when Brody stuck out a hand.
“What time is it?”
Thorp lowered the rifle.
Brody withdrew his cell. It took a second before the phone cooperated, bogged down as it was with the massive e-mail waiting in the in-box. A warning prompt informed Brody that the duplicate files copied from Hubert Ward’s ordi tipped the scales at four zettabytes, putting a major strain on the phone’s processor. It was doing all it could to keep itself from crashing. Brody okayed the warning and waited for the main screen to load, the display coming in one quadrant at a time jerkily.
“Seventeen past,” he said finally, tucking the noticeably warm phone away.
“We got thirteen long minutes.” Thorp threw the rifle strap over his head.
A deep pounding noise in the stairwell caused both men to drop to all fours behind the walls at the edge of the maze of carpeted cubicles. Blood charged into Brody’s face, a twin set of fat veins leaping up in his temples. The world fluttered before his eyes in a wave of grainy streaks—the lenses were starting to falter. He’d get the red digits in a second, he knew.
Across the aisle, Thorp positioned onto one knee, the rifle in his arms. He leaned forward and peeked out beyond the corner of the cubicle, pulling back quickly. Making a V with two fingers, he pointed them at his own eyes, then the stairwell door.
Past the rushing of blood in his ears, Brody listened. The door to the stairwell’s hydraulic made a soft moan of unlubricated metal turning on a hinge. He heard the muffled sound of the first guard stepping onto the office’s carpet with caution.
More entered. The sound dispersed. They spread out, not communicating with any means Brody could overhear. He stole a glance as one rounded the corner at the far end of the office.
A man turned automaton, featureless and high-shouldered in matte black armor covering every inch of him. Adorned with a complete face mask, a high collar that was thick, unbending, like he was wearing blinders, the man had to turn his whole body to look in any direction other than forward. Wholly packaged in titanium-weave flak of top-shelf manufacture, stuff typically reserved for generals, unpopular politicians, or religious figureheads. He held his weapon casually with both hands: a new model rifle, its muzzle busy with devices, scopes, a louvered suppressor that made the barrel nearly double in length, electronic eyes, computer-aiming assistants—a peerless instrument of lethality.
Just as Brody glanced, 1:19 became 1:20.
He looked up to see Thorp across the aisle, readying his assault rifle in reaction to the approaching, if meandering, tread of a security guard. Brody held his breath, kept clutching the pliable rubber of his pistol grip. It took every ounce of him to force his finger through the trigger guard. The soft pad of his index finger met the steel. It was cold.
The guard stopped inches shy of their cubicle openings, spun on his heel, and walked back.
Brody sighed internally, never making a sound aloud, but relief crashed on him in a deluge—until he saw Thorp standing, rifle to shoulder. Brody watched, paralyzed, as Thorp disengaged the safety with a flick, took aim, and let three rounds shatter the silence of the office.
His ears responding by singing along with their own squeal, Brody remained low and went for the south-facing window. Thorp covered him, letting a few more shots go in the direction of the three security guards. They were well concealed, and in the commotion of the gunfire, Brody could hear a guard frantically summoning backup on his walkie-talkie.
After putting his pistol away, Brody hoisted a desk printer and threw it toward the glass. Thorp provided cover fire. The printer shattered, leaving only a scuff in the tinted surface. He took out his pistol and hammered the bottom of the grip against the glass. A sizable crack splintered from one corner of the pane to the other. He focused on it, digging out chips of laminated glass, when he heard the whistling patter of a silenced assault rifle.
He ducked, the rounds hitting the glass above him. Broken glass rained down, but when he looked, the window was still intact. On the floor, in his hair, and in the collar of his coat were tiny bits of broken glass. A sudden heady smell, sweet like caramelized sugar, enveloped him.
Brody was baffled until he noticed among the glinting chips bent hypodermic needles and pinheads of clear liquid soaking into the well-tread carpet. Anodyne. They want us alive.
Thorp gave no answer, rose from his hiding space, and fired bursts of gunfire back at the guards.
Brody snatched the pistol up again when Thorp fired, striking against the glass as if hammering a nail. The two-inch-thick pane came down in broken, laminated sheets, flakes the size of his thumbnail. He swung again and again, another volley of tranquilizer rounds hitting and shattering upon the window frame beside him, one even puncturing the sleeve of his coat and left dangling, not striking him.
“Throwing lachrymator,” one of the guards shouted to his compatriots.
As Brody had expected, there it was—the sound he dreaded. The snap of a pin being pulled and the heavy thud as the tear gas grenade was tossed in their direction. The canister burst and spun on the floor, spewing a thick gray fog.
Immediately, that smell of burned sugar of the broken darts was replaced for Brody—to that of cayenne pepper, of melted tires, of spoiled fruit. He hammered at the window, but each grunt was becoming heavy. He yielded fits of violent hacking instead of another inhale. Pulling the bandanna back up did precious little to keep the choking gas out. The hole to the outside world he’d made through the glass—perhaps big enough to fit a pinky through—became a blurry dot before his eyes. The carotene lenses reacted to the gas, his vision stacking doubles and triples.
“Keep with the darts. I’m changing to slugs,” one of the guards said.
Brody took this as his cue to duck behind a cubicle wall. He heard the guards switching their magazines, slapping in clips that had actual bullets.
Thorp ignored the gas, popping up to fire, with tears running down his cheeks and off his chin, the flesh circling his eyes a deep ruby. He wiped at his eyes with the length of his arm.
“They’re switching to live fire,” Brody shouted to Thorp. The smoke grenade spun in his direction, and he kicked it away where it bounced, gliding across the floor, hissing angrily.
The muffled whistle of the fire was now different, a denser, meatier sound. The bullets smacked into the cubicle walls with more punch to them. The air over his head was filled with sawdust, bits of semiburned cubicle upholstery.
Brody remained in his hiding place, feeling useless, still holding the Franklin-Johann.
Thorp noticed him trying to bat the sting of his weeping eyes. “They’re going to fucking kill us. You’ve got to shoot back.”
Brody, his eyes teeming with bloody spider legs reaching from one corner to the other, shook his head.
Thorp dropped down into cover, yanked his bandanna from his face, and shouted at him, his voice rising to a desperate shriek, “You take out your fucking sidearm and you shoot, soldier.”
“I can’t.”
Thorp snarled and stood up to fire.
There was a clap of sound when a shot connected with Thorp, hitting him in the chest. He was thrown back, stumbled, and dropped. He let go of the rifle to grip the wound. Brody noticed the vial of glass, the miniature plunger within pushing forward, the clear liquid being shoved into his bloodstream. Thorp tried to pluck it out, but the drug took effect immediately. His head lolled forward, and his fingers loosened on his assault rifle.
Brody started to crawl across the aisle when the carpet came alive at his fingertips with fire. Three smoldering holes where the guard using live fire had taken divots out of the carpet, digging into the cement floor beneath.
Remaining in cover, Brody watched as Thorp attempted to fight the drugs, pushing his eyes open wide, even though they were slowly curtaining closed on their own. He fumbled around for the gun.
Brody took out his cell and checked the time, saw that it was exactly half past one. The train would be coming at any moment. He could very well escape with what he had in his in-box.
The guards filed down the aisle.
But he thought about finding and rescuing Nectar on his own only to have her come out of her bonds to freedom and discover that her brother had died in the struggle—she would surely blame herself. Most likely carry an unspoken resentment toward Brody for not doing more. He’d be doing plenty of that himself to make up for any animosity she might have toward him.
What would be worse?
Brody looked at the envelope in the corner of his cell’s screen denoting the new massive e-mail, all of Silver Fox waiting there, ready for viewing. He highlighted the e-mail and selected Nathan Pierce from his contact list as the addressee. The phone momentarily halted, all activity on the screen freezing. Brody tapped send over and over, and just as the armored men stepped into view, training their muzzles on him, the e-mail vanished, sent.
And not a moment too soon. A boot swung in and knocked the phone out of his grasp, and by the feel of it, broke one of his fingers as well.
Brody slumped to the floor, and he could see across the aisle as Thorp finally succumbed and spilled backward with his limbs splayed out.
Standing, Brody put out his hands, leaving the handgun on the floor.
The guards lowered their weapons. One went for a zip tie looped through his belt. Another telescoped a baton with a swing. The closest planted the toe of his boot on the Franklin-Johann and sent it skidding away behind him.
The guard who had been using slugs stood over Thorp’s motionless form. He kept his back to them and flicked Thorp’s rifle from his hand with his foot. “To the van,” he said, his voice muffled from inside the goggled mask.
They closed in around Brody. A hand gripped the lapel of his coat, as well as his wrist.
“Easy now,” one said.
Brody drove his free hand into the pocket, and when it was pulled free, it was armored across the knuckles with black metal. Squeezing the knuckleduster directly before impact, Brody sunk a punch into the closest guard.
Mayhem cut loose in immediate reply. The armored men turned the butts of their rifles on him, swung at him with batons, punched him with gloved fists. Brody swung and connected with another one’s neck, aiming for the provided slot in the high Kevlar collar. The man let out a panicked wheeze.
Another stepped forward, swinging his rifle like a bat. Brody ducked, let it pass over his head, and threw a jab at the man’s belly. He cast the rifle aside and caught Brody’s fist. They grappled, falling to the floor in a scrambling heap.
The one with the baton took Brody’s open back as an invitation, the steel ball on the end of the telescoping club easily finding his kidneys, his spine, glancing off his shoulder blade, and in the same pass colliding with the back of his head. Pinning the man beneath him with his knees, Brody struck repeatedly with the knuckleduster—got a solid seven hits in—when he felt the suppressor-equipped muzzle kiss the back of his neck. He was in midswing when he heard the muffled thwack.
He sunk the final punch, the man’s head twisting away in the impact—and everything grew a shade darker. He raised his arm again, having to consciously pull the arm up and away. The motion caught gravity, and he felt the world sucking at him, pulling him back. He had no choice but to let it.
In the plunging tunnel of shade that enveloped him, as Brody sunk to the floor beside the guard he had knocked unconscious, he saw it blinking there, like a divine spark being cast over a fog-throttled gulf. Six digits and two colons, all in red: 00:59:59.
Flat on his back, he could feel the faint vibrations as well. The “L” passed below, rumbling over its trestle without its new passengers. The digits blinked two more times and were gone—and he with them.