Andre followed Morgan out into the hall. “This bomb,” he said, peering at her phone and the photos she’d taken, “it reminds me of the school. The bombs the Taliban had rigged there.”
He meant the bombs in Afghanistan that had killed dozens of schoolgirls and all of Andre’s Marine Recon squad. And left him with burns over sixty percent of his body, forever scarred inside and out.
“Jenna’s bomb looked just like the one which killed her grandfather,” Morgan told him as they reached the old man’s room. Tim and Kelly had found a wheelchair for Emma and were just behind them.
“If he’s copied Afghanistan, then we need to be careful of secondary devices. Maybe I should go, not you.”
They entered the old man’s room. He’d made it upright and was leaning heavily on his walker, too out of breath to talk but not so much that he didn’t send a supremely suspicious glare in Andre’s direction. Morgan ignored him, moving to the window closest the wall shared with the next ward. She cranked it as wide as she could and popped the screen free.
Andre joined her and stopped arguing—it was clear that there was no way he could fit through the opening in the frame. “Not much of a ledge.”
Not much translated to about six inches. And the way the window cranked out it blocked her path to the next ward. “You’ll need to close the window once I’m out so I can make it past.”
“What about the window on the other side? Can you see if it’s open?”
“Doesn’t matter.” She’d refined which weapons she carried while dressed for the office—smaller blades, a pistol in an ankle holster beneath her jeans, and a new toy: a tactical pen made of aircraft aluminum. Where the traditional pen tip would be it had instead a diamond-sharp drill bit-shaped point that could easily pierce flesh or break glass. Inside the body of the pen was a fire starter and a space where she’d slid the two lengths of steel that were her lock picks. If she removed the cap, there was even a functional real ink pen—in case anyone was suspicious. She placed the pen between her teeth, let Andre help her over the sill, and climbed out onto the ledge, flattening her chest against the plate glass.
Andre closed the side window and she inched past it, twisting her feet sideways, not liking how she could feel her body’s mass aching to surrender to gravity. The aged yellow brick wall between the two wards was about eighteen inches wide, jutting out flush with the ledge—probably some kind of fire-protective reinforcement, she guessed, trying not to look down at the six flights of nothing between her and the ground. There was no way around it except to stretch as far as she could and pray she found a foothold on the other side.
The brick scraped her face as she pressed into it, clawing at gaps in the mortar with her fingertips, trying to keep her balance and weight on her left toes as she reached with her right. She hadn’t climbed in a long time, but she remembered it was more than just strength and agility. Like most things that hovered between life and death, the deciding factor was strength of mind.
All she had to do was convince gravity that she was one with the brick long enough to find the ledge waiting for her on the other side. Her instincts were to move slowly and cautiously, but she knew that was gravity trying to trick her into falling into its greedy embrace. Momentum, that’s what she needed. She just had to trust some long-dead architect had been precise with his measurements and that the ledges lined up.
Then her left foot slipped free. For a heart-lurching second, she was blind to everything but yellow brick and gravity’s hungry claws as she hung, suspended in the air. She hugged the wall, her fingers gripping it with all her strength, and completed the pendulum move, swinging her weight to the right.
Finally, just as she was beginning to doubt, imagining her body hurtling through the air before impacting the ground, her foot connected with the ledge on the other side. She made a blind grab for the window frame and hauled herself past the wall. Not bothering with the screen in the narrow side window, she spit her tactical pen into her hand, closed her eyes, turned her face away, and hammered it into the bottom corner of the main window. She felt the pen go through and quickly pulled it back and punched two more bursts in rapid succession, disrupting the glass’s integrity enough so that its own weight fractured it. The glass shattered and crashed downwards.
Yeah, gravity was a bitch, but she was Morgan’s bitch. Grinning, Morgan eased past the remnants of broken glass and into the empty room beyond. The bicycle lock was even easier than she’d thought, and it yielded to her picks without any resistance. Within seconds she had the door open for Andre and the others.
Andre had gotten another wheelchair for the old man, who was being pushed by Tim. Kelly steered Emma, leaving Andre to take point, scouring their path for any other traps or devices, while Morgan guarded their backs.
“Elevator?” Morgan asked, when they arrived at the empty elevator lobby. She pushed the button to test if they were even running or if the fire department had locked them down. It was likely the bomb squad had kept the firemen out, given that Emma had confirmed the presence of an explosive device.
Andre frowned and considered. “It would take a lot to get inside and rig them. I mean, compared to rolling in an oxygen tank that no one would think twice about in a place like this.” He glanced at the old man who was clutching his own oxygen tank on his lap, sucking in so hard that his cheeks hollowed with every breath.
“Just as easy to hide another bomb in the stairwell,” Morgan said, as the doors chimed open. “And the longer we’re inside—”
He nodded and motioned to Tim to push the old man inside the elevator. Kelly and Emma followed. Morgan entered, then Andre. She stabbed the button for the ground floor. “Hey, it’s only six floors—”
The doors closed with a clang that made Kelly gasp. Then they were sliding down, a chime sounding with each floor passed. Finally they reached the ground floor.
“We made it,” Tim said gleefully as the doors slid open.
An explosion shuddered through the building, and the blast echoed down the shaft, rattling the elevator’s steel walls.