He heard nothing.
But he couldn’t expect to, he realized. The Secret Service might’ve made all the racket in the world on the way down, but other security personnel coming up to hold the stairwells would probably be quiet as cats.
He returned to the suite’s living room. He had five men left. One with a broken nose and probably a facial fracture. The man was still on his feet, but he looked like he could barely see through the swelling under his eyes.
Outside, police had begun converging on the building. Their sirens sounded faint from thirty stories up. Finn noticed the winking lights of an incoming helicopter, far away across the city.
He stooped and picked up the cylinder from where it’d rolled to a stop, at the corner where the windows met the wall.
He considered the logistics of the situation.
On the other side, Miss Campbell and her friends would be making their way down the stairs by now, at whatever speed they could manage.
Unless they’d decided to stay and fight it out.
Finn turned in a slow circle. He let his eyes roam. He imagined the suite in its ruined state, pitch-black and skeletal and cold and wet. And devoid of cover. If the others really were waiting for them over there, where would they position themselves?
He continued his slow turn. And then he stopped. He was looking down the entry hall toward the outer corridor—and the unseen stairwell beyond.
He thought about it. It made sense. It was all that made sense, really.
He turned again and studied the suite, no longer envisioning its alternate form. He looked across the living room, through the doorways on the far wall, toward the distant end of the residence.
The point furthest from the stairwell.
He headed for it, waving his men to him as he went. They fell in behind him, weapons ready. Fifteen seconds later they reached the place—a sitting room with wicker furniture and bright yellow paint. It had thick canvas drapes—pulled back at the moment.
Finn pulled his FLIR headset up and secured it over his eyes. His men did the same. He raised the cylinder. He put his finger to the on button.
And then he withdrew it. Something obvious had occurred to him.
“Shut the drapes,” he said. “And kill the lights.”
Travis waited. The rain had soaked through his shirt. The night was probably sixty degrees, but the dampness made it feel a lot colder.
He continued to sweep his eyes across the darkness. It was hard to say how long he’d been kneeling here. Three or four minutes, at least. Paige and Bethany should be most of the way down the building by now.
Travis cocked his head. He’d heard something. The sound was distant, keening, rising and falling. Just discernible in the rain. It reminded him of the wolves in the ruins of D.C., but the pitch was higher. Coyotes, maybe. Or simply the wind playing through the girders.
Paige kept count of the floors as she and Bethany descended. Garner’s suite had been on the thirtieth. They’d come down twenty-three flights from there.
The going was harder than she’d imagined. The metal treads were slick in the rain, and on some flights the handrail was missing. She tried to remember what the stairwell had looked like in daylight on their way up. Tried to recall any places where the landing was buckled or compromised in any way. She didn’t think she’d seen anything like that—it should have stuck with her if she had—but she couldn’t shake the sense that there was something. Something she’d noticed on the ascent. Something that hadn’t mattered then, but might matter now, in the dark.
Travis had discounted the keening sound—what little of it he could hear—even though something about it troubled him.
Now he heard something else. Very faint, at first. A kind of drumming. It might have been only the rain intensifying—but he felt no change in it on his skin.
Then the sound swelled by a tiny degree, and he recognized it.
And he understood that he was in trouble.
Paige was stepping onto the fifth floor when it happened. The moment her foot came down, she remembered exactly what she’d been trying to think of, and why it did matter—not because of the darkness, but because of the rain.
It was a clump of maple leaves, still attached by their stems to a narrow twig. Lying there curled and damp in the afternoon light, they’d been harmless. Something to step over and forget within a few seconds.
Plastered flat now against the smooth bars of the gridwork, the clump might as well have been an oil slick.
Paige’s leading foot hit it, coming down hard off the bottom step, all of her weight on it in the instant before it went out from under her.
Her arms shot down to break her fall against the steel treads—it was that or break her skull—and she was on her ass before she realized what she’d done.
“Paige?” Bethany said.