The door opened as Mark reached for the handle, Heather’s smile breaking the ice that had enclosed his soul. Her gaze lingered for a moment on his full beard; then, as Heather’s gaze settled on Jennifer’s limp body in his arms, the smile faded.
“Set her on the couch,” Heather said, motioning toward what appeared to be a small break area beside a sink and coffeepot.
As he gently released his twin’s body, Heather bent over her, lifting one of Jennifer’s eyelids, then the other. “Damn it.”
Mark nodded. “They’ve messed her up bad.”
Standing up, Heather threw her arms around Mark’s neck and hugged him tight. For a full ten seconds Mark held her close as his heart hammered the walls of his chest.
As Heather pushed back, she pointed to the duty belts, service holsters, and spare clips on the table by the bank of monitors. “You take one, and I’ll take the other.”
“What’s the plan?”
“I’ve got the security teams, except for two wounded guys down on sublevel four, pulled back to defend the building from outside attacks. Now that you’re here, I’ll open the doors that will let the rest of the Arab prisoners up stairwell one. That should give the response teams plenty to think about.”
She slid into the seat in front of the laptop, motioning Mark into the seat in front of the microphone that was hardwired to the third and fourth sublevels. “As soon as I open the right doors, get your best Arab terrorist voice ready.”
Mark nodded in understanding and waited.
Heather nodded. “OK.”
Mark’s Arabic flowed from his lips with a distinct Saudi Arabian accent. “My brothers. We are here to free you. In his greatness, Allah has opened a way. Break contact with the infidels you now fight and move down the corridor to your rear. You will find the stairwell open all the way to the top. From there you must fight your way to freedom. Allahu Akbar!”
Turning his attention to the monitors, Mark noted the speed with which the Arab fighters reacted to the command, leaving the two wounded security guards lying among the bodies of their fallen comrades in the disabled elevator. In less than thirty seconds, sixteen terrorists had entered the stairwell and begun racing up the stairs toward the ground floor. With a clank, heavy steel bolts engaged, locking the door shut behind them.
“Time to go,” said Heather, rising to her feet and strapping the remaining duty belt and holster around her waist, pausing to tuck in the excess.
Odd as it seemed, Mark found the image of the gun belt wrapped around Heather’s slender body, wearing only a blue hospital gown, remarkably appealing. “Stairwell two?”
“No. We’re going to have to climb the elevator shaft.” Her eyes moved to Jen. “Can you carry her on a cable climb?”
“If we strap her to my back. No problem.”
Heather knelt down, stripping the dead guards’ shirts and belts as Mark lifted his sister. Following her to the elevator shaft, Mark saw that the door stood open onto the empty shaft. Shifting Jennifer onto his back and wrapping her arms around his neck, he let Heather strap Jen’s hands together with a bloody shirt. Then, hooking both belts together, Heather fastened them around Mark’s and Jennifer’s bodies.
She paused for a moment to inspect her work, then turned and leaped into the shaft, caught the thick cable, and began rapidly climbing. Mark followed, the added weight jolting his frame hard enough that he wondered if the cloth ties would handle the strain. They held and he began steadily pulling himself hand over hand up the shaft.
“You good?” Heather asked from above.
“Right behind you. All the way to the top.”
“We’re making a short stopover on sublevel one.”
“Why is that?”
“I found our laptops.”
Heather passed the open elevator door on sublevel two, continuing her steady climb until she hung suspended three feet above the opening into sublevel one. Swinging her body, she launched herself into space, landing in a forward roll that brought her back to her feet in the wet corridor as cold water rained down on her from above. As she’d seen on the security cameras, sublevel one had been completely evacuated once the fire alarms and waterworks had started.
Nevertheless, she pulled the Berretta from the holster and chambered a round. Moving forward in a shooter’s crouch, she began clearing rooms left and right as she moved past them. To her rear, she heard Mark land and slide. Then he was beside her, moving with his own gun drawn, Jennifer dangling awkwardly from his back.
Unlike on the lower sublevels, laboratories and offices filled this floor, a facility designed to provide close-in, real-time technical support to some of the best interrogation teams in the business. This was where equipment captured with the prisoners held below came to be analyzed and dissected, providing a rapid turnaround totally focused on providing corroboration or leverage on the former owners. A single cell phone often yielded information that skilled interrogators wielded on their subjects like Chinese water torture.
Heather paused outside of the lab she had targeted, took a deep breath, and held it. Opening the door, she stepped inside, grabbed the nearest chair, and used it to wedge the door wide open, letting the halon gas pour out into the hallway. The gas itself wasn’t harmful, but it displaced the breathable nitrogen-oxygen mix that fires and people lived on. Without waiting for the gas to drain out into the hallway, Heather stepped into the room and turned on the lights, leaving Mark standing guard with Jennifer outside.
The lab was a large room, sixty feet by forty-eight, with raised flooring to accommodate the wiring that ran beneath it. Rows of workbenches divided the room into four sections. On the third of these, Heather found what she was searching for. Both laptops had been stripped, the motherboards and computing components plugged into other systems capable of recording all electrical activity in the circuits. Heather ignored them, selecting instead the two specially modified USB dongles. Removing these from their mounts, Heather dropped them in a small plastic Ziploc bag she retrieved from the supplies strewn across the workbench, and made her way back toward the door.
Pausing momentarily to grab a white lab coat from a hanger by the lab entrance, she slipped out of the wet hospital gown, fastened the coat around her with the gun belt, and stepped back into the corridor. She’d been in the lab for just over three minutes, and she felt certain that she could have held her breath another seven. Still, it felt good to replace the old lungful with a fresh breath.
Partially revived by the cold downpour, Jennifer was moving on Mark’s back, in weak protest against the trusses that bound her to her brother. The sound of distant gunfire echoed from above.
“Got ’em?” Mark asked.
“What we need.”
“So now it’s up and out.”
“The shaft comes out in an elevator alcove about fifty feet from the main entrance. Right now there’s a serious fight going on up there; we should be able to get to the parking garage exit with minimal resistance.”
“Minimal?”
“Three to five guards. Eighty-seven percent probability based on my last look at the video.”
“Let’s do it.”
Heather led the way back to the shaft at a jog. Her last step propelled her out onto the cable. The gunfire was louder now, interspersed with yells and screams of pain. She slowed her ascent as she approached the open door to the main elevator alcove. A black-clad guard crouched facing away, firing down the hall toward the entrance. Heather shot him in the back of the head.
Leaping into the alcove, she grabbed him by his heels and pulled him farther back into the alcove as Mark landed behind her.
Heather yelled to make herself heard over the sound of the raging gun battle in the main foyer. “Take his uniform. I’ll cover you.”
Mark unstrapped Jennifer as Heather grabbed the dead guard’s short-barreled Mark 17 SCAR-H and magazines and took up a defensive crouch by the exit into the main corridor. When she glanced back again, Mark, dressed in black, was finishing lacing up his boots.
Heather tossed him the SCAR-H. “I’ll carry Jen. You get us the hell out of here.”
As she lifted Jennifer’s body onto her shoulder, Heather saw Mark lean around the corner and squeeze off two quick shots. Seeing him motion her forward, Heather hit the hall in a dead run, heard Mark firing behind her as she ducked around the corner. A crouching guard saw her coming, paused to take in the girl in the white lab coat with an orange-clad woman slung over her shoulder, and hesitated. Heather’s bullet took him between the eyes, the nine-millimeter Parabellum slamming his lifeless body to the floor with an audible thump.
As she reached the door out to the parking garage, Heather heard Mark’s boots pounding down the hall behind her. Turning the handle in her hand, she stepped aside as Mark’s shoulder hit the door, launching it into one of the two guards crouching outside. The other tried to level his weapon, but Mark was too fast, his booted foot catching the man in the chest with the force of a battering ram. Two trigger pulls ensured neither man would pose a continuing threat.
Glancing back down the hallway, Heather saw an Arab prisoner peek around the corner. She squeezed off a round that caught him in the throat, sending him sprawling.
“Got their keys,” Mark said. “Let’s go.”
Ducking as low as she could and still run with Jennifer slung over her shoulder, Heather followed Mark through the rows of cars while he clicked the alarm buttons on both key fobs. They were rewarded with the sound of a honking horn and the flash of headlights on a white Ford Edge halfway down the second row.
Heather piled Jennifer into the backseat and climbed into the passenger seat as Mark threw the car into drive and squealed around the exit ramp. As Mark cornered out of the building, the mini-SUV slid sideways, tires spewing black smoke as the rear window exploded in a hail of bullets. Heather emptied the Beretta along the calculated back trajectory and then they were around the corner, headlights off, sliding right onto Canine Road, then left onto Rockenbach with all the speed Mark could extract from the new Ford.
“You’re bleeding.” The concern in Mark’s voice made Heather aware of a dull throbbing in her left temple.
A quick touch and her hand came away bloody. “Just a glass scalp cut. Bleeds a lot, but I’m fine.”
At Cooper Avenue, Mark hung another left, letting the speed fall off naturally as they entered the wooded housing area. A left on Ninety-First Division Boulevard led to Colyer Loop and then Anderson Loop. Mark parked the Ford on the curb in the widest expanse between houses, turned off the interior lighting, opened the driver’s door, and stepped out into darkness, a move that Heather duplicated on the passenger’s side.
As Heather opened the rear passenger door, Mark stepped up beside her. “I’ll get Jen. You take this.”
He handed her the Mark 17 and lifted Jennifer from the backseat.
Heather paused to listen to the cadence of distant gunfire and sirens, letting her mind play out the most likely scenarios. Someone would find the bullet-riddled vehicle first thing in the morning. That was just fine.
She stepped away from the SUV, walking swiftly across the grassy expanse between houses and into the woods beyond, Mark striding silently by her side.