The rear fa?ade of the Wolstenholme Hotel could have been more forbidding. Sure, it was possible. Throw in a few gargoyles. Maybe a moat and fill it with alligators.
Gibson told himself it would be fine. Chances were, Deja and her boarding party had drawn attention away from the rear entrance. Unless the fifth floor were disciplined, which up until now they had been. He judged it to be about thirty yards. Thirty yards of open, well-lit parking lot between him and the hotel. All it would take was a single man with a rifle to ruin his night. Gibson wouldn’t even hear the shot that put him down. He scanned the darkened windows again. Nothing.
It wasn’t a comfort.
He broke cover and sprinted across the parking lot. No serpentine or zigzag nonsense; he put his head down and ran for his life. Thirty yards later, he threw his back against the hotel and strained to hear any indication that he’d been seen. So far so good. Now he needed a way in. Vehicles were parked in tight formation around the loading dock, so he didn’t feel like rolling the dice there. Emerson wouldn’t leave his escape route unprotected. Instead, Gibson hoisted himself up on a dumpster, where he realized the jump was a lot farther than it looked from up on the fire escape. Don’t be such a baby, he told himself; it’s only a ten-foot jump from the top of a dumpster to an antique fire escape. In the dark. If he missed, he was going to break something. Hell, he might break everything.
“You can do this,” he whispered to himself.
Gibson took a short run up, leapt, and reached for the bottom edge of the fire escape. Actually, the jump was the easy part. The hard part was absorbing his forward momentum with his shoulders and arms so that his lower body didn’t swing him loose and let gravity slam him down onto the concrete.
To his surprise, he managed to hang on. He hauled himself up and rolled his shoulders in their sockets. A pair of gloves would’ve been nice; he wiped the blood on his pants and picked splinters of black metal from his palms, then climbed the fire escape to the third floor. He knew someone had been in his room, because the window was open, and the smell that greeted him made him gag. It reminded him of a latrine that had taken a mortar round when he’d been in the Marines. He remembered the sad bastards tasked with cleaning it. Not the kind of thing they put in the recruiting commercials. Gibson covered his mouth and nose with the collar of his shirt and climbed inside.
His room had a new guest.
Gibson stood over the body lying on his bed—fully clothed, on top of the covers. From the look of him, he hadn’t been dead long enough to decompose, but he’d taken at least one round to the gut, which explained the terrible smell despite the window opened for ventilation. Gibson reckoned he’d found one of the second-place finishers from the airfield shoot-out, although why the body had been brought back here he couldn’t guess. He doubted it was out of respect for the dead.
Time to move.
The door guard blocked the door so it couldn’t close all the way. As if someone had just run down the hall for ice. Gibson slipped out into the hallway and made his way to the stairwell at the front of the hotel. Along the hall, every door was cracked open the same way. Morbid curiosity forced him to check all the rooms in turn. In every bed, another body. All strangely serene despite the brutality of their deaths. This was a morgue now, not a hotel. But so far he couldn’t count Lea among the dead, and that gave him some small hope. Near the end of the hall, Gibson found the sheriff and Jimmy Temple; they lay side by side in a queen bed. They hadn’t been shot like the others but were dead all the same. Gibson touched the scar around his throat, cursed, and left them as they lay. Emerson Soto King had a lot to answer for.
In the last room, he found the answer for why the doors had all been cracked open: a simple but effective bomb attached to a radio detonator, wrapped around two barrels of acetone that would act as an accelerant. By design, hotel doors swung closed to act as fire breaks, and propping the doors open would cause the fire to spread even faster. Now that he thought about it, the windows hadn’t been opened to air out the rooms but to provide oxygen to feed the fire. He’d bet good money that he’d find a similar device on every floor. The old hotel would go up like a bonfire. It would cover the fifth floor’s tracks crudely but efficiently. Investigators would spend years attempting to unravel what had happened in Niobe, much less be able to prove it.
Gibson knew better than to attempt to disarm the bomb himself. It wasn’t his skill set, and simply because the bomb wasn’t complex didn’t mean it hadn’t been designed by a pro. Good bomb-makers always anticipated attempts to defuse their work. His best hope was to find Lea and get far from here before it detonated. At the mouth of the main staircase, angry voices rose up from below, trading threats and promises of violence. Gibson slipped out onto the stairs, but heavy footfalls drove him back into hiding. He held his breath as Emerson led half a dozen men down the stairs. If they’d gone any direction but down, he would’ve joined Jimmy Temple for one final night’s rest.
Below, gunfire exploded in an ugly cacophony. From the sound of things, Deja had her hands full. Hopefully she would hold their attention long enough for him to free Lea. Gibson glanced out onto the third-floor landing and saw that one man had been stationed on the landing to guard the rear. The gunman had his back to the wall with unobstructed views up and down the stairs. He would cut Gibson down before he took three steps.
A gun would come in handy right about now, and he was glad Deja wasn’t there to tell him so.
Guo Fa didn’t know the new players down in the lobby, but they had his eternal gratitude. They’d drawn most of the security detail away from the presidential suite, and that presented a window of opportunity. Fate had smiled upon him, and he would not allow it to pass him by again.