Revolution (Replica) (33 page)

Belinski held out his hand, and Nate handed over the gun with something akin to relief. He’d probably have shot his own foot off if he’d tried to fire the gun, and it hadn’t been doing anyone any good in its holster.

“Coast is clear,” one of the bodyguards said. He and his partner stepped out into the hallway back to back, guns at the ready.

“Which way?” Belinski asked Nate, the only one of them who knew the building well.

Nate glanced to the right, toward the central atrium where there were sets of stairs as well as the main bank of elevators. The usually bright atrium was dim, its windows and skylight no doubt covered by the sliding metal plates that came into play during lock-down. “Left,” Nate said with feigned confidence. “There’s a set of fire stairs at the end of the next hallway.” In a normal building, the fire stairs would always be accessible, no matter what, but he suspected here in the Fortress, they would be locked. However, the elevators and the main stairs were out of the question.

With Marco taking the rear and the other two bodyguards moving forward, Nate, Nadia, and Belinski stepped into the hallway and started to the left.

“I’m not stupid,” a disembodied female voice said, freezing them all in their tracks. “I have locked all doors, including the fire doors.”

Belinski and his team looked around in frantic search of the body that went with the voice, but Nate and Nadia knew better.

“You will not escape this building,” Thea’s voice continued from whatever unseen speaker she was using.

“We have more chance of escaping it than you!” Nate taunted. “At least we have legs.”

Belinski made an angry cutting motion across his throat—the universal sign for “shut up”—while glaring at Nate.

“I’m sure Thea was listening to us all along,” Nadia said to Belinski, and Nate realized that Belinski still hadn’t thoroughly grasped the scope of Thea’s reach. He had thought Nate was giving away secrets with his taunt.

“Indeed,” Thea confirmed. “It’s very noble of you to be willing to sacrifice yourselves for what you see as the greater good. It is one of my goals to instill that spirit of self-sacrifice in my children.
All
of my children, not the few select noble ones.”

Children? What the hell was Thea talking about? Nate had a feeling he really didn’t want to know.

“Ignore her,” Nate advised. “Let’s just concentrate on proving her wrong.”

Belinski nodded his agreement, and they moved cautiously toward the hallway that led to the fire stairs.

“If you lay down your weapons and surrender,” Thea said, “I will be merciful and let you live.”

Nate almost laughed at the absurdity of the suggestion. “You were willing to kill thousands of innocents in the Basement to get to us, and now you want us to believe you’re not going to kill us? Don’t be ridiculous.”

“One of the things that drove your father crazy about you was your assumption that everything that happened had to be about
you,
” Thea said, and Nate had to clamp his jaws shut against a surge of fury that she would even
talk
about his father after murdering him. “I know you don’t think very highly of me,” she continued, “but surely you don’t think I’m foolish enough to use bombs to swat flies.”

Belinski’s point men made it to the corner and peeked around. The point men gave the okay, and they all rounded the corner and headed toward the fire stairs and the heavy metal door that blocked them. One of the men gave the handle an experimental tug downward, but no one was surprised when it remained locked. There was a card reader and a keypad on the wall beside the door, but Thea could no doubt block that even if they had the proper card and code.

“Do you honestly think I bombed the Basement on the off chance that one of my bombs might hit you?” Thea asked, sounding incredulous.

Nate knew he should take his own advice and just ignore Thea’s voice, but he found himself responding against his better judgment.

“If it wasn’t about us, then what
was
it about?” he asked.

One of Belinski’s men produced what looked like a tube of toothpaste from somewhere beneath his jacket. He squatted in front of the door and squeezed a line of off-white paste from the tube onto the area around the locking mechanism. He capped the tube while another of the men unspooled a length of wire so thin it was almost invisible, sticking one end into the paste and clipping it down to a length of about a foot.

“Do you have any idea how much money Paxco throws into the black hole you call the Basement?” Thea asked. “All to support people who are of no use to society, who are in fact
harmful
to society. They peddle drugs and contraband, they steal from legitimate citizens, they murder, they rape. The list goes on. And Paxco
pays
for the privilege of supporting them.”

Nate fought a shudder as he and Nadia shared a horrified look. Bad enough to think that Thea was okay with causing massive collateral damage in an attempt to kill them, but to think that her ultimate goal had been to destroy the Basement entirely … that all those helpless people had been not collateral damage, but
targets.

“Paxco will recoup the cost of the military strike in no time,” Thea said with a hint of gloating in her voice, “and we will no longer have to spend our hard-earned money on supporting the dregs of society. We will reclaim the land, and I will have the funds I need to continue my work.”

“We’re going to want to stand around the corner,” Belinski said. He sounded brisk and unruffled, but the look in his eyes said he was hearing everything Thea was saying with the same sense of mounting horror as Nate felt. If any of them had doubted before that destroying Thea was a goal worth risking their lives for, they didn’t now.

“Does your security team always carry explosives when on bodyguard duty?” Nadia asked Belinski with an arch of her brow.

“Only when there’s a possibility we might have to blast our way through doors,” he answered. “I figured even in the best-case scenario, we might encounter immovable obstacles on our way down to the subbasement.”

Everyone except for the man lighting the fuse took shelter, and when he came pelting around the corner, they all covered their ears.

A loud boom shook the hallway, followed by the metallic clink of debris raining down on the tile floor. The door had been blown open, and the stairwell beyond gaped enticingly.

They hurried down the hallway, their feet crunching on debris as they went. There was an acrid, burning smell in the air, and Nate had to stifle a cough. They slowed down when they neared the door, one of the guards taking point again and motioning for everyone else to wait.

His caution was well warranted. He was still five feet from the door when a shot rang out from somewhere above. The shot just missed. Belinski’s man threw himself backward, but a second shot caught him before he was out of range. His colleague shot off a barrage of cover fire while Marco herded the rest of them back toward the corner.

“You didn’t think it would be that easy, did you?” Thea’s voice mocked. “Perhaps you’d like to reconsider your options. I’m sure we can reach some kind of mutually beneficial agreement, Mr. Chairman, if we sit down to talk, just the two of us.”

“Somehow I doubt that,” Belinski said.

The lights suddenly went out, leaving the hallway in utter darkness. In the event of a blackout, there should have been emergency lighting and illuminated exit signs, but there was nothing. The heavy protective shutters over the windows blocked out any hint of distant daylight.

“You had better
hope
we can reach an agreement,” Thea said. “I don’t foresee any positive outcomes on your horizon if you continue being so difficult.”

Nate had slowed down when the lights went out, and Belinski’s bodyguard had stopped shooting. It seemed like the darkness, while annoying and disorienting, would make it easier for them to stay hidden and escape. But Thea wouldn’t have turned off the lights if she didn’t think it was to her advantage.

“Keep moving,” Marco growled under his breath, and there was an unmistakable sense of urgency in his tone.

With a chill of renewed alarm, Nate realized that just because
he
couldn’t see his hand in front of his face didn’t mean Thea’s people had the same problem. They had access to the Fortress’s arsenal, and there was enough gear in there to stage a small war.

“Hurry!” Nate shouted, sprinting for the corner he could no longer see and dragging Nadia stumbling behind him. “They can see!”

Nate put one hand on the wall so he would know when they reached the corner. Just as they did, the hallway lit with the white flashes of automatic weapon fire.

In those brief flashes, Nate saw men in full combat gear and wearing night vision goggles spilling out of the emergency stairwell. The last of Belinski’s bodyguards was bringing up the rear, firing over his shoulder while Marco pushed Belinski in front of him, using his own body as a shield. But a handgun was no match for automatic weapons, and as Nate and Nadia careened around the corner, the gunfire stopped.

“Go!” Marco yelled, and for once Nate had no issue with taking orders. In a manner of minutes, Thea had killed—or at least incapacitated—four of Belinski’s five guards. The rest of them didn’t stand a chance unless they could find some way to put a barrier between themselves and the security officers.

Apparently, Marco had the same thought, because he brought them all to a sudden halt, right around what Nate guessed was the conference room door.

“Inside!” the man ordered, just as their pursuers rounded the corner and started firing.

Nate dove through the door, dragging Nadia with him. The muzzle flashes were blinding, but in their glare, he saw Belinski standing in the doorway, gun firing into the darkness. Marco unceremoniously shoved Belinski through the door, pulling it shut with one hand while still shooting with the other hand.

Nate would have liked to open the door and pull Marco in, but the man had made his decision and was buying them what little time he could. There was no point in wasting it.

“Help me block the door!” Nadia said, and he could hear her shoving chairs out of the way so she could get to the conference table.

Nate tripped over the body of one of the dead Replicas in his haste to get to the table. There was a lock on the conference room door, but it wouldn’t work with no power. That meant the only way to keep Thea’s men out was to block it physically.

Together, he and Nadia toppled the table and manhandled it around until one end was shoved up under the handle of the door and the other was braced against the wall. The table was too big to fit in the room sideways, so the impromptu blockade was at an angle. It would slow down anyone trying to get into the room, but it wouldn’t stop them.

The lights suddenly went on, blinding in their brilliance.

“I am becoming annoyed with you,” Thea said.

Outside the door, the gunfire had ceased, which no doubt meant Marco was dead—and the rest of Thea’s security squad would soon be at the door. Still blinking in the sudden light, Nate hastily hit the lock on the door. Its indicator light briefly flashed red, then flashed back to green again.

“The doors will obey
my
will, not yours,” Thea said smugly.

Nate cursed, realizing they were trapped. He’d had hopes that they could block the main door, then exit through the door at the head of the table, but of course its red indicator light was on. Which explained why Thea had suddenly turned the power back on—she wanted them trapped in this room.

“Nate!” Nadia cried, and he turned to see her crouching beside Belinski, who sat on the floor with his back to the wall. There was a large patch of blood on his pants right above his knee.

Belinski’s face was pale and sweaty as he put his hands over the wound and applied pressure. He closed his eyes and let out a strained breath. “It won’t kill me,” he said, pain evident in his voice. “But I won’t be doing any more running.”

“Perhaps now you will acknowledge your defeat,” Thea said. “If you surrender now, I will spare your life, Mr. Chairman. Once you come to understand my vision for Paxco’s future, I think you will find it is to our mutual advantage to work together.”

Nate didn’t have to tell Belinski that Thea was lying through her nonexistent teeth. She no doubt had a Replica of Belinski available, and once she took care of the real Belinski, she’d put her Replica in his place. Worst of all, Belinski had had a scan when he first arrived in Paxco—it had been part of the marriage agreement he and Nate’s father had arranged—which probably meant Thea could extract all the Chairman’s knowledge from his brain. No one would ever be able to prove the Replica wasn’t really Belinski.

Whether Belinski realized all this or not, he evidently had no interest in cutting a deal. He took one hand off his wound to pull the gun out of his pocket. He swept his gaze around the room, fixating on the security camera discreetly located in the far corner.

“This is your last chance, Mr. Chairman,” Thea’s voice warned, and Nate realized it was coming from the security camera.

Belinski realized the same thing and smiled grimly. Then he raised his gun and fired one shot, and the camera exploded in a shower of glass shards.

“Any more generous offers you’d like to make?” Belinski asked, but this time Thea didn’t answer. “I suspect her mike and speaker are in the camera housing,” he said in a low voice, “but let’s keep our voices down just in case.”

Nate wasn’t sure they had a whole lot to talk about. There was no way out. Unless …

Something banged into the door, making the conference table shudder. Belinski scooted over so that his back was now against the table, using his body weight to help hold it steady.

Nate glanced up at the ceiling. The white paneled ceiling. The kind that was used when there were things behind it maintenance workers might have to get to. Nadia and Belinski both followed his gaze.

“I don’t think I’m up to acrobatics,” Belinski said, then had to stop a moment to breathe through what looked like a wave of pain. “You two have to go on without me.”