When she reached the fifth floor she heard something. It took her a second to focus on it: a loud whirring noise overhead.
For a second she actually froze, staring up in disbelief. A helicopter bringing in a second kill team? They wanted her that badly?
It was flattering, in a perverse kind of way: they’d broken their own rules of engagement by releasing a chopper when the world was without power. They couldn’t have imagined it would go unnoticed, even in the chaos. So, someone had decided eliminating her was worth tipping their hand.
Alom.
He had that kind of power and the arrogance to accompany it. But even he wasn’t stupid enough to think he was untouchable, was he?
She felt the building shudder as the helicopter touched down. The noise of the rotors increased exponentially, the second kill squad already pouring out of it. They’d take the stairs and start working their way down, meeting up with the first team in the middle and trapping her between them.
She couldn’t go up. She couldn’t go down. She was fucked.
She tried to picture the building’s exterior, needing to find an alternative exit point. She refused to just lay down and wait for death to come find her. That just wasn’t her. Nine stories, a covered walkway below, terrace midway, and an open square at the top. There were deeply recessed windows all around, and a flagpole jutting from the northernmost corner facing out onto the square.
Was that level with the fifth floor or the fourth? Was it even there?
Fifth. Had to be. She was risking her life on it. She knew it was crazy, but she didn’t have a choice.
Sophie kicked open the door and rushed out into the fifth-floor hallway, expecting to be greeted by a hail of bullets. Without any better ideas, she raced down the hallway toward the corner office. Time was more important than caution now. They surely had enough equipment to pinpoint her exact location in the building. If they didn’t know where she was, they would soon enough.
Keep moving. Make them work.
She reached the door and she didn’t bother with the lockpick gun this time. She kicked it down, right foot against the lock plate. The trick was to allow the force to keep driving through the door, not to pull back as the shock of impact hit.
The door flew inward with a loud splintering as the wood around the lock plate twisted and tore. Sophie slammed the door shut behind her and toppled a huge glass display case in front of it. The barricade would only buy her a few seconds more.
She glanced around. This was another company’s office suite, almost identical in its drabness to the one she’d borrowed on the third floor. At the end of the little inner hall was the door to the corner office. She started toward it, but then stopped. First things first. Looking around, she spotted a smaller door to one side.
It wasn’t locked and there was no nameplate. It was a utility closet, overflowing with mops and brooms and cleaning supplies, and behind them, office supplies, reams of copier paper, coffee filters, rubber bands, and pens. And there, coiled at the bottom beneath the sturdy industrial shelves, she found a heavy-duty extension cord, its thick cable scarred from long use. There was an outlet beside it. Judging by the coils, it was maybe fifty feet long. Which was perfect for what she had in mind.
Snatching up the extension cord, she made for the corner office. The view from its window was spectacular, and uniquely London with the rich and diverse architecture of hundreds of years’ worth of civilization all in one small place. There were people gathering down below, drawn, no doubt, by the helicopter.
The room’s other window interested Sophie more. Through it she saw the flagpole that speared toward the adjacent building.
She swept the room quickly, looking for something to smash the glass. On one of the bookcases she found a handsome award of marble and glass given to the office’s resident for something or the other. Sophie grabbed it, turned, and, running toward the window, hurled it with all of her strength.
The entire sheet of double-paned glass shattered, jagged shards exploding outward though a shower of small chips burst inward as well, causing her to turn her head away and shield her eyes with her arms and hands. There was no disguising her location now. She kicked away barbs of glass that clung to the frame until there was nothing but empty space where the window had been.
Stepping up onto the window ledge, she gauged the distance between her and the flagpole. Maybe twenty feet. More than she would have liked, and at least thirty feet to the next building. Too close for comfort.
She unwound the extension cord, hefting one end of it, once, twice.
It wasn’t going to work, it wasn’t heavy enough.
“Shit. Shitshitshitshit.” She wished she hadn’t thrown that award through the window. It had been a terminal maneuver, no going back. And she needed to go back.
She scanned her surroundings for anything else that might work. There were a few other awards, but they were all plaques, glass and metal, with no real weight to them. She wanted something she could use like a grappling hook.
This office, though more modern than the one downstairs, still had a few old-fashioned touches, including the old-school banker’s lamp with its heavy green glass shade. That might just work.
She grabbed the solid brass lamp from the desk. It was good and heavy, with a big round base.
Sophie slammed the lampshade against the desktop, shattering the green glass and the twin bulbs that nestled within it. She yanked the lamp’s cord free and knotted the extension cord’s end firmly around the base. Going back to the broken window, she swung her makeshift grappling hook. It had a good solid heft to it now, and plenty of bits to catch on the cord.
She tried to ignore the not-so-distant sounds of pursuit behind her. At least one member of the kill team had arrived on the fifth floor, but he hadn’t breached the outer office yet. It was only a matter of time though. Time that could be counted out in seconds, not minutes.
She was going to have to gauge the angle and distance perfectly. The throw couldn’t be too weak. Or too strong. And she only had one shot. Get it wrong and there’d be no time left for a second try.
She lifted the lamp-weighted cord, swung it in a quick circle like a lasso, and hurled it forward, holding her breath as it sailed out, arcing upward,
just
under the flagpole, then wrapping tight around it. The lamp’s own weight caused it to circle the pole once, twice, three times and knot itself into the cord that trailed behind it.
Sophie gave it a quick, experimental tug, then a second one.
It held.
But that was no guarantee it would take her weight.
A splintering sound alarmingly close convinced her she had no choice but to find out.
They were through the outer office door.
Grabbing the bottom end of the cord and wrapping it around her fist, Sophie took a deep breath. Without giving herself time to think about it, she ran forward, right to the lip of the window—and jumped.
The air caught at her, tugging at her hair, clothes, and bag. As she fell, a scream ripped from her lungs when she felt her stomach drop. The ground rushed up to meet her as the cord’s slack disappeared rapidly. She barely had the presence of mind to clutch it even more tightly right before it snapped taut, and suddenly she stopped falling and was swinging across the space between the buildings, arcing back upward.
It took every ounce of her willpower at the apex of the swing to unwrap her hands and let go. The cord fell back away, but Sophie’s momentum carried her forward, still arcing up.
The pale stone wall of the neighboring building loomed like a giant sledgehammer ready to crush her. She felt herself slow, falling again, safety tantalizingly close, but there was nothing for her hands to catch ahold of before she fell away.
And then, agonizingly, she wasn’t falling anymore.
She lay on her back, peering up at the sky.
The lower roof had broken her fall.
It hurt so much she was sure for one sickening moment that the fall had broken her spine too. Sophie lay there, gasping, the pain excruciating. But she loved every damned searing second of it because it meant she wasn’t dead.
She could see the extension cord hanging limp from the flagpole an impossible distance away. Beyond that, the first of the kill squad, carrying full assault gear, stormed into the room she’d just vacated. They broke left and right, sweeping the office, then stopped, staring at the destruction and putting the pieces together. The squad’s leader stood in the broken window, probably expecting to see her lying in a whorish sprawl, dead in the square. It took him a moment to look upward and catch the inconceivable sight of his quarry stretched out on a rooftop over fifty feet away. Safe.
Sophie had maybe a second or two before he started shooting. She hauled herself to her feet, crying out in pain as she rose, and stumbled around the corner of the building, following the roof away from the square and out of sight.
It
hurt
to move. Something was definitely broken in there.
Sophie gritted her teeth against the pain, knowing it would be so much worse once the adrenaline and shock wore off. Right now the chemicals flooding through her system were the only things keeping her going. It was amazing how the human body could force the impossible out of itself in extremis.
She found a latched door at the far end of the roof where a wall of opaque window tiles descended to meet the terrace. She still had her go bag slung over her shoulder. Her lockpick gun made quick work of the mechanism—five pumps of the trigger and the door opened to allow access to a darkened hallway.
Moving as fast as she could, she found a stairway and descended all the way to the ground floor. The crash of breaking glass warned her that the kill squad had already reached this building. That was fine. That was good.
She figured they’d probably only left one man stationed in Paternoster Square, eyes on the stock exchange lobby, and one man in the lobby. Two men could only cover the main exit. This was a big building, with lots of emergency exits. It didn’t take her long to find one that would allow her to slip out the side of the building.
A couple of minutes later she’d disappeared into the crowd that had gathered in the main square to stare up at the helipad and the broken window where Cabrakan still stood clutching his assault rifle.
She saw two of the kill team trying to force their way through the crowd. They hadn’t spotted her. She eased between a couple of gawkers, then stepped around a huddle of men in suits. It was noisy. People were talking over each other, trying to make sense of what was happening. This was London, a city plagued by terror attacks for decades. It wasn’t panic that spread through the crowd so much as outrage. It took Sophie a minute to thread through the throng to the square’s far side. She slipped out of the press of bodies and disappeared into the streets beyond.
It was over.
She’d done what she’d set out to accomplish and she’d come out alive—that was a win on both fronts.
Now on to the next step.
She still had a lot to do.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
JAKE DIDN’T THINK ABOUT THE TWO BODIES less than five feet away. They weren’t a threat anymore, which meant they weren’t worth wasting time on. He didn’t plan on sticking around down there long enough for them to become a problem.
He stripped them of weapons, getting his hands on a long, nasty-looking dagger. It was made out of some kind of highly polished black rock or ceramic. The handle had been carved to look like a strange little totem pole. Jake wiped it on the dead man’s combat trousers, then unbuckled the knife belt and strapped it to his own thigh. He slid the blade into it. He found another knife over by the door where it had come to rest after he’d kicked it away in the fight. It was a standard combat knife with a long, single-edged blade and a leather-wrapped handle. Jake grabbed it and went over to the second dead man.
He rifled through the corpse’s pockets, but didn’t find a wallet or any ID. What he did find was a Maglite. Unsurprising, given that this was basically a stealth op. Whoever these guys were, they weren’t stupid enough to carry identification with them.
There was a cheap burner cell phone. No contacts in the list, no recent numbers stored that he could see.
He didn’t want to root around too much inside the device in case some kind of mercy call might give his location away.
A glint of metal caught his eye as he rose from his crouch. Jake froze, half reaching out instinctively for the source of the reflection.
It was a small metal pin on the dead man’s collar, a golden circle with a weird-looking core to it, like an iris, he realized, taking it carefully from the guy’s lapel. Both of the dead men wore the same pin, so it wasn’t just some odd little piece of jewelry, it was something more fundamental than that. He’d seen action and hung out with military men all of his life, so he knew what a tag was when he saw it, even if it was shiny gold rather than daubed in paint on weeping brick.
He dropped one of the pins into his pocket. Right now, he needed to figure out what they’d been doing down here. He could worry about what sort of creepy cult they were part of later.
Jake pushed himself back up to his feet. His knee hurt like hell from the pounding it had taken. He limped back toward the row of monitors. There were seven computers set up against the far well—one for each of the dead men outside, he realized. Thick wire housings emerged from the floor beside those machines, and smaller lines ran back from there to the computers themselves. They were the only things in the room: seven computer terminals and two dead guys.
Not exactly Scandinavian design, but it’s pretty fucking minimal
, he thought bleakly as he approached the first terminal.
Jake woke the system but couldn’t tell exactly what he was looking at on the screen: spikes of energy readings? The computer seemed to be monitoring a trunk line, checking signal strength and bandwidth and current information payload, and from what he could see there was precious little activity on any of them. But there was some.