“You just went straight in?” Mazzucco asked.
Allen shook her head. “Of course he did. What did you expect, subtlety?”
“Hey, fuck you, Fixer,” McCall said. “Now back off, cupcake. We got work to do.”
Allen snapped. She launched herself at McCall, but was caught around the waist by Mazzucco, who’d plainly been anticipating the explosion. McCall’s man, late to react, inserted himself as another layer in between the two of them and McCall.
“You heard the man,” he said stonily, eyeing the pair of them.
Mazzucco fixed Allen with a glare. “Later.”
She nodded and relaxed, jutting her chin at McCall’s flunky as she allowed Mazzucco to move her a couple of steps backward.
McCall had moved a few steps in the opposite direction. He put two fingers to the earpiece on his headset. “Rooker, sit-rep.”
Allen backed away and looked at the building. And then she realized she’d forgotten all about somebody in the heat of the moment.
“Where is he?”
“Where’s who?” Mazzucco replied.
“Where’s Blake?”
McCall heard her and grinned. “I forgot to tell you the other thing, Allen. Our caller gave us a name, too.”
I moved back down the tight corridor between the pallets and glanced over the edge of the drop. The smoke was already filling the warehouse. It looked like they’d fired smoke and stun grenades in from the windows on both sides. Had I been on the ground floor, I’d be blinded or severely disoriented. As it was, the Samaritan’s little makeshift death chamber had effectively insulated me from the explosives.
The smoke had already engulfed most of the open portion of the ground level, rising and expanding and starting to fill the small partitioned rooms. It was like standing halfway up a mountain and seeing the morning fog fill the valleys below. I saw movement toward the rear door, the one I’d come in by. I huddled close to the nearest stack of pallets and tried to focus on the movement. In another minute, the smoke would be thick enough to blind me to anything further than a couple of feet in front of me, but for now I was elevated enough to make out shapes and disturbances in the smoke below. I could make out at least four figures entering from the doorway, where the smoke was thinner. I caught small details that added up to trouble. Body armor. Riot helmets. Assault rifles. A SWAT team. LAPD, most likely, or perhaps FBI. Either way, it was very bad news for me.
I remembered the SIS guy I’d encountered earlier. McCall, that was his name. If McCall’s men followed his lead, they’d be the type to shoot first, ask questions never. If I’d guessed their numbers at the rear entrance correctly, that meant the same number again approaching from the front entrance. Minimum: eight trained men with Kevlar and grenades and M4s, versus one unarmed guy wearing a nice suit.
I glanced around my immediate surroundings, knowing I had bare seconds to do so. I saw nothing that could help me. I looked up at the roof and remembered the gaping hole in the ceiling. I found the spot and dismissed any idea of escaping that way. It was fifty feet out from my position, more than a thirty-foot drop to the solid warehouse floor. The nearest steel rafter was ten feet from the hole. Even if it hadn’t been, I could still hear the chopper’s rotors thumping away directly above me, its search beam glancing through the hole and the second-floor windows every so often. Behind me was a tight corridor and then a brick wall: a dead end with a dead body.
If I was getting out of here, it had to be from the ground level.
I looked back toward the position of the four men who’d entered at the back. It was getting tougher to see them all the time, but I could see they were beginning to spread out, covering the open-plan area at the back of the warehouse. I heard low voices as they called out code words. The smoke finally reached me, my already limited visibility beginning to gray out. I crouched down, gripped the edge of the platform, and swung myself over the edge. I took a deep breath and let go, allowing myself to drop blindly into the void. I hoped I’d memorized the configuration of the partitions below correctly.
I landed hard on the concrete floor, making sure to favor my right side. I couldn’t avoid banging the sore ankle pretty hard, though, and I had to stifle a grunt as my shoes cracked off the surface. I heard a yell, a three-round burst of automatic fire, the splintering of wood. None of it too close to me. I waited and exhaled. I guessed I had dropped into the second row of boxes, meaning the guys out there would have to clear the first row.
Nice going, Blake
, I thought.
You’ve bought a whole extra couple of minutes of remaining unperforated
. I could see a little better down here. As I’d hoped, the partitioned workshops or offices or whatever they were, were fouling the dispersal of the smoke. Some of it was seeping through, but visibility in here was much better than out on the floor.
The immediate space around me was square, about ten by ten. The walls were also ten feet high, making this a big square wooden box with no lid. And me, the Jack, waiting to be sprung. The box was virtually empty, the bare wood walls showing holes and scuffs where shelves or bulletin boards had hung. There was a door that I knew had to open out on the central corridor. Since I didn’t have too many other options, I carefully pushed the handle down and pulled the door open. I had a vague idea about getting farther back into the nest of partitioned rooms, but beyond that I was out of ideas. All I knew was that the longer I wasn’t shot or cuffed, the better. The smoke was much thicker in the corridor. I turned in what I was reasonably sure was the opposite direction from the men who were approaching from the warehouse floor and started to walk deeper in.
Visibility was worse than ever now. I could barely make out my own shoes. I bore close to the side of the corridor, tracing my hand along the wall and marking the doors as I passed by. I was starting to think it was about time I picked one of the doors when I heard a yell from some unknown distance behind me.
“Freeze!”
I didn’t stop to think. I was alongside one of the partitions that happened to have a bare doorframe. I ducked inside the box before the voice could follow up with further instructions. There was no gunfire. I wondered if the yell had been a bluff. Perhaps he’d seen something, a whisper of movement, but he couldn’t possibly have gotten a clear view of me and my position from any distance, not in this smoke. I looked around my newest box. It was harder to see in here, the absence of a door meant the flow of the smoke had not been restricted the way it had elsewhere. Still, visibility was far better than it had been in the corridor. This box had been an office. There were shelves on the wall and a steel file cabinet with the drawers removed. There was a desk along one wall, and a broken swivel chair had rolled into the center of the room.
The voice rang out again from outside. The same voice, I was pretty sure. A clear, commanding tone, just like the one he’d been trained to use.
“Come out with your hands on your head. I will shoot you.”
I decided it probably was a bluff, but an informed one. The guy out there had seen
something
; he just wasn’t sure what. If the something had been a someone, it was a safe bet that someone was hiding in one of these rooms. My hunch was backed up when I heard a door being kicked in, maybe four boxes down. Twenty seconds later, I heard another one. He’d be taking the methodical approach. Room by room. I heard the voice again, lower this time, conversational. Talking to one of the others over his headset, I guessed. More bad news.
A lull and then another door kicked in. Next door, I was certain of it. This guy wasn’t waiting on his backup, probably wanted to nail the bad guy all by his lonesome. I expected there’d be another one or two along soon, but probably not all of them, not yet. I was betting one of the teams had ventured upstairs. I wondered how long it would take them to discover the body.
It hadn’t taken him long to clear each room, so I knew I was down to seconds. I stepped up onto the desk, being careful not to make any noise, and listened. I heard scuffing of boots, something small being knocked over in the next unit, probably with the barrel of a rifle. I waited to hear the retreating steps. I gave him time to get back out into the corridor, and then I grasped the top of the walls and lifted myself up and over, trying to balance speed with making as little noise as I could manage. A simple maneuver, under normal circumstances—up, over, and drop. I landed in the adjacent box, making sure to touch down on my right foot. Immediately, I moved to the door, which my pursuer had helpfully left opened. I moved into the corridor and waited.
Five seconds later, the guy appeared at the adjacent door, his head turned slightly in his planned direction of travel: the opposite direction from me. He was decked out in standard tactical dress: a black uniform, body armor over the chest, a black helmet and visor. I hit him in the throat with the blade of my right hand. It took absolute precision—I had to make sure I struck in the narrow gap afforded by the body armor and the visor, and I had to hit him hard enough to stun him immediately. But the real precision was in judging how hard to hit for a stun, rather than a killing blow.
The cop made a gagging noise and dropped to the floor, his helmet smacking off the concrete with a crack, his Bushmaster M4 clattering on the ground. I crouched beside him and touched the same hand to his neck, this time checking for a pulse. I found it and wasted a couple seconds to make certain he was still breathing, and then I stripped his sidearm out of its holster. It was a Beretta. I checked the safety and tucked it into the back of my waistband, and then I took off down the corridor.
There was one last door at the end of the corridor. I opened it and found myself in a narrow corridor, this one defined by the last wall of the partition block and the brick wall of the warehouse itself. I’d been hoping for a fire exit that had been missed in the rush to surround the place. What I found was a large split-door hatch in the floor. The hatch was locked, too, with a rusting padlock that looked reassuringly old. Reassuring because it didn’t feel like I was following the Samaritan’s script this time: he would have used a fresh padlock. This lock was worth spending a little time on. It was old and cheap enough that I knew I could have simply shot it off, but I wanted to avoid signaling my location while my pursuers still had an entire warehouse to search. I got my wallet out again and took out a couple of the smaller picks, testing one, then the other. The second one I tried was the right size. Out of habit, I counted off the time in my head as I worked the lock. Six seconds. Not exactly world-beating, but it would do.
I unhitched the padlock and opened one wing of the hatch. Below, it was pitch-black. No ladder. How deep could the basement floor be? Not too deep, I hoped. There was a rung on the underside of the hatch door, which would allow me to close it behind me. I positioned myself on the edge of the drop, then grabbed the rung and pulled the door most of the way closed, allowing myself space to slip through the gap. I gripped the edge with one hand and kept ahold of the rung with the other as I shuffled my body into the drop. Just before the hatch door slammed shut on my fingers, I let go of the edge and reached my hand up to join the other one holding the rung. My feet dangled in the air as I hung suspended from the underside of the closed hatch. I’m six feet even, and my arms are about thirty inches, shoulder to fingertip. That meant the drop had to be at least eight feet. I tried to raise my left foot a little higher than my right, and hoped to hell it wasn’t too big a drop as I let go.
The good news was that my feet hit solid earth a heartbeat later. The bad news was I didn’t manage to protect my injured ankle. A fierce stab of pain shot up my leg and I dropped onto my back, grabbing the ankle. I rubbed it for a few seconds until the pain dulled. The ground felt uneven and dusty beneath me. I got my phone out and hit the flashlight app, directing it upward at the closed hatch to confirm I’d fallen only a matter of inches.
After the past twenty minutes of darkness and smoke, it was like staring into the sun. I blinked the glare of the light out of my eyes and cast the beam around me. I was in the foundations of the warehouse. The ceiling was about ten feet above me; the giant slabs of concrete supported by steel crossbeams. The brick walls came all the way down here to the foundations, and the floor was hard-packed dirt. Any illusion I’d had about this warehouse being the Samaritan’s primary workshop were dispelled, because this would have been a far better location than the second floor. Light and sound would be well contained; day and night would appear the same to a prisoner. But there were no shackles, no bloodstains.
I hadn’t been meant to find my way into this part of the warehouse. If the Samaritan had taken the time to look down here, he’d have made sure there was no escape for someone who made it this far. I played my flashlight beam across the nearest wall again. There was a gap where some of the bricks were missing. I walked closer and confirmed my hope—I could see the basement of the neighboring building through the hole. I tugged at one of the bricks at the side of the gap. It was loose. I hit it with the heel of my hand and it moved an inch or two. Much looser now, it took almost no effort at all to work it free of the wall. I heard another burst of gunfire from above as one of the tactical guys opened up on a pigeon or a threatening shadow. I heard footsteps on the concrete floor a little way off.
I started working at the other bricks at the edge of the gap.
It was almost an hour after the initial incursion by McCall’s team before the warehouse was finally cleared for Allen and Mazzucco to enter. The sun began to rise in the pale blue sky, bathing the streets in a golden glow.
A lot had happened in that time. Ray Falco, one of McCall’s men, had been found unconscious but otherwise unharmed in a corridor within the maze of office units in the building. McCall’s team had followed the trail to find the point where their suspect had made his escape: a rupture in the wall that led through to the adjoining basement. By the time it had been discovered, their quarry was long gone. Finally, the second team had made a more grisly discovery: the mutilated body of a young woman.