"Alison—"
"We've got a minute and a half," Alison cut him off as she reached the van and climbed inside. "Maybe more if Frost sees the carnage and decides to take it slow."
"Are you crazy?"
"Probably," Alison conceded, crouching in front of the safe as Taneem crowded into the van beside her. "Now shut up and let me work."
The MixStar was nearly finished. "Let's check out the fail-safes," Alison said, holding out her hand.
Taneem touched the hand with her paw and went two-dimensional, vanishing up Alison's sleeve. As she did so, the comm clip popped off her ear. Alison caught it in midair, stuffing it into a pocket as she turned around and pressed her back against the door of the safe. The K'da had a special trick in their 2-D form for looking "over" walls that would let her see into the safe.
She felt the subtle wriggling as Taneem adjusted herself. A moment of stillness, then a second wriggle, and her head slid around over Alison's right shoulder. "The third and fourth indentations," Taneem whispered.
"Got it," Alison said, glancing at the display strip on the inside of her mask. "Don't worry about breathing—the mist has dissipated."
The MixStar had finished its work. "Combination is three-seven-twelve-nine-twenty," Alison said. "We're opening it now. Taneem?"
Lifting a paw from Alison's forearm, the K'da stuck two of her toes into the third and fourth indentations in the safe's sidewall. "Hurry it up," Jack said. "They've reached the door and stopped. Probably wondering why no one's opening it for them."
"Fifteen seconds," Alison promised. She keyed in the combination and pulled the break bar.
To her relief and satisfaction, the door swung quietly open. "Got it," she announced. Reaching in, she scooped up the handful of data diamonds lying on the safe's floor and shoved them into her side pocket along with Taneem's comm clip. "And we're out of here," she added, getting a grip on the break bar and starting to close the heavy door.
And without warning, the hangar was rocked by a thunderous explosion.
Alison gasped, grabbing the edge of the safe as the blast lifted the van an inch off the floor and then slammed it back down again. Someone was shouting into her ear, but for those first few seconds she couldn't hear anything but a loud ringing.
But at least she was still conscious. If she hadn't been inside the van when the concussion blast went off, she'd be flat on her back right now.
Abruptly, the ringing cleared. "—blew the door and are coming in," Jack was saying urgently. "All of them, and they're spreading out to cover the whole hangar."
"I'm coming in," Draycos added, his voice dark and grim. "Find somewhere to hide until I get there."
"You'll never make it," Alison said quickly. She could hear the widely separated sounds of squealing brakes as the cars came to a halt in four different parts of the hangar. "They're too spread out, and there's no cover. They'll kill you."
She heard a sudden whistling sound from the comm clip as Draycos left the car and sprinted through the night air. "My life isn't important," he said over the whistling. "The data diamonds you've obtained are all that matter."
"No, they're not," Alison snapped, looking frantically around her for inspiration. "How do we convince StarForce this is on the level without a genuine K'da to show them?"
"You have Taneem."
"Who was born and raised on Rho Scorvi," Alison countered, knowing that she was running out of time. The first thing Frost would check once his men declared the area secure would be his precious safe.
The safe.
And with that, she knew what she had to do. "We're getting into the safe," she said, grabbing the MixStar. Crouching down, she stepped into the big metal box.
"You're what?" Jack demanded. "Alison—"
"My mask can give us air for six hours," Alison cut him off, sitting down facing the safe door with her knees tucked to her chest. It would be a tight fit, but not too bad. The door's inner plate, she noted, had several small access holes to the lock mechanism that were big enough for her to get a couple of fingers into. "We'll be safe until then, so take your time and pick your moment. Don't try to rescue me—either of you. Understand?"
"Yes," Draycos said reluctantly.
"Good," Alison said. Taneem, she noted uneasily, had gone rigid against her skin. Was the K'da claustrophobic? She hoped not. "Also, don't worry if you can't catch up with us before the six hours run out. Taneem and I will just play it by ear. I can get to the lock from in here, so we won't be stuck."
"Understood," Draycos said, his voice tight but steady. "Good luck."
Alison could hear heavy footsteps now, and the echo of terse commands. Bracing herself, she got a grip on the door and pulled it closed. There was a soft click as the lock reengaged.
And she and Taneem were alone in utter darkness.
"Taneem?" she murmured softly toward her shoulder. "You all right?"
There was no answer. "Taneem?" Alison tried again. "Come on, girl; we've been in worse scrapes than this one."
"Have we?" Taneem whispered back, her voice shaking. "Have we really?"
Alison grimaced. Actually, they probably hadn't. "We're going to be fine," she assured the K'da. A sudden thought occurred to her, and she dug her mascara tube from her kit. "Let's see if we can hear what they're talking about out there."
Unscrewing the end from the tube, she placed it into her ear. The burglar's pickup was designed to let her listen into safes from the outside. There was no reason it shouldn't let her listen the other direction, too. Switching on the microphone half of the tube, she pressed it against the safe wall beside her.
"—Morgan, I tell you," Colonel Frost's voice growled faintly in her ear. "It's exactly the sort of crazy stunt he and that frunging K'da of his would pull."
"Very likely," a second voice answered.
Alison felt a shiver run through her. That voice was very familiar: Arthur Neverlin, once the number-two man at Braxton Universis. The man who, five months ago, had framed Jack for theft and murder and then blackmailed him into helping with his plan to kill Cornelius Braxton and take complete control of the huge corporation.
Only Jack and Draycos had turned the tables on him. They'd saved Braxton's life and sent Neverlin scurrying for the shadows where he'd been lurking ever since.
Which probably meant Neverlin hated Jack as much as Colonel Frost hated Alison.
Alison's father had once told her it was good to have all your enemies grouped together in the same place. At the time, she'd thought it sounded like a reasonable idea. Now, she wasn't so sure.
"Which brings up the question of what he was trying to accomplish," Neverlin continued. "Morgan wouldn't waste his time just trying to tweak us."
"I think it's pretty obvious this is what he was after." There was a sharp rap on the side of the safe. "Question is, did he get in or not?"
"There's one way to find out," Neverlin said. "Unfortunately, since we don't know how Kayna opened the other one, we'll probably destroy it if we try."
A sudden cold chill ran down Alison's back. In her hurry to get out of sight, she'd completely forgotten the fact that the K'da and Shontine had booby-trapped these safes to protect the precious information inside them.
Booby-trapped with a small but powerful bomb, in fact. A bomb that was currently pressed up against the side of Alison's head.
"Yeah." Frost bit out a curse under his breath. "She did something—she must have done something—that the other safecrackers we hired didn't do. But I've been over that recording a hundred times, and for the life of me I can't figure out what it was."