This, strangely, was confounding. I had a much harder time accepting I’d succeeded than a few moments earlier accepting that I’d failed. “So I did it? I’m a mindreader?” I’d hardly spoken more than a few words a day the week before.
“Don’t get cocky,” Max said, rummaging through cabinets and drawers, pulling out papers and holding them under my camera for recording. “You picked up a specific mind intentionally beaming out a message. You’ve been around Tauber and me, you had to fight off Volkov and Marat and now we’ve got Kate and a bunch of drones trying to probe us. That’s a lot of activity all at once, so you’re getting stimulated. You probably live on the minder’s frequency anyway.” He looked me square in the eye. “But you paid attention,” he said. “Give yourself credit for that. And fix those rubies in the back of your mind-you may find them handy later on.”
“But what was the point?” Kate asked. “Why send out a bomber intentionally to get captured?”
“Good question,” Max said.
“Think of the damage he could’ve done if nobody’d stopped him,” she mused.
“He wouldn’t’a done shit,” Tauber said, holding up the bomb blueprints for us. I focused the camera on the drawings in the center, where he was pointing. “See?” he challenged Max, who stared at it blankly. “Didn’t they teach you anything in that program?”
“I told you, I resisted.”
“Shee-it!” The blueprints quivered in his hands but not as bad as they had the day before. “It was no bomb to begin with! Damn thing couldn’t go off the way they had it wired. No way, no how. Wiring’s all wrong.”
“Jesus,” Kate moaned. “What a sitting duck.”
“Time’s up!” Max yelled suddenly, throwing another few documents under my lens for preservation. “We’ve got company.”
A moment later, we heard shouts and a crackle of electricity in the street below. Tauber started badly at the electrical sound; he had the door open before Max yelled “Go!”
“Head for the staircase at the end of the hall!” Renn ordered but there was a stairwell just in front of us. Tauber and I both made for it, Tauber arriving just in time for a bolt of electricity to rip past his ear and blow a hole in the ceiling above. Leonardo light poured gloriously down through the billowing plaster. Tauber turned two shades paler than he already was and we scrambled backward.
Shouts and footsteps echoed up the stairwell, but Max came tearing around the corner, his arms swinging over his head and down the stairwell. He looked crazy at first but, then you could see the energy ball arcing through the smoky lightshaft and plunging down the metal staircase. The banisters buckled and bent, the steel latticework groaned and screeched and several steps collapsed, crushed like someone had dropped a steam roller. We heard the cries of shooters scrambling away as the ball bounced down into the lobby below, taking the rest of the staircase behind it.
Tauber gaped but Max simply pointed at the far end of the hall like this happened to him all the time. “ That staircase, dammit!” Kate was already ahead of us, hitting the landing and disappearing down the shaft.
We bounded down two flights before the crunch hit. Kate went first, slipping-jumping as many steps as she could without falling, the rest of us a few rungs behind. We had just about made the lobby when a lightning bolt hit the staircase just above us, slicing it away from the wall. I looked up just long enough to catch Marat’s white hair and the arm of his dark robe flapping over the railing. The staircase groaned and began to list at a nasty angle. We stumbled on, the lobby just ahead.
That’s when I saw something that wasn’t there. Just like at the airport, that distant radio station began drifting in and out of my head again. This time, I knew what was happening, so I focused- rubies, rubies. I held that color, that frequency, vivid in my head and locked into the signal right away. And I found myself staring at the staircase-the staircase we were descending, except I was seeing it from the lobby just below.
The lobby where Marat and five L Corp guys with stun guns and anti-noise headsets waited to take us the moment we appeared. Marat and five others, including the guy whose head I’d just gotten inside of again.
Kate was inches from the last step. I threw myself into the air and grabbed her just above the last step, our momentum carrying us hard into the far wall. We flew through the doorway in two seconds-the third second, the place opened up, bullets and lightning bolts everywhere. We lay flattened on the floor, scrunched tight together as the place erupted.
In the fifth second, dead silence, except for the tinkling of glass hitting the floor. We were cramped into the corner behind the doorframe, staring across at Max and Tauber still clinging to the precarious staircase.
At the same time, I still saw the other angle as well, the same doorway but now from down the hall, through the eyes of my L Corp contact, as his crowd waited for us to show, for a clear shot at us.
“You wrecked the other staircase,” said a dry voice from down the hall. Through the L Corp side of my head, I could see the head blueshirt-a bullethead with a full red beard-talking and Marat slinking up behind him. How’d he get back downstairs if there was no other staircase? “So there’s no place else for you to go.”
“Like hell,” Max muttered. He and Tauber were hanging onto the monkey-bar staircase, their weight threatening to pull it down altogether at any moment.
“That’s all you got?” Max answered loudly, moving hand-over-hand very deliberately toward the landing. “Volkov offered three-quarters mill and a country house.”
“Offer?” Redbeard answered, sounding almost amused. “You’re taking offers?”
“We need an escape route before I run out of bullshit,” Max whispered. “Anyone has suggestions, now’s the time.”
The staircase shrieked and sagged sickeningly toward the outside wall of the building. If I’d ever heard that sound onboard a ship, I’d be looking for life rafts. The whole apparatus now hung entirely over the wide-open stairwell, Max and Tauber literally clinging to the handrails.
“The Italian police just want accomplices; you’re better off with us,” came Redbeard’s voice again.
I don’t know if Kate had risen to her feet or if I’d just lost track of her, but suddenly she was at the back of the stairwell, sheltered behind the doorframe, out of the line of fire, peering down into the dim landing.
“I think I can get a better offer,” Max yelled. In seconds, he and Tauber were either going to have to swing over onto the landing-in full view of our attackers-or plummet two stories down into the stairwell.
“I think you’re misinformed,” Redbeard answered drily, clearly close to the end of his patience.
“It’s a plumb-bob!” Kate mumbled, talking to herself, gazing into the stairwell with an idiotic level of excitement. It’s a cannon, I’d have understood. A plumb-bob?
“Are we outside the walls of Rome?” she demanded.
“ What walls?” Tauber rasped. His fingers were slipping; he was in no mood.
“The ancient city had walls!” she burst, like this was absurdly obvious. And, looking over the railing, I saw the plum-bob, conical, pointed, ridiculous, string looped over the doorknob two flights down. “We have to be outside the ancient city,” she muttered to herself.
“Time’s up, Renn! Come out or we come in!”
“What’s the point, Kate?”
She was smiling now, which was insane. “We go,” she said softly.
“Go? Where?”
“ Down,” she answered. She was already working her hands back and forth, in and out. A moment later, she leaned into the doorway and threw an air ball down the corridor. I had to grab the doorframe to keep from being sucked out after it. Marat’s team scattered in twenty directions as it flew between them, ripping pictures off the walls and pulling potted trees, newspapers, doormats, pairs of shoes and every bit of dirt and lint and paper in the hall into a crazy, swirling, rolling tide.