Nimec snapped his head around to Barnhart and Nori.
“We’ve got a problem,” he said.
“Hey, come here,” the man in the Air Force bomber jacket said.
“What is it, Vasily?”
“Just come over here and take a fucking look, will you?”
The man in the gray overcoat stamped snow off his shoes and then trudged heavily up beside him.
Vasily had paused inside the entrance and was facing the wall, scrutinizing the status window on the security system’s master control box. The alarm was set on a thirty-second entry delay, so that anyone with the deactivation code would have enough time to punch it into the keypad — and turn off the system — after passing through the door. He’d been about to do exactly that when he noticed the reading on the LCD.
The second man looked at the backlit display. Its pale blue digital characters said:
CODE29: SYSTEM FAILURE
Vasily glanced at him. “I don’t get it.” “Could be it’s the storm. Wind might’ve knocked out the power awhile. Or the phone lines.”
“I dunno, Pavel.” Vasily was shaking his head. “You want to check out the back door?”
Pavel was still for a second, his broad brow crunched in thought, balancing the minor hassle of having to walk out back against what his boss would do if it turned out that something really was wrong, and he and Vasily didn’t go investigate.
“Yeah,” he said, drawing a pistol from under his coat. “Better we don’t take chances.”
In Roma’s office, Nimec, Barnhart, and Nori heard the two bodyguards speak agitatedly to each other as they discovered the unlocked back door. Instants later they heard them racing up the stairs, saw lights blink on in the outer corridor, heard more rapid footsteps.
They were hustling toward the office.
The footsteps stopped outside the door.
Then extended silence.
The silence pressed.
The doorknob rattled, turned.
Nimec touched Nori’s arm above the elbow and he saw her glide into position, a dark silhouette against the deeper darkness of the room.
The door flung open, both thugs framed inside it, Uzi carbines held out in front of them.
Nori fingered a button on the control box of her laser and a blinding beam of high-intensity light streaked from the M203’s muzzle, hitting Vasily full in the face. He released a high-pitched, whooping scream, the subgun seeming to leap from his grip, hands clawing at his eyes. Nori held the weapon on him another second, its laser beam pulsing in the air like a bright white strip of the sun. He went jigging back into the hallway, slammed into Pavel’s shoulder, then went reeling into the corridor, his contortions throwing a delirious crop of shadows across the walls.
“My eyes!” he shrieked, sinking to his knees. His hands stayed over his face. “God, God, my fucking eyes!”
Ignoring him, Pavel threw himself back against the door wall, reached around the jamb with the Uzi, squeezed out a burst. Rounds crackled from the snubby barrel. Nori sprang out of the way as the deadly stream of 9mm bullets came rippling into the office, shattering the window, blasting chunks out of the walls, punching holes into the side of Roma’s desk, knocking over his chair amid flying wads of its chewed-up cushions. Spent casings swirled around the Uzi in a glittery blizzard.
Launching himself out of the darkness, Barnhart swung the Benelli toward the door, a flash-bang round already jacked into its chamber, and fired. There was a loud whump in the corridor, a sudden flare of brilliance, a swirling bubble of smoke. Pavel’s gun stopped chattering and withdrew from the entry. Almost simultaneously Nori took her finger off the laser control, hooked it around the trigger of the modified M16, and unleashed a sustained burst of VVRS sabots, laying a band of covering fire for her teammates.
“Now!” Nimec shouted.
The three of them plunged out of the office, Nori’s gun spewing a torrent of non-lethal rounds. When they reached the corridor, she pivoted to the right, spotted Pavel crouching near the door with the Uzi in both hands, and aimed for his chest. He flopped back in a graceless heap, his finger spasmodically squeezing the trigger of his carbine, the weapon discharging rounds in a crazy upturned fountain.
Gobs of plaster rained from the ceiling. Ricochets whined through the corridor in wild trajectories.
“Ah, shit!” Barnhart said through gritted teeth behind Nori.
She jerked her head around, saw him clutching his side, his face a twist of pain, blood slicking his fingers. A dark wet stain was already spreading over his coveralls. He started to wobble forward, his legs folding beneath him, but Nimec rushed over and got an arm around him an instant before he would have fallen to the floor.
The thug’s gun, meanwhile, continued to jolt and rattle. Nori whipped her head back around, leveled her rifle downward, and hit him dead-center in the chest with another gust of fire. A scream ripped from his throat and he thrashed on the floor as though suffused with voltage. After a moment he passed out, the Uzi dropping from his fingers with a metallic clatter.
“How bad is it?” Nimec said, helping Barnhart to his feet. He nodded his chin at the blood-saturated middle of his coveralls.
“Don’t know exactly.” Barnhart winced. “Hurts like all hell, though.”
Nimec regarded him steadily, his lips clamped together.
“We’ll try and get out of here the way we came in,” he said after a moment. “With any luck the rest of those guys will still be out front.”
Barnhart shook his head vehemently. “I’m not sure I can make the stairs. Head on down without me… I can hold my own if any more come up here… I’ll use that mope’s Uzi—”
“Do us a favor, Tony, okay?”
Barnhart looked at him.
“Shut up and cooperate,” Nimec said.
Barnhart shook his head again, but this time didn’t voice any protest.
Noriko hustled over to Barnhart’s left side, lifted his arm, and slung it around her shoulders. At the same time, Nimec continued bracing him on the right. He had drawn his Beretta from its holster with his left hand.
He swapped glances with Noriko, then nodded.
Half-carrying Barnhart between them, they started toward the entrance to the stairwell.
They had no sooner reached the steps than a third thug appeared on the landing below. He had a Glock nine in both hands and was raising it in a shooter’s stance.
His eyes slitted with concentration, Nimec got off two shots with his own pistol before the bodyguard managed to fire a single round. The first caught him in the right kneecap, the second in the left. He crumpled to the base of the stairs and rolled around there in spastic agony, howling at the top of his lungs.
“Shut him up,” Barnhart rasped. He unclipped a DMSO canister from his utility harness, passed it to Noriko. She noticed that its tubular surface was slick with blood, but said nothing.
Slipping out from under Barnhart’s arm, she sprinted down the stairs, held the canister over the screaming man’s pain-knotted face, and depressed the nozzle. A fine, nearly invisible mist hissed out of it. The thug raised his hands in front of his face in a warding-off gesture, his eyes wide, white, and bulging. Then his arms dropped like deflated balloons and his features went slack and he fell off into sedated unconsciousness.
Nori turned back toward her companions. They had almost reached the bottom landing, Nimec gripping the rail with one hand, supporting Barnhart with the other. Barnhart’s face was blanched of color and she could see a greasy patina of sweat on his cheeks. He was biting his lower lip, gasping a little with each descending step.