As he swept along the seventh-floor hallway, he collected extra magazines from the dead, making sure they matched the weapon he had swiped. He didn’t know how many others were downstairs, but he was taking no chances. In a firefight, the difference between life and death could be a single round.
“I’m heading below,” he said, pinning his cell phone to his ear with his shoulder. After finding Raffee dead, he had placed a quick call to Sigma for help.
“I’ll get units to you as soon as I can.” Kat sounded tense, but even with her husband in harm’s way, she stayed focused. “Be careful.”
“Only as careful as I need to be.”
He hung up as he reached the end of the corridor. He paused long enough to grab a hammer from a construction worker’s toolbox. Despite Kat’s efforts, he estimated it would still take law enforcement several minutes to arrive on-site.
Too late to help Monk and Jason.
Gray stepped to the fire alarm on the wall and yanked the red lever down. An alarm immediately rang out. His goal was to light a fire under the enemy, hopefully scare them into flight. Failing that, it might make them at least hurry, perhaps even make needless mistakes.
Plus the racket should help cover his own approach.
He crossed to the elevator bay, knowing the stairwell would be guarded, and entered the same cage he took to get here. He pressed one of the lower floor buttons, but as soon as he felt the cage descend half a floor, he hit the stop button. A buzzing alarm sounded as the cage came to an abrupt halt, but the noise was easily drowned out by the louder clamor of the fire system.
Using the claw-toothed hammer, he pried open the inner door of the elevator. As he’d hoped, the cage had stopped shy of the sixth floor, exposing the top half of the exterior door on that level. He reached and tugged the latch to manually release those doors. Once free, he ducked out of the cage — only to turn back and crawl beneath the stalled elevator.
The open shaft yawned below him.
With the cage above his head, he swung out onto the emergency ladder that ran down the wall to his left. Once mounted, he slid along its length, ignoring the individual rungs. He used his hands and feet to occasionally brake to control his speed, counting the floors as he fell past them. In twenty seconds, he had reached the subbasement doors marked L3.
Hanging by one hand, he pulled the latch to release those doors, then lunged out as soon as they parted. He landed and skidded on his knees across the floor, his body twisted to face the neighboring stairwell door. As he had suspected, a lone gunman stood guard, holding the way open with one foot, keeping an eye on the stairs.
Gray already had his stolen pistol out, still outfitted with a silencer. He shot the man in the head, the suppressed gunshot little more than a harsh cough. He quickly swung his gun toward the data center down the hall.
Shadows moved in there, along with hushed, angry voices.
“Maybe they were never here,” he heard one assailant call out sharply. “That dead guy could’ve lied about someone being down here.”
Gray let out a breath. So Monk and Jason hadn’t been found. Maybe they’d already made it upstairs. But he had to be certain, especially after hearing a voice, full of command, bark out.
“We’re out of bloody time!”
Another voice: “Done! Got the worm delivered into the servers. It’ll delete all files here and any redundant backups elsewhere.”
“Then get those last charges set and move out!”
With the fire alarm still ringing, Gray moved down the hallway to the data center’s open door. He took a fast glance inside before ducking back out of sight.
Four men.
They were all staring through the window to the rows of mainframes in the neighboring room.
Must be more men in there, setting the final charges.
Their mission was clearly to compromise those servers. He pictured Lucius Raffee upstairs. He imagined the handful of security guards in the building had suffered a similar fate. Had the director simply been at the wrong time and place, or was his execution another goal of this assault team? An hour ago, he had heard from Painter about the attempt to eliminate the only witness to events in California. Was this attack a part of that, an attempt to erase all trails that led back to that base?
He had no way of knowing — except the one in command sounded like he had a British accent. He recalled Jason’s discovery of the connection between Dr. Hess’s work and a research team out of England.
Could just be a coincidence, but maybe not.
“All set!” a voice called from the server farm.
“Clear out,” the leader said. “Double-time before we’re pinned down here.”
Gray kept to the side of the doorway, half hidden behind a trash can. He was still mostly in the open, but he hoped that in their mad rush to flee, they’d dash right past him.
As expected, men burst out of the control room and pounded down the hallway toward the stairwell — where the guard’s body still lay in shadows.
Gray didn’t have much time to act.
As soon as the last man barreled out, Gray rolled across the threshold and into the data center. He kicked the door closed behind him, swiping his black Sigma card to lock it from the inside.
A shout burst from the hallway outside.
Gray stood, staring through the bulletproof window in the door.
A flashlight clicked on down the corridor, revealing a cluster of men around their fallen teammate. The tallest of the lot — burly-chested, with chiseled aristocratic features — turned and stared back at Gray.
They made eye contact across the distance, the other glowering in fury.
A teammate touched the man’s shoulder and pointed to his watch. They plainly had no time to force Gray out of the locked room, not with law enforcement closing a noose around the area and the charges about to blow.
With a silent growl fixed to his lips, the leader waved the others up the stairs, then fled with them.
Gray turned and opened the door that led into the server farm. A half flight of metal stairs led down to the air-conditioned, insulated space. From his perch, he searched the rows of tall black mainframes. He noted packages of C-4 affixed to the closest racks, their timers glowing, all counting down from 90 seconds.
He bellowed into the space. “Monk! Jason!”
Along the back row, a door to one of the towering refrigerator-sized mainframes swung open. Monk and Jason fell out, untangling their limbs.
Thank God…
Gray waved. “Move your asses!”
They came running, dodging down the rows of servers. The pair bounded up the metal stairs to reach the data center room.
Gray unlocked the door to the hallway with a swipe of his card.
Monk slapped Jason on the back. “Quick thinking, kid.”
Jason got knocked a step forward but collected himself. “It’s common for server farms to be overbuilt,” he explained, “to leave empty racks for future expansion. Figured DARPA would do the same.”
Gray led them out and sprinted for the stairs. “This way.”
Reaching the stairwell door, he found no body, only a pool of blood.
“See you had some trouble reaching us,” Monk said, noting the stain.
“More men were upstairs, too. They executed Dr. Raffee.”
Monk swore as they rushed upward, sprinting from landing to landing. “Any idea who they were?”
“They took the body below, but there are four more on the seventh floor. We might be able to ID them.”
That’s if there’s a building still standing after all of this.
They burst out onto the ground floor and ran across the lobby. Gray spotted the slack form of one of the building’s security guards collapsed behind his desk. Anger fired through him anew. He pictured the face of the assault team leader, and silently promised to even the score.