Dark Time: Mortal Path (28 page)

“What is it, Jenson?”

Jenson kicked at the dirt with his foot. “Nothing. Rabbit got under the fence.”

“Again?” He turned to his dog. “Enough, Sport. Let’s move on.”

Both dogs quieted. A guard talked on the radio, and although Maliha couldn’t hear it, she was sure the other guards were being told the reason for the commotion. As Sport was leaving, he sniffed Maliha’s footprints enviously, no doubt dreaming of the day when he would be free to chase rabbits.

Maliha turned her attention to the building. From her vantage point, the brick edifice with few windows looked like a fortress.

Fortresses I know.

She took advantage of the shadows to wait out the passage of the second pair of guards, whose dogs reacted to the rabbit scent but were quickly pulled along by the guards, who’d been alerted to expect it.

After they’d passed, she used a compact crossbow to launch a grappling hook to the roof. She tested the rope and began climbing, a straightforward walk up the side of the building. When she reached the roof, she pulled up the rope and took it with her.

On the roof were several ventilation shafts, vertical drops that ran through the core of the building, joined at intervals by smaller horizontal vents. She picked the shaft that was closest to Greg’s office. The louvered cap wasn’t locked on. She lifted it and propped it up on a rod, like a car’s hood. Peering over the 93 z 138

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side, she could see utility lights shining up from the bottom, where a large exhaust fan turned lazily. The rest of the shaft was in darkness.

Maliha put on a headband light and switched it on. She fitted the grappling hook onto the lip of the shaft and let the rope slide down the inside. Over she went, into the darkness. Bracing her back against one side of the shaft and her feet on the other, she inched her way downward. She passed the first set of branching vents that served the ninth floor, then the second set, and paused at the third set, for the seventh floor. She picked the vent that headed toward Greg’s office and crawled in.

Moving along on hands and knees, she passed several grates. Gazing through, she could see that she was near the ceiling, as she’d expected from studying the photos she’d taken. There were side branches that went to individual rooms. Unclipping a GPS device from her belt, she checked her location using the light from her headband. The special device boosted the reception of the satellite signal. Her target was the restroom attached to the private dining room, where she’d taken a location reading during her lunch with Greg. Once there, she’d have to rely on the blueprint she had in her head to find Greg’s office.

It all worked as planned, and in a few minutes she was in the vent with a good view of Greg’s office.

She looked through the grill of the vent to check for cameras in the room. There were none. Greg, like Diane Harvey, didn’t want his private doings on film. She used a clever, U-shaped ratcheting screwdriver to remove the screws holding the grill, and lowered herself into the room.

She was here to find information on Project CESR and the financial troubles Greg was keeping under wraps. She picked locks on desk drawers and file cabinets, to no avail. The good stuff must be in the safe.

While searching, she also kept an eye out for anything that looked like a safe combination. Some people wrote the combination somewhere nearby in the office, maybe trying to disguise it as an invoice number or a date or something similar. There were no notes that appeared to have a number casually written on them.

A door on the side of the office was heavily secured. It had a palm-print reader, a retina scanner, and a microphone for voice recognition. She hadn’t come prepared to break into it and would have to do it by force if she wanted to see what was in the room it protected.

First things first: the safe.

It was where Betty said it would be, behind a painting. It had an electronic lock with a keypad to enter the combination.

Maliha licked her lips. If procedures were careless, it might be easy to get inside. She was prepared to blast the safe open, but why do that if Shale would open it for her?

She removed from her kit a fingerprint brush that looked like a tiny feather duster and a small bottle of green-fluorescing fingerprint powder. She gently dusted the safe’s keypad with a thin coating of powder. From a case that looked like it would hold a pair of eyeglasses, she pulled a device the shape and size of a pen and attached an amber shield to it. The device was a portable Alternate Light Source, ALS, that generated ultraviolet light. She snapped off her headband light and turned on the ALS. Looking through the shield, several of the keys on the keypad glowed with fingerprints: 8, 4, 3, 2, and Enter. The 8

key was more heavily printed than the others, indicating that the number 8 was used more than once in the combination. She sighed in relief. The keypad hadn’t been wiped clean after use. She turned her headband light back on and got to work on the keys.

Greg was thirty-eight years old, so she pressed the 3 and 8 keys first, then various combinations of the other numbers. When she punched in 38248—age thirty-eight, two times four equals eight—the red light on the keypad turned green. Greg hadn’t been very imaginative with the combination. She pulled down on the handle and the safe was open.

She removed the ledgers and sat on the floor behind the desk with them. She photographed the pages, returned the ledgers to the safe, and locked it. With a clean cloth, she scrubbed off the fingerprint powder. Mission accomplished.

Now for that intriguing door across the room. Her choices were blow the door lock mechanism off or leave without seeing what was behind it. If she blew the door, she would have to fight her way out, because there was no way that was going to escape the attention of the guards.

Blow the door. All that security has to be hiding something important.

She took out a small brick of C4 and rolled it into a snake shape, which she wrapped around the door’s locking mechanism. She inserted a detonator, played the wire out until she was across the room and behind the desk, and pressed the detonator’s control button. The explosive blew, and the lock with it.

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She’d been counting seconds in her head since the blast and now ran over to stand behind the door to the hallway. The guard at the end of the hall would have heard the noise, and she figured the door was wired into central security and her actions had sounded an alarm, too.

First, the guard from the hall.

The office door opened slowly and a gun barrel entered the room. The guard wasn’t rushing in. She didn’t have time for his caution, so she grabbed the end of the gun, yanked him into the room, and knocked him out. She’d gained more seconds of precious work time.

Beyond the door was a room with a panoramic view of numerous monitors. In the center was a swiveling chair surrounded by computer equipment. The view from the chair would allow a person to track activity on all the monitors and respond to the changing displays using the computer. She walked up and examined the monitors, which varied in purpose.

There were scrolling charts with multiple lines of spikes and troughs, like an EKG readout. There were maps that reminded her of airline routes and views with banks of dials and switches. Those views were in a rapid rotation cycle, and some of the views had people in them, caught in still shots with their mouths open while speaking, in mid-stride, and in one case, mid-stroke, with fly open. She took a couple of photos of the room in general and then close-ups of a few of the monitors. It seemed to be a control room, but for what?

The timer in her head went off. She had to leave. There was another tempting door across the room from her, another secure door that she’d have to blast, but she didn’t have the time.

As she exited the control room, the office door slammed open, hitting the wall, and several men came in. They had their guns drawn, ready to shoot first and not have to ask questions later, because the target would be dead.

Maliha hoisted herself into the vent, moved inward a dozen feet, and stopped to pull a tube from her pack. She pulled the pin and slid the flashbang backward through her legs into the room, squeezed her eyes shut, and pressed her fingers into her ears as hard as she could.

The vent lit up around her, the bright light reflecting from the metal surface and visible through her protected eyes. Then the powerful noise rattled her surroundings and her ears too, in spite of having them stopped up. The unprepared guards behind her were incapacitated. She had a few seconds before their eyes would readjust, even longer before they regained their balance, lost due to inner ear disturbances.

She made the most of the time by scurrying along in the vent.

Sooner than she’d hoped for, there was a scraping noise behind her—someone else was in the vent.

She switched off her headband light and flattened her body against the metal floor. Several bullets flew over her back, through the space where she’d been moments before. When the firing stopped, she scrambled ahead and rounded a right-angle bend. She drew one leg up under her body and waited in the dark. She could hear the man’s uneven breathing as he closed the gap. Light moved erratically on the vent walls; he was pushing a flashlight ahead of him. When he got close to the bend in the tunnel, the noise of his motion stopped. He was thinking about what to do next. Finally he stuck his gun hand around the right-angle bend, finger on the trigger. He was going to shoot to make sure no one was waiting for him around the corner.

She kicked her drawn-up leg backward, landing a powerful blow on his wrist. The gun flew out of his grasp. The flashlight snapped off. He fumbled for the gun in the dark, moving his body forward a little.

She landed a solid kick to his arm and heard it snap. Moaning, he began to slide backward in the vent, pushing back with his good arm. Satisfied that he wasn’t coming after her, she didn’t try to finish him off.

Instead she moved forward, heading for the main vertical shaft.

She could hear shouts echoing in the vent, bouncing off the metal so that they seemed to come from everywhere. Up ahead there was a light moving around in front of her. Someone had taken off a vent grill and was shining a flashlight in. Her way was blocked.

Shit, shit, shit.

She stopped and loaded an arrow into her crossbow. It was cramped, but she managed it. She lay down on the floor of the vent and waited. She heard a dragging noise, and envisioned a chair being pulled up to the vent. A man stuck his arm in and waved it around to draw fire if someone was lying in wait for him. She kept still.

Having tested for safety—he thought—the guard’s head appeared in the opening and she released the arrow. It buried itself in his temple. Without uttering a sound, he toppled backward on the chair and 95 z 138

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crashed to the floor. She hurried past the opening and soon arrived at the vertical shaft. Her rope dangled there. She grabbed the rope, climbed into the shaft, and started moving upward. She looked up and could see a patch of sky with stars.

Past the eighth floor, heading for the ninth.

Noise reverberated through the shaft. The fan at the bottom had come on and was whirling rapidly, sucking air from the interior of the building and blowing it out toward the stars. Maliha was buffeted by the strong blast of air. Her feet slipped on the metal wall of the shaft and she slid down several feet until she caught herself with the rope. Planting her feet firmly, she struggled upward as the powerful wind tried to tear her loose.

Ninth floor, out onto the roof.

Maliha used a mirror on a telescoping rod to look over the side of the roof and check out the situation on the ground. Guards were moving around the building, looking for a point of entry. She wouldn’t be able to go over the side of the building on the rope, unless she wanted to be a bullet pincushion.

Maliha moved to the part of the roof where the fewest guards were posted below. She stepped up to the edge of the roof and then stepped off it.

BASE
jumping: an extreme sport involving leaping from a fixed object with a parachute. The acronym comes from
B
uilding,
A
ntenna,
S
pan,
E
arth, the four places a jumper leaps from to launch.

An ultra-compact ram-air parachute nestled on Maliha’s back, running from shoulder to waist and tightly compressed in a pack. She deployed her pilot chute manually as soon as she jumped. There had been no time to attach a static line to the building, which would have automatically opened the pilot chute as she jumped. She had only ninety feet of air space to the ground—giving her a dangerously short, almost impossibly short, amount of time to slow her descent. Most BASE jumpers preferred six or eight times that height in order to enjoy tracking in freefall, opening their chutes when they got closer to the ground.

Maliha had no tracking time at all. The main chute snapped open partially and she half fell, half glided, unable to maneuver well. She tucked up her legs as she passed over the fence closer to the building, then made it over the outer fence, but the fence snagged the chute. Her shoes were a few feet from the ground, but she was held in place by the harness.

A bullet from behind her snapped one of the harness straps above her head, and she cut the other one with a knife. She ran into the woods with bullets chasing her, heading away from the barn. The last thing she wanted was to have someone trail her to her car, or even worse, guess where she was going and arrive there first.

She ran for miles in the night, the moon lighting her way, forest animals acknowledging her passage with a blink of their eyes or the flick of a tail.

When she got back to the barn, she was feeling good about her mission that night. She’d gotten what she came for, photos of the ledgers, and a bonus: a glimpse behind the secure door.