The Last of August (Charlotte Holmes #2)(80)
The basement smelled like cedar chips and mold. A set of stairs led up to the main level. Already Holmes was at the door at the far end of the room. She tried the knob once, twice, then pulled out her pick again and got to her knees.
“This door isn’t ever locked,” she said to herself, as if in confirmation.
The door was reinforced with steel bars. The lock was the old-fashioned kind, with a large keyhole you could peer through. I was reminded of the doors I’d liked so much in Prague. What had Holmes said were behind them? Tourist shops? I peered up at the doorframe.
“It’s wired,” I told her, pointing up. “There must be a keypad on the other side, some kind of alarm system.”
“On the far side?” August asked. “I know this house. The only entrance into that room is from this door.”
“What’s inside?” I asked him, but he looked away.
Holmes moved the pick to the left, then the right, and paused. “The silent alarm is about to sound. If we haven’t been detected already, we will be now. I don’t want commentary on what you see. I don’t want judgment. I want you to follow me in and then we move out.”
She looked ill. Pale, drawn, her eyes flat as coins.
And with that last confirmation, I let myself think it, make it into words, the thing I’d known since we boarded that flight back to England but hadn’t wanted to believe. Leander was being kept in this house. In this room. I didn’t know why (though I had my suspicions) or what the consequences were of springing him free, but as Holmes picked the lock, humming that strange, tuneless melody under her breath—even now, she was a creature of habit—I tried not to think about what would happen next. After.
If he was still alive in there.
A click. A creak. Holmes charged in before me on her long legs, August muscling past me to follow, and all I saw, at first, were their coats as I pushed in after them. There was a low buzz in the air, like the vibration of a phone going off in a pocket, but amplified, something hanging between these cinder-block walls. This lightless room.
It was coming from a generator, and the generator was powering a series of beeping machines, something that whirred and something that beeped and something else that had clear plastic tubes and wires that wound up from its base and over to the hospital bed where Leander was lying, in a blue cotton gown, his hair lank and greasy like it hadn’t been washed since we’d left. A tube taped to his mouth, as if to feed him. An IV tower next to him hung with bags that didn’t hold saline and blood. I knew what saline and blood looked like. I’d been in the hospital enough myself. The room was scattered with crutches, a wheelchair, what looked like a Persian rug. It was a makeshift hospital.
This was enough to stop me dead, more so than if the room had been set up for torture or interrogation—though, now that I looked more closely, I thought I saw the metal hardware for hooks and chains still attached to the walls and the ceiling—the idea that Leander had been here, underneath everything, sedated to be kept out of the way of whatever plan was in play.
Except that he wasn’t sedated. He was awake. And Emma Holmes hovered over him in a mask and a lab coat, a scalpel in one latex-gloved hand.
Then she reached over and yanked the cord from the security camera in the corner.
Instinctively, I searched my pockets for a weapon; next to me, August did the same, coming up with nothing but the stained knife he’d pulled out in the museum in Prague.
Charlotte Holmes rushed over and flung herself into her mother’s arms.
“Lottie,” she said, one arm around her daughter, the other pulling off her mask. “Excellent timing. He’s fine to travel. We have about four minutes. Move.”
UNDER EMMA’S SWIFT DIRECTION, AUGUST HELPED HER remove the IVs. I took socks and a sweater from the suitcase in the corner—Leander’s—and helped him into them, taking care to lean in closely to his ear to whisper, “Is she hurting you?”
“She isn’t,” he said, his voice strangely strong. “He is.”
Alistair? August? The latter was putting an arm under his legs now to help turn him off the bed and put him into the wheelchair.
“Get off me,” Leander said, and stood. “I’m fine.”
“Where is Dr. Michaels?” Holmes was asking her mother. “Where is she being kept?”
“In my room,” Emma said. “Your brother had a camera put there—is he secure? Leander, are you ready to go?” I was shocked to hear her speak to him with such gentleness.
“Fastest way out,” I said. “The window we came in?”
“Done.” Emma Holmes was pulling things from the suitcase—a pair of passports, an envelope, scarves and gloves and a hat—and stuffing them into the pockets of her lab coat. “Go,” she said. “I’ll follow.”
We ran. Leander kept pace behind us, moving far too quickly for a man who looked as debilitatingly ill as he did. The window was just ahead, but there were footsteps, now, above our heads, the scuffle-run of someone moving too quickly for grace.
August hoisted himself up out of the window. “Here,” he said to me, “help him up.”
“Oh, for God’s sake,” Leander said. “Come on, Charlotte. Move.”
I grasped her waist and lifted her high enough that August could pull her out onto the snowy ground. Leander went next; I made a cradle with my hands and boosted him up and out.