Wormhole (The Rho Agenda #3)(82)
As he gently released his twin’s body, Heather bent over her, lifting one of Jennifer’s eyelids, then the other. “Damn it.”
Mark nodded. “They’ve messed her up bad.”
Standing up, Heather threw her arms around Mark’s neck and hugged him tight. For a full ten seconds Mark held her close as his heart hammered the walls of his chest.
As Heather pushed back, she pointed to the duty belts, service holsters, and spare clips on the table by the bank of monitors. “You take one, and I’ll take the other.”
“What’s the plan?”
“I’ve got the security teams, except for two wounded guys down on sublevel four, pulled back to defend the building from outside attacks. Now that you’re here, I’ll open the doors that will let the rest of the Arab prisoners up stairwell one. That should give the response teams plenty to think about.”
She slid into the seat in front of the laptop, motioning Mark into the seat in front of the microphone that was hardwired to the third and fourth sublevels. “As soon as I open the right doors, get your best Arab terrorist voice ready.”
Mark nodded in understanding and waited.
Heather nodded. “OK.”
Mark’s Arabic flowed from his lips with a distinct Saudi Arabian accent. “My brothers. We are here to free you. In his greatness, Allah has opened a way. Break contact with the infidels you now fight and move down the corridor to your rear. You will find the stairwell open all the way to the top. From there you must fight your way to freedom. Allahu Akbar!”
Turning his attention to the monitors, Mark noted the speed with which the Arab fighters reacted to the command, leaving the two wounded security guards lying among the bodies of their fallen comrades in the disabled elevator. In less than thirty seconds, sixteen terrorists had entered the stairwell and begun racing up the stairs toward the ground floor. With a clank, heavy steel bolts engaged, locking the door shut behind them.
“Time to go,” said Heather, rising to her feet and strapping the remaining duty belt and holster around her waist, pausing to tuck in the excess.
Odd as it seemed, Mark found the image of the gun belt wrapped around Heather’s slender body, wearing only a blue hospital gown, remarkably appealing. “Stairwell two?”
“No. We’re going to have to climb the elevator shaft.” Her eyes moved to Jen. “Can you carry her on a cable climb?”
“If we strap her to my back. No problem.”
Heather knelt down, stripping the dead guards’ shirts and belts as Mark lifted his sister. Following her to the elevator shaft, Mark saw that the door stood open onto the empty shaft. Shifting Jennifer onto his back and wrapping her arms around his neck, he let Heather strap Jen’s hands together with a bloody shirt. Then, hooking both belts together, Heather fastened them around Mark’s and Jennifer’s bodies.
She paused for a moment to inspect her work, then turned and leaped into the shaft, caught the thick cable, and began rapidly climbing. Mark followed, the added weight jolting his frame hard enough that he wondered if the cloth ties would handle the strain. They held and he began steadily pulling himself hand over hand up the shaft.
“You good?” Heather asked from above.
“Right behind you. All the way to the top.”
“We’re making a short stopover on sublevel one.”
“Why is that?”
“I found our laptops.”
Heather passed the open elevator door on sublevel two, continuing her steady climb until she hung suspended three feet above the opening into sublevel one. Swinging her body, she launched herself into space, landing in a forward roll that brought her back to her feet in the wet corridor as cold water rained down on her from above. As she’d seen on the security cameras, sublevel one had been completely evacuated once the fire alarms and waterworks had started.
Nevertheless, she pulled the Berretta from the holster and chambered a round. Moving forward in a shooter’s crouch, she began clearing rooms left and right as she moved past them. To her rear, she heard Mark land and slide. Then he was beside her, moving with his own gun drawn, Jennifer dangling awkwardly from his back.
Unlike on the lower sublevels, laboratories and offices filled this floor, a facility designed to provide close-in, real-time technical support to some of the best interrogation teams in the business. This was where equipment captured with the prisoners held below came to be analyzed and dissected, providing a rapid turnaround totally focused on providing corroboration or leverage on the former owners. A single cell phone often yielded information that skilled interrogators wielded on their subjects like Chinese water torture.
Heather paused outside of the lab she had targeted, took a deep breath, and held it. Opening the door, she stepped inside, grabbed the nearest chair, and used it to wedge the door wide open, letting the halon gas pour out into the hallway. The gas itself wasn’t harmful, but it displaced the breathable nitrogen-oxygen mix that fires and people lived on. Without waiting for the gas to drain out into the hallway, Heather stepped into the room and turned on the lights, leaving Mark standing guard with Jennifer outside.
The lab was a large room, sixty feet by forty-eight, with raised flooring to accommodate the wiring that ran beneath it. Rows of workbenches divided the room into four sections. On the third of these, Heather found what she was searching for. Both laptops had been stripped, the motherboards and computing components plugged into other systems capable of recording all electrical activity in the circuits. Heather ignored them, selecting instead the two specially modified USB dongles. Removing these from their mounts, Heather dropped them in a small plastic Ziploc bag she retrieved from the supplies strewn across the workbench, and made her way back toward the door.