A Chip and a Chair (Seven of Spades, #5)(84)
One of the men nodded. “Probably best if you all stay put. This building’s pretty safe.”
Ensuring his breathing was slow and silent, Levi emerged from the parked cars and padded toward the men’s turned backs. Leila kept pace with him and readied the baton in her right hand.
“Thanks in part to you, I’m sure,” said Natasha, flashing the men a sweet smile. “That’s what you two are doing down here, right? Keeping watch to make sure nobody gets in who isn’t supposed to?”
The men’s chests puffed up. The one on Natasha’s left said, “We’ll do what we can, ma’am.”
“What gentlemen,” she said, and zapped him with the stun gun she’d been hiding beneath her draped jacket.
As the man collapsed, gasping and spasming, the other guard stumbled backward and scrabbled for his gun. With an aggressive lunge, Leila whacked him in the back of the head with her baton. The man reeled, half-turning, and Levi punched him hard in the face. One more good smack from Leila sent him to the ground, unconscious.
Levi flexed his hand, grateful for the MMA gloves, and looked up. Dominic was crouching by the stunned guard, stripping the man of his weapons and radio while Martine and Rebel covered him. Two down-God knew how many to go.
Once they’d confiscated the unconscious guard’s belongings as well, they dragged both men out of sight around the corner, ziptied their wrists and ankles, and gagged them with duct tape.
“Can you give me the radio frequency Utopia is using so I can tap into it?” Carmen asked. “It’d be nice to have eyes and ears on them, and this way you guys won’t have to lug one of the radios around with you.”
While Dominic gave her the information she needed, Levi returned to the elevator bank. Natasha, who’d put her jacket back on, was bending down to retrieve the one guard’s fallen mug. She unscrewed the cap and sniffed the steam that wafted forth.
“Time for a coffee break?” Levi said snidely.
She just smiled and screwed the cap back on.
With the guards secured, their group piled into the freight elevator, which stood across from two regular elevators in the central bank. It was huge, with padded walls, designed for use by residents moving in and out of the building.
“How do things look up there, Carmen?” Martine asked.
Carmen broke down the situation for them. Besides the guards stationed on the same floor as Hatfield’s condo, there were several teams of two or three men patrolling the nearby floors in regular patterns, as well as a team in the lobby.
After hearing the specifics, Leila whistled. “That’s . . . a lot of guards.”
“Thirteen against six?” Dominic shrugged. “Those odds aren’t too bad.”
“Twenty-one against six,” said Levi. “There’s eight more on Hatfield’s floor.”
Shaking his head, Dominic said, “They won’t break position and leave the condo undefended.”
“Okay, guys.” A burst of rapid typing came from Carmen’s end of their shared link. “I think the eighteenth floor is your best bet. I’ll send you up so you get there right after the patrol team has left. It’ll give you enough time to get in position, and put you as close to a halfway point between the various enemy teams as I can get you.”
Martine readied her shotgun, tossing her hair out of her eyes. “They won’t be able to tell the elevator is moving?”
“I can prevent the panels on the other floors from lighting up. I’ve locked down the other elevators, too, as well as the individual units. But you need to move fast, because any residents still in the building will definitely call 911 when you get started, and I can’t guarantee that the cops are too overwhelmed by the riots to respond.”
“Understood.”
“Everyone ready?”
After a chorus of confirmations, the elevator lurched and began its slow ascent. The ride was silent and tense-but it was an anticipatory tension, the dangerous intoxication of impending battle. Levi’s blood buzzed with it; he saw the same charge reflected on the faces around him, even Rebel’s.
When they arrived on the eighteenth floor, they moved swiftly toward the east stairwell. Levi grabbed the fire extinguisher from its box on the wall in passing.
“Wait!” Carmen said sharply as Natasha reached for the door. “The team upstairs is lingering . . . Okay, go. Quietly.”
Natasha eased the door open, poked her head through, and then slipped into the stairwell. The rest of them followed, making as little noise as possible-in this tunnel of concrete and metal, every sound would echo like crazy.
On the landing beside the door, Dominic set down the duffel bag and eased the zipper open. The first thing he pulled out was a bundle of fireworks which so authentically resembled sticks of dynamite that Levi hadn’t been able to tell the difference at first. Dominic handed it to Natasha along with a fuse kit, and she darted up the stairs like a ghost.
Being outnumbered, their strategy was to create choke points that would funnel their enemies through a limited number of routes they controlled. A stairwell could be perfect-except for the fact that Utopia could enter the stairs from any floor along the height of the building. Fire safety measures made it impossible for the doors to be locked on the residential side.
Nasty-looking traps on the nineteenth and sixteenth-floor landings should scare Utopia off and force them to enter the stairwell only through floors seventeen and eighteen. But if that didn’t work, the fireworks would detonate anyway. Though they weren’t real dynamite, they packed a hell of a kick.