A Chip and a Chair (Seven of Spades, #5)(85)

Dominic passed Levi and Leila each a roll of firecrackers, took another dynamite trap kit for himself, and went down to the sixteenth floor. Martine scooped up the bag and established their base position: the wide landing on the other side of the stairwell, at the midpoint between floors seventeen and eighteen. There, they’d have the wall to their rear, and a clear vantage point from which to monitor both doors and the two lengths of stairs connected to the landing.

Levi and Leila split up, unrolling their 16,000-count strips of firecrackers along the stairs leading down from seventeen and up from eighteen, then lighting the delayed-ignition fuses. Levi kept the fire extinguisher at hand-none of the materials in the stairwell were flammable, so he doubted there’d be any lasting fire, but accidentally burning down the building would throw a pretty big wrench in the works.

With all measures in place, everyone retreated to the landing, hunkered down, and covered their ears. Dominic tucked Rebel’s head between his arm and chest.

For a few endless moments, they crouched in place, barely breathing.

Crack. Crack. Crack crack crackcrackCRACKCRACKCRACK-

The strung-together firecrackers ignited each other like toppling dominoes, erupting in showers of sparks and puffs of smoke, filling the air with their violent reports. The acoustics of the stairwell amplified every explosion, bouncing the noises back and forth off the walls and layering them over each other, so that the cacophony grew ever faster and louder.

To people on the other side of the door, it would sound a lot like automatic gunfire.

A few seconds later, Levi heard the tinny, panicked shouts of distant voices. He was confused until he realized they were coming from Carmen’s tap into Utopia’s radio frequency, audible through his earpiece.

“Report! What the hell is going on down there?”

“It must be the FBI!”

“Where is that gunfire coming from?”

“I don’t-”

“The stairs!”

“Hold position,” Carmen said, her voice tight. “Three guards entering on nineteen.”

Just as the noise from the last firecrackers died away, a door above them opened with a creak. “What the fuck?” said a voice that floated down the stairwell.

Multiple footsteps sounded on concrete, and someone let out a strangled gasp.

“Back, get back! There’s explosives in the stairway!”

“I think I saw people down-”

The door slammed shut.

“Worked like a charm,” Dominic said, grinning. He released Rebel and met her eyes. “Enemies.”

Her lips pulled back from her teeth in a menacing growl.

“They’re making a beeline for the west stairwell,” Carmen said. “Two more about to come through the door on seventeen.”

Levi stood, pulled the pin on the fire extinguisher, and hurried halfway down the steps. As expected, the firecrackers had burned scorch marks into the stairs, but nothing had caught flame. That meant this extinguisher could serve a different purpose.

While the rest of the team prepared themselves to engage as well, Carmen continued her sitrep. “The guards on twenty-one are maintaining their positions, but everyone else is moving in your direction. You’re gonna get hit hard and fast.”

The door below Levi swung open. A man ventured into the stairwell, gun drawn, only to come to a stunned halt when he saw the six of them arrayed on the stairs.

Levi sprayed him in the face.

The guy flailed backward, stumbling, and collided with the man entering behind him. Levi jumped down the remaining steps, slammed the end of the fire extinguisher into the guy’s foam-soaked face, then adjusted his grip and whacked the guy in the head like he was wielding a baseball bat.

That took the first man decisively out of the running, but the second had already recovered and was aiming his gun point-blank at Levi’s face. Levi wouldn’t be able to react in time—

With a blood-curdling snarl, Rebel leapt from the landing and crashed feet-first into the man’s chest, bringing him to the ground with her entire weight. His screams rent the air as she clamped her jaws around his gun arm and savaged it without mercy.

On the staircase above him, Levi heard several gunshots, the bang of Martine’s shotgun and the rapid-fire thwacks of Leila’s batons, and answering screams and curses. Levi craned his neck in time to see a man tottering halfway down the stairs, a tell-tale red stripe across his dazed face, trying to steady his gun arm.

Two steps down, Natasha threw hot coffee in his face, seized his jacket, and yanked him casually down the rest of the stairs. The man landed at Dominic’s feet, shrieking, and dropped his gun to claw at his burned skin with both hands.

“Two more about to come through eighteen,” Carmen reported. “The other teams have gotten a little more cautious.”

That gave Levi some breathing room. He gathered the guns from the men at his feet, then told Rebel to release her hapless victim. The guy curled up around his ravaged arm, groaning, as Rebel backed off with a blood-streaked muzzle.

The door on eighteen flew open. Dominic-who, as their best ranged combatant, was positioned on the landing to cover both staircases-fired off a shot. The bullet went wide, embedding itself in the door frame, and the Utopia guards retreated hastily.

There was no way Dominic would miss a shot at this distance. He’d aimed to deter rather than kill, which could only have been for Levi’s sake. The sole difference between Dominic’s and Natasha’s willingness to kill under these circumstances was that Dominic wouldn’t take pleasure in it.