The Black Wolf (In the Company of Killers, #5)(6)

Pulling back my glove, I glance down at my watch.

“We have less than fifteen minutes to pull this off,” I whisper to Nora while she adjusts the tiny speaker fixed inside her ear.

I hear Victor’s voice inside mine as well:

“One man is stationed just outside the tenth floor door,” he says. “But there are three at the far end of the hall.”

Nora and I nod to each other, knowing what we have to do.

After tucking my lock-pick back behind the tight fabric at my wrist, I pull my gun from the holster on my thigh and follow behind Nora as she descends the concrete steps of the stairwell. The air is warm and moist in here where the air conditioning doesn’t reach, making my bodysuit adhere to my skin uncomfortably. The sound of our boots moving down the steps is faint, practically unnoticeable, but slightly enhanced by the echo of the small space. Dull fluorescent lights lay out a path for us as we make our way to the bottom and reach the tall metal door that leads out onto the tenth floor.

“Left or right?” Nora asks Victor.

“Right side of the door,” Victor responds, his deep but soothing voice always a comfort to me on these missions. “He is armed, but his gun is holstered.”

We spent two weeks scoping this building out: sent others in before us, blending in with the day visitors, who planted hidden cameras of our own, feeding real-time images to Victor and James Woodard back at our Boston headquarters.

“There is only one surveillance camera in the hall,” Victor says. “It’s stationary. Wait for my word.”

Keeping eyes on the one man sitting in the surveillance room of this building, without Victor as our eyes on the outside, we’d be completely blind to everything around us.

A full minute passes, then another, and all I can think about is how many minutes Nora and I have left to get this done.

“Now,” Victor says urgently into our ears—he was waiting for the man in the surveillance room to leave the multiple screens in front of him to take his nightly piss and make a coffee pot run, practically right on schedule.

Nora carefully swings open the door into the tenth floor hallway so as not to let it hit the wall, and she grabs the man standing guard on the other side, snapping his neck before he can reach for his gun. His heavy body slumps over into her arms and together we carry him into the stairwell and let the door close quietly, hiding him from view of the camera.

Wasting no time, Nora and I move quickly down the hall where just around the corner at the end, three more men stand guard at the elevator.

With our silenced guns drawn, we round the corner to see them staring back at us with wild rounded eyes and quick hands.

“STOP!” one man shouts just before Nora’s bullet zips through the air and drops him like a slab of meat.

Squeezing my trigger without even thinking about it, I put a bullet in another man’s head and he drops onto the white tiled floor in a heap of dead weight and black fabric. The third man raises his gun, but Nora takes him out before he can get a shot off. His gun hits the floor and slides several inches as he falls.

“Are we still clear?” I ask Victor as Nora and I drag two bodies by their ankles across the floor toward another door, the sound of their suits moving over the tile like a snake slithering through a bed of leaves.

“Yes,” Victor says, “you’re still clear, but move with haste; he won’t stay away from his post long.”

Pushing open the door with my back, I drag the body inside; the long, heavy legs hit the carpeted floor of what looks like an office, with a thump-thump. Nora comes in right after me, dropping the second body.

“Clean the scene,” she tells me as she grabs the last body by the ankles and hurriedly drags him away in the same direction.

I grab the man’s gun that had fallen, shoving it into my boot, and then I pull a square of cloth tucked away inside my other boot and mop up the small droplets of blood and one noticeable smear, that had stained the floor.

“You’re still clear,” Victor says.

Nora comes out of the office just as I’m setting the magazine that had fallen onto the floor neatly back onto the chair.

Without a word, Nora and I move fast past the elevator and down the hall to another stairwell. The sound of our boots hitting the concrete steps as we make our way down is now more audible. Our breathing less controlled, but only a surprise, or a gunshot wound can break our concentration.

Halfway down the ninth floor, Victor says, “He’s making his way back. There are two men outside the door on the ninth floor—”

“But we’re not going to the ninth floor,” I cut in.

That wasn’t in the plan. Why are we straying from the plan: use the stairwell straight to the eighth floor, bypassing anymore men in the halls? The only reason we came out on the tenth floor and took out those men was because they were stationed too close to the stairwell, our safest getaway route.

“I got it,” Nora says and rushes right out the ninth floor door, this time letting it smash against the wall, not caring, or not having time to control it.

“Who the f*ck—”

She drops the man at the other end of the hall with a single muffled shot.

“Don’t move,” she says to the other just as he’s reaching for his gun in the back of his slacks.

His arms shoot up beside him, his tanned, lined face twists with trepidation.