“You mentioned you had a connection to Antarctica.”
“I once lived there, but it’s been a while. My mom, stepdad, and sister are still there . . . near McMurdo Station.”
Monk squinted at him, sensing there was more to his story, adventures left untold, but he left it there. “Then with your background, maybe you should be the one to interview this Harrington guy. Find out what the Brit knows.”
Jason perked up. He always wanted to do fieldwork someday, and this might be the opening he needed. Anything to break free of motherboards, logic circuits, and code-breaking algorithms.
A door closed down the hallway, the sound echoing to them.
Monk stood up.
Jason glanced over his shoulder. “Sounds like Commander Pierce is back.”
Hopefully with something more exciting to do than look at maps.
“Kid, do you have a side arm?”
Only now did he note how tense his companion had gone. All that easygoing manner had washed out of his form.
“No . . .” Jason squeaked out.
“Neither do I, but that was the stairwell door. Not the elevator. Don’t think Gray needs the exercise at this late hour.”
The heavy tread of multiple boots on concrete reached them.
Monk turned to Jason, his gaze dead serious. “I’m open to any bright ideas, kid.”
4:06 A.M.
Gray worked swiftly, knowing every second counted.
As he swept along the seventh-floor hallway, he collected extra magazines from the dead, making sure they matched the weapon he had swiped. He didn’t know how many others were downstairs, but he was taking no chances. In a firefight, the difference between life and death could be a single round.
“I’m heading below,” he said, pinning his cell phone to his ear with his shoulder. After finding Raffee dead, he had placed a quick call to Sigma for help.
“I’ll get units to you as soon as I can.” Kat sounded tense, but even with her husband in harm’s way, she stayed focused. “Be careful.”
“Only as careful as I need to be.”
He hung up as he reached the end of the corridor. He paused long enough to grab a hammer from a construction worker’s toolbox. Despite Kat’s efforts, he estimated it would still take law enforcement several minutes to arrive on-site.
Too late to help Monk and Jason.
Gray stepped to the fire alarm on the wall and yanked the red lever down. An alarm immediately rang out. His goal was to light a fire under the enemy, hopefully scare them into flight. Failing that, it might make them at least hurry, perhaps even make needless mistakes.
Plus the racket should help cover his own approach.
He crossed to the elevator bay, knowing the stairwell would be guarded, and entered the same cage he took to get here. He pressed one of the lower floor buttons, but as soon as he felt the cage descend half a floor, he hit the stop button. A buzzing alarm sounded as the cage came to an abrupt halt, but the noise was easily drowned out by the louder clamor of the fire system.
Using the claw-toothed hammer, he pried open the inner door of the elevator. As he’d hoped, the cage had stopped shy of the sixth floor, exposing the top half of the exterior door on that level. He reached and tugged the latch to manually release those doors. Once free, he ducked out of the cage—only to turn back and crawl beneath the stalled elevator.
The open shaft yawned below him.
With the cage above his head, he swung out onto the emergency ladder that ran down the wall to his left. Once mounted, he slid along its length, ignoring the individual rungs. He used his hands and feet to occasionally brake to control his speed, counting the floors as he fell past them. In twenty seconds, he had reached the subbasement doors marked L3.
Hanging by one hand, he pulled the latch to release those doors, then lunged out as soon as they parted. He landed and skidded on his knees across the floor, his body twisted to face the neighboring stairwell door. As he had suspected, a lone gunman stood guard, holding the way open with one foot, keeping an eye on the stairs.
Gray already had his stolen pistol out, still outfitted with a silencer. He shot the man in the head, the suppressed gunshot little more than a harsh cough. He quickly swung his gun toward the data center down the hall.
Shadows moved in there, along with hushed, angry voices.
“Maybe they were never here,” he heard one assailant call out sharply. “That dead guy could’ve lied about someone being down here.”
Gray let out a breath. So Monk and Jason hadn’t been found. Maybe they’d already made it upstairs. But he had to be certain, especially after hearing a voice, full of command, bark out.
“We’re out of bloody time!”
Another voice: “Done! Got the worm delivered into the servers. It’ll delete all files here and any redundant backups elsewhere.”
“Then get those last charges set and move out!”
With the fire alarm still ringing, Gray moved down the hallway to the data center’s open door. He took a fast glance inside before ducking back out of sight.
Four men.
They were all staring through the window to the rows of mainframes in the neighboring room.
Must be more men in there, setting the final charges.
Their mission was clearly to compromise those servers. He pictured Lucius Raffee upstairs. He imagined the handful of security guards in the building had suffered a similar fate. Had the director simply been at the wrong time and place, or was his execution another goal of this assault team? An hour ago, he had heard from Painter about the attempt to eliminate the only witness to events in California. Was this attack a part of that, an attempt to erase all trails that led back to that base?
He had no way of knowing—except the one in command sounded like he had a British accent. He recalled Jason’s discovery of the connection between Dr. Hess’s work and a research team out of England.
Could just be a coincidence, but maybe not.
“All set!” a voice called from the server farm.
“Clear out,” the leader said. “Double-time before we’re pinned down here.”
Gray kept to the side of the doorway, half hidden behind a trash can. He was still mostly in the open, but he hoped that in their mad rush to flee, they’d dash right past him.
As expected, men burst out of the control room and pounded down the hallway toward the stairwell—where the guard’s body still lay in shadows.
Gray didn’t have much time to act.
As soon as the last man barreled out, Gray rolled across the threshold and into the data center. He kicked the door closed behind him, swiping his black Sigma card to lock it from the inside.