Phantom Instinct (9780698157132) (29 page)

“No,” she said.

Harper grit her teeth. Sorenstam was not about to give up her service weapon. Sorenstam and Aiden exchanged quick hand gestures. Aiden moved out. Harper followed. In her hand, she held her Swiss Army knife.

They walked silently along the wall until they came to a door. Aiden tried the handle. Locked. Sorenstam whispered, “Window, twenty yards farther.”

Harper ducked low and ran to it. It was securely locked. She ran back, shaking her head. “Only way to get in is to break the glass. And what we need isn't access. It's surreptitious access.”

From his back pocket Aiden took a slim black case. He dropped—painfully—to one knee and withdrew two slim stainless-steel implements. They looked like they'd been liberated from a dentist's office. He inserted their tips one after the other, carefully, into the lock. He manipulated them back and forth. Harper heard every scratch and click. She scanned the view, her skin practically throbbing with the sense that they were about to be discovered. Sorenstam watched. Aiden whispered, “Light,” and she cupped her hand around the display of her phone and directed it toward the door handle. He murmured, “Almost . . .”

This was taking too long. Harper said, “Let me.”

With reluctance, Aiden moved aside. His kit was a basic five-pick set, but the old factory had a basic lock. She inserted the tension wrench along the bottom of the lock. Then she slid in a rake. She felt it move along the pins inside the lock. She gently applied tension, sliding the rake back and forth. One by one, the pins fell into place along the shear line.

With a sharp click, the lock tripped. She turned the handle. Eased it open an inch. No alarm.

Pressing a hand to the wall for support, Aiden stood up. The burglar's tools went quickly back in the case and into his pocket. He held the door, nodded, and silently counted to three.

If Sorenstam had any qualms about silent entry without a warrant outside her jurisdiction, she quashed them. First through the door, she disappeared inside. Aiden and Harper followed her, into the dark.

I
nside, they paused. From the pocket of her fleece, Sorenstam took a roll of electrical tape. She tossed it to Aiden. He tore off a strip with his teeth and strapped it across the latch on the door. He silently pulled the door closed. With luck it would appear locked, should anybody come patrolling. They waited while their eyes adjusted to the darkness. It was almost no adjustment at all. Just dark.

Sorenstam clicked on a mini Maglite. The beam, pinpoint bright, illuminated the hallway.

It smelled of mildew. Closed doors, carpet chewed and bunched up in places. Drop-panel ceiling, with panels missing. Fluorescent light tubes above. On the walls, light switches, some pulled loose and hanging by the wires.

Aiden whispered, “Foragers have been here. Stealing the copper from the wiring, probably.”

So, poor security, as if Harper needed any confirmation. “Normally, I would hope the plant has a hard line to the security company, maybe we'd trip an alarm and get a response. But since it's Spartan, I guess we don't want that.”

Sorenstam said, “No way.”

They crept forward, stepping over the bunched carpet. Harper listened and heard nothing.

Aiden said, “The layout.”

“Offices along this side of the building. The factory floor takes up most of the ground level, with a high ceiling and ventilation windows at the top.”

“Basement access?” he said.

“Stairs on either end.”

They progressed along the hall. At each office, Sorenstam paused, opened the door, and checked the interior, barrel first, the shotgun a black glint under the Maglite. All were empty.

They wanted to work their way to the center of the vast building. That, they had agreed, was where Piper was most likely to be held if she was on this floor: farthest from any doors or windows that could be breached. As far as possible from the exits. She was either near the factory floor, or deep in the guts of the place.

Harper checked her watch. Two minutes, nineteen seconds since they'd left the cover of the rocks outside. Five minutes since she had left the car running. Her arms itched, her scalp, her nerves.

Where was Travis? Where was Zero? Out front, she hoped, staring at the idling MINI. But even if they were, the deception couldn't last much longer.

Aiden paused at a corner and raised a hand, signaling
stop.
He put his back against the wall and inched out to glance around. After a second, he waved them on. Sorenstam snapped the Maglite into a mount atop the shotgun, and she carried it shoulder high, aimed down the hall, with the light tracking her path.

Halfway down the hall, Harper's phone vibrated. She put a hand against Aiden's shoulder. He did the same to Sorenstam. The three of them stopped short.

Harper checked all her nerves. If she answered too loudly, and Travis was nearby and heard her voice . . .

She pressed the key. “Where is she?”

They all held absolutely still. She had spoken quietly, with a note of menace.

Travis said, “This isn't a negotiation. Drive through the gate.”

The demand in his voice was absolute. So was something else. Mockery, maybe.

“I can wait all night. I have a full tank. Piper comes out and then Oscar goes on his merry way.”

“Pull forward. Piper's in no shape to walk eight hundred twelve meters.”

She felt a chill. To know that precise distance, he had to be looking at the MINI through range-finder binoculars. The high beams would keep him from seeing inside the car, but he was sending her a message.

In the white glare from the Maglite, Aiden and Sorenstam looked ghostly. Harper pointed down the hall. Gestured for them to keep going. The three of them hurried, Harper with the phone to her ear, Sorenstam in the lead. Aiden glanced at Harper and made a circling gesture—
keep talking.

“I need to see Piper. Right now,” Harper said.

The offices along the darkened hallway gave way to workshops and labs, some with interior windows, most with broken glass. Then there was a sense of sudden spaciousness. Sorenstam clicked off the Maglite. Aiden inched forward.

They were at the doorway to the vast factory floor. High up, above the catwalks and hoists on rails overhead, a row of windows leaked moonlight. A disused assembly line ran parallel to one wall of the room. Bizarrely, it reminded Harper of the bar at Xenon.

She listened closely and still didn't hear Travis. “Send Piper out.”

“Where's Oscar?”

She turned, thinking she heard his voice. Aiden and Sorenstam did likewise. Aiden pointed at the front of the building.

She waited, as silent as she could be. She tried to see in the dark.

Travis still didn't put Piper on the phone. Harper had two thoughts, both of which tightened her stomach. One, Piper couldn't come to the phone because she was unconscious or dead. Or two, Travis couldn't put her on because he wasn't with her. She was someplace apart from him in this complex.

She scanned the rafters, and stopped. A tiny red light glowed from a top corner of the building.

“Come out, Zannah, or I'll bring Piper to you at the end of a chain being dragged behind my car,” he said.

It was a camera. She knew then: They were out of time.

She frantically scanned the factory floor. Across it she saw the stairs heading down to the basement. She saw that the staircase had pipes running overhead, and wiring, and conduit. She nodded at Aiden and Sorenstam, and ran out onto the factory floor, heading directly across, aiming for it.

Travis said, “It's time to say good-bye.”

H
arper ran, past empty assembly lines, around ruined and rusting equipment. A second later, she heard Aiden at her side, his boots hitting the concrete. Sorenstam was behind them. The stairway loomed across the factory in the moonlight, a mouth leading down into more darkness.

Travis said, “You can't outrun me, Flynn.”

The call went dead.

She might have stuck her hand into a live electrical circuit. “He knows. He's coming.”

She sprinted to the stairs and pounded down. Aiden and Sorenstam were a step behind her. Sorenstam's flashlight veered back and forth, illuminating the staircase in flailing streaks.

Halfway down, at a landing, the stairs turned. Harper swung around. Aiden was a silhouette a couple of steps above her, sporadically outlined by the swerving Maglite.

Behind him and Sorenstam, across the factory floor, came two more swinging flashlights.

Harper's skin shrank. “They're coming.”

Sorenstam glanced back. Harper and Aiden careened down the stairs two at a time, sinking into the dark. Sorenstam's flashlight barely illuminated their path.

They reached the bottom of the stairs and Harper ran, hands out now, feeling for obstructions. Her knife was in her hand, blade open.

She said, “Light. Put it on the ceiling, Erika.”

Sorenstam swung the barrel of the shotgun upward. The Maglite illuminated a trail of thick electrical cabling and conduit and rusting pipes bolted to the ceiling.

Pied Piper. Hansel and Gretel. Ariadne.

“Follow it.”

The cabling and pipes were what Piper had cryptically spoken about on the phone earlier. They were the bread crumbs in the forest. They were Ariadne's silken spider's thread—the trail Piper had seen as they brought her in. The girl had the presence of mind to note her surroundings and to recognize the conduit that would lead her out again.

“This way.”

Harper ran along the corridor. After fifty yards, the pipes and cables rounded a corner to the right, into another hallway. It was dark, but at the end, some hundred yards distant, light was leaking from around another corner. A shadow wavered within it.

Harper kept running and slipped on something slick. On the floor ran a thin trail of what looked like blood.

She inhaled sharply and pointed. “Gotta be.”

Aiden said, “If we find her, we have to get her out. Where's another exit?”

“Second staircase at the opposite end of the building.”

Sorenstam took the lead, sweeping the Maglite across the walls and ceiling as she ran. The passageway was deep within the guts of the old plant. Twelve-inch pipes rose vertically along the walls, with rusted valves and joints. The pipes disappeared into the concrete.

Sorenstam drew up. “Stop.”

Harper saw that they had not, in fact, come to the end of the rainbow. “God.”

Directly ahead, the floor vanished. There was a ten-foot break in the concrete. They approached and looked over.

Below, down at least twenty feet, was a platform that seemed to have been lowered on a hydraulic piston.

Aiden said, “Platform ram lift—for heavy pallets or rolling loads. Looks like it's stopped on the floor below.”

They looked around for a switch to activate it. Aiden saw the button on the wall and slammed his palm against it. Nothing happened.

Beyond the gap, around the corner at the end of the passageway, the light spilling onto the floor continued to flow with shadows.

“Piper,” Harper called.

There was shuffling and a weak cry. The shadows slid again. They heard the unmistakable clink of a chain.

“Harper?”

Her heart raced. “We're coming.”

Behind them, back by the stairs, came the sound of men moving at speed.

“We have to get across,” Harper said.

Abandoned equipment was stacked along the walls. Aiden pulled a drop cloth from a humped pile and said, “This.”

He lifted a ladder, his face striped with pain.

Harper helped him extend it. They dropped it across the gap in the floor. It clattered and landed on the far side with just inches to spare.

Aiden knelt and braced it. “Erika, you first.”

Sorenstam slung the shotgun across her back by the strap. She stepped onto the ladder and walked carefully across. The aluminum creaked. She reached the other side and knelt down to brace the ladder for the next person.

“Harper, go,” Aiden said.

Pulse thudding, Harper stepped gingerly onto the ladder. It was flimsy and vibrated with her weight.

“I got you,” Aiden said. “Walk.”

She put her fingertips against the wall for balance and stepped out over the drop. The rungs felt insubstantial beneath her feet. Her entire body seemed to clench and rebel against what she was doing. Holding her breath, she began walking across.
Jesus
. Her heart pounded, ready to jump out of her chest.

“You got it,” Aiden said. “Keep going.”

From around the corner at the far end of the hall, Piper called, “Harper, are you coming?”

Harper looked down. The pit beneath her telescoped. Ready to vomit, she stepped off the ladder onto solid concrete, realizing she was close to passing out. She turned around and knelt next to Sorenstam, helping to brace the ladder so Aiden could cross.

He stepped onto the ladder without pause, even though one shoulder was higher than the other, tight with strain, and his leg looked like it might buckle.

Behind him at the distant end of the hall, where it turned, flashlight beams careened.

Sorenstam said nothing, but drew her pistol.

Aiden crossed quickly and stepped off. They pulled the ladder toward them across the gap, stood, and rushed down the hall.

Behind them, at the end of the hall, two men came around the corner. They didn't say anything. They started shooting.