Chapter 25
Chapter twenty-five
There was nothing else in the parking areas, but with every step more tension spread across Hallie’s shoulders and the knot in her stomach grew tighter and heavier.
There was no good reason she could think of for Findo and Russet to be inside the Conclave building, and particularly not on the day when the Conclave’s next session of meetings was due to start.
The two men each seemed to like hurting people.
Findo on his own would have been concerning enough.
The veondken loved violence, and she thought he might take great delight in inflicting pain upon the most powerful people in the world.
But Findo seemed to prefer to see his victims, to have the violence be personal.
From what little she knew, it seemed that Russet liked to blow things up and wasn’t too particular about whether he was there when it happened.
Or how many people might be hurt. The thought of what the two of them might do was making her mouth dry and her heart thud in her throat.
Then Frollo led them through a secured door into the machinery section of the basement areas.
The quiet, crackling tension Hallie had carried through the parking garage lifted momentarily, her senses overwhelmed by dark heat and humidity and noise.
Air sticky against her skin. Whirring overhead, strange thumping noises.
The lighting was poor, coming from sparse, orange-tinted bulbs on the walls.
There was a high whining noise that sounded like some kind of machinery that Hallie could not begin to identify.
She kept up with the rest of them as they wound their way through corridors lined with a variety of pipes and wiring as thick as her wrist, pasted with the occasional warning signs.
Danger - high voltage. Danger - risk of death.
Danger - pressure. Hallie mentally added another warning of her own: Danger - lethal veondken on the loose.
A blast of fetid air slapped her face and she grimaced.
Frollo had stopped a few paces in front of her and Girard, the remainder of his team spread around him. They were at some kind of an opening, looking up. When Hallie found a space alongside them, she saw that they were at the bottom of a very tall shaft that had no daylight at the top.
“Is this the bottom of the lifts?” she asked Girard. Although she hadn’t noticed any lifts on her brief visit to the main building, it made sense that there would be at least one. She was sure that some Conclave members would see it as beneath them to trot up and down multiple flights of stairs.
“Yes. There are four lifts on this side, and four on the other side of the building as well, which go down into the other engineering section,” he told her.
“Shouldn’t the access be secured somehow?” she asked, turning around. She hadn’t noticed any kind of door or barricade.
“You’d think so, wouldn’t you?” Girard agreed. “But I’ve never heard of any unauthorised entry to the building before now, let alone getting this far.” From the tone of his voice, Hallie could tell he was frustrated and concerned.
She turned away from the lift with difficulty, remembering that she and Girard were supposed to be keeping watch at the rear of the group.
“There’s no movement up there,” Griff commented. “But I don’t think this access panel should be open.” He pointed with the end of his gun at the wall beside the lift shaft. It looked like some kind of control box. Probably for the lifts, Hallie guessed, given where they were.
“I think you’re right,” Frollo said and muttered a curse. He tried his radio again, but the tightening of his jaw let Hallie know he was still getting static. “Can anyone see what floor that lift car is on?”
“Looks like eight to me,” Caerleon said, leaning forward into the shaft and peering up.
“That’s one of the office floors,” Frollo observed. He still looked grim and Hallie wondered if he was also thinking that, if they’d managed to get into the lifts, Findo and Russet could be anywhere in the building by now.
“I don’t suppose you can get a fix on Findo, can you?” she asked Girard.
He was shaking his head almost before she’d finished the question. “Tried a couple of times. Both him and Welliver. I get nothing. There’s a lot of magic in this building which might be interfering.”
“Well, this part of the engineering section is empty,” Frollo said, the professional calm underlaid with something that sounded like the same tension Hallie was feeling. “We’ll finish the sweep here, then go to the next level.”
Following the others around the empty space of the lift shafts, the back of Hallie’s neck started to itch as if they were being watched.
She looked around, seeing nothing but hard surfaces and shadows, but the feeling wouldn’t leave her.
She’d worked through enough abandoned buildings over the years to know that feeling was not always reliable, so she sent a query to the zauber, which had been still and quiet since it and Hallie had completely drained their energy shielding themselves and Girard from bullets the day before.
The artefact stirred, and she could feel its attention spreading out around them.
After a moment of looking, she caught a sense of puzzlement.
“Hold up,” she called out.
“What is it?” Frollo asked, turning to face her. “Catch something?”
“I don’t know. Feels like we’re being watched,” Hallie said.
“Yeah, I caught that too,” Griff said. “Thought I was imagining it.”
“Everyone look sharp,” Frollo said. The tac team moved a little closer together, facing outward in all directions, even if a couple of them were facing a wall, and edged forward.
As they got to the end of the lift shafts, Hallie caught the faintest glimmer of a light that wasn’t orange, and called out again.
“Motion sensor,” Frollo said, voice grim. “A couple of them. They shouldn’t be here.”
“No reading of explosives here,” Tortain reported, before Frollo could ask. He was holding his gun in one hand, the sensor device in the other. “Not even a trace, which is odd.”
“Why?” Hallie asked.
“Well, engineering equipment can often give a false positive, depending on what chemicals are used,” Tortain answered.
“I do not like this one bit,” Modron said in a low voice. She sounded more annoyed than afraid. A murmur of agreement ran through her colleagues.
“One step at a time,” Frollo said. “Let’s check out these sensors and see if they are attached to anything.”
The sensors, faint red lights glimmering in the dark, turned out to be mounted on either side of a narrow metal door that, when Frollo opened it, led to a set of narrow metal stairs going up.
“Service stairs for the lifts,” Frollo said. He moved into the foot of the stairwell and looked up. “Can’t see a thing. Too dark, and the stairs turn back on themselves too tightly.”
“Let me try,” Hallie suggested, and moved through the group to the stairs.
As she crossed the motion sensors, every hair on her body stood up and she hesitated.
Nothing happened, so she kept going. “Whoever set the sensors knows we’re here,” she said, mostly to herself, as she stopped beside Frollo at the foot of the stairs.
“Nothing we can do about that now,” Frollo said.
To Hallie’s surprise, the air in the stairwell was fresh, rather than the humid, fetid air she’d been breathing in the machine section. “Someone’s been here recently,” she commented, and then asked the zauber if it could sense anything above them.
The artefact stretched its awareness out, spiralling high over their heads, and then let out a silent cry of warning that had Hallie clapping her hands over her ears in a useless attempt to shut out some of the sound.
“Back,” she called out, her own voice scraping through her skull. “Run.”
The team didn’t question her, just moved away from the stairwell as fast as they could, Hallie scrambling to keep up with them.
Frollo slammed the metal door shut behind them and brought up the rear as they ran past the lift shaft.
Not a moment too soon.
There was a scraping, rattling sound from the stairwell followed by a series of explosions, hard and loud in the confined space.
The metal door blew off its hinges at the first explosion, flying out and slamming into a concrete wall, followed by twisted, shattered fragments of metal that must have been the actual stairs.
More explosions followed, the concussive effect throwing Hallie off her feet, face down onto the bare concrete floor, ending up in a pile of warm bodies, bruising across her body from the fall and the various bits of equipment and elbows that jammed into her as the tac team scrambled back to their feet, weapons up, on alert even as Hallie’s head was ringing from the noise.
Moving much more slowly, not quite sure if she was in one piece, she managed to get to her knees and then, with one hand on the wall next to her, to her feet.
Girard was nearby, a long, thin cut on one cheek where a shard of metal must have struck him.
He said something to her that she couldn’t hear.
She shook her head, ears ringing, and he repeated the word, mouthing it carefully.
Even then it took a moment for her eyes and ears to make sense of what he was trying to say. “Grenades.”
It took her a moment to connect the word and the explosions and the rattling sounds that she’d heard just before the door had blown off. She shivered. She would never have considered such a thing. Despite the gun she now carried, she still wasn’t used to the technology of violence.
Then the team was moving, heading back the way they’d come, towards the parking area, moving fast, so that Hallie had to jog to keep up, breathing hard, the ringing in her head gradually fading.
She could feel the pull of energy on her body as it fought to heal her, reducing bruises and swelling, and the faint hum of the zauber.
It sounded distressed. She put a hand over her pocket, where the artefact sat, and sent it a mental thank you for the warning.
The distress faded, but it still seemed unsettled.
They burst out of the engineering section and the tac team kept going, heading for the nearest ramp at a full run.