15. The Glass Cage #2
“You kill me; the timer runs out. You hurt me, I go into shock, I miss the window, the timer runs out. You keep me here without internet access; the timer runs out.” I lean back in the chair, crossing my arms to hide the trembling in my hands.
“So, go ahead. Cut off a finger. See what happens to your client’s career in…
” I glance at the clock on the wall reading 06:15. “two hours.”
Mercer studies me. Silence stretches, thick and suffocating. The generator hums outside. The wind rattles the metal siding as he runs the probability.
A genuine sound of appreciation leaves him.
“Smart. Very smart. You anticipated capture.”
“I anticipated murder.”
“Fine.” He drops the shears back onto the desk and turns to the soldier. “Bring me the laptop from the comms bag. The clean one. And get me a satellite uplink.”
He turns back to me.
“You want to play the game, we’ll play. You have two hours to enter your code.
But you’re going to do it right here, where I can see the screen.
And if I see you trying to send a message.
If I see you typing anything other than a refresh code.
” He leans down, his face inches from mine.
“I won’t cut off your finger. I’ll cut out your tongue. You don’t need speech to type.”
“Deal.”
He straightens, buttoning his coat.
“Take her to the holding area. Secure her. But give her the laptop. Let her see the timer ticking down. It builds character.”
The soldier grabs my arm, hauling me up.
“And, Iris.”
I turn back toward him.
“Don’t get comfortable. Two hours passes fast. Eventually, you have to sleep. Eventually, you have to blink. And when you do, I’ll be there.”
I keep my mouth shut. Letting the soldier drag me out of the office, I focus on my breathing.
We move deeper into the facility.
The air drops colder alongside a stronger smell of rust.
We pass through a heavy steel door onto a catwalk overlooking the main processing floor. A cavernous space, lit by floodlights. Trucks idle below while men move crates.
It’s a staging ground.
The soldier shoves me toward a small room at the end of the catwalk. It’s a glass-walled office, suspended over the drop, acting as the foreman’s observation deck.
He opens the door and shoves me inside.
“Sit.”
A metal desk anchors the room alongside a chair. A cot resides in the corner, holding a thin gray blanket.
He places a ruggedized laptop on the desk, connecting a thick satellite cable to the back.
Then he does something that drops my stomach to the floor.
He reaches to the side of the chassis, flipping a physical toggle switch disabling the network interface card, then locks it in the ‘OFF’ position with a tiny barrel key strung on his dog-tag chain.
The tags swing loose as he leans across me. The little brass key winks on the chain, and his throat, the soft hollow beneath his ear, sits a hand’s width from my face.
Go for the eyes, Iris. Or the throat.
My father’s voice, from a parking garage a lifetime ago, the night he first threaded my keys through my knuckles and told me what to do with them.
I run the triage in a single heartbeat. Fifty feet of open air.
A dozen armed men on the floor below. No door I could reach before they cut me down.
A strike buys three seconds and costs me everything.
So I don’t take the throat.
I take the key.
The rake-and-palm he drilled into me a hundred times, the one I never landed in that garage because Boyd caught my wrist first. Two fingers, the slack of the chain, a flick of the wrist I have owned since I was sixteen.
The barrel key lifts into my fist. The soldier straightens, oblivious, the tags settling back against his chest.
“Mercer’s orders.” He doesn’t look at me again. “The uplink stays dead until he comes up here to watch you type. Prep your code locally. No outbound signals until the boss watches over your shoulder.”
He walks out. The lock clicks.
I’m suddenly alone.
I rush to the door and try the handle. Locked. I press my face against the glass. The entire facility stretches below, the entrance where the SUVs are parked, and the tunnel mouths descending into darkness.
I sit trapped in a glass cage, suspended fifty feet above the ground.
I turn to the laptop. My hands shake so badly I barely hit the keys.
If I wait for Mercer to unlock the network, he’ll stand right here. He’ll see exactly what I type. He’ll realize in five seconds that I’m not pinging an encrypted server in Switzerland, but just typing nonsense into a local command prompt. The bluff dies, and so do I.
I need the network live now so I can build a fake server interface looking authentic before he walks through that door.
I open my fist. The barrel key sits in my palm, warm from the soldier’s skin, a stubby cylinder of cheap brass.
The kind of small, stupid thing that decides whether people live.
My father knew that. He spent his nights teaching a teenager to turn her keys into a weapon, and for fifteen years, I thought the lesson was about the eyes and the throat.
It wasn’t. It was about taking the one piece of metal that opens the door before anyone notices it’s gone.
I fit the key into the lock on the network switch. My hands tremble. I force a breath, regulate, find the same stillness I find with a scalpel poised over an open chest.
It turns.
I slide the switch to the ‘ON’ position.
The network icon on the screen immediately flashes green. The satellite connection goes live.
I don’t waste a second. Opening a command prompt, I type in a string of syntax I picked up from an IT tech at the hospital.
A ping set to loop without end, hammering a list of foreign addresses, so a relentless wall of replies and timeouts scrolls down the black screen and doesn’t stop.
It creates the illusion I’m holding a live link to a secure, partitioned server.
I pull up a desktop clock and set a timer.
02:00:00
I hit enter.
Then I sit back and stare at the screen. The bluff is set. When Mercer walks in, his “secure” laptop will already look like the dead man’s switch actively counting down.
The bluff holds for now. I bought time, but time operates as a finite resource.
I look at the clock.
01:59:50
Boyd is dead.
The thought comes unbidden, a cold whisper in the back of my mind.
He fell. He froze. He’s gone.
Tears prick. Hot. Angry.
No.
I refuse the diagnosis.
He isn’t dead. He’s Boyd Vance. The man executing one-armed pushups on a bad shoulder. The man who held off a tactical squad with twelve bullets.
He’s coming for me. I know it in my gut. All I have to do is stay alive until he gets to me.
Walking to the window, I look out at the snow swirling in the floodlights.
“Come on.” I press my hand against the cold glass. “Find me.”
I scan the tree line, but nothing appears except black trees and white snow.
But then, movement.
Way out on the perimeter. Past the fence line.
A shadow.
It moves differently from the wind-blown branches. It travels with purpose, low to the ground.
It disappears into the dark.
Something catches in my chest, a hitch in my throat that won’t release.
Maybe it was a deer. Maybe it was a trick of the light.
Or maybe it was a promise kept.
I turn back to the laptop, and look at the timer.
01:54:00
I have less than two hours.
If he isn’t here by then, I’m going to have to start a fire.