31. August 25, 2024
Daleyza
The couple looked at each other, then swiftly moved through the portion of the room they had touched, putting things back the way they found them, as best they could.
Once finished, they sped out into the hallway, closed the door, removed the skimmer, and took off for the end of the tunnel they’d originally been traveling in.
At the end of the hallway, they met their next obstacle.
“Midas, we’re at the end of the tunnel. We’ve got a garage door-style entryway, capable of something as wide as a forklift, a golf cart, or something slightly larger. Definitely not a truck. Also, another digital panel for coded entry. I’m putting the skimmer in place now.”
It was the same exact size as the previous panel, so he didn’t even need to change the dimensions.
“Checking for possible entry points on the security cameras first,” Midas informed them.
Daleyza tapped Ildefanso on the shoulder. “What do we do if there are people on the other side?”
He slid a gun out of his shoulder holster and took the safety off.
Blowing out all the air in her lungs, she did the same.
“Looks like we’ve got unfriendlies. Cerberus has some firecrackers ready topside. He’s going to set those off, and we’ll let the games begin. Hopefully, we distract security and send the underside workers scrambling.”
“And if it doesn’t?” Ildefanso asked.
“Then we go to plan B.”
“I hate plan B.”
“No, you hate subset plans. We all do.”
Concern flooded her system. “What does he mean by subset plans?”
“We plan contingencies. Then we’ll plan contingencies for contingencies.
So let’s say we plan to go through door A.
Suddenly, door A has unexpected guests behind it.
We have plans AA, AB, AC, and so on, for dealing with said guests.
Usually that’s Waters’ job because his jacked-up brain thinks up the craziest shit that could go wrong—”
“And often does,” Midas reminded him.
“And often does,” he agreed. “But he’s not here, so instead of him, we had to rely on our less jacked-up brains.”
“Ah. Part of why you had the headache and the tense shoulders yesterday.”
He snorted. “More like since Maico showed up at my crash pad, threatening you and Madre.”
“I’m sorry,” she apologized.
“Don’t. Never apologize.” He smiled. “No matter what, it brought you back into my life, and even if it ended today, it would be worth it. Headaches and all.”
There was a sniffle over the comm. Gem sniffled. “That was beautiful, Steel.”
He groaned. “Sorry,” he told Daleyza. “A little warning next time, Midas, before you patch people in.”
“Oops.” Yeah. He didn’t sound very apologetic to her.
“I kind of liked being publicly claimed,” she teased.
Now he rolled his eyes at her. “Dios Mío.” He switched to Spanish. “Siempre te amaré, belleza. Hasta que mi corazón deje de latir y me falte el aliento.”
“Sabes que algunas de ellas hablan espanol, ?verdad?”
“Hey!” Nemo chimed in. “Remember, some of us need subtitles!”
They laughed. “Pero Nemo no lo hace. Y me encanta fastidiarlo más que casi cualquier otra cosa en la vida.”
“Casi todo, ?eh?”
“Sí.”
“Not to interrupt the Spanish soap opera here,” Midas said, “but get ready for the click-click-boom.”
Two seconds later, a soft boom sounded as if it came from a long way away. “Oops. There went the motor pool,” Midas informed them.
“You boys say ‘oops’ a lot,” Daleyza said.
“You have no idea,” Ildefanso told her.
From behind the garage door, an emergency klaxon went off. “Workers are scattering,” reported Midas. “Start the skimmer.”
Ildefanso pressed the button, and they waited impatiently for the password to encode.
Well, she waited impatiently. He stood still as a statue, no expression on his face, registering no reaction with each number or letter that clicked in place.
When all but the last were there, he raised his gun into a high-ready cover position.
Daleyza immediately matched him in low ready.
The skimmer beeped, and the door began to rise.
When it did so slowly, both ducked to the side, flattening themselves against the wall.
All they heard was the emergency system trilling like a fire alarm and a computerized voice giving calm, even instructions to exit the warehouse and proceed to their assigned safe positions.
When the door was at its full open position, he popped the skimmer off and tossed it to her. Once pocketed, they both swung out into their cover positions.
“The warehouse appears to be empty.”
“Good. Stay put for a couple of minutes. I’m looping the feeds. Demon is headed your way. Should be there in less than two minutes.”
“I thought he was waiting under Gem and Nemo,” she said to Ildefanso.
“They must be done and over the top of the cliff, on to the next step of their job,” he replied.
“Why is he coming here?”
“Because when we find Waters and Ka-Bar, they’re likely to be in pretty bad shape. As our medic, he’ll be able to assess them quickly and determine how to move them with minimal damage. Besides, I can’t carry both of them, and you won’t be able to carry either of them.”
She hadn’t thought of that.
A soft echo of padded feet came from down the hallway, and both turned to see Demon moving as lightly and speedily as possible. His lean swimmer’s body was all grace and flow as he ran, and Daleyza would have been hard-pressed to deny his dangerous attractiveness.
When he stopped beside her, she could smell the fresh lake water, the clean winter night, and a hint of his darkness. Even without knowing his story, it was easy to cast this man as a fallen angel, the servant of a dark lord.
But where he was the gray shadow that walked through the night, Ildefanso lived in the shadows he created—reveling in them. He was the devil other men served, and they were proud to do so. Eager to follow him. Begging to do his bidding. Willing to sacrifice themselves for him.
While it should have frightened her, it never did.
And why? Because he had never turned that darkness on her.
Instead, he kept her outside his world, living in the light.
Free to sparkle in the sunshine and burn radiantly, brightening the edges of the prison he dwelled within.
Allowing her to draw him out of the abyss, at least long enough to retain some of his humanity.
It wasn’t that she didn’t have darkness within her. She did. But she had fought her way out of it because her nature didn’t allow her to live in it. He, however, had been forced there against his will and conditioned to it. Unable to escape.
Just as she drew him to the light, he drew her to the darkness. Both sides held power, but where the light was all that was courtship and tenderness, the dark was seduction and passion. A constant push and pull between their two natures is what made them so volatile.
“Which way do we go?” Demon asked.
“Midas,” Ildefanso called out. “Double-check our positioning.”
“You’re under the far end of the residence. There should be an entrance on the opposite side of the warehouse. You’re actually not far enough underground yet.”
“Perhaps there’s another door on the opposite wall,” Daleyza suggested. “One that will take us lower.”
“We’ll start there.”
The three of them crossed the warehouse at a low run through the aisles, past the tables of product being packaged. On the far wall, glass windows looked into the lab area, where the product was processed. There was nowhere for a door to go further underground.
Daleyza, hands on hips, blew out a frustrated sigh. “There’s nothing here.”
Demon looked behind him. “Well, we’ve established one key point.
We’ve got a processing area”—he pointed to each area—“a packaging area, and a shipment area.” He crossed to one of the tables and picked up a kilo-sized brick.
He turned the top of it toward Ildefanso to show him the stamped logo.
A red horse. “And we’ve also confirmed this is shipping to the Colonel Cartel. We have our connection.”
“Let’s just hope, in a perverse way, we’re right about everything else,” Ildefanso said.
He threw the brick back on the table. “We’re right. We’re almost never wrong. So there’s no door here. For some reason, the facility here doesn’t connect to the area beneath the church. Fine. It’s not optimal, but we find a way upstairs, we get to the church.”
“Other than that garage door, I don’t see any other entrances and exits, do you?” Daleyza asked.
“No,” Midas confirmed. “I was too busy looping cameras, and believe it or not, none of the views show any doors or windows, which is really odd. There had to be fifty people inside this room when that alarm went off, and they didn’t just vanish into thin air.
They had to go somewhere. Based on what I could see, they all appeared to go north. ”
The threesome headed to the north end of the warehouse, where they found a long alcove set off from the main room by a set of six archways.
The alcove had no entrance or exit other than back into the warehouse.
All that was in the space was a decorative wall, fashioned like a barn, with wooden slats running top to bottom, held together by a top and bottom slat.
Every twenty feet, another set of two slats crossed diagonally from the four corners, so the wall looked like a series of barn doors.
Hanging on the decorative wall were black-and-white photos of the mission over the last hundred years.
“This is bizarre,” Demon mused. “What’s the point of a four-foot gap between these arches and the wall?”
Steel was looking at the ceiling’s corners. “No cameras. That’s even more bizarre.”
Daleyza looked back and forth between the two features, slowly walking to the eastern wall. She got down as far as another X feature when she stopped. “Over here!” she called to them.
Both men walked up behind her and looked where she was focused.
“I almost missed it,” she said apologetically.
Together, they surveyed the slats, even running their hands up and down them, looking for whatever she saw.
Finally, Demon found it. A red glow came from between two of the slats.
He handed his rifle to Daleyza. Turning to Steel, he instructed, “There’s an elevator behind this wall. Run your hands along the bottom and look for a break in the seams. Probably near the tops and bottoms of the X’s.”
One man worked on one side, the other took the opposite side. There was a loud clicking sound, like a bolt being shot from its casing. “Found it!” Steel yelled. “Help me. I’ll pull. You push.”
Together, the two men put pressure in opposite directions, allowing the fake wooden door to slide open, revealing two massive elevators that would hold twenty to thirty people each.
“That explains why there are no cameras in here and the space after the arches. They didn’t want anyone to know this elevator was here.”
“That seems strange. Why would it matter?”
Demon and Steel shared a look.
“The cameras are for internal security only,” Demon explained.
“The cameras in the warehouse portion are to make sure no one is stealing the product. Besides that, people getting into the space would be an issue, not out.”
“Which means that wherever these elevators come out, there are going to be stationed guards,” Ildefanso surmised. “It’s time for plan C, Midas! We need security out of our way.”
“Gotcha covered. Keep on the line for good tidings.”
“What is he going to do?”
“More distractions. Cerberus will have planted all kinds of party favors around the property for different situations. He’ll set something off, try to get everyone to move toward that instead of wherever we are. Or at least lessen the number of unfriendlies we have to deal with.”
“What if there are guards at these elevators, and they don’t move?” she asked. “We’ll be sitting ducks when the doors open.”
“We’ll have a slight advantage. They’ll have to be out in the open to shoot at us because they’re shooting into a box.
” He pulled her into the elevator carriage to show her.
“If you stand here by the control panel, you have some cover from the front of the wall because the walls are smaller than the door opening. We can shoot from an angle. They have to shoot straight in. Bullets don’t bend around corners. ”
“That’s not all that much of an advantage.”
“Nope, but it’s something, so we’re going to have to make it work.”
“Or pray the guards run off at the distraction,” Demon added.
Midas came back online. “Okay, God, Loki, and Gilgamesh are storming the towers in three, two, one, mark.”
Two seconds later, there were three loud booms split seconds apart.
Demon looked at Steel. “Think they told Nemo and Gem they were firing?”
Steel considered the idea for a moment. “I’d say the odds are sixty/forty they didn’t fire at the tower they were supposed to be hanging off.”
“What?” squeaked Daleyza.
“Gem’s basically a human cat. She’s got at least three lives left. It’s all good.”
Was he serious?
Then she saw it. A twitch at the corner of his mouth.
“Eres un gilipollas,” she groused.
“It’s Nemo, babe. We’ve had bets on where he bites it for years. If it hasn’t happened by now, it won’t. Idiots lived charmed lives.”
“And as much as Midas wants to strangle him on a regular basis, he’d never let one of us put Nemo in that position,” Demon insisted. “Don’t worry, Gloriosa.”
The features on her face tightened. “Did you just call me ‘Glorious’?”
“Umm… yes?”
“You’re not sure?”
“No. I’m sure. It’s… a nickname.”
Ildefanso frowned.
Demon threw his hands up. “She didn’t have one. You didn’t give her one, and the rest of us had to talk about something while you two sorted your shit out. Things have been a little busy to notify you officially,” he snarked.
“I’m so confused,” Daleyza said.
Her husband was staring at Demon, but he spoke to her. “Our clients all get nicknames. When the women were claimed, we kept them in place, and we don’t use their real names as a way to protect them. That way, if anyone ever heard us talking about them, they wouldn’t know who they were. In theory.”
Demon listed them off. “Kubrick. Flame. Gem. Cherry. Mouse. Gloriosa. It’s what we’ve been calling you,” he explained.
“Why Gloriosa?”
Now Demon looked a little uncomfortable, flashing a look at Ildefanso. “Midas, we clear?”
She squinted at him, but he suddenly became very interested in the elevator controls.
“Bringing you topside now, Loose Lips.” There was laughter behind Midas’ voice. “And I won the bet as to who’d let it slip. Everyone, pay up to my bank app when you’re in the clear.”
“Feckin’ ridiculous,” Demon grumbled.
The elevator began moving upward, and there was no time to discuss it further as they checked their weapons.