CHAPTER 22 #2
“Everybody stand down and step off the plate.” The oldest of them said it and meant it.
The one who had swung was on the plate with a knee in his back before he had the butt down. The rest of them put their weapons on the concrete and stepped away from them.
“Luca, you are bleeding into your eye.” Cassian was already at the roller and had it moving. “Hold this door and keep it open.”
“I will hold the door. Talking is all I am good for on stairs.”
The garage stair went down with a rail on the left and I took it with my right shoulder on the wall. The block work between the landings was cold and gritty and it helped.
The mantraps stand between the garage and the cage in sub-level two. The first one cycled for us because Sasha had the reader. The second one did not.
“First door is clear,” Cassian said. “Matteo, mind the frame behind me.”
“The second one fails closed and it will try to shut.”
“Hold this door with your body if you have to. Nobody closes it behind us.”
“I have the frame. Go through wide and do not wait for me.”
Cassian got both hands into the gap and the steel came against him hard. Somebody put a blade through at his arms and it ran along his right forearm from the wrist up. He held the edge until Rian was through and I was through, and the blood went down the frame in a stripe.
“It is my forearm and it still works.” He shook the hand once and closed it again. “Keep moving and leave it alone.”
Rian stopped on the sub-level two stair with his back against the wall.
His right hand went inside his coat and came out with the medal on its black cord, worn thin along one edge.
He tried to lift the left arm to shoulder height and the shoulder would not give it to him.
So he pushed the medal into my hand and closed my fingers over it with his thumb.
Neither of us said one word about it. I put it in my shirt pocket, flat against my chest, and went down the last steps behind him.
“Get her out ahead of me,” he said.
The corridor past the second mantrap ran straight at the cage door. Kranz was standing at it with his back to the steel, with the same courtesy he had used through my door.
“You are one arm short, Mr. Doyle, and nothing about this hurries me.”
I stopped at the corner of the corridor and I did not get any closer than that.
Kranz went for the side that would not come up and he was right about it.
The hit landed under Rian’s left shoulder and turned him half around, and any other day he would have blocked it.
Rian took it and kept coming and put his right hand in.
The knife went in below the collarbone and Rian leaned his weight onto it once. Kranz sat down against the cage door with his mouth open and his hands loose. It took less time than the sentence he had spent on the way in. Rian stepped back and let him go down and left him where he fell.
I watched all of it from the corner and I did not look away from any part of it.
The cage door was open behind him. She was at the far end of it with her back against the racks and her hair down. That was all the corner gave me, and it was enough to move me off the wall.
The distance from that corner to that door is about the length of the corridor at home. I walked this one with my hand already out in front of me.
There were marks on her left upper arm in the shape of a hand. I saw them and left them where they were, because they were not mine to count.
“He could not make me use it,” she said. “The terminal is air-gapped and I said no.”
“The key is in my hand. I am not putting it down for anybody.”
It was in her right hand with dried blood around the crack in the barrel. Her other hand was closed, and I knew what was inside it without asking her to open it. I took the medal out of my pocket and opened the cord with my thumbs.
Her hair was down and I had to lift it off her neck to get the cord underneath. The steel went where it goes, flat under the notch of her throat, and the weight settled against her. She put her hand over it and held it there.
“You were on time. You were exactly on time and I want you to hear it.”
I had no words at that end of a corridor. I put two fingers on her sternum and tapped twice, and she tapped back above the pocket where the medal had been.
“Somebody needs to tell Sasha that she found the right building.”
“She knows. I told her in the vehicle on the way in.”
“Tell her again in front of people.” She was still holding the steel. “Use her whole name when you do it.”
We came back out through the second mantrap. Cassian was still holding the frame and bleeding down the steel. Luca had come down with gauze pressed above his eyebrow.
“Head wounds bleed like this and mean nothing,” he said.
Rian had walked out of the cage beside her, not over his shoulder. He stopped at the mantrap door and looked at her properly for the first time since the corridor.
“You’re not a job. You never were. I’d have come anyway.”
She did not answer him with anything. She got her hand round the back of his skull and held on while he breathed.
Cassian said it from the frame. “Put it on the ground, sit down, and say nothing at all until counsel gets here.”
Rian laid the knife on the concrete and pushed it away with his boot. Then he walked back to the cage door and sat down with his spine against the steel.
“Nobody speaks to the police before counsel arrives.” Luca said it to all of us and then said it again to the dock on the radio. “That includes the man bleeding on me.”
“I want Monday, and a lawyer who is not me.” She was watching Rian on the concrete while she said it. “Then I want all four of you sitting down.”
The rain was still coming down the ramp above us. She turned to watch him and her shoulder came against my arm and stayed there. I put my hand flat on her back and left it there, and there was no distance left to measure.