Chapter 36
THIRTY-SIX
Sofia watched them run. The security feed from the alley camera showed Dante pulling Jessica left, away from Broad Street, into the gap between buildings.
Two of Borya's men came through the fire exit four seconds behind them, flashlights cutting the dark.
They went right. Wrong direction. By the time they corrected, Dante and Jessica would be on the side street and moving.
They were going to make it.
She allowed herself one breath for that. Then she picked up the phone.
She didn't dial immediately. She looked at the monitor grid one more time, the main floor still pulsing, the crowd oblivious, the stages still lit.
Borya was on his feet in the darkened alcove, his phone to his ear, his posture rigid.
He was calling the security room. The phone on the desk beside her started ringing. She let it ring.
On the basement feed, nothing had changed.
The corridor, the closed doors, the server rack blinking green.
The two staff at their desk, unaware that the magnetic locks on the service entrance had been disengaged for the past six minutes.
Unaware that everything they maintained was about to become federal evidence.
She dialed Cole. She let it connect and heard the click of the line opening and the half-second of silence before Cole's voice began to form a word, and then she hung up. That was the signal. One ring. He'd know.
She set the phone on the desk. There were footsteps in the hallway.
She'd known they were coming. The moment she'd killed the lights in the alcove, she'd started a second clock—the one that measured how long it would take Borya's people to trace the blackout to its source.
The security room was the obvious answer.
The only answer, really, for anyone who understood the building's systems. She'd estimated two minutes.
It had been closer to four, which meant Borya's men were worse at their jobs than she'd given them credit for.
Either that or the chaos on the main floor had slowed them down.
Either way, four minutes had been enough. The signal was sent. The locks were open. The kill switch was dead. Everything she'd come here to do was done.
The footsteps stopped outside the door.
Sofia stood up from the desk. She straightened the hem of her jacket but she didn't reach for a weapon.
She had one, a knife, but using it would mean a fight, and a fight would mean noise, and noise would mean Borya's attention turning away from the main floor and toward the mezzanine at the exact moment the FBI was coming through the basement door.
She needed him downstairs for another ninety seconds. She could give them that.
The door opened.
The man in the doorway was one of Borya's. He was holding a gun low at his side. He'd clearly been sent to check the security room for an intruder.
“What are you doing in here?” he said.
Sofia looked at him. She calculated the distance between them—six feet, maybe seven—and the angle of the gun, and the likelihood that he'd been told to shoot versus the likelihood that he'd been told to report.
Borya's men reported. That was the culture.
You didn't make decisions; you relayed information and waited for the man above you to tell you what the decision was.
He'd call it in.
Ninety seconds. She needed to buy ninety seconds.
“Close the door,” she said. Her voice carried the authority she'd spent four years perfecting the voice of a woman who operated at Borya's level, who gave instructions rather than received them.
The man hesitated. The hesitation was the gap she needed.
She moved.
Not toward him. Toward the console. Her hand found the intercom panel and she hit the building-wide channel—every speaker in the Dollhouse, main floor to basement, all of them live— and she leaned into the microphone and said three words in a voice loud enough to cut through the bass line and the noise and the pink-lit oblivion of three hundred people having a Friday night.
“FBI. Get out.”
The effect was instantaneous. She heard it through the monitors before she heard it through the walls: the music cutting out, replaced by the sound of three hundred people processing the word FBI simultaneously.
It sounded like a single collective gasp followed by scrape of chairs and the crash of glasses and the first screams.
The man in the doorway turned toward the sound and Sofia used the fraction.
She hit him low, driving her shoulder into his midsection, using the momentum to slam him into the doorframe.
The gun went off, a single shot that punched into the ceiling and rained plaster.
Then they were on the floor, tangled in the doorway, and she felt his weight shift as he tried to bring the weapon around.
Her hand found the knife.
It was fast. It was the thing she'd always been best at. She sunk it into the man’s side, below his ribs and directed upwards. A sharp thrust that made him scream.
He rolled off her and she scrambled free.
She pulled herself up using the doorframe.
There was blood on her jacket, some of it his and some of it hers.
The gun had gone off between them, the muzzle pressed against her side when it fired, and she'd felt the impact before she'd felt the pain.
It was a deep, concussive punch beneath her ribs that had rearranged something fundamental inside her.
She leaned against the wall. Breathing was different now. Shorter, wetter, each inhale catching on something.
From below, the sound of the building coming apart.
The FBI was inside—she could hear the commands, the organized shouting that was different from the civilian panic, the specific vocabulary of a federal raid in progress.
Cole's team, through the service entrance, into the basement.
The front team would be coming through the main entrance now, meeting the flood of civilians pouring out.
She slid down the wall until she was sitting.
The blood was coming faster now, pooling beneath her hand, soaking through the jacket into the carpet in a slow, warm spread that she could feel but couldn't stop.
She pressed harder. It didn't help. The wound was below her hand, deeper than her hand could reach, and the pressure that had always been enough—in every other situation, in every other room—wasn't enough here.
She reached into the inside pocket of her jacket. The medal was where it always was. Her thumb found the blank space where the Saint’s face had been and pressed into it.
The edges of the hallway dimmed. The medal grew warmer in her hand, or her hand grew colder around it—she couldn't tell which, and then she couldn't tell much of anything, and the last thing she was aware of was the silver pressing into her thumb and the distant, fading sound of a building being taken apart, piece by piece, by people she had let in through the doors.