21 - Sam
G ROUPED TOGETHER IN S AM’S DAD’S studio, Sam, Frida, and Ari watched the monitor showing the security camera view of the building lobby.
They saw Raul come out from behind the doorman alcove with his hands up.
One of the masked gunmen raised his gun and must have fired, because Raul crumpled to the floor.
“Oh, fuck,” Sam said, trying to push down panic. Keahilani and Noble One’s bad guys were serious . Was Raul dead? Was Nico okay?
“We need to go,” Sam said.
“They’ve grounded all four elevators.” Ari pointed to the other security views showing the masked gunmen calling all the elevators to the lobby and pulling the stop buttons.
“We’re sure these thirteenth-floor jerks are coming for us?” Frida asked, not wanting to believe it.
Sam nodded.
He wasn’t going to get trapped in his own condo, and for sure he wasn’t going to let his friends get shot.
They’d shot Raul! And it was Sam’s fault! The thirteenth floor would never have shown up at their building if it weren’t for him .
Sam pushed it from his mind. He’d deal with his messy emotions later.
Right now he needed a plan. He ran to the kitchen island, where Byron’s bee drone assembly unit was in the middle of making another drone.
He picked up the last glass vial that had any liquid tranquilizer left.
“Byron, how much of the tranquilizer does it take to put someone to sleep?”
Byron spoke in his ear. “Twenty milliliters.”
The graduated scale lines on the squat vial showed it held thirty milliliters. And it was only half full.
Sam drew the liquid into the syringe. It wasn’t nearly enough, but it was a weapon. Sort of.
“Does it go in muscle or vein?” Sam asked as he capped it and stashed it in his pocket.
“Vein’s faster, but you don’t want anyone to bleed out,” Byron said. “For the bee drones I calculated for muscle. There should be six new ones ready to go.” Sam opened a drawer on the main fabrication unit, where six bee drones lay charging.
“Can we control them?” Sam asked.
“Yes. By my new hummingbird drone there’s a controller—it will do both,” Byron said in Sam’s ear. “If it helps, I can control them from here too.”
Sam scooped the bees into his shirt pocket and grabbed the controller by Byron’s gray-and-yellow feathered hummingbird drone. He’d need to leave that behind.
“Stand by,” Sam told Byron.
Newly armed, he returned to the studio.
Frida updated him. “One guy’s guarding the stair exit to the lobby, and this other one’s pretending to be the doorman.”
“Which leaves six coming for us.” Ari tapped the screen showing the interior of one of the elevators. Six bulky men with weapons and ski masks loaded into the elevator car. One rolled a stack of equipment on a dolly with him.
“What about the trash dock?” Sam asked Ari. “Where Hergenreder broke in and started that fire?”
Frida confirmed. “No one’s there. There are only eight of them.”
Which still meant the three of them were outnumbered.
“They just pressed 42!” Ari sounded on the verge of freaking out themselves.
They were definitely coming for Sam and his friends.
The moment from Diamonds Are Forever Nico had texted him about flashed into Sam’s mind—when Connery-Bond rides on top of that outdoor elevator all the way up the high-rise to break into Willard Whyte’s penthouse. Bond looked so smooth and unflappable in that moment.
And hiding on top of the elevator car had worked for Nico when he escaped Hergenreder’s Institute…
Sam barked it like an order: “Take the stairs up one flight!”
Ari protested as they unplugged the computer from the monitors and flipped it to tablet mode. “But we need to go down. Trash dock’s under the lobby.”
“We need to not get caught,” Sam insisted. “Those are guns. Up to forty-three—go! I’m right behind you!”
Sam ran to the kitchen and opened the oven door, yanking out one of the steel racks. He spoke into his earpiece. “Byron, get ready to use your hummingbird drone to flip the security latch in here. That will slow them down.”
“On it,” Byron said in his ear.
Sam closed the condo door behind him and used the same key to turn the lock and the deadbolt. He could hear Frida and Ari hustling up the stairwell.
“Now, Byron.”
Inside the condo, the gray-and-yellow hummingbird drone flew to the front door and with its robotic feet grabbed the metal security latch that was over the door frame. The drone flapped its wings, but the latch only moved a quarter inch.
Byron tried another way. He slid the drone’s beak under the metal, using the tiny drone’s weight to push the latch instead.
It worked, and with gray-and-yellow wings a blur of motion the drone got the security latch to lie flat against the door—the metal ball locking the door in place.
“Done,” Byron said as he flew the hummingbird drone to another woven art basket above the kitchen cabinets and hid it there, camera eye looking back on the hallway by the entrance door.
Sam raced to the stairway, smoothly shutting the door all the way behind him and then taking the stairs two at a time to get up to forty-three. He could feel the seconds ticking fast.
“Byron, have your AI crank the TV volume in the condo. We don’t want them to think we left.”
“Roger that”—Byron’s voice in his ear.
“Frida, which elevator shaft are they in?” Sam’s breath was wild.
“Facing it, the right one.”
Sam burst into the hallway of forty-three and eased the door shut behind him as quietly as he could. Frida and Ari stood by the elevators, unsure of the plan.
Sam wedged the oven rack two inches in between the exterior elevator doors on the right. And then pulled like hell to lever the doors open.
The doors parted three inches, and they heard the DING of the elevator arriving one floor below them.
Frida signaled them to be silent.
Help me , Sam mouthed as he set down the oven rack and tugged on the left door edge to open it further.
Frida and Ari grabbed the right door edge.
Together, they all pulled to widen the opening.
When it was three feet wide, Sam slid the oven rack into the opening between the doors like a doormat.
The tempered steel kept the doors from closing.
The roof of the elevator car was right there, one foot below them.
In the center was a raised metal box for the fancy light fixture inside, with plenty of room for the three of them to stand around it.
Frida went first, helped Ari, and then Sam stepped over.
He grabbed the oven rack and pulled it with him as he went.
The exterior elevator doors slid shut.
Ari’s tablet showed them the hallway security camera view of Sam’s condo door.
The thirteenth-floor team wasn’t even going through the door!
They were cutting a small rectangle through the wallpapered drywall to the left of the door and were breaking in that way.
One guy was using a plasma torch to cut through the metal framing, and a giant arc of sparks flew around his safety helmet.
“That’s not going to take them long,” Frida said quietly.
“Can we use one of the bees to press the button for G?” Sam whispered to Byron, eyeing the light fixture air vents by their feet.
“I don’t… where you are…” Byron’s voice was staticky and broken up in Sam’s ear. “…better… yourself.”
Sam wished he’d gotten a chance to practice, but it was kind of like a video game. His fingers danced on the controller and one of the bee drones in his shirt pocket animated, flying up and then down into the elevator. He had it bump the G button. Nothing happened.
“It’s not strong enough,” Sam said.
“Two bees?” Ari suggested.
“Two bees or not two bees…” Frida started, and Ari shot her a look like Now?
“I’ll try faster,” Sam said. He backed the drone up to the elevator wall and advanced it full speed into the button. TIC. The G button lit up.
Sam pumped a fist, and the elevator car jerked below their feet, descending fast.
His ears always popped around thirty-two, but being in the elevator shaft was different. The wind whistled past them as he flew the bee back to his pocket. Sam hoped with all his might that his plan would work and not get anyone else—not get any of them—killed.
Two floors below the lobby, the garden level had the community room and the tiny bit of green space that was basically a dog park.
With the elevator car stopping there, they’d be even with the trash dock and laundry room on level M, one flight below the lobby.
It was how trash from their building got out through a service alley to Eighty-Eighth Street for pickup.
Nobody in Sam’s building—certainly not his parents—wanted to walk by piles of trash when they went in or out of the lobby of their home.
The elevator car slowed and stopped. A white M was painted on the interior of the doors to the mezzanine level just one foot up from the elevator roof they were on. Sam wedged his trusty oven rack in between the car doors and levered the hell out of it.
Frida grabbed the other edge and the two of them pulled the doors open wide enough for Sam to set down the oven rack so they could slide over it.
“The lobby guy just noticed the elevator’s on G—hurry!” Ari was watching the security views on their tablet. “He’s going to call the car up!”
“Go, go, go!” Sam’s heart was pounding madly as he pushed Ari and then Frida to safety. He jumped through the opening himself just as the elevator car started to rise. He whipped the oven rack out and the doors slid shut behind him.
The empty elevator DING ed as it arrived at the lobby level one floor up.
They were in a messy pile on the floor but were safe. They’d made it.
1018
Time toImpact: 01hrs41min17sec
Sam, Ari, and Frida walked up the service alley to Eighty-Eighth Street.
“They just got in the apartment,” Ari reported on the security camera view they saw on their tablet.
“They’re going to be pretty disappointed,” Frida said gleefully.
Sam smirked. He had to admit he felt pretty badass.
Pretty magical penis swagger.
Pretty Bond.
But then he remembered he didn’t know where Nico was. Or if he was safe.
And that Raul was dead.
And he didn’t feel like Bond at all.