10. Before the Fall
Before the Fall
Janice
Vegas owns my screens now.
Steve is still beside me, but his attention is buried in Saint-Pierre, listening to Adrian and Victor sit among eleven Legacy families while the Council meeting gets underway. I leave him to it. He has the bunker. I have Forest.
Outside Fontainebleau, the afternoon light is beginning to fade. Hope has been inside that penthouse for hours.
We know where she is. We know who took her. We know the floor.
Getting to her is proving to be the difficult part.
G has duplicated the electronic pass Hope’s captor has used around the hotel and loaded the copy onto Jax’s device. It’s our best chance of finding out how much access the man actually has before Forest commits his team.
“Sending it now,” G says.
A few seconds later, Jax confirms receipt from Vegas. He enters an elevator.
“Mirrored walls, standard floor panel, separate reader for the penthouse levels.”
“Try it.”
Jax holds the duplicate credential to the reader.
Nothing.
He tries again.
“Penthouse floors are still locked.”
“Then his pass isn’t what gets him upstairs,” G says.
Jax studies the panel. “Private elevator?”
“That’d be my bet,” Forest replies through comms. “Separate keycard once he’s inside.”
Which makes sense. The captor could use the hotel credential for ordinary access, then carry a dedicated penthouse card in his pocket for the private elevator.
“Try the stairs,” I say. “Don’t waste time if they’re secured.”
Jax takes the elevator as high as guest access allows, gets out and heads for the stairwell. He climbs several flights at a quick pace before another locked door stops him.
“Steel fire door. Reinforced frame. Electronic lock.”
He tests G’s duplicate.
Red light. A sharp negative beep.
“I can get through it. I just can’t do it quietly.”
He pauses while he considers.
“Should’ve brought the ferret.”
“He’s not HALO qualified,” I tell him. “Done. Come back down.”
“Copy.”
At least we know. No elevator access. No stairwell access. Hope is sitting behind a security layer we can’t duplicate from outside.
Not without making a hell of a lot of noise.
G is already working the problem.
“So the penthouse has separate access.”
“Looks that way,” Forest says. “At least we know what we’re dealing with.”
I look at the Vegas feeds.
Forest has his three mates spread through the hotel and surrounding areas, watching without approaching. Matthias is with the operational team, ready for Hope and for any evidence that Meridian conditioning or drugs are involved. Jax is heading back down. Nobody has attracted attention.
“Janice,” Matthias says.
Something in his voice pulls my attention away from Forest’s position.
“I’m here.”
“There’s a poster in the lobby for a singer performing here tonight. Sandie Cross.”
“That’s your surname.”
“Yes. You’re not going to believe this.”
Now I sit straighter. “Try me.”
“She looks like my sister might look now.” His voice changes slightly. “She’s got our mother’s cheekbones.”
“Thandiwe?”
“I don’t know.” He pauses. “But it could be her.”
When Matthias goes quiet, I can hear the faint shake in his breathing. After ten and a half years of searching, even the possibility that he’s just seen his sister has rattled him.
Forest’s voice remains steady as he checks positions. This is his first command, and I have to remind myself not to fill every silence for him.
My job isn’t to run his team from San Francisco. It’s to make sure he has everything he needs to run it himself.
Mercy sits a few feet away from me, watching Hope’s Beacon location on one of the secondary screens.
She hasn’t asked how long. She knows I can’t answer.
The sky over Las Vegas darkens another shade.
Forest comes back over comms.
“We wait until full dark. Keep eyes on our guy and every penthouse access point. If anything changes, I want to know before he does.”
“And if nothing changes?” I ask.
“Then we stick to the plan.”
“And if he doesn’t leave?”
A brief pause.
“Then we find another way in.”
That’s the answer I wanted.
I check the time.
They’ve got a location, eyes on the exits and a team ready to move.
What they don’t have yet is a door.
And somewhere above them, Hope is waiting for one to open.
Blackstone Ventures HQ, San Francisco. 1730 hours.
Forest comes back over comms while I’m checking the latest positions around Fontainebleau.
“Janice, I’ve got our timing.”
“Go ahead.”
“We leave for Henderson at nineteen-thirty. That gives us forty minutes for the drive if traffic behaves, longer if it doesn’t.”
I pull the timeline onto my screen.
“And you want to be airborne?”
“Twenty-thirty.”
That gives Jax and Matthias another two hours at the hotel before they need to move into their ground roles. More importantly, Forest and his three mates get away from Fontainebleau early enough to gear up without rushing the part of this operation where mistakes come with gravity attached.
“How long from takeoff to jump?”
“Depends how quickly they clear us and how much circling we need while we climb. We’re allowing about forty-five minutes to get to altitude and into position.”
“Jump around twenty-one-fifteen.”
“That’s the target.”
I add it to the operational timeline.
1930. Leave Fontainebleau.
2030. Airborne.
2115. Jump.
Four men dropping through the Nevada night toward a Las Vegas hotel.
I still can’t quite believe this is the plan we settled on.
“Run it through for me again.”
Forest does.
The aircraft gets him and his three mates above the city. They jump together, stay tight during descent, then separate enough for the final approach. The penthouse roof is the objective. From there, Forest takes the lead and the others follow his calls.
Hope comes out with them.
Everything after that depends on what they find when they reach the roof.
“Ground team?” I ask.
“Jax and Matthias. They’ll be ready before we jump.”
“How are you marking the roof?”
“I need G to map the coordinates to Hope’s Beacon location,” Forest says. “Can you get him to pull recent imagery of the roof as well? I want to know exactly what we’re dropping onto.”
“I’ll get him on it.”
“If it’s flat and clear, Hope’s Beacon can give us the live reference on the way down.”
“Wind?”
“Within limits right now. We’ll check again before we leave the hotel, at Henderson and before the jump. If it changes, we adjust.”
That’s what I need to hear. No bravado. No pretending the plan is fixed simply because we’ve spent hours building it.
I glance toward Mercy. She’s listening without interrupting, her eyes still returning to Hope’s Beacon location.
“Once you’re on that roof, how long until you reach Hope?”
“Can’t answer that. Too many unknowns.”
“I know.”
“We move as fast as the situation allows. I’m not charging through a door blind because we’re watching a clock.”
A small smile pulls at my mouth.
Forest’s first command.
He’s doing just fine.
“Keep it that way.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
I narrow my eyes at the speaker.
Jax’s laugh comes faintly through the channel.
Forest continues before I can answer him. “We’ve still got nearly two hours before we leave for Henderson. We use every minute. Keep eyes on our guy and every penthouse access point we can cover. If anything changes, you’ll know.”
“Copy.”
I look over the timeline again.
In less than four hours, Forest and three men are going to step out of an aircraft into the dark.
At the end of that fall is Hope.
And tonight, we’re getting her out.
Blackstone Ventures HQ, San Francisco. 1815 hours.
For once in the past few hours, neither operation is demanding something from me every ten seconds.
Vegas is holding. Forest’s team is maintaining surveillance while G finishes mapping the rooftop and checking the latest imagery. Saint-Pierre is still talking, which means Steve has spent most of the afternoon with one ear tuned to a bunker full of people we’ve been hunting for eighteen months.
I roll my shoulders and look across at him.
“Did you hear Matthias earlier?”
Steve glances away from his screen. “About the singer?”
I nod. “Sandie Cross.”
Mercy turns toward us from the other side of the table. She heard the exchange when it happened, but she’s been so focused on Hope that I’m not sure she’s really processed it.
Steve leans back slightly. “Same surname and she looks like Thandiwe?”
“Like she might look now. Matthias said she has their mother’s cheekbones.”
“Bloody hell.”
That about covers it.
Mercy looks between us. “After ten and a half years?”
“Maybe,” I say. “That’s all we’ve got right now. A maybe.”
“And Matthias is still functioning?”
“Forest has him working. Probably the best thing for him.”
Serenity arrives carrying two large paper bags, with Destiny and Faith behind her balancing another three.
“Working dinner,” Serenity announces. “Because none of you are going anywhere.”
The smell reaches us before the food does.
Kebabs, grilled chicken, lamb, warm flatbread, falafel, hummus, salad and foil-wrapped Turkish wraps start covering the clear end of the conference table. Destiny adds containers of rice and dips while Faith distributes napkins and bottled water.
G looks over from his workstation. “I love this organization.”
“You love free food,” Felicity says.
“Both things can be true.”
I take a bite of my wrap and look across at Steve. “So, while we’ve got five minutes, are you going to tell everyone what we discovered about Adrian?”
Steve’s mouth twitches. “Turns out our resident English lord speaks six languages.”
“Six?” Destiny asks.
“French, German, Italian, Mandarin, Russian and English.”
Destiny considers that while reaching for another kebab.
“Does that make him sexlingual?”
Silence.
Then G loses it. Faith nearly chokes on her food, Felicity bursts out laughing and even Mercy manages a smile.
Steve shakes his head. “I reckon you mean multilingual.”
“I know what I meant.”
“Then they can keep talking while I eat.”
Mercy hesitates until Serenity puts a chicken wrap directly into her hand.
“You need fuel too.”
“I’m not hungry.”
“I didn’t ask.”
That gets the smallest smile out of Mercy, and she unwraps it.