Final Shadows, page 25
Still, Miranda appreciated the heads-up.
Take great care, beloved.
Yes. I will. You too.
Miranda stirred, closed her eyes briefly, then looked at her waiting team. The sky was just beginning to, faintly, lighten in the east, but she wouldn’t have needed the extra light to see them all. Calm faces, trained and athletic bodies relaxed in that deceptive way only people of action ever were.
“Let’s move,” she said softly.
TWENTY-ONE
Tasha knew she shouldn’t be so tense. The others weren’t, she knew. Robin and David. Very alert, yes, but not tense. She could feel that through the increasingly strong link between all of them—and others, distant and yet coming nearer, following the link they all shared. Everyone intent, focused. And what she sensed through her connection with Brodie was the same, his concentration, his focus.
What she should have been feeling, thinking.
And they had, after all, gained entry to the building with almost ridiculous ease on this Sunday morning. The door codes Tucker had provided—and the tiny metallic “biometrics” Murphy had somehow persuaded Duran to supply, each secured to their forearms with an organic tape that would read as their own skin—had made getting in through doors and past scanners they knew were there but never saw a fast and simple process.
So what was bugging her?
She had been aware, on some level of her mind, of Sarah’s quiet voice checking off the boxes of today’s operations as each was completed. The shadow houses and clinics raided, the Stepford moms and their unborn babies safely away. A dozen field operations halted in quick succession, a number of the soldiers of Sebring’s faction and three of Duran’s—very carefully selected—taken out.
All smoothly, as planned.
Tucker or one of their other technical geniuses had hacked into the supposedly unhackable building’s security to make sure that the scanners would record only residents going up to their apartments after, perhaps, a morning run, since they were all casually dressed as though they had done just that. No scanner would note that the elevator stopped briefly on a certain floor, or that the “residents” got out there.
No camera would see them, their blank electronic stares on a peaceful loop monitored by a technical genius perhaps far away who would return the cameras to good working order as soon as the right people began arriving.
Which was, they had been told, less than an hour away.
The big boardroom, still empty, was where it was supposed to be, no receptionist or executive assistant in the foyer space outside it, the doors to executive offices lining the long hallway closed and locked.
They checked everything. Double-checked that all was as it was supposed to be so early on a seemingly peaceful Sunday morning.
As Brodie and David were checking the stairwells for a final time, Robin slid up beside Tasha, frowning.
“What is it?” Her voice was low.
Tasha bit her lip, then shook her head. “I don’t know. Everything is just the way it’s supposed to be. Right?”
“Yeah.” Robin’s frown deepened. “But you’re feeling something else. Deeper than thought. Maybe instinct. You’ve never been here before?”
“No, never.”
Robin glanced at the watch on her wrist, then grimaced when she realized it had stopped, and shifted her gaze to a clock behind the receptionist’s desk, where decorative indoor “trees” were intended to soften the very sterile look of the area. “I know you’ve been getting the verifications, same as me. The rescue operations down south have been completed successfully. The suits should be getting the word from Duran. Once they learn more than fifty shadow houses have been raided, the women and kids gone, caretakers left sedated, and that a dozen field operations this morning have been stopped, the bosses will want to meet here ASAP.”
“Here in less than an hour, I know.”
“We have people from the Chicago cell all around us,” Robin reminded her. “They know who should be here and who shouldn’t, know the schedules, the cleaning crews, which security guards patrol, and where, and when. They know this place as well as they know their own homes. And they’re busy, constantly monitoring the security, watching from nearby buildings, just in case something goes wrong, just in case they’re needed.”
“I know. I know.” Tasha wanted to relax, but something was tapping away inside her, deep inside her, a weird, dark fear she couldn’t shake.
Robin gripped her arm. “Tasha, we have to be on the same page here. We all have to be concentrating on the same thing. We’re going to be rewiring these guys, reprogramming their brains, and it’ll take all the concentration we’ve got plus all the concentration of those we’re linked with to pull it off. You get that, right?”
“Of course I do. Of course.” Tasha straightened her shoulders, only then realizing they had been slumped, almost as if her instinct was to hide herself.
No wonder Robin was concerned.
“Okay,” the other woman was saying, her voice calm again. “The guys are heading back our way, and when they get here we all just follow the plan. We take up our positions outside on that pretty, very expensive terrace wasted on a boardroom, where more of these nice potted trees will give us shade and cover.”
“But allow us to see in. To see the suits. Yeah, I remember.” Tasha turned along with Robin, both of them watching their men returning to them, briskly but without making a sound on the carpeted hallway.
Tasha stepped forward to meet Brodie, about to say something casual or reassuring to ease the sudden attention and concern she could feel. But even as she opened her mouth, she realized abruptly that one of the trees behind the receptionist’s desk was casting a shadow, the wrong kind of shadow.
Faster than thought she turned her head, everything in her mind reaching out to probe, instantly aware of coldness and darkness and something slimy, something to fear. And as quickly as that, she saw the other woman, stepping out of the shadow that had hidden her, her lovely, exotic face twisted in hate, her arm extending, the wicked black gun with its deadly long silencer pointed straight at Tasha’s head.
And Tasha knew.
Sebring. Nobody reported in that they got Sebring!
* * *
• • •
Miranda’s team breached the “way past pretty damned good” security of the lab with barely a pause, thanks to a solid plan, seamless teamwork—and Tucker’s genius.
The guard at the gate never saw them coming, never saw the gun in Miranda’s hand that sneezed softly and sent him on his way to hell. Another of her team acted almost in the same instant to push the guard back into his innocuous little post and closed the door so that the post looked empty. As if the guard had, perhaps, merely stepped away to answer the call of nature.
Knowing that the cameras were looped and showing nothing interesting to the guards inside the building who were watching their monitors, Miranda used the door code Tucker had promised would not betray them in any way, and found him as usual as good as his word. The door code and the “biometrics” implants they wore taped to the inside of their forearms beneath the long sleeves of their black jumpsuits allowed them to slip in quickly and without making a sound to betray them.
She knew another part of her team was entering the rear of the building, knew they too had entered in silence, unseen.
The guards in the security room managed to get to their feet, but not one weapon cleared their belts—and not one finger reached the alarm button.
The team moved swiftly then, clearing the main floor without haste but quickly nevertheless, making certain no threat lurked in any room or any corner. The other psychic on their team was sent up to the second floor, along with two other team members, with orders to locate and tranquilize the two psychics and take them out of the building once the rest of that floor was cleared of any threat.
Some of the computer storage they expected to find was just where the floor plans showed, though the computers, as Duran had warned, did not resemble any computers Miranda or her team had ever seen. But the four people assigned the task knew what to look for and how to transfer all files into the storage devices they carried in backpacks.
“Good to go?” Miranda paused in the doorway just long enough to check with one of her information retrieval team. She kept her voice low, the clock in her head ticking off the seconds.
“Yeah, we’re good.” She was staring fixedly at a screen that had appeared like a hologram to hover in the air before her, on which lines and lines of information appeared, first in a strange, symbolic language like hieroglyphs and then wavering and transforming into English and mathematical equations. “Our Rosetta stone’s working like a charm. Ten minutes, Miranda, maybe less.”
“Good. The data storage on the lower level is supposed to dwarf this one, so be prepared to move downstairs as soon as you’re finished here.”
“Copy.”
Miranda left the two information retrieval specialists doing their work on this floor, with two more of her team standing guard to make sure their work was not in any way hindered. The upstairs had been cleared quickly and easily, two unconscious female psychics carried out to a waiting van, and those team members had rejoined Miranda. Other team members had already locked off the elevator on this main floor and located the stairwell.
They fully expected to encounter both more resistance and quite likely signs or results of stomach-twisting “experiments” in the lower level, which would make it the most difficult level to clear. And the most important, since the demolition charges three of her team carried needed to be placed both quickly and in precisely the right locations to bring the entire building down in the most quiet and controlled manner possible once they had completed the rest of their mission and cleared out.
They had to locate and rescue any imprisoned psychics; they had to make certain that the “healers” either awake or in whatever state of hibernation they were found were destroyed; and they had to make very, very sure that only themselves and the psychics they intended to rescue came out of the lab alive.
The skills and dedication of her team being vital to the successful completion of her mission had caused Miranda to choose very carefully the people who would go down into the bowels of this place with her.
She and Bishop had been given necessary information on the team members awaiting them, and the time to study that intel on the jet, so Miranda knew the four men and two women on her team whose job was to help her clear the lower level of its evil, even if that evil looked human and wore nice white lab coats, were entirely up to the job.
She led the way.
* * *
• • •
“Tasha!” As quick as Sebring was, Brodie was quicker. But he was one step too far away from Tasha and, as he would say later, it never even occurred to him to reach for his gun because Sebring’s was already aimed at Tasha’s head, her finger tightening on the trigger.
He acted purely on instinct, stretching out one hand toward Sebring, everything in him driven to protect the woman he loved from a deadly threat.
The gun in Sebring’s hand literally flew down the hallway, narrowly missing David, and the woman herself was lifted two feet off the floor and slammed with incredible force backward into the wall between the two potted trees.
The wall was formed of concrete reinforced with rebar, but they all heard it groan and both heard and saw it crumple behind the woman, almost enfolding her in a cold, unloving embrace. For an instant, everything was still and silent, and then she dropped to the floor.
“Wow,” David said. “Cool ability.” He wasted no time in moving around the reception desk to check the pulse of the fallen enemy. He looked down at her rather pitilessly, then at the damaged wall, and said without emotion, “Broken neck. Hell, maybe broken back.” He bent and hoisted her easily over his shoulder in a fireman’s carry, straightening to add, “I’ll dump her in the stairwell. Pity she fell. Really shouldn’t have been climbing all those stairs in heels.”
“That’s sexist,” Robin called after him, clearly no more disturbed by what had happened than David was.
“Practical,” he called back to her.
Brodie was the one who was disturbed, but only because Tasha had come so close to being shot.
“Jesus,” he muttered, lifting her off her feet in a powerful hug that didn’t hurt her a bit.
Tasha returned the hug, then leaned her head back far enough to see his face, saying, “Told you it’d be triggered. And—wow. Very cool ability.”
“Yeah,” Robin said, watching them with interest. “When he says he doesn’t know his own strength, he’ll mean it.”
Brodie set Tasha on her feet and looked over at the damaged wall. “I did that?”
“Yes, and thank you,” Tasha said seriously, adding, “I wonder if she would have tried for all of us if I hadn’t realized that shadow wasn’t natural.”
“Probably,” Robin said. “So she was Sebring? That’s the name that was in your mind.”
“Yeah. And that’s what was bugging me. We were told the suits here were her bosses, not Duran’s, but she was supposed to be targeted and removed out in the field. I suddenly realized somebody should have told us if she had been removed. Specifically her, since she posed the greatest threat to us. That was when it struck me that the shadow beside that tree on the left was all wrong.”
“Your ability to see them even with one of their shadows trying to hide them saved your life,” Brodie said.
“No, you did that. Did I thank you?”
“Yes, you did.” He was still rather subdued, for Brodie, but obviously not because a rather astonishingly powerful—and rare—telekinetic ability had been triggered in him. “Are you sure you’re all right?”
“I’m fine.” Tasha considered, then nodded. “No tension or anxiety at all. But why did she even have a shadow? Weren’t the healers supposed to be dead and gone by now?”
Brodie looked at the clock now barely hanging on to the damaged wall. “The operations at the labs are under way by now, but that doesn’t mean all the healers are dead yet. They couldn’t even start to move until the rescue operation had been completed and had drawn all the right attention.”
“Speaking of,” David said politely as he rejoined them, “I believe we’re expecting suits anytime now. So maybe we’d better get outside on the terrace and get set.”
Brodie took Tasha’s hand. “Definitely.”
Robin said, “Somebody better push those two trees together to hide the dimple in the wall.”
“Dimple?” David shook his head at her as he went to push the trees together.
* * *
• • •
The fairly vast lower level of the lab was a maze of corridors, tiny cells, and larger rooms filled with stark, unidentifiable but nevertheless threatening tools, equipment, and machines. Everything was whitewashed concrete, smooth, featureless metal, and glass observation windows.
Miranda left one of her team stationed at the bottom of the stairwell to prevent the egress of anyone they didn’t want to leave, and took her remaining people with her to clear this lower level. They were faced with three corridors leading off in different directions, an immediate indication that this level was far larger than anyone would have expected if they’d had only the size of the building above to offer a guesstimate.
A quick, silent gesture was enough to split her team up, with at least two people taking each corridor. Miranda chose the main corridor for herself and two of her team members, in part because according to their intel it was likely prisoners would be kept there. And because Miranda could feel a stronger sense of the cold despair and echoes of old pain.
It was very quiet; clearly, no one upstairs had managed to raise the alarm.
The first door she came to gave no indication she could see of its contents or purpose, and Miranda was wary as she eased the door open. She stood there in the doorway for a long moment, then stepped back and closed the door with the same care and silence.
“Miranda?” It was only the breath of a question.
She shook off as much as she could of a lingering chill, then whispered, “If either of you have any doubts about this place being evil, just look in there.”
“I got no doubts,” Winters said, his level gray eyes calm and infinitely old. “We rescue prisoners, take out or otherwise immobilize healers and everybody else, and then we send the whole fucking horror show straight to hell.”
“No questions here, either,” Sanders said, her voice also low and calm.
“Good,” Miranda said, and continued on, reflecting, not for the first time, that they were lucky to have so many utterly dedicated people on their side.
They cleared two more rooms, both empty, and then Winters opened a door on the other side of the hallway, paused only an instant, and then put two bullets into the head of the creature who had greeted the intrusion with very large blinking eyes.
“Clear,” Winters said softly as he eased the door shut. “A healer, Miranda. Intel was right. They look human except for the size and metallic look of the eyes.”
“Copy.”
Miranda found two more healers behind the next door she opened, both of them stirring only as the door opened. They occupied a featureless room that boasted only two palletlike cushions on which they sat, apparently meditating or hibernating until they were disturbed. Both looked completely inoffensive.
She killed them both without hesitating.
“That’s three of the five healers,” she breathed as she eased the door closed.
H-hello?
Miranda stopped her team with a quick gesture, and sent out a probing telepathic touch.
