Furious

34

“Well, that tears it,” Penny said from her place last in line.

“That’s a general alarm, throughout the building,” Nelly added. “I don’t think they know where we are.”

“Let’s keep it that way. Nelly, release more scouts. If there are nanos in the stairwell, we need to get them under our control.”

“I haven’t identified any nanos yet. Your grandfather is really cheap.”

“Nelly, is this commlink I’m carrying sending out a locator signal?”

“It is, Kris. Just a second. Okay, I have a nano cutting out the signal, and I’m sending a copycat signal down the stairwell. If they interrogate that puppy, they’ll think we’re way below where we are. Maybe more, depending on how long they take to ask it anything.”

“Good, Nelly.”

There had been no interruption at stair climbing as Nelly set about messing with the search for them.

“Kris, any thoughts about going to Plan B?” Jack asked.

“You tired of climbing?”

“I’d like to get to the two hundredth floor a whole lot quicker,” was all he said.

“I second the idea,” Penny said. She didn’t sound winded, but she was slowing down. All of them were.

The 75th floor gave Kris her option for Plan B. While the elevators for people in suits only went fifty floors between security checkpoints, the service elevator for dirty and messy things had only one transfer point between the ground and the top floor. It was on the 75th.

“Let’s see what they have,” Kris said, and Penny quickly did her magic on the lock. The 75th floor turned out to be a support and maintenance floor. No carpet in sight there. There were cameras as well as at least two guards, armored and armed, walking their rounds.

Clearly, Grampa Al’s attitude toward security grew with more altitude.

It took Nelly half a minute to get the cameras turned to look at what Kris wanted them to see. Then they slipped out of the stairwell and began stalking the two guards. The two were intent on discussing a particularly controversial call at yesterday’s basketball playoffs and only looked ahead.

They were fully armored—from the knees up.

Kris gave the orders to Jack on Nelly net. AIM FOR BELOW THE KNEE. I GOT THE ONE ON THE RIGHT.

I’LL TAKE THE ONE ON THE LEFT.

ON THREE. ONE . . . TWO . . . THREE.

Four gentle pops, and the two guys—make that a guy and a gal—dropped to the floor, their fully automatic machine pistols clattering beside them.

NELLY, CLOSE DOWN MOST OF THE GEAR ON THIS FLOOR. THIS IS THE BACKUP POWER FROM THE MAIN POWER IN THE BASEMENT. CLOSE THE BASEMENT DOWN AT THE SAME TIME, BUT MAKE SURE WE CAN STILL USE THE FREIGHT ELEVATORS.

THE FREIGHT ELEVATORS HAVE THEIR OWN EMERGENCY POWER, KRIS, SO FIREFIGHTERS CAN USE THEM. KIDS, DO YOUR STUFF.

YES, MOM.

Kris stepped up to survey her work. Both guards were securely asleep on the floor, at no risk to themselves. Kris eyed their weapons with the thought of upgrading her armory but shook her head. The machine pistols had only one kind of ammunition: six-millimeter armor-piercing. Putting a target to sleep was not an option for these guards.

Jack must have been doing the same examination of their opponents’ weapons load. He raised an expressive eyebrow to Kris.

“As a Marine Gunny once told me,” she said, “‘If you’re in a shoot-out, the best thing to do is not get shot.’”

The two turned back to the problem at hand. While Kris and Jack stalked the roving watch, Penny had located the night team keeping an eye on all the gadgets. These had been the subject of some hot debate back on the mountain. If they took them down, all the world couldn’t help but notice. Kris had hoped to hijack the freight elevator without doing anything to this crew.

A glance over the actual setup showed that what they had hoped was a wall was only a clear plastic plate that protected them from any freight getting loose. It did nothing to restrict their view of the elevators.

Wordlessly, Kris and Jack joined Penny to watch the unsuspecting night watch. Three of them looked at gauges, dials, and readouts, occasionally making an adjustment. One watched a bank of screens, overseeing the cameras that Nelly had pointed at innocent scenes. He seemed bothered; he fiddled with a dial intent on adjusting a camera. The camera doggedly ignored him and obeyed Nelly.

“I got a problem, here,” was the last thing Kris could let him say.

PENNY, YOU HIT THE CAMERA GUY ON THE LEFT. I’LL HIT WHAT LOOKS LIKE THE BOSS GUY ON THE RIGHT. JACK, YOU GET THE TWO IN THE MIDDLE. ON TWO.

ONE . . . TWO.

Kris put two sleepy darts into the back of her target and got her third shot into the next guy over toward the middle. Penny put two shots into her man, and also put a third into the gal next over. Jack had put one shot into each of them and was going back to service them with a second shot, but he only got one off.

All four laid sleepy heads down on their workstations.

“The freight elevator,” Kris ordered.

They made their way quickly to the bank of elevators that could take them well up the Longknife tower. Maybe even to just below Grampa Al’s penthouse. The higher up the tower you went, the more vague their schematic got.

Kris eyed the open door of the first freight elevator. There was a camera in the right corner. She checked the next one. Camera there, too. Just as she hoped, the third elevator showed hard use, and the camera there was smashed. What was left of it dangled from a single wire.

“That working?” Kris asked Nelly.

“Yep, but it’s only getting a picture of what’s below it. We stay away from there, and no one will be the wiser.”

“Here’s our ride, crew,” Kris announced.

Unlike the elevators for the finely dressed suits, you had to work to get a freight elevator moving. Kris closed the outer doors, but they didn’t come together all that tightly, being dented and dinged. She latched the inner cage door closed but paused before punching for a floor above them.

“Nelly, I’m getting sick and tired of all the beeping and ringing. What do you say we close down the alarms?”

“I’ll have to kill the lights as well,” Nelly said, and if she’d been a real girl, Kris would have heard a near giggle mingled in the words.

Kris pulled up her shirt, and extracted a set of night goggles from the foam flab at her stomach. Penny and Jack followed suit.

“Let everyone know we’re here, Nelly.”

A second later, the noise went to a deathly hush. The lighting flickered, then went to dark. Emergency backup switched on for a moment, then blinked and went out as well.

Dim red lights switched on just above the nose of Kris and her team’s low-light goggles. Kris punched for floor 198, and the elevator began to grind noisily upward.

“I told you I could keep just the power we needed,” Nelly crowed.