“How the fucking, bloody hell do they keep finding us?” He hissed under his breath, to no one in particular.
From his vantage point, he could just see into the walkway leading into the kitchen. Sam was on his haunches as well, and had also drawn his gun.
“That was a warning, Thane!” Came a voice from outside. Through the ringing numbness in their ears, it sounded as if the man were yelling through a cone of cotton, but his words were still clear. Omigod, is that actually Sean Bean out there? Annabelle thought, ludicrously. It sounded even more like the actor than Jack did. And that was a warning? She didn’t recognize the source of the voice, not knowing any men with that particular accent other than Jack.
But Jack swung around to face the direction the voice came from, and his eyes had gone wide.
Annabelle watched him. His expression had changed from pissed and frustrated to surprised and apprehensive. He recognized the voice?
“Give us Brandt and the vial and we’ll let everyone else live, Jack,” the voice continued, taking on a more personal tone, “including Clara and Annabelle!”
Whoever the guy was, he knew his stuff. He had enough information under his belt to be able to hit Jack where it really hurt. He’d called the girls by their first names and also somehow knew that Jack, Clara, and Annabelle were still alive, inside the house.
“Oh, fuck me,” Jack muttered, under his breath, and shot a glance at Sam. Sam shook his head, once. He wore the same pale, uneasy expression.
Jack closed his eyes for a moment, rubbing the grit out of them. Then he opened them again and re-focused on Sam. They exchanged a meaningful look and Sam nodded.
Jack turned back to Annabelle. He knelt and put his lips beside her ear to be sure she would hear him. “Bella, we’re heading underground again. Get on your hands and knees and slide them across the floor to keep from getting cut. Don’t lift them, understand?”
Annabelle nodded.
“Move in front of me and follow Sam.”
Again, she nodded and got on her hands and knees. She was still clutching something in her right hand, but Jack couldn’t tell what it was.
“We’re counting to ten, Jack!” There was a pause from outside and then the voice added, in cruel jest, “Maybe!”
Ahead of them, Sam had made it to the doorway of the entertainment room, where he signaled to Clara. Clara nodded and tugged on Dylan’s sleeve, who followed behind her, keeping his body pressed as close to the ground as possible. At one point, however, he lifted his left hand and placed it back down atop a shard of glass.
He inhaled sharply and bit back a curse.
“Slide along the ground, Dylan,” Clara instructed him. “Don’t lift your hands or legs.”
“Got that,” Dylan shot back.
Clara ignored his irritated tone and continued to lead him after Sam.
In a few seconds, the five of them joined up in the hall, protected on both sides from windows and the glass they’d shed. Here, a few shots had made it through the old plaster of the hallway, but it hadn’t sustained as much damage as the rest of the house.
“Where is Cassie?” Annabelle asked, keeping her voice low. Outside, she could hear men shouting to one another and she knew the house was being surrounded. Middlesex was a small town and the mansion was set back into more than thirty acres of un-cultivated land. No one in New York was going to help them right now.
“I’m here,” came the reply. Annabelle looked up toward a door at the end of the hall as Cassie came around the corner, followed by Virginia and Craig, all of them sliding on their hands and knees across the hard wood floor.
At the same time, the door to the hall bathroom popped open and Beatrice came crawling out quickly, moving like a spider across the floor. “Bloody ‘ell, when do you think the next time’ll be that I can use the loo withou’ being nearly blown to bits!”
Annabelle couldn’t believe their fortune that no one had been severely injured in either the gunfire or the grenade blast. What were the chances of that? Was it even possible?
And that’s when it hit her that the men who had shot up the mansion and thrown the grenade had known very well what they were doing. They’d kept from hurting anyone on purpose.
Only the best hit men knew such tactics. These guys were not the amateurs who had botched Max’s suicide. So, who were they?
Just then, there was another blasting sound and Annabelle knew that the door to the back porch had been blown off of its hinges.
“Everyone move back!” Jack waved everyone out of the way, fanning them out in a circle around a space in the floor.
Annabelle muttered under her breath. “Another trap door?” According to Clara and Beatrice, there’d been one in the mansion in Forest Hills as well, and that had been how they’d escaped when Reese blew the house up. Jack had a thing for trap doors. Which was brave, considering he hated dark, damp and enclosed spaces.
Jack didn’t waste time answering her, but he did shoot her an exasperated glance just before Sam handed him a Buck knife and Jack used it to pry the first board up from the floor. Beneath it was indeed the o-ring metal loop to a trap door.
They all helped pull the remaining slats of wood up, and in the space of a few short seconds, the door was uncovered.
At that moment, the back door to the kitchen, which was connected to the back porch, rocked in its frame. Someone was slamming into it from the other side.
Jack jerked the metal loop upward, revealing the dark space below. Annabelle wasted no time in leading the rest of the team down the connected metal ladder into the darkness. She took the rungs quickly, holding on to the sturdy sides even as she still held on to something in her right hand.
“There’s a light switch on the left,” Jack told her as her head disappeared below and Cassie was the next to descend.
Annabelle felt along the dark wall for the switch, found it, and flicked it on. It worked like a charm, lighting up the underground chamber. A connecting tunnel lit up as well, portions buzzing to life one after another.
Soon, the entire group was down the ladder and once Jack and Sam had both made it down as well, the two worked together, turning toward the ladder and grabbing hold of it to slide it along two connected metal rungs to steel couplings on the other side of the trap door hole.
Annabelle was highly impressed with the mechanism. The ladder drew a thick metal sheet behind it and then locked firmly into place, sealing off their passage so that no one could follow them down.
“It’s bullet proof, right?” She found herself asking, simply needing to be sure.
“It was taken and compiled from the sides of a German King Tiger Tank,” Jack answered, shrugging slightly. “So I can’t personally vouch for it. Germans, and all.”
Annabelle breathed a sigh of relief, but Sam and Jack didn’t give them time to get comfortable.
“Keep moving,” Sam urged, and Jack spun Annabelle around to face the corridor that led off to God-only-knew-where. The lot of them ran down the corridor, and before long, the reverberating sounds of metal upon metal followed them through the man-made tunnel. The bad guys were trying to get through.
There were no turn-offs or tributaries the way there had been with the corridors beneath Buell Hall and Columbia. Instead, the escape route led them about a quarter of a mile straight ahead, and then curved slightly to the left.
Here, the air grew cooler and the carved-out walls more damp and Annabelle wondered if they were bordering a river. At one point, they passed under a small steel door, set into the cement ceiling of the tunnel. They kept going, past this door, and Annabelle couldn’t help but question what it was. And, with the darkness and dampness and the low ceiling above them, she also couldn’t help but wonder how Jack was holding up.