McCracken moved behind the desk and eased her head back. “We’ve got problems, Sal,” he reported over the walkie-talkie.
The woman behind the desk wasn’t Virginia Maxwell.
“We’ve been duped!”
“Come again, boss,” Belamo said.
“The real Maxie didn’t make it in this morning. What we got ourselves is a double.”
“A fucking trap!” Sal squawked into the walkie-talkie.
“Could be.”
“But nobody went inside after you, I tell ya! None of them went inside!”
“They might have been in already.”
“Jesus Christ, boss! Jesus Christ! You ask me, you boys better make time gettin’ out.”
“Plan B, Sal.”
“I read ya, boss.”
A sound reached McCracken and Wareagle at the same time, barely rising above the continuous screech of the fire alarm. Little more than a door opening, perhaps some furniture being disturbed as someone approached from the floors below. They looked at each other.
“We got company, Sal,” Blaine said hurriedly into the walkie-talkie.
“Oh, fuck.”
“Get away from here!”
“Hey, I’m—”
“I said get the fuck away! Now!” Blaine ordered.
Blaine looked at Johnny, who stood as rigid as a guard dog sniffing an intruder’s scent.
“They’re here, Blainey.”
McCracken drew his pistol an instant ahead of Wareagle. They carried identical 9-mms loaded with Splat exploding bullets. No sense bothering with anything else today. Johnny started for the door.
“No, Indian. I’ve got a better idea,” Blaine said. He looked up and pointed his pistol at the ceiling.
The first Splat he fired shook the entire room and showered him with rubble from what had been the center of the ceiling. The second Splat blew a hole straight through the crawl space containing the wiring and filtration ducts into the floor above.
“Going up, Indian?”
They slid Virginia Maxwell’s desk over so it was directly beneath the hole in the ceiling. Blaine jumped, grabbing hold of some ruined corrugated piping for purchase. Wareagle pushed him the rest of the way into a smoke-filled office on the nineteenth floor, which was directly above the Gap. McCracken was helping Johnny up when gunfire erupted in Virginia Maxwell’s office, just missing the Indian’s legs as Blaine hoisted him the rest of the way up. With Wareagle safe, Blaine dived to a portion of the floor that was still intact and tried to get off a shot through the hole. He caught a glimpse of a large figure garbed in a gas mask almost identical to his own and fired at it as it whirled.
The sons of bitches were ready for us, goddammit!
An explosion followed, but no scream. Blaine rolled again, and now it was Johnny who fired down through the jagged hole in the floor, his target Virginia Maxwell’s desk. The desk ruptured into a thousand pieces, effectively turning it into a massive grenade of wood fragments. McCracken was on his feet by then, and they moved out into the corridor together. McCracken looked in the direction of the elevator bank outside the glass entry doors.
“Switched off, Blainey, because of the fire alarm.”
“Thanks for reminding me.”
McCracken led the way through the glass doors and back-pedaled down the short hall as if expecting some of the disciples to charge at them at any second.
“You take the left, I’ll take the right,” he told Johnny.
Wareagle knew instantly what he meant. Not hesitating at all, the two of them pried open the doors to the shut-down elevators. The car on Johnny’s side had stopped eight floors down. The one on Blaine’s was in the lobby or possibly the garage. A straight twenty-story drop.
“Put your gloves on, Indian.”
“Not the shorter drop, Blainey?”
“With another door to pry open once we get down there? Not on your life. This’ll give us the head start we need.”
If Johnny had any doubts as to the necessity of that strategy, they vanished when a pair of dark, gas-masked figures — with machine guns firing — came at them from the direction of the glass doors. Blaine and Wareagle fired a pair of Splats each; the result was a chaotic symphony of exploding glass as the entrance blew inward. Flames blew back toward the retreating figures, then quickly gave way to black smoke. McCracken reached across the threshold of the elevator shaft and grabbed hold of the cable.
“Ready or not,” he said to the void beneath him, “here I come!”
The instant he dropped downward, Johnny leaped over the threshold after him, thick gloves digging hard against the cable as his slide began. The cable was well greased, which added to the blinding pace of their descent. To keep reasonably under control, Blaine found himself turning around the cable as he moved. He grew dizzy, and the shaft spun about him crazily. He closed his eyes, but the fear of dropping blind gripped him tighter than the dizziness, so he opened them again.
It couldn’t have been more than four seconds in all before the stalled elevator compartment itself drew dangerously close. Instinctively he wrapped his feet around the cable and twisted it tight between his calves and ankles. The impetus stopped his spin and drove him into a straight downward slide, the greased cable flying through his hands. He fought to slow himself at the end, but still hit the roof of the elevator with a thud. He went down hard, watching Wareagle land a foot from him with a mere flex of his knees. In unison they stripped off their gas masks.
“Uh-oh,” McCracken muttered as he came to grips with his one miscalculation.
The compartment doors would still be centered directly before the garage level. And they couldn’t simply drop into the elevator through its roof and open those doors to safety, because Johnny had sealed them minutes before. The only option left was the lobby-level floor just beyond their reach.
Blaine was about to relay his conclusions to Johnny when the gunfire erupted from above. It slammed off the shaft walls, ricocheting madly, and Blaine had to cover his ears.
“We’ve got to stop them, Indian!” McCracken shouted as he hugged the wall for cover.
Wareagle was directly across from him. “Your gun, Blainey!”
“Splats aren’t much good at this range!”
“No, shoot at the—”
The rest of Johnny’s words were drowned out by a fresh barrage of bullets, but McCracken had already realized the intent of his words. He aimed his pistol directly in front of him, at the elevator cable attached to the car they were standing on. The Splat thumped out and shredded it with a burst that took out a portion of the wall across the shaft. Instantly the counterweight fell and the cable shot up the shaft in a steel-weighted blur that would sever any flesh it came into contact with.
“Give me a boost, Indian,” McCracken asked Johnny, listening for a scream to pour down the shaft from the nineteenth floor. Even though none came, at least the disciples had been prevented from following the same route down.
He was on Wareagle’s shoulders a blink later, working the doors with all his strength. He ended up splitting them six inches apart, which was enough to force his shoulders through, and leveraged them the rest of the way. He pushed himself out of the shaft and onto the lobby floor, then grabbed hold of Johnny’s arms to hoist him up. It took all his strength, but he managed it just ahead of another battery of automatic fire aimed down the shaft from the nineteenth floor.
Together they moved out of the alcove housing the elevator bank and eased in among the crowds still pouring out through the lobby from the building’s highest floors. They used the hubbub to change their clips of exploding bullets for normal ones. If the disciples confronted them down here, the Splats would unquestionably kill innocent people. The bullets chambered now were Glazer safety slugs, composed of dozens of small pellets suspended in liquid Teflon and finished in a blue tip. Guaranteed one-shot stop for a normal man. With the disciples, who could tell?