Chapter 8

Every workplace has its culture. The FPMP was no different. And for a sinister government spy organization, when push came to shove, we acted more like one big, reasonably tolerant family. No one pulled rank here. We were just too midwestern for that. Storming in and swinging your dick around was something we’d expect from National. Not one of our own.

But desperate times call for desperate dick-swinging. And as Internal Affairs, Jacob truly was at the top of the spy heap. “You’ve got this under control,” Jacob said. “So give us our weapons and we’ll be on our way.”

Darnell hadn’t been what you’d call affable, even when I recognized him from grade school. But now it was like a barrier had come down. “Yes sir,” he said, so neutral it stung, and turned back to the weapons locker….

Only to be cut off by a pair of EMTs slamming through the stairwell doors.

Water beaded on their rescue gear and they moved with the quick efficiency of workers who no longer got joy from knocking things down. Their gargantuan prybar put our tire iron to shame. And they walloped it into place between the elevator doors with a literal sledgehammer. “Good thing you caught us on our way down to the Loop,” one of them said between bangs. “You’re not the only one with a stuck elevator.”

“Lucky it’s Saturday,” the other one agreed. “Most of the office buildings are empty.”

No doubt he was right. But somehow, I wasn’t feeling all that lucky.

One thing I can say for emergency workers: they don’t fool around. With a few good, solid hits, the elevator doors screeched open. The floor of the elevator was hanging down maybe a foot and a half, and the interior, presumably not on the same power grid as the lab, was totally dark. Darnell swept a flashlight beam through the gap, showing Leonard prone on the elevator floor.

“Sir?” one of the workers snapped, no-nonsense and efficient. “Can you hear me?”

“He’s unconscious,” the other one confirmed, “let’s get him out of there.”

Alisha sagged against Darnell, fighting back tears. “What if he’s—?”

“They’ll take care of him,” Darnell said. “He’ll be fine.”

“Some help over here?” the first guy said over his shoulder as they strained to maneuver Leonard’s limp body through the gap. Jacob, Darnell and I hurried over to help. It took all five of us to pull Leonard out, but eventually, we managed.

One medic grabbed Leonard’s vitals with a handheld ECG while the other rigged him up to the gurney. “Significant ST-segment elevation,” the first one said.

The other acknowledged. “Prepping nitroglycerine—but get him upstairs before we establish a line.”

“Understood.”

“What does that mean?” Alisha demanded, but Darnell caught her before she threw herself on the gurney, while Jacob cleared a path to the stairwell and held open the door.

I was familiar enough with the lingo to be glad she hadn’t asked me. But Jibben couldn’t resist being the smart guy. “Sounds like a myocardial infarction.”

Alisha’s eyes went huge.

“Heart attack,” Darnell translated.

Which didn’t help at all.

Alisha started wailing something about Leonard being too young to have a heart attack, while Darnell steered her away from the stairwell. The EMTs would have a hard enough time dragging Leonard’s bulk up the stairs without her interfering.

Which meant Darnell’s hands were full—with our guns still locked in the weapons locker.

Jacob caught my eye and nodded to a corner of the lobby that was semi-blocked from the drama by the pile of crates, and I slipped around Alisha and Darnell to have a word.

“We can’t leave our sidearms here,” Jacob said. He didn’t need to remind me why—not after the time he’d had Laura Kim detained for Roger Burke’s murder based on her service weapon. “But there’s no reason we both need to stick around.”

“You want to split up?” It made sense, I supposed. Jacob hardly needed my help to go home to Clayton. “Fine. Just make sure you don’t forget to come get me when this is all over.”

Jacob looked puzzled. “No, Vic—I meant that you should go home.”

“Me?”

“I need to stay. I’m the only one Agent Thompson will take orders from.”

True. Darnell was turning out to be a real hardass. “But, with Clayton—”

“He trusts you.” Jacob looked into my eyes—a look that would normally have been accompanied by him cupping my jaw or settling a hand on my hip. We were at work, though, and a big fish-eye camera in the middle of the elevator bay ceiling had a clear view of every last nook and cranny, so we had to act professional. Still, I knew his looks pretty well by now—and I could practically feel the hug. “You got this, Vic.”

It’s the little things. Cliché, but true. Jacob plies me with compliments all the time, from thanking me for cleaning up, to random remarks about my sense of humor, to praise for my bedroom technique (which I still think is basically nonexistent—but if he’s happy, I’m happy.)

But Clayton is his favorite kid in the whole world. Even when Clayton was at peak-level obnoxiousness, as far as his uncle was concerned, he could do no wrong. For Jacob to stay back and deal with our guns and leave me to ride to Clayton’s rescue hardly seemed like something for me to get all schmaltzy over.

I did, though.

Jacob loved me, I had no doubt. He lusted after me, too, and he missed me when I wasn’t there. While most of the time, though he might secretly think he was smarter, he did acknowledge I was the expert where ghosts were concerned.

But him trusting me to be there for Clayton—to be the responsible one—took things to an entirely new level.

“Don’t worry.” I gave Jacob’s forearm a quick, semi-professional squeeze. “We’re all gonna be fine.”

But as I turned toward the stairwell to ride to the rescue of Jacob’s precious nephew, the building quivered.

I felt it in my bones, even three stories underground. Something rumbled so low it was practically subsonic.

And then all the lights went dark.

“Are you fucking kidding me?” I hadn’t meant to say it aloud, but I’d wager the sentiment was shared by everyone else stuck in the FPMP’s sub-sub basement.

I pulled out my pocket flashlight. And as I flicked it on, everyone else produced a light of their own. Jacob and Alisha both had their phones out, Darnell had a massive magnum, and even Jibben had a little pen light going. Jacob aimed his phone’s light at the stairwell door, and told me, “Stick with the plan—go home to Clayton.”

And get my ass out of the dark basement? He didn’t need to tell me twice. But when I tried to charge out the door, I bounced off and staggered back.

What the hell? The paramedics had just gone through.

It was a big steel slab with a pushbar across the middle. Jacob immediately tried again, rattling the bar. But no luck.

“It’s an electric strike lock,” Darnell told him. “If the power is out—”

Jacob interrupted him. “It should still open from this side.”

“It must be jammed,” Darnell said. But I wasn’t so sure. The FPMP played fast and loose with the sorts of safety rules that other people had to follow. I wouldn’t put it past them to trigger a total lockdown if they thought someone was capable of stealing their precious scientific secrets. I might have even thought it was a fine idea, given the types of nut-jobs who’d probably kill for whatever was inside the lab. But not with me trapped down here, too.

Darnell retrieved our crowbar from the weapons locker, and I wondered if Jacob was gonna commandeer it by force. But any potential macho-contest was diverted by a crackle of static on Darnell’s walkie, followed by a message.

Attention all security, the building has sustained a lightning strike. Everyone stay in place until further notice and secure the area. We’ll update you as soon as more information is available.

Darnell and Jacob both froze and locked eyes. This was uncharted territory. And the protocol was clear: do as we’re told, stay put, and await further instructions. But whether or not Jacob was about to follow orders was anyone’s guess.

Here’s the thing about Jacob and authority. He’s all for it…as long as he’s the one with all the power. While he may be pretty good at pretending to follow orders, and while his perfect Boy Scout demeanor has most people fooled, ultimately, Jacob does only what Jacob wants to do.

And I think Darnell had his number.

But even Jacob couldn’t challenge the weather, and when Darnell set the crowbar aside, he didn’t make a lunge for it. “We’re staying put,” Darnell said to the room at large—but mostly to Jacob.

Jacob nodded. “We’re staying put.”

But some people just can’t let sleeping alpha dogs lie. And through the wedged-open safety glass door, Jibben called out, “Then we might as well get the crates into containment, since we’re stuck down here anyway.”

“Staying put in the elevator bay,” Darnell clarified, annoyance threading through his businesslike calm.

Jibben added, “And then, once you square the crates away, I’ll show you the emergency exit.”

Stunned silence.

Maybe Darnell would finally return our sidearms—once I promised to use mine on Jibben.

Alisha recovered first. She swung around to do a double-take at Jibben. “There’s another way out? What the hell’s the matter with you? Tell us where it is.”

“Not until the artifacts are secure.”

For a guy flat on his back with his pant leg cut off and a lasagna strapped to his leg, Jibben was maddeningly smug.

Jacob clearly knew stubbornness when he saw it, because he was the first to give in. “Fine. Where is this storage?”

“Agent Marks,” Darnell reminded him, “you agreed to stay put.”

“That was before the emergency exit,” Jacob said, and stepped over the crate wedged in the doorway to begin shifting boxes. “Give me a hand,” he told Alisha and me. “The sooner we get this over with, the sooner we get out of here.”

I knew the FPMP. And I knew that under Con Dreyfus’s regime, lots of high-tech hidey-holes and panic rooms were installed. Dreyfus’s sense of self preservation was legendary. And I couldn’t imagine he’d let himself get trapped in a basement with no way out.

The first step was extricating the cart from the door—but we were all very motivated, and with Jibben holding my flashlight on us, soon we had the thing upright and loaded with heavy crates.

No thanks to Darnell.

We could’ve used another pair of hands, but he just stood beside his post with his mag light trained on us, glaring—following orders to the letter and staying put. And while I understood that a whole team of Jacobs playing by their own rulebooks might be every boss’s worst nightmare, there was definitely a time and place to improvise.

As we struggled with a particularly heavy crate, I told Darnell, “Look, this isn’t Mrs. Smith’s class where you’ll get in trouble for leaving without a hall pass.”

“I told you, I don’t remember Mrs. Smith.”

I said, “No one can get in or out of the basement, so you might as well pitch in.”

Whether or not Darnell remembered me, I’d like to think I was starting to get through to him…. At least until his walkie let out a loud blip of static and reminded him that his supervisor was somewhere on the premises.

I glanced up at the fish eye camera mount in the ceiling and said, “They can’t see us, y’know. Not if the power’s out.”

Darnell wasn’t listening—he was too busy with the walkie. “Break. This is Agent Thompson. Did you have a message? Over.”

The only reply he got was a jumble of blips and static.

“Don’t waste your time with him,” Alisha called to me from the safety glass door. “Ain’t nobody gonna change that man’s mind once it’s made up. We’re better off doing this ourselves and getting it over with.”

I had to agree.

“You could at least hold the door,” I told Darnell, who grudgingly stuck a foot in to wedge it open while the rest of us worked free the biggest, stuckest crate. He couldn’t even be bothered to aim his mag light in any useful way, because he was too busy futzing with his walkie.

“You need to lift the far corner,” Jibben pointed out from his vantage place on the floor. “Once you straighten it out, you can work it free.”

“He’s right,” Alisha said. For some reason, I was more inclined to believe her. Not only because she moved heavy stuff for a living, but because she probably had more common sense than Darnell and Jibben put together. “Grab that side. Got it? On the count of three. One…two….”

The fiberglass crate came free with a groan—what the hell was in there, barbells?—but somehow, we managed to muscle it back onto the trolley. Again, with zero help from Darnell. A blast of static caught his attention and he turned away from the door, waving his walkie around as if it might help him catch the signal. “Say again,” he barked into the handset. “I don’t copy you. Repeat, I don’t cop—”

His voice cut off abruptly as the safety glass door closed behind him with an ominous clunk, with Darnell in the elevator bay and the rest of us in the lobby.

Jibben aimed my flashlight at the push bar. The beam danced over the safety glass like a spotlight and landed right on the imposing horizontal hunk of metal.

Alisha said, “Do not tell me that door is locked now, too.”

I gave the handle a good shove and the door didn’t so much as flex. But the bar itself did rattle, which caught Darnell’s attention on the opposite side of the glass. He grabbed his side of the handle and tugged. Nothing. And then he reached over his guard station and jabbed uselessly at his powerless buzzer.

I sighed.

Meanwhile, Darnell holstered his walkie…and picked up the crowbar.

“That’ll never work,” Jibben said. “It’s one of the world’s strongest polymers. You’d need a jackhammer. And even then—”

Darnell probably knew exactly what that window was made of—so he didn’t try to shatter it. Instead, he went for the door frame.

We’d all seen how much effort it took to get the elevator doors open—equipment in the same category as the Jaws of Life. But Darnell was determined to show that door who was boss. He tried to wedge the chiseled tip inside the doorframe, but the seam was just too tight. Undaunted, he went for the hinges. No good.

Finally, he resorted to brute force, and drove the tire iron like he was putting a stake through Count Dracula’s heart. If it were me, I’d probably bounce it off the steel frame and put my eye out. But Darnell’s aim was true, and the chisel tip wedged itself solidly between the door and the frame, just above the strike plate.

Would the crowbar be strong enough? Hopefully so—it was designed to lift a car, after all.

The only thing left for Darnell to do was use leverage to his advantage and pry that sucker open.

All of this had been taking place by the light of two flashlights and two cellphones—so when the overhead lights flared to life, we were all struck momentarily blind. At least until, with a sound like the pops of distant gunfire, every overhead can light exploded and we were plunged back into darkness.

I blinked away afterimages and snatched up my pocket flashlight from Jibben, who’d been bouncing it uselessly around the ceiling to gawk at the blown out fixtures.

“Give me that,” I said, and did a quick check of the room. “Broken glass—everyone okay?”

No one was showered in glass shards, even Jibben lying there on the floor, so I was relieved we’d come through the power surge unscathed.

At least, I’d thought we were all fine….

Until I swung my beam out through the safety glass and saw Darnell lying face-up on the floor with his magnum and the crowbar beside him.

“Did that fool knock himself out?” Alisha demanded. “Tell him to get his ass up.”

I soon realized that wasn’t gonna happen, given the last lightning strike, the steel doorframe…and the fresh repeater flickering there on the other side of the glass.