“It’s okay,” Dan told me. “Caleb’s hiding, and he’s good at that.”
“It’s not okay. He called me, and he’s moving around in there. I told him to stay hidden, but…”
Fear flickered in Dan’s eyes. “We need to get in. I found another door on the far side of the sphere, but it’s got no handles on the outside. Looks like a fire exit. There’s also a moveable camera on a pole near the snack kiosk over there.” She pointed to a small building shaped like a flying saucer. “It points towards the rear door.”
“Is the camera manual or automatic?”
“On a timer, I think. The motion arc covers the door, but the camera sweeps back and forth at regular intervals. There are two points where the door’s invisible to the all-seeing eye—the shortest gap is only five seconds, but the longest gives us twenty-seven seconds to open the door and get inside between passes.”
Less than half a minute? Great. Plus we’d need to avoid arousing the suspicions of the employees at the kiosk or any punters who happened to be hanging around.
“Can you stop the feed?” I asked Mack.
“Still working on it. Whoever set up the security cameras used a different password, and that one isn’t so easy to crack.”
“Guess we’d better keep our fingers crossed for the monkeys, eh?”
“There might be a way to lever the door open,” Ana said. “The mechanism on the pod thing was easy to bypass.”
“So let’s take a look.”
The Steampunk Saloon was getting busier, but a few drops of rain had encouraged people to eat indoors, leaving Mack in relative solitude as she huddled under a huge umbrella outside. We borrowed the bathroom to change our jackets and stash extra weapons about our persons, and a quick rummage through Bradley’s bags of crap revealed a bunch of scarves we could use to cover our faces. The only downside? They were multicoloured and decorated with dinosaur silhouettes. I picked out the T-Rex and passed Ana the velociraptor. It seemed appropriate.
Mack had patched Vine’s device into the comms system, and every so often, we heard another demand to stay still or be quiet. The remainder of the speech was too garbled or too far away to make out, although the hum of voices in the background told us people were talking.
The few drops of rain turned into a steady drizzle as Dan, Ana, Carmen, and I crossed the plaza towards the sphere, the four of us hurrying as if we were looking for shelter. Unfortunately, a bunch of other people had come up with the same idea, and where the sphere bulged outwards, they’d huddled beneath the overhang.
“I hate having an audience,” Ana muttered.
“You and me both.”
But the situation was what it was, and we had to make the best of it.
Over the years, we’d all learned enough about security cameras to understand their fields of view. We stood just out of range, pretending to discuss where to go next as we waited for the right moment.
“Now,” I said, and Mack started a countdown.
We moved as one to the rear entrance, which was barely visible against the silver skin of the sphere. Whoever designed the place had made the door curved, almost seamless. Even the hinges were hidden. The rest of us shielded Ana as she probed for a weak point, somewhere she could insert the blade of a knife.
“Anything?” I asked.
“Nothing yet.”
“Ten seconds,” Mack reminded us.
With my team and several escaped monkeys as witnesses, I was never visiting an amusement park again.
“Prepare to move away,” I ordered, but the faintest scrape from inside made me pause.
I checked the angles again. If I flattened myself against the wall, my gut told me the camera should miss me by a whisker. Hopefully. It would be damn close.
“I’m staying. Get back.”
Nobody asked questions. We’d worked together for long enough that the others knew I wouldn’t make a decision like that without a damn good reason. I tried to look casual while I did my best impression of a dolophones spider. One of those creepy little suckers had wrapped itself around my arm when I was working surveillance in Australia not so long ago, and I’d had to lie there and let it when what I really wanted to do was flick it over to New Zealand. My lovely colleague Mimi had just chuckled under her breath and pointed out the huntsman spider in the tree opposite. Thankfully, I hadn’t heard of any arachnids escaping at SciPark yet.
Another scuff from inside. Somebody was definitely on the other side of the door, but who? Friend or foe?
No racing pulse for me, just the tiniest hit of adrenaline, enough to keep me focused as a clunk made the door vibrate. Our mystery person had pushed down on the exit bar. The door swung outwards, slowly, slowly, and I watched the arc of the camera. The five-second gap was coming right up.
I watched.
Waited.
Burst through the opening the instant the camera got out of range, then yanked the door shut behind me. The pitch-black robbed me of one of my senses, but four was enough. Five if you counted the instincts I’d spent the best part of two decades honing. I forced my opponent to the floor, found his shoulders, worked my way to his hands and twisted them behind his back. That took me a second, two at most, and he hadn’t yet got around to screaming. I replaced one of my hands with a knee and clamped the free hand over his mouth.
“Shhh.”
He complied and went limp.
Hmm. He was kind of small. And he smelled vaguely of Dan’s favourite perfume.
Ah, shit. I loosened my hand.
“Race?”
“I found you a door,” he whispered.
At that moment, I knew Race would end up working for Blackwood one day whether Dan liked it or not. I rolled off him and checked him over by feel. He seemed intact.
“Are you hurt?”
“Nah, I’m tough.”
I got to my feet, but as I pulled Race up, my spidey senses tingled. We weren’t alone. I put a hand over his mouth again, gently this time, a signal rather than a threat. He nodded, and I tucked him behind me.
A narrow flashlight beam played over the wall to my left. Amateur. That made the owner a sitting duck. But so were we. The passage curved to the left, but a few more seconds and whoever it was would be on top of us. The light flashed again, catching the edge of a slim metal cabinet. A yellow zigzag graced the front along with a warning: Danger of Death. No fucking kidding. There was nowhere to hide. Nowhere for us to go but outside, and we couldn’t do that. Not only would it be a pain in the ass to get back in again, but if whoever was coming was as unhinged as unsub number one sounded, then I wouldn’t put it past him to panic. And gunshots in the plaza weren’t something I wanted to contemplate.
Nor did I want to start shooting in the sphere myself. It could be a stray member of the public ahead, or an escaped hostage, and if it wasn’t, I didn’t want to alert anyone on the platform to my presence by making a noise.
Fortunately, I had the perfect bit of kit with me. I slipped my Fenix PD35 out of my jacket pocket and held it above my head in my left hand, and when our new friend rounded the bend, I hit him with a thousand lumens. In near darkness, the burst of light would be like an explosion behind his eyeballs, and it disoriented him for a couple of seconds—plenty of time for me to close the distance, twist the semi-automatic out of his hand, and dump him on his ass.