Stone thought the armed security was extra cute. For all he knew, Bryant had placed the crew on Howard not because of any perceived threat, but to have them on-hand in case somebody like him showed up.
Well, he was already there.
And Stone had no real intention of being anywhere near the conference at this time.
The streets finally settled down just after 9:30, and when the opening ceremony began promptly at ten, it was shown on the big screens on Howard and pumped over the speakers hung from the scaffolding.
That’s when Stone departed Yerba Buena Gardens, carrying a tote bag, and walked five blocks east.
To Bryant’s skyscraper.
He bypassed the lobby by slipping in through the loading dock in the rear, and found a freight elevator to take him to the basement level.
Only a skeleton crew occupied the building; everybody else was at the conference.
Stone had every advantage.
Or so he thought.
Chapter Eight
The elevator doors opened on a hallway with old carpet and scuff marks on the walls.
Stone stepped into the hall. Mailroom directly in front of him, a small closet, really, with just enough space to sort the mail. To the left, the underground parking lot. To the right, the maintenance office.
A radio played in the mail room but when Stone stuck his head through the open doorway, he saw nobody inside.
Ditto the maintenance office. The door was not locked, and the single cluttered desk was empty. In a small anteroom a selection of uniforms hung on hangers, and Stone quickly found one that fit and put it on, stowing his street clothes in the tote bag. Searching through the desk drawers, he found a few stray key cards but couldn’t tell if they’d work or not. He grabbed several and put them in a pocket.
For added effect, he grabbed a clip board from a trio that hung on the wall near the desk.
The nametag on his uniform shirt bore a name not his own and if anybody challenged him, they’d quickly see he wasn’t Xavier like the tag said, and while Stone didn’t have a plan for such an encounter, he decided he’d deal with that if it happened. Most of the building staff was gone, considering his ease of movement so far.
Earl Bryant was proud of his building, and told the media a lot about it during the construction phase. From archived news articles on the Internet, Stone had read up on as much as he could before getting sick of seeing the man’s name. His office was on the very top floor, the penthouse, which he’d divided into a living and working space. He wanted his clients to know he was always on the job, even when relaxing on the couch.
Marketing bullshit, Stone knew, but there was always some sucker who would buy the bullshit and give Bryant money for his services too, and then have to talk to somebody in India who barely spoke English when a problem with the service inevitably arose.
The tech world.
Stone returned to the elevator and pressed the button for the penthouse floor. The button did not light up. He started trying to key cards. The scanner was right beside the floor buttons. The first key card beeped but didn’t activate access. Stone pressed the button for the 20th floor and the elevator started upward. During the ride he tried the next card, which failed, and the next, which also failed. He started to sweat. The doors opened on the 20th floor and Stone listened, hearing nothing. Another part of the building empty. He tried the fourth key card as the elevator doors rumbled closed, and pressed the penthouse floor again. This time the button lit, and the elevator resumed its ascension.
Stone breathed a sigh of relief and watched the indicator above the doors tick upward. The elevator did not stop.
The elevator car slowed, eased to a stop, and the doors rumbled open.
A bald man in a blue blazer sat behind a table at the end of a short entry way. Oak double doors off to his right side were firmly closed.
Stone smiled and stepped out of the elevator. He walked toward the man.
“Hi, heard you had a water leak.”
“Nobody called about a problem.”
“They told me there was a water leak. Can I at least check? While everybody’s out it’s the perfect time.”
Stone reached the table and handed the bald man the clip board. “Here’s the work order.”
The bald man took the clipboard, dropped his eyes, and by the time he realized he’d been fooled Stone was swinging his pistol like a club. The barrel cashed hard into the bald man’s head and he toppled out of his chair to rest on the floor.
Stone patted down the man. No gun, but he did find a radio. Stone clipped the radio to his own belt and found the man’s keys, which unlocked the oak doors. Stone shut the doors behind him.
Long hallway. White walls, white tiled floor. Paintings that cost more than Stone made in a decade hung on the walls, along with marble sculptures that didn’t look like reproductions.
Stone wasn’t an art guy. He knew a nice painting when he saw it, though, and the ones hanging on Bryant’s wall looked amazing and if he’d been a connoisseur, he might have truly appreciated the display, but that day was not today.
He advanced along the hall, passing the doorway to a library that looked too clean to have ever been used, despite the fullness of the shelves, and onto a another, wider doorway that led to a large living room with a sunken floor, plush carpeting, and enough furniture to fill Stone’s apartment twice. He crossed the space to an empty dining room that contained a large glass table and a chandelier with so many diamonds it probably cost more than all of the paintings in the gallery.
No office. No indication of where Bryant worked.
Stone stepped through a doorway to his left and entered the kitchen and bar area, from there it was an easy cross to a small office. Stone would have expected something bigger. Desk faced the wall, blinds covered the one window, and it was all very organized and neat.
Stone sat behind the desk. The cushion hissed air as his weight settled.
From the tote bag he pulled out the blue USB, the one that Victoria Hood said could break passwords and copy the entire contents of a hard disk.
Stone reached under the desk and pressed the power button on the CPU. How considerate of Bryant to leave it powered off when not in use to better save on electricity and thus save the environment.
Tech workers.
The screen lit up with a password prompt. Stone ignored the screen and pressed the USB into one of the two ports in the CPU. A light on the USB started flashing on and off, and Stone figured the gizmo was doing its work. He left the desk, keeping the tote bag in hand, and wandered back to the bar. From there he noticed a sliding glass door on the other side of the dining room and opened the doors to step out onto the terrace where he might as well have been flying because he had an aerial view of the city that was quite breathtaking. The place didn’t look so bad from the top of a skyscraper. The hills in the distance were covered in rooftops, most of the houses white in color, giving the hillside almost a snowy look. The red towers of the Golden Gate Bridge rose into the air off to the right, and the city blocks directly below were so well defined they looked like places on a checker board.
But the wind blew awfully hard. Stone wondered if the building would tip over from the force. He laughed and returned to the kitchen.
Bryant could open a liquor store with all the booze he had on three levels of shelving. Stone noticed a bottle of vodka called Venus. He twisted off the cap and sniffed. The aroma was terrific. He found a glass, poured a shot, and swallowed. Buttery smooth. He frowned and looked at the label.
“Hey!”
Stone looked up casually.
“What are you doing?”
It wasn’t the bald guard, but another hulky guy in a blue blazer and tan slacks and this one held a pistol.
“I’m just having a drink. Want one?”
The big man opened his mouth to respond, which corresponded with raising his pistol, but then he had to dodge the flying bottle of vodka that tumbled end over end through th
e air as it flew toward him, most of the contents spilling onto the floor. The big man stepped aside and the bottle crashed on the floor, breaking into a million pieces, but he didn’t expect a follow-up throw via the glass which beaned him right between the eyes.
He staggered, let out a wail as he reached for something to grab onto, and that’s when Stone closed the gap and sent a fast roundhouse kick straight into his jaw. The man crumpled onto the wet floor.
Stone took two steps toward Bryant’s office when the radio on his belt crackled to life.
“I hear glass breaking! We need help in the penthouse, everybody up here now!”
Then the alarm blared, strobe lights throughout the penthouse flashing as the siren filled the air. The assault on Stone’s eardrums was intense and he winced, turning away from the office to run back the way he’d entered, knowing he faced an unknown number of guards who wanted nothing more than to knock off his head.
He reached into the tote bag once more as he ran, pulling out a small grenade. A smoke grenade, which might give him a second or two advantage against the guards. He didn’t want to hurt anybody, at least not these men, who were only doing their jobs and certainly didn’t deserve a bullet for the effort.
He heard them in the foyer as he passed through the living room and paused at the entryway of the galley, pulling the pin on the grenade and holding down the spoon as he ran forward again. Four guards now, framed in the doorway of the foyer, and when they saw Stone, they shouted commands. Stone stopped, pitched the smoke grenade ahead of him, the spoon flying free as the grenade sailed a short distance before landing, skidding across the smooth tile and spewing thick white smoke from either end.
The gallery took on “white out” conditions as the white smoke blended with the white walls and floor but then it didn’t matter as the smoke overtook everything in the gallery and made the senses useless. Stone moved briskly to where he’d last seen the wall, striking it hard and scooting along until he stopped at the pedestal for one of the sculptures. The guards hollered and made a mess of themselves trying to run into the smoke, instead crashing into each other, and a tan colored leg or blue colored elbow broke through the smoke here and there. Stone, holding his breath, started for the foyer after a minute, his lungs starting to strain. When he reached the foyer where the air was clearer, he let out the breath, running for the elevator, correcting his step midway to crash through the adjoining stairwell door instead. They could shut down the elevators and trap him like a rat; that was a problem he didn’t need.
But racing down 30 floors wasn’t a picnic either.
He hugged the tote bag to his body and started down the metal steps, making a huge racket magnified by the close proximity to the walls.
How many more guards did he face?
How long before they figured out where he’d gone?
Worse, he’d left behind the blue USB.
He figured Victoria Hood and Brad Preston wouldn’t like that very much at all.
The radio crackled some more.
“Shut down the elevators. We think he’s in the stairwell but we don’t want him jumping on halfway down.”
Other guards acknowledged and another asked for the police to be called. Stone huffed and puffed as he ran down the steps, his legs hurting, and he was only on the 20th floor. The quick turns down each level of the stairwell required careful attention to where he planted his feet. He didn’t need a twisted ankle or a slip-and-fall added to his complications.
The janitor’s uniform at least had a loose fit, which helped him move.
15th floor.
He breathed heavily, pushing himself further. There was no time to stop.
And then he had to stop.
The skinny guard who came through the 14th floor stairwell door stopped short, shouting into his radio that he found the suspect, and Stone used the steps to push back against as he launched himself at the guard, catching him in the middle of the torso and forcing him back through the doorway.
They tumbled onto the hallway carpet, Stone getting a knee in the belly as they hit, the wind rushing out of him which gave Skinny a chance to jab Stone in the throat with a two-finger strike. Stone rolled off, sucking short breaths. Skinny closed to execute an elbow strike which Stone blocked, kneeing the guard in the groin. Skinny howled and bent over, and Stone smashed a fist into the side of his head. Skinny dropped. Stone staggered back, striking the edge of a large potted plant. He fell back, landing hard on the arm of a corner chair and then to the ground.
As his breath came back, he gasped, laying still, somebody on the radio trying to raise Skinny, and Stone counted it a blessing that he’d cut off Skinny’s transmission before he told everybody where he was. But that didn’t mean the rest of the crew wasn’t close.
Stone went back to the stairwell and retrieved his tote bag.
He paused. Basically, he was trapped. Security was searching for him, and the cops were on the way, if they hadn’t already arrived.
Leaving the stairwell, he found a bathroom and quickly shed the janitor’s uniform and pulled on his street clothes. Not all of the security team had seen his face; they were looking for somebody wearing the uniform. It might give him an edge. He went back to Skinny, who was still out. Skinny wore his key card on his wrist, attached to an elastic lanyard. Stone pulled it off and put it on his own wrist. That would at least make him look like a regular employee. His attire wouldn’t raise any eyebrows; tech people didn’t wear suits.
He tried the elevator but the call button didn’t work. The elevators were still out of action.
He left the stolen radio with Skinny. If he was going to have any chance of slipping out, he couldn’t be seen with it.
Taking a deep breath, Stone started down the stairs at a much slower pace than before.
Chapter Nine
They caught him on the 10th floor.
Two guards were coming up the stairs, two more entering the stairwell from the floor above. Luckily no cops. But for rent-a-cops the two that held him did so with iron grips. The other two stayed close, their collapsible batons ever threatening in their meaty hands.
At least he got an elevator ride down to the lobby. Nobody talked during the descent.
He didn’t bother to try sizing them up as the elevator made its way down. The cramped space was no place for a fight and he wasn’t feeling totally 100% anyway.
Two bored-looking cops with hands on hips waited in the lobby, where another security man, the desk man, waited as well. The four guards in the elevator shoved Stone out of the cabin and marched him toward the officers. One started to say something. Stone decided he’d have to abandon his tote bag and the SIG-Sauer P-225A1 that one of the guards had put in his own waistband but he could get another pistol and the items in the tote were replaceable as well.
The open lobby had a smooth tiled floor, tall glass in front letting in plenty of light. The exit doors led to a plaza, flat and open, and across the street a bus terminal might provide a good place to ditch a pursuit.
As the guards escorted Stone closer to the cops, he made his move. An elbow strike to the man on his right started the action. The man went down hard, his buddies taking a second to react. Stone punched another, kicked a third, and slammed a fist deep into the stomach of the fourth as he tried a haymaker of his own. Stone ran toward the cops, who suddenly weren’t bored anymore, but reaching for Taser guns and ordering him to stop. Stone shoved one of the cops out of his way, hearing the man land hard with a grunt, and crashed through the exit and out onto the plaza.
There were more people here, some of them looking his way as the cops gave chase, but he ran faster, down some steps, scaring away a cluster of loitering pigeons.
Cars jammed the street in front of the building and Stone weaved through the stopped vehicles, gaining the opposite sidewalk and running parallel to the bus terminal. Spear Street lay ahead. He didn’t look back at the cops but he knew they were there.
As he rounded the corner at Sp
ear and made a right, more cars moving on the street, a blue Audi convertible screeched to a halt and bumped onto the sidewalk, blocking him. He skidded to a stop. The brunette behind the wheel yelled, “Get in, Stone!” and the Z Section operative only had to think about it for a second. He knew the brunette well--from way back. He leaped over the passenger door, dropping into the seat, and had his seatbelt on before the brunette backed off of the sidewalk and tore into traffic.
“You’re like following a bouncing ball,” Tatiana Ivanov said.
Stone grinned. The wind whipped through his hair. He had to speak over the noise of the engine and the general cacophony of the city streets.
“Thanks for the ride.”
Tatiana Ivanov bit her lower lip as she looked back at the cops in the rearview mirror.
“We left them behind,” she said. “Thanks to you I’ll have to ditch this car.”
“You haven’t been in town long enough,” Stone said. “You can spit and hit an Audi in this place.”
“Where are you staying?”
Stone told her. “Are we here for the same reason?”
“Partly, but my country has its own interest.”
Zero Hour Page 5
