The wind howled in her ears as she looked down from one of the tallest buildings in the city. It was almost midnight, and the city lights glowed bright against the dark backdrop of the sky.
She and Adriana were on the edge of Stadium Tower, 262 feet above the ground. They stood on the edge, with knees bent to keep their balance against the gusting wind.
“Sean would like it a lot less,” Adriana quipped.
Sean’s fear of heights was legendary. There was zero chance she’d get him onto a high ledge like this, not even for an important mission. He would have opted to find another way in. Probably through the front door with guns blazing.
She laughed internally at the mental image.
“It’s gonna be fine,” Adriana said. “Just make sure you throw your chute the second you’re clear of the building. Our window is gonna be tight. Throw it too late, and you’ll miss the landing spot.”
The two women had parachute packs strapped to their back. They held the main chutes in their right hands. They were also armed with enough weapons and ammo to stage a small coup. Both carried a pistol on each hip, strapped down tight to keep the weapons from moving too much. In addition to the handguns, they carried HK-5 submachine guns tied tightly to their chests. They each had a complement of backup magazines for their weapons, with everything totaling over two hundred rounds.
Adriana would have carried more, but then she’d have sacrificed weight and agility for firepower. She knew her ability to move quickly was just as lethal as a bullet. Or so she hoped.
June cleared her throat. She’d never base-jumped before. Adriana hadn’t either but assured her friend it would be fine. “Safer than jumping out of an airplane,” she’d claimed.
June didn’t need to know that was a lie.
“You ready?” Adriana asked, casting her partner a sidelong glance.
June shrugged. “Not really.”
“Good. Remember, we’ll be coming in pretty hot, so be sure you pump your legs as fast as you can when you get close to the rooftop.”
June gave a tentative nod.
“I’ll be right in front of you,” Adriana reassured. Somehow, she knew it wasn’t that reassuring.
She pressed a button on her lapel. “A-Tak, you ready to kill the lights?”
“Ready and waiting, boss.”
Adriana had called on her associate for one more favor. Tosu’s building was covered from head to toe in high-tech security systems and that, ironically, made them vulnerable to an online attack.
“Sixty seconds,” Adriana said.
“Ten-four.”
“Jumping now. Mark.”
Adriana pushed off from the ledge and dropped away from the building. Air rushed by her, whistling loudly in her ears. She threw the black chute out as hard as she could, and the fabric caught air and yanked her upward.
She grabbed the handles and guided herself toward the target. The men on the rooftop were miniscule at first, but grew larger by the second. The area above Tosu’s complex was well lit, with floodlights shining brightly from every corner. Adriana knew in a matter of seconds the rooftop would be bathed in darkness. Unless Ray screwed up.
If that happened, she and June would be cut down before they could put their feet on the ground. She considered the possibility and had decided that if the lights weren’t killed within fifteen seconds of landing, she and June would abort and steer clear of the complex.
Even then, the guards would probably see them, which would make for a hairy escape amid a hail of gunfire.
A thousand yards from the target, Adriana pulled on both cords, and the parachute lifted slightly and steadied its course.
The city below her feet passed by quickly as she approached the target. The gap closed: nine hundred yards, eight hundred, seven hundred. Inside of five hundred yards, Adriana’s concern ballooned. If Ray didn’t kill the power, she and June would have to turn away.
“Come on, Ray,” Adriana whispered to herself.
Five seconds passed like a month. Then suddenly, the bright lights on top of the building went dark.
The guards disappeared in the blackness, but Adriana could still make out the rooftop’s silhouette against the glittering backdrop of the city.
“Good man, Ray,” she said.
A hundred yards and closing quickly, Adriana readied herself for impact. She raised her feet like she’d been trained to do on her first jump from an airplane. Her boots cleared the roof ledge with ten feet to spare, and she let off on the cords to allow the chute to go limp.
Her feet hit the ground and she rolled forward. It took her less than two seconds to cut the chute free and draw the pistol from her hip. The suppressor on the end of the barrel made freeing the gun a little clumsier than normal, but it was essential to keep things quiet.
The parachute fluttered away in the gusting wind and a moment later disappeared over the edge.
June hit the ground and rolled fifty feet away from Adriana. She deftly copied her partner’s movements, pulling her weapon and freeing herself from the chute.
Adriana saw one of the guards appear around a huge air conditioning unit. He was chattering on a walkie-talkie about the power outage, ordering someone to get the lights back on.
The man was between the two women as he walked over to the edge and looked out.
Adriana started to sneak in his direction but sensed something move behind her. She ducked under a huge ventilation cylinder and waited for a second. A guard appeared around the corner, pacing deliberately to where she’d just been standing.
“Did you see that?” he said into his radio, cutting off the guy who was in the middle of a rant about the power outage.
“See what?”
Adriana sprang from her hiding spot with knife drawn. She plunged the tip into the base of the man’s skull and drove it up into his brain. His body shuddered for a second and then went limp. She withdrew the blade and let him fall to the ground, dead instantly.
She looked across the rooftop and saw June pulling her knife’s edge across the other guard’s throat. The man waved his arms around for a moment and then desperately clutched his neck to stem the bleeding. He fell to his knees and then lay prostrate on the ground in a pool of dark crimson.
Adriana made a signal for June to go around the other way to sweep the perimeter. They’d discussed the plan ahead of time, and both women knew to take out as many of the bad guys as possible as they worked their way to the middle, where the maintenance door led to the elevator.
Two down. Four to go.
June spun around and took off in the other direction, crouching low behind a row of air conditioning units as she made her way to the corner of the building.
Adriana turned and crept behind a huge machine. It was a tangled mess of pipes and hoses. What the thing was for, she had no idea, but it gave her cover as she skirted the rooftop in search of her next target.
A burst of radio static from the other side of the machine gave away another guard’s position. Adriana moved with graceful speed. She rounded the machine’s backside and caught a glimpse of the guard’s jacket as he stalked down the row toward where she’d been just a moment before. In a couple of seconds, he’d find the bloody body of his associate and radio for help.
He was already checking in on the patrol with his walkie-talkie. No doubt, he was heading that direction because it was the last place the dead guard had responded.
Adriana snuck around, knife ready to give him the same treatment as the first guy.
She was so focused on the target that she didn’t notice a strip of thick gray wire running from the machine on her right to another unit on the left. Her boot caught it, and she lost her balance for a fraction of a second.
The stumble caused her left foot to pound the surface of the roof hard. The noise startled the guard and he spun around with his submachine gun leveled, waist high.
The knife wasn’t an option now.
Adriana raised her pistol and fired a quick burst of three muffle
d shots. One of them missed, smashing into the short wall surrounding the roof. The other two struck true, hitting the target in the chest. She left nothing to chance, rushing to the falling man and planting one more round in his skull before he fired his weapon and alerted the city.
She hovered over him for a second. His lifeless eyes stared into the twinkling night sky above.
“Patrol five, come in,” a man’s thick accent came through the radio. “Where are two and three? Is something wrong with their radios?”
She picked up the walkie-talkie attached to the guy’s vest and clipped it to her belt, turning the volume down a few notches before she started back toward the middle of the roof.
She listened intensely, hoping her third mark would reveal his location, but the radio had gone silent. At least the guy wasn’t putting the entire building on alert.
Adriana stayed low, moving with ninja-like stealth as she reached the end of the row. There was no one standing on the path between her and the elevator shaft entrance. Her eyes narrowed with suspicion. Where was the guard?
She didn’t see any sign of June, either, which was concerning. June should have also been making her way toward the elevator shaft.
Suddenly, a big arm wrapped around her neck and squeezed.
The man’s dense forearm crushed her throat and cut off the air to her lungs. Adriana felt her eyes bulging out of their sockets almost instantly. She kicked and wiggled to free herself, but the man lifted her off the ground, leaning his body back for leverage. Her feet swung wildly. Her head turned back and forth but couldn’t move more than a half inch or so due to the big man’s brute strength.
He dragged her backward, passing the machine with all the pipes, and slowed his pace until she realized where he was taking her. He wasn’t going to choke her to death. He was going to throw her over the edge.
11
Tirana
The huge guard twisted his body, moving Adriana’s feet out over the ledge. A terrifying vision of falling to the pavement below filled her mind. For the first time in her life, she understood Sean’s fear and did everything in her power to escape the man’s death grip.
A low pop interrupted her thoughts. The sound came from the left. Almost instantly, the guard’s arms went limp. She felt herself falling, but luckily the guard was toppling backward. Her butt hit the ground by the big man’s knee, and she rolled to the side, ready to fight him if he wasn’t yet dead.
The bullet hole in his left temple did away with that potential problem. Adriana tried to swallow, but it was difficult. She knew her throat would be sore for a few days. As she caught her breath, she saw a shadow approaching. It wasn’t a threat. It was June holding her pistol at her side.
“Thought you could use a little help.”
“Thank you,” Adriana managed. “Glad he fell backward.”
June bit her lower lip. “Yeah, had to take a gamble on that.”
“Other guards dead?” Adriana asked, not wanting to harp on her near-death experience for long.
June gave a nod. “Yeah, they’re taken care of.”
Adriana tried not to show her surprise, but she was impressed. This wasn’t the first mission she and June had worked together on, but the natural, almost callous killer instincts June displayed—along with precision—had caught Adriana a tad off guard.
“Good,” she said, not wanting to delay further. “Let’s get to the shaft.”
They hurried over to the maintenance access. It was nothing more than a metal rectangular box with a side door about four feet high. A padlock on the clasp was the only thing keeping people out, although Adriana couldn’t imagine why anyone would want to get in there—unless they had a death wish or were just stupid.
She reached into a cargo pocket and pulled out a small device. It looked like a cigar lighter, but was much more than that. It had two black prongs that rose up from the main body. Within those prongs were four metal rods. She placed one of the padlock bars inside the prongs and pressed a button on the center of the gadget. The prongs turned bright orange. Suddenly, the padlock glowed a similar color. A few seconds later, the thing fell from its hinge to the ground, the bar melted from the plasma lighter.
June swung the door open and leaned inside. She couldn’t see much in the pitch-dark shaft. The rooftop lights came back on and startled the two women, though they knew that was going to happen. Ray’s mischief was designed to keep the power down for only a few minutes to make it look natural.
“Rooftop patrol, do you copy?” A voice came through the radio on Adriana’s belt.
“Crap,” she said and grabbed the device. She made static noises and then used the manliest voice she could muster. “Copy…power back on. Sweeping area now.”
There was a pause. June and Adriana exchanged a concerned look for a moment while they waited for the guy to respond.
They were flooded with relief when he came back on the radio. “Copy that.”
Adriana sighed. Learning Arabic was turning out to be one of the best investments of time she’d ever made.
June reached into a cargo pocket and pulled out a metal disc. On one side, the thick device had a digital readout and three buttons. The spool contained a thin cable, capable of holding four hundred pounds, although she had no intentions to test that strength. Adriana also pulled a similar disc from her pants and tapped the buttons.
“How far down?” she asked.
“Tosu is on the top floor. It’s only a thirty-foot drop. Of course, if these things don’t work, the drop could be much farther depending on where the lift is right now.”
The answer didn’t exactly fill Adriana with confidence, but she’d been in tight spots before—worse ones, actually.
They clipped their harnesses onto a hook on the end of the spool and then reached around the inside of the portal’s frame and attached the magnetic discs to a steel support beam. Then they pressed a button on the right, and the device switched on, indicated by a red light. Seconds later, the light turned green.
Adriana pressed a button with a plus arrow until the blue digital display read 30. Then she looked over at her partner. “Ready?”
June finished the same process and then nodded. “Ready if you are.”
Adriana gave a nod and then swung her right leg out over the abyss. She held on to the cable with both hands and sat back away from the opening for a moment to test its stability. It seemed to hold just fine, so she stood up and eased herself into the darkness.
She planted her feet against the wall, leaning back to rappel down. June tested her line and then joined her friend in the shaft. She reached up and pressed a button. Adriana did the same.
It only took two seconds for the devices to start letting out the slack on the line. The women used the balls of their feet to keep control of their descent. Once they were ten feet down, it was nearly impossible to see anything. The only light in the shaft was coming from the maintenance door above, and that wasn’t much.
They kept moving at a steady, cautious pace.
At twenty feet, it was pitch black. The portal at the top did almost nothing down that far.
When the women hit the thirty-foot mark, the motor in the discs stopped. Adriana reached into a cargo pocket and found a pair of glasses. She slid them onto her nose and flipped a tiny switch on the right temple. The lenses changed to a greenish color, and suddenly the elevator shaft illuminated before her eyes.
The door into Tosu’s floor was right in front of them.
June reached into one of her pockets and retrieved a thin plastic box with a camera lens on one side. She pressed its prong into the female power adapter on her phone and then hit the power button.
Her phone’s screen lit up, showing nothing but dim, bleak space. Then she turned it to the left. Nothing. She swung carefully to the right.
Adriana watched her partner. June pointed to the right corner of the elevator shaft and then held up two fingers.
Two figures appeared on her phone screen
in bright red, orange, and yellow. The thermal scanning device was capable of detecting heat signatures from up to a hundred feet. Inside the elevator shaft would limit that range, but it was apparently still effective. June twisted around again to recheck the other end of the hall. It remained empty.
Adriana reached back to her belt and produced another tool with what looked like pliers on the end. She inserted the narrow end into the seam in the center of the elevator doors. Then she turned a rod sticking out of the top. The doors parted slightly. Adriana cranked the rod several times until the opening was around five inches wide. The bright light from the hallway seared her vision for a second, and she had to turn off the lenses to save her eyes.
She squinted hard, squeezing her eyelids to adjust to the light. It took a few seconds. Then she was back to work, prying the door open.
June continue scanning the hallway with her device. She turned to the right and saw the figures of the two guards still positioned where they had been before. Then she swung back to the left. No sign of…wait. A new figure appeared on the screen, walking down the hall toward them.
Her heart rate quickened.
She reached over and tapped Adriana’s shoulder then showed her the screen. The guard was bearing down on them at a steady pace.
Adriana sighed and twisted the rod the other direction to allow the elevator doors to close. It didn’t work. Instead, the doors remained open, and her tool came loose, nearly dropping from her hand into the darkness below.
She swallowed and then shoved the tool back into her pocket.
Neither woman panicked, but they were far from relaxed at this point.
The guard would be in front of the door within ten seconds.
Adriana had an idea. She didn’t dare say a word lest the guard hear them. Her idea, however, was risky anyway. But it was the only thing she could think of. She couldn’t close the elevator doors. And the guard would absolutely see that they were open and assume something was wrong. He’d probably stick his head in and have a look around. When that happened, the jig would be up.
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