By then, Jake was two aisles over, moving as silently as possible. He glided along that path for a moment, found another of the cross aisles, and slipped into it.
“Damn it!” Foster yelled. “Use your phone lights! Get in there and find him!”
Jake stayed on the move, weaving his way through the stacks toward the back of the lower level. The wheels of his brain turned over rapidly. He had already figured out that was the direction he needed to go. The stairwell was back there. If he could reach it, he could head up and lose himself somewhere on the other floors of the library. Foster didn’t have enough people to hunt him down.
Once he had accomplished that, he could start planning his counterattack.
Counting Natalie, Foster had only four allies on this level. He couldn’t send all of them after Jake, because the hostages might well panic and try to escape if they weren’t being closely guarded. Jake looked back toward the front of the room and spotted two moving, flickering glows among the stacks. Those were the two men Foster had sent after him, using the lights on their phones to look for him.
Jake wanted to avoid them if possible, but he would take his chances against them if he had to. He liked the odds if he had to take them on one at a time, even though they had guns.
He didn’t let himself think about Natalie and her stunning betrayal. Those thoughts tried to crowd into his mind, but he wouldn’t allow them to do so. Later, what she had done would be painful to consider . . . assuming he was still alive to do so.
Assuming any of them made it through this alive.
His eyes had adjusted to the shadows. He knew he wasn’t far from the stairwell.
Unfortunately, the same thought must have occurred to Foster. The man shouted, “Get to the stairs! Don’t let him get out that way! Keep him trapped in those shelves!”
So much for stealth, Jake thought. He broke into a run, his shoes pounding against the floor as he headed for the stairwell.
Normally an exit light burned over the heavy steel door with its push bar. Since the power was out, that light was dark now, but Jake was able to spot the door anyway as he emerged from the stacks. The stairwell was about twenty feet to his left, beyond a pair of water fountains. The doors to the men’s and women’s restrooms were back to his right.
As he turned toward the stairs, one of Foster’s men emerged from an aisle beyond the metal door. The light from the phone in his left hand splashed over Jake, who slowed down, but only for a second, just long enough to grab a heavy book from the end of a shelf he was passing.
He flung the thick volume at the gunman as hard as he could.
The book struck the man’s gun hand and knocked it aside just as he pulled the trigger. The bullet whined off one of the metal shelves in the stacks.
Jake had charged right behind the thrown book. His outstretched left hand clamped around the gunman’s right wrist. Jake’s right fist rocketed up and crashed into the man’s jaw with enough force to slew his head far around to the side. He went limp.
Footsteps slapped the floor behind Jake, who whirled around and pulled the stunned gunman with him. Flame spurted twice from the muzzle of the gun fired by the man who had just emerged from the stacks in front of the restrooms. Jake heard the bullets smack into the back of the first gunman and felt his body jerk. The pain jolted the man back to consciousness for a second as his eyes widened. Then they began to glaze over in death.
Jake plucked the dead man’s gun from nerveless fingers, thrust his arm under the man’s arm, and triggered twice as the pistol Jake had just liberated belched fire three times. The trio of swift shots spun the second gunman off his feet. His gun flew out of his hand.
Jake might have liked to have that second pistol, but it had landed somewhere in the stacks and he wasn’t going to take the time to hunt for it. He did slap the pockets of the first man as he lowered the corpse to the floor and came up with three magazines. He hoped they were fully loaded but didn’t take the time to check as he stuffed them in his pocket, then slapped open the stairwell door.
It was dark as pitch in there once the door swung closed behind Jake. He wished he had some way to wedge it closed so Foster’s men couldn’t pursue him, but there was nothing he could use for that. Instead he switched the gun to his left hand, since the stair railing was on his right, and started up as fast as he could, sliding his hand along the rail so he would know when he reached a landing.
Running upstairs in the dark was more of a challenge than he thought it would be. He stumbled several times and dropped to a knee once, banging it painfully on the stair riser. But he didn’t waste any time getting to the next level, which was the ground floor.
He was able to make out lines of light coming through the tiny gap around the door on this level. It was a lot brighter here because of the large windows in the library’s front wall.
Jake hesitated for a moment, uncertain whether to try leaving the stairwell here. There was at least a chance he’d be able to fight his way past Foster’s men and reach the doors before they could stop him. Then he would be out.
But he wasn’t sure he wanted to be out. Once he left the library, he wouldn’t be able to do anything to stop Foster’s plan. All the innocent people in here would be left to that madman’s mercy.
A short time earlier, he would have included Natalie with those innocent people, he thought bitterly. Now that he knew the truth about her, he felt like he ought to hate her and believe that whatever happened to her, she had it coming.
Somehow, he just couldn’t do that.
If he escaped from the library, eventually things would come down to a bloodbath. The authorities would breach the building sooner or later. There was no way of knowing how many would be slaughtered in that battle. Taking Foster down from the inside was still the best chance to minimize loss of life, Jake decided.
He started up the stairs to the second floor.
As he climbed, he thought that probably all the members of Foster’s bunch were carrying satellite phones. Foster seemed to be pretty smart. He would have anticipated that the authorities would take the cell towers off-line and jam the walkie-talkie bands. It would be difficult to stop the sat phones from being able to communicate with each other, though. By now Foster would have warned his men on the other floors of the library about Jake being loose. All they had to do was guard the doors to the stairs and be ready to shoot him down if he poked his head out.
He might have escaped one trap by charging right into another, he mused. But under the circumstances, there was nothing else he could have done.
When he reached the second floor, he didn’t stop. He didn’t even slow down. The idea of going all the way to the roof had started to nibble around the edges of his brain. If he could get up there, he might be able to communicate somehow with whatever law enforcement agencies were on hand. He might even be able to help them work out a plan to storm the building without too much loss of life.
There was still the matter of those bombs, Jake reminded himself. He still believed there was a good chance Foster was running a bluff. Foster’s men could have planted one or two actual bombs, just enough to make it seem like a possibility that he could blow up the entire campus.
Or maybe by the end of the day, what had been Kelton College would be just a huge, smoking crater in the ground. Jake didn’t know. One thing was certain, though. Matthias Foster couldn’t set off any bombs if he was dead.
Even though only a few minutes had passed, it was starting to seem to Jake like he had been climbing forever in the darkness. There was one landing between each floor, so he knew when he reached the third floor. He paused at the door this time and wondered why none of Foster’s men had started down from above. They would have had him corralled in the stairwell with nowhere to go. He supposed they didn’t want to risk a firefight in such cramped quarters. They might feel like they had a better chance by waiting him out.
He pressed his ear to the door and heard nothing from the other side. Well, th
at made sense, he told himself. If there were two of Foster’s men on this level, one of them would be watching any hostages they had taken—probably not many, considering that this floor was devoted to Special Collections and not as many students utilized those—while the other would be hidden somewhere with a good view of the door to the stairwell, ready to fire if Jake emerged from it.
He thought about kicking the door open to draw the gunman’s fire, then trying to pick him off. Every bit he could whittle down the odds against him made it more likely he would survive the final showdown.
He had just about discarded the idea, though, when he heard a sudden crash on the other side of the door. A man yelled, “What the hell?” at the same time as someone else let out a startled, incoherent cry.
Then guns started to roar, but Jake realized quickly that none of the bullets were striking the door. Nobody was shooting at him.
That meant somebody else was in bad trouble in there, and Jake didn’t hesitate once that thought went through his mind.
He bulled the door open with his shoulder and plunged out onto the third floor with the pistol gripped in both hands, ready to deal out death.
CHAPTER 34
Dr. Alfred Montambault was lost . . . and not just in the physical sense. He had no idea where he was, he had no idea what to do, and he had no idea what was going to happen next. All he knew was that he had been crawling around up here in the dark for what seemed like hours, and it was only a matter of time until he did something wrong and died because of it.
He was not cut out for this. Not at all.
And making it even worse . . . he kind of needed to pee.
He didn’t allow himself to think about that. As long as he didn’t acknowledge the need, maybe it wouldn’t become urgent.
He stopped and drew in a deep breath. As he did, dust settled in his nose and throat and tickled maddeningly. He wanted to cough, but he stifled that impulse. One of the terrorists might be right below him, and if he coughed, the killer would hear him, realize that someone was in the crawl space, and open fire. Those flimsy ceiling tiles wouldn’t stop any bullets. The thick plank on which Montambault was lying might shield him, but he didn’t want to risk that. So it was best to be as quiet as possible while he continued his quest to find a way out of here.
He must have covered the entire area up here more than once, he told himself. If there was any sort of ladder or hatch that led out of the crawl space, he hadn’t found it. If there was such a thing, it might just lead him into more trouble. His choices were limited, though. He could continue exploring, or he could just give up, lie here, and wait to see what happened.
Chances were, he would die no matter what he did.
With that bleak thought in his mind, he started crawling forward along the plank again. He hadn’t gone more than a few feet when, without warning, he sneezed.
The dust he’d inhaled a few minutes earlier had caused that reaction, he knew, but knowing the cause didn’t make things any better. His nose, which was on the prominent side, made sure that the noise it produced was loud and resonant.
A man’s shout from below dashed his hope that the sneeze hadn’t been heard.
Montambault started crawling faster as another man responded with a shout of his own. Even though he was hurrying, he still tried to be as quiet as he could, so maybe they wouldn’t be able to track him by the sounds of his flight.
Whether they could hear him or not, they started shooting through the ceiling, just as he feared they might. The gunfire was thunderous and made him cry out involuntarily. The wild thought crossed his mind that maybe he should shoot back at them—he had a gun, after all—but he couldn’t even see where he was going, let alone being able to aim at the men trying to kill him.
Something punched through a ceiling tile near him and thudded into a board, chewing splinters from the wood that stung Montambault’s face. That bullet had almost hit him. He gasped in shock and crawled even faster.
Suddenly the plank wasn’t beneath him anymore. It had come to an abrupt end. The air duct and the path alongside it must have turned, probably at a right angle. Thrown off balance with nothing to support him, Montambault sprawled forward. His outstretched hands struck one of the ceiling tiles.
The tiles and the metal latticework that held them up weren’t meant to support any sort of weight. The tile broke under Montambault and fell out of its frame. He yelled as he plunged headfirst through the opening that hadn’t been there a second earlier.
Montambault had always been clumsy and unathletic. It was pure luck that he didn’t break his neck when he hit the floor. He had dropped the gun when he fell, but he was able to catch himself with both hands and roll over to take away some of the impact. Despite that, he landed hard enough on his back to take his breath away, rattle his teeth, and shake himself to his core.
Someone yelled, “What the hell?” The shout reminded Montambault that he was still in deadly danger. His brain screamed at his muscles to move, but they weren’t quick to react.
He moved a lot faster when a shot blasted and a bullet whined off the tile less than a foot from his head. He jackknifed halfway up and tried to get to his feet as his instincts told him to run.
But run where? He glanced to his left and to his horror saw two men pointing pistols at him. There was nowhere to run, no place to hide.
Then he heard something from the other direction and a voice bellowed, “Doctor, get down!”
Montambault did what he was told. He dived, landing flat on his belly this time, and as he did, he lifted his head enough to look up and see Jake Rivers standing just outside the door to the stairs, with a gun clasped in both hands and thrust out in front of him.
That gun spat flame as four shots erupted from it, the reports rolling through the air so fast they sounded almost like one long roar. A tiny wisp of smoke curled from the muzzle as Rivers stopped shooting.
No more shots came from the other men, either. Montambault jerked his head around, twisting his neck so he could see them lying on the floor a few yards away. One man was motionless, but the other still writhed and spasmed as a little fountain of blood arched up from his ruined throat where a bullet from Rivers’ gun had torn through it.
Then with a hideous gurgle, that man slumped down, too, and didn’t move again. Montambault’s brain was stunned, but enough of it still worked for him to realize that Rivers had killed those two men in not much more than the blink of an eye.
Now Rivers stalked toward him with the gun still held ready. Montambault covered his head with his arms. Surely Rivers hadn’t saved him only to kill him, but the young man hated him, Montambault was sure of that. There was no telling what a bloodthirsty barbarian like Rivers might do.
Something thumped against Montambault’s side and made him jump. Rivers said, “Grab the gun, Doc, and get back on your feet. There might be more of them around here.”
That was the pistol he had dropped when he fell through the ceiling, Montambault realized. Rivers must have slid it over to him with a foot. He wasn’t going to kill him after all.
Rivers strode past the professor to check the two terrorists and make sure they were dead. While he was doing that, Montambault pushed himself into a sitting position and gingerly wrapped his hand around the butt of the pistol lying beside him. Rivers glanced over his shoulder, smiled faintly, and said, “You know how to use that, Doc?”
“I . . . I killed one of them a little while ago,” Montambault said. His voice sounded hoarse and strange in his ears.
Rivers cocked an eyebrow in surprise and said, “Good for you. You’ll probably get to do it again before the day’s over.”
* * *
Jake hadn’t known what to expect when he stepped through the door, but the sight of Dr. Montambault lying on the floor while two of Foster’s men tried to kill him wasn’t it. He was pretty sure of that.
Actually, now that the two guys were down and out of the fight and Jake was leading the way up a corrido
r toward the center of the library’s third floor, he hoped those two actually had been part of Foster’s bunch. He didn’t see how they could have been anything else, since they’d been trying to kill the professor, but you came right down to it, he didn’t know any of Foster’s followers by sight except the few he had already encountered.
Foster had boasted of having the entire building under his control, though, so anybody with a gun ought to be an enemy.
But Montambault had had a gun, Jake reminded himself. In fact, the professor had the weapon in his hand again, but only because Jake had prodded him to pick it up.
He paused and said quietly over his shoulder, “Do you know how many of them are on this floor?”
“N-no. All I know is that I shot one of them, while the others were trying to get all the prisoners together in the central part of the floor.”
“How many prisoners are we talking about?”
“I have no idea,” Montambault replied with a shake of his head. “I was the only one in the section where I was. Maybe a few people in each of the other sections, a couple of staff members . . .” He shrugged. “A dozen in all, perhaps.”
“If that’s all, Foster’s men might have left just one person guarding them.”
“Foster?” Montambault repeated, frowning in apparent confusion.
“Matthias Foster, or that’s what he claims his name is, anyway. He’s the guy behind all this.”
“I never heard of him.”
“Could be not many people did before today,” Jake said. “Sometimes when guys pull big stunts like this, it’s as much for the sake of their ego as for the money they hope to collect.”
“I still don’t know what you’re talking about. I’m afraid I have no idea what’s going on.”
Quickly, Jake sketched in what he knew about the takeover of the campus. Montambault, already pale, blanched even more when Jake told him about the bombs.
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