Deep Dark State: A Annabelle Perkins Thriller: Book 2 (Annabelle Perkins Saga)

by Karl Weber

  Past the guards was a wall of clear bullet-proof glass and past it the entrance to the tunnel that led into the vault in the next room over. A door on the glass wall with a biometric lock separated the civilian area from that of the vault. A pair of guards stood at the entry point of the tunnel that led into the vault.

  The only good news for Anna though was that the environment couldn’t be any more to her advantage. Both areas were pure darkness with the only lighting coming from the flashlights a few of the guards were holding. Other than that, everything was as black as the void. This couldn’t be any more to my liking. Anna didn’t even need a cloaking device since the matte-black camouflage of her tac suit pretty much made her invisible.

  She took one step past the archway before she turned around and looked up at the wall. She jumped up and gripped the wall with her MAG gloves. With haste she scaled the wall and made it up to the ceiling. Like a spider she maneuvered herself to be almost above the group of guards. There were six of them by Anna’s count, not including the two guarding the entryway to the vault tunnel. She could overhear the conversation they were having.

  “Did we get all the civilians and bank workers out?” one guard asked the group.

  “I think so. We checked all the office spaces and lockbox area. Only had about half a dozen needed to be escorted to the lobby,” another guard stated as he pointed his flashlight toward the two stairwells that flanked the hallway Anna had just come down.

  “I’m glad that wasn’t too hard. I just wonder why the building lost power and why the emergency lights haven’t come on yet?”

  Anna chuckled. Because my boyfriend blew up the power plant. She needed to pacify all the guards before she could lead Blake and the rest to the vault. There were too many of them together to take out all at once. Not only that, but the guards on the other side of the clear glass wall would alert authorities if they saw their comrades all collapse onto the floor. They all needed to be broken up and taken out separately.

  Moving across the dark ceiling, Anna entered the lockbox area. While still attached to the ceiling, she blew a sharp whistle that echoed throughout the dark open space.

  “Did you hear that?” a guard just outside the room asked.

  “Is someone still here?” another guard shouted.

  “Let’s go check.” The voice was followed by footsteps. By the sounds of it, only that of two men. Perfect. The two guards entered the room through the same entrance Anna had, only they had their boots on the ground. Both had flashlights. They hugged the lockboxes attached to opposite sides of the room and walked down the room in unison looking for the source of the whistle.

  Anna waited, with her MTSO9 pistol in hand. As soon as both guards had passed underneath, she fired two consecutive rounds, one in the back of each guard. They fell face first onto the marble floor followed by their flashlights bouncing off the floor. The flashlights came to a rest in a position to where they were shining on the two unconscious men.

  “You guys alright?” a voice yelled outside the room. Knowing more would come to investigate, Anna released her MAG boots followed by her glove’s grip on the ceiling making her land on her feet. She quickly shut off both flashlights to conceal the bodies in darkness before returning to the ceiling. The four other guards in the group walked inside the lockbox room. One of them flashed his light on the pacified bodies.

  “What the f …” A sharp pain in his back kept him from finishing his sentence as Anna fired four shots in quick succession and dropped the last four guards to the ground. She smiled underneath her balaclava at the sight off all six men lying face down on the floor. Amateurs. With the first group of guards down and a biometric lock separating her from the tunnel, Anna quickly made her way back to the elevator.

  “Open the elevator,” Anna quietly ordered Price. The door slid open revealing the three directors looking shaken at the sight of Anna stepping out of the darkness. She stepped inside and forcefully grabbed Schulz’s shoulder and escorted him out of the elevator. “Shut it back up.” The doors quietly slid shut behind her and Schulz.

  “What do you want from me?” he asked with fear in his voice. Anna turned him around and pulled him close enough to her that he saw only her bright red eyes within a black void.

  “Do not make a sound. Do what I say or else.” Anna turned him back around and escorted him into the lockbox room, covering his mouth before he saw the motionless bodies on the floor. They were still alive, of course, but Anna didn’t see a reason to let Schulz know that.

  She leaned in and whispered into his left ear, “This is what happens to people who upset me. Have I made myself clear?” Anna took Schulz’s nervous nod as a yes. “Price, power on the emergency lights and doors. A thin strip of lighting running across the floor powered on, making Schulz shudder even more now that he had an even better look at the mess of bodies at his feet.

  Anna maneuvered him to the opposite door of the lockbox room facing the final door and biometric lock that separated them from the entrance to the vault.

  “Go up to the scanner like things are normal and open the door. Don’t react to the guards on the opposite side of the glass. Or else.” Anna emphasized her last sentence by grabbing the back of Schulz’s head and making him get one more good look at the bodies. “One word that I think is an alert to the guards, and you get a forty-five-caliber round to the head. Do you comprehend the danger your life is currently in right now?” Schulz nervously nodded his head. “Go.” Anna pushed Schulz away from her.

  He walked toward the glass door with slight hesitation in each of his steps. He approached the biometric scanner and placed his right palm onto it.

  “Mr. Schulz, what is going on?” one of the guards on the other side of the glass asked. Schulz’s name appeared above the scanner, and the glass doors slid open.

  “Cut the power again,” Anna whispered to Price. The room went fully dark again. Anna sprinted back up to Schulz and took him as a human shield. She raised her MTSO9 in the direction of the two guards standing at the tunnel with flashlights. They raised their pistols in her direction but didn’t beat her to the trigger as Anna pacified them both before either could fire off a shot. “Bring back emergency power, unlock the elevator, and tell Blake to lead the others to the vault entrance.”

  “On it,” Price hastily replied. The low-level lighting came back, which at least made the room bright enough to allow a normal person to see in front of them. Anna released her grip on Schulz, who caught his breath.

  Once he had his breathing in order, he stated, “You cannot seriously believe you will get away with this?”

  “We got this far, why not all the way?” Anna quickly switched to thermal vision to check for any guards that might be inside the guard station connected to the tunnel but saw none. To her left was the service elevator that went to and from the garage. That was where she planned to make her escape.

  Anna entered the guard station where monitors displaying security feeds filled the entire wall across the long, skinny room. The video feeds displayed the floor of lava that covered every inch of flooring inside the entry tunnel. The console that ran everything was some of the most high-tech stuff Anna had ever seen. With no guards left to intervene, she plugged her SCU into the console that controlled the security inside the vault’s entry tunnel.

  “You’ll never make it past my defenses, Ms. Perkins. Nobody can.” The gloating came from Lee. Blake at that point had arrived with Lee and Cross in tow. “Getting past my vault’s security is impossible, even for the likes of you,” Lee yelled from the hallway.

  Having done everything needed at the console, Anna stepped outside the guard room and joined the others. She looked at Lee. “You mean this impossible,” she said as she tapped on her SCU. The black tinted doors slowly slid open. Inside the vault the glowing, red tile floor of lava and cameras had every inch of the tunnel covered. Lee smirked at the sight. Anna tapped her SCU with her index finger one more time and then everything in the room went
dark. Lee’s smirk turned to a frown.

  “Better luck next time,” she told Lee while patting him on the shoulder. “Keep moving,” she ordered. The group entered the tunnel and walked to the end of it where there was a thick steel door with a biometric sensor off to the side. “You know what to do.” Anna was looking at Schulz.

  He shook his head. “I worked too hard to lose everything now.”

  Anna rolled her eyes and holstered her MTSO9. He screamed when she grabbed him from behind and twisted his left arm back in a direction that he didn’t think was possible. His screams filled the tunnel.

  “Scream. Scream as loud as you want. Nobody is coming to save you at the last second.” She twisted the arm back some more, getting an even louder cracking noise out of it. Schulz just screamed even louder. “You say you don’t want to lose everything. Does that include your arm?” She released her grip on Schulz. His left arm was apparently broken as he grunted in pain trying to raise it. Cross witnessed the whole event with a look of terror on his face. Lee, who stood next to him, appeared to be chewing on his jaw as a reaction.

  Schulz looked toward the biometric scanner and slammed it with his right hand. The light turned green followed by the large chunks of steel for doors sliding open.

  As the doors opened wider and wider, one specific color could be seen all throughout the room, gold, lots of it. Gold bars were stacked up to the ceiling across almost every wall of the room with some stacks being well over eight feet tall. There was enough gold in the room for someone to live a lavish lifestyle several times over. Anna, however, didn’t care about all the precious metal. What she came for was so valuable it was priceless.

  After making it past the holy grail of gold bars, she was at the final barrier to the intel she came for. A titanium blast door thick enough to put nuclear bunkers to shame. Three separate biometric and retinal scanners were mounted on the wall next to the door. Only the three bank directors in unison could open the door to the treasure trove of information stored behind it.

  “There is nothing you can do about this,” Lee spoke up. “It takes all three of us to open this door, and there are only two of you. Our heads would be taken off if we forfeited what is past this door. Our families would also pay the consequences. They would all be punished for our betrayal, and the three of us would live just long enough to know it.” Schulz and Cross nodded in agreement to Lee’s statement. Opening this door would be the equivalent of crossing the Rubicon; there was no going back.

  The gold was just money in the end. The information on the other side of the titanium door, however, had the power to reshape nations. In the end, Schulz, Lee, and Cross may have been power hungry tyrants but they still had families they cared for. Anna sighed. Blake warned her and Jack this would happen. She absolutely hated that it had to come to this, but she and Jack had both reluctantly agreed there was no other choice.

  “What are you doing?” Cross asked as he noticed Anna tap away on her SCU.

  “Something … something that I hoped I would never be capable of,” Anna said with sorrow. “But I’ve realized that sometimes to defeat evil, you have to embrace it yourself.” She brought up a holographic video feed.

  “No,” Schulz uttered in absolute fear. It was a video feed of his wife, on her knees with hands tied behind her back and gagged. Her mascara had run down her cheeks and darkened the long, shiny, blonde hair on her shoulders.

  “Show the rest of them,” Anna requested. The camera zoomed out and showed the rest of Schulz’s family along with Lee’s and Cross’s. All three of the directors dropped their jaws in shock and fear.

  “How?” Cross asked.

  “Kidnapping three families isn’t as hard as you think it is as long as you’re doing it during the middle of a near city-wide blackout.”

  Jack stood in front of the three families and filmed them with his SCU. The group consisted of the director’s wives plus Lee’s teenage daughter and Schulz’s two teenage boys. They had been abducted and transported to an abandoned warehouse by Jack and his team. All gagged and blindfolded. The rest of Jack’s eight-man team surrounded the group with AK-12s in hand while Jack filmed the whole experience with his SCU so Anna could stream it.

  “You’ll never get away with this,” Lee stated. Unlike his peers, who had the look of powerless individuals, Lee’s body language was still calm and rational. Something about it didn’t add up to Anna.

  It reminded her of the first encounter she had had with Patterson. She had him held at knifepoint in his own office, but he still acted as if he had a card yet to play, and it turned out he did. Anna brought her SCU up to where it was pointed at Lee and activated its electromagnetic field sensor. Damn it, Anna thought when she saw it. An electronic beacon transmitting from the inside of Lee’s mouth.

  Lee was able to catch Anna’s concern and smirked. “Impressed? I had my team design a beacon small enough to fit inside one of my cavities. To be used as an S.O.S signal for situations just like this.” Lee glared at Schulz and Cross. “When I proposed the idea to my peers, they thought it was ridiculous and unnecessary. Any minute now a strike team will storm the building and save us. You’re as good as dead, Ms. Perkins. Release our families and only then maybe we’ll let you leave here alive.”

  Anna thought and thought fast about what to do next. She needed to get into the next room now or never and after Lee’s revelation, all three of her captives showed no signs of cooperating. The situation was becoming more dire every second. Anna took a step back and whispered to communicate with Jack without the rest of them overhearing. “Jack, we have a problem, a big one.”

  “What?” he asked with concern.

  “Lee triggered a beacon he had hidden on his person. Said a strike team will be here any minute to gun us down if we don’t release the hostages.”

  “Shit. I guess you’re the one in the hot zone. It’s your call what we do next.”

  Anna thought hard about what to do. Something came to mind. No, not that, Anna retorted to herself. She kept thinking but nothing else came to mind. Time was running thin. She had to do something and didn’t see any other option. Anna sighed before saying, “Jack, shoot Lee’s daughter.”

  “You mean with a sedation round?”

  “No, Lee needs to know we are not playing games. Shoot her with a real bullet.”

  “What the hell, Anna,” Jack muttered.

  “I know the scale of what I’m asking. I’m sorry, but I don’t see any other way.”

  Jack exhaled. “Alright.” Jack removed the SCU from his wrist and handed it the soldier standing closet to him. “Keep the camera on me.” The soldier nodded his helmet and took the device from Jack, who then slowly brought up his AK-12. He stepped toward Lee’s daughter, who looked to be about seventeen years old. She shuddered as Jack moved in closer.

  Lee went wide-eyed when he saw Jack approach his daughter. “No, stay away from her,” he shouted, even though he knew it would fall on deaf ears.

  “Give us what we need, and we’ll be on our way. No harm will come to any of them,” Anna stated.

  Lee worked his eyes back and forth like a mathematician going through an equation in is head. His eyes even opened wider like his head was exploding. “Fine, you win. You can have the vault. Just leave my daughter alone,” he begged.

  “Hold it,” Anna ordered Jack. He halted in place.

  “You know what I want,” Anna said as she twitched her head at the titanium door. The three directors all nodded in defeat and approached the biometric and retinal scanners without further conflict. After a few seconds for the scans to complete, the sound of large metal locks disengaging was heard.

  The slab of titanium then began slowly moving out of the way. It eventually showed the contents of the dome-shaped room. A single piece of hardware that went all the way to the top of the dome was located at the center of the massive room. It was the room’s only contents. Anna stepped inside.

  The entire surface from the flooring, walls, a
nd ceiling was nothing but shining titanium metal. It would be the safest room in the entire city if it were directly hit with a nuclear bomb. Anna approached the single console attached to the massive piece of hardware that took up the center of the room. When she got close to the server, she looked up to get a scale for the size of the apparatus. To Anna it seemed that she was standing at the bottom of a mountain of computer hardware. She brought herself back to the task at hand and tapped away on the hardware’s console. No further security to get past. Why would it need it anyway when the hardware was locked inside of the world’s most secure vaults?

  Anna lost herself in the amount of intel she was looking at. There’s got to be at least fifty years’ worth of stuff here, no, one hundred. She had no idea how much was there, only that it was more than she’d probably collected in any previous operation put together. Anna connected her SCU to the console and began the process of making a copy of it all.

  “Anna, we might have a problem,” Price said in her earpiece. She had a bad feeling she knew what it was.

  “Mercenaries assaulting the bank?”

  “The same ones you ran into back at Patterson’s place. How did you know?”

  “Lucky guess. I’m making a copy of the intel now. There’s a lot here. How long do I have?” Anna looked down at her SCU. Data transfer was only at thirty percent.

  “From the drone’s point of view, the vans are just pulling into the employee parking garage now. They’re probably going to use the service elevator to reach your position to avoid going through the lobby.”

  “And block my way out of here. Great.”

  “Does your sarcasm mean you can handle it or …”

  “It means I’ll figure it out. Somehow.” Data transfer was now at fifty percent. “Can you cut the power to the elevator?”

  “Already have. They’ll have to take the stairs down. Unfortunately, it looks like they’re leaving a few guys behind to watch the elevator in case you do come up it somehow.”