Koval grabs Joel’s hand and raises it where Katie and I can see. “Do not question my ability to hurt him or anyone else.”
Okay, so maybe reasoning was the wrong tactic with this guy.
“Look, Koval, you don’t really want to hurt a civilian, a kid—”
I’m cut off by Joel’s scream piercing the room as Koval crushes his hand inside his own bear-sized paw.
Katie fires her gun. It has zero effect on Koval. He’s still standing there looking scared, then surprised, then amused. But me? I can’t seem to stay upright.
I feel myself falling and can’t do anything about it. I don’t hear anything except the sound of people running from the room, and then nothing.
*
When I come to for the second time today, Jones is standing over me.
“What the hell just happened?”
It feels like I’ve been out for days, but the clock on Maitland’s wall tells me it has only been a few minutes, which is plenty enough time for Koval to have hurt Joel even more than he already has. And if Mr. Easter finished the reassembly job, a few minutes is more than enough time for both Easters to be dead. I need to go find them before time runs out, but I can’t even stand up.
Beside me, Katie also tries to stand, but Jones has to catch her as she loses her balance.
“I must have put the flute together wrong and it backfired.”
“Then you’d be dead, unless that wasn’t a gun you fired,” I say, already suspecting it wasn’t, considering this is Katie.
“It doesn’t shoot bullets. It was supposed to shoot nerve gas to render Koval unconscious, but I must have assembled the flute wrong and it got us instead.”
“So where are they now?” Jones asks.
“I don’t know,” Katie says, “but Joel needs a doctor. That beast probably broke every bone in his hand. Hopefully, he hasn’t done anything worse. Yet.”
Jones instructs the two agents he brought as backup to go find Koval before he says, “You two also need a doctor. I’m calling an EMT, and you’re sitting out the rest of the mission.”
“No. Absolutely not. The effects of the gas wear off quickly.” Katie not only gets to her feet to prove it, she leaves the office, and this time it’s our turn to follow her. “And Koval’s on the run.”
“I don’t think he’d leave without his sister. Wait a minute. Jones, did you know you’re mic’d up?”
“Yeah, I figured it out on the way back here. It’s gone now.”
“She probably told him she planned to ambush and kill me in the basement,” I continue. “Koval obviously knows that didn’t work out well for her. If he left with them, it’s either because Dr. Easter didn’t finish putting the code back together, he needs them as hostages to safely leave campus, or both. Sveta probably knows where he’d go.”
“We might even find him with her,” Jones says. “I assume you gave Sveta more of that tranquilizer than you gave me, so she’s probably still unconscious.”
“I’m going to wake her up with a shot of opioid antagonist to reverse the effects of the tranquilizer, and then I’m going to make her wish I hadn’t.”
Yeeeah. Katie is a little scary.
When we reach the sub-basement, Sveta is gone. I shouldn’t have expected any different. All day, it’s been one step forward for the bad guys, two steps back for us.
“How is that even possible? I checked her pulse before we left her and her heart rate had already begun to slow,” Katie says. “And even if she came to, Houdini couldn’t have escaped the ties I put on her.”
“You think Berg got to her first?” Jones asks.
“No, we’d have heard it on the radio.” Katie holds up a Motorola. She must notice the incredulous look on my face because she adds, “I snagged it from a desk in the office while Agent Jones was setting that cretin straight.”
“Well, I know that cretin, and he is not very discreet,” I say, “at least not when it comes to bragging about himself. Believe me, if Berg had found Sveta or her brother, he’d be patting himself on the back about it all over that radio.”
“Damn it!” Jones yells, the first time I’ve ever seen him lose his cool. “Koval got here first.”
“That would mean he’s moving around with three people now,” I say, because it seems so unlikely. “He knows we’re after him, assumes Berg and his team are. Four people make for an easy target. Koval would never be so obvious.”
Jones draws his weapon as we all realize there’s a good chance Koval is still down here somewhere, hiding in the shadows. He hands me the backup revolver from his ankle holster, then nods and hand-signals our directives. Katie and I go the opposite direction of Jones. Thirty seconds later, we all return to the center of the room, having found nothing.
“I still can’t see Koval trying to move around with Sveta and two hostages,” Katie says. “What are you doing?”
I look up at her for a second before staring at the floor again, walking slowly across the room. “Looking around for a trap door in the floor, like we found in the shed and the janitor’s office. Y’all could help, you know.”
“But we’re in the sub-basement. It seems unlikely, especially in Colorado. Isn’t there a lot of rock near the surface?” Katie says.
“Good point, but I’m desperate here.” I look overhead. “The ceilings, maybe?”
“They’re pretty high. You’d need a ladder, and I don’t see a ladder anywhere,” Jones says, being about as helpful as Katie.
“Okaaay … let’s check the walls, then. There’s a camera in the hallway outside the door, and Sveta had to assume Berg’s team was watching the monitors,” I say, beginning to pace between them. “There are no windows, and yet she’s gone. I suppose she could have turned off the cameras. She did have a smartwatch. But Berg probably turned off her connectivity, so—”
That’s when I notice there’s a partial handprint on the dusty shelf I’m standing next to. I can tell by the thick layer of dust on the floor that the shelf had been here a long time, undisturbed, until today. Someone tried to move the shelf back to its original position, but didn’t quite make it. I swing one side of the shelf out a few inches from the wall.
“What did you find?” Katie asks.
“I don’t know yet, but at some point recently, someone moved this shelf.”
Jones takes the other end of the shelf and we move it a couple of feet away from the wall. I run my hand over it and realize it isn’t a wall at all.
“There’s a draft,” I say.
“Hidden door?” Katie asks, and feels for the draft before pushing her shoulder against one side of the door.
It works like a lever and opens the side near me. Inside, we find a safe room that definitely wasn’t part of the blueprints I’d memorized.
And inside the safe room are Joel and his father.
People outside the building can probably hear us all sigh in relief.
But that feeling doesn’t last long.
As soon as I remove the tape from Mr. Easter’s mouth, he says, “You’re too late. He already has the flash drive with all my research on it. I’m sorry, but I had to save my son. You saw what he did to Joel’s hand. He would have killed us.”
Though I never needed to, I’ve been willing to kill before—for survival, or to complete a mission—but I never wanted to. Until now. Koval had better hope I’m not the first one to find him.
“And the hacker—a blond girl—was with him?” I ask.
“We saw her, but she didn’t come inside the safe room with us. It was only him,” Joel answers after Jones removes his duct-tape gag.
“That makes sense. Someone had to move the shelf back into position after Koval took you two inside with him. And it was too heavy for her to get it back in the exact right position.”
“Or she was in a hurry and didn’t care about making it look perfect,” Jones says.
“Now that I think about it, she wouldn’t have cared if Berg caught her on the stairwell camera. He doesn’t know she’s the hacker, who he thinks is in London somewhere. Berg won’t be looking for her. She can just walk right out the door past his guards, the last straggler student to evacuate,” I say.