The screws gave and came free. When I pried open the panel, light came through from the crevices of another wall before us, showing a cavity between the section where we stood.
I slipped through and thanked God for small mercies when I saw a metal door a few inches down from me. It looked like one of those standard maintenance doors you’d find in a subway.
Moving to it, I picked the lock and pushed the door slightly open. The light then illuminated the area revealing similar vaulted spaces and aisles to the ones above in Giovanni’s Castle courtyard. Up there, I’d mainly seen a bunch of diamonds in the vaults I’d been in. This section definitely looked different. It also didn’t seem like there was anybody else down here.
“We’re in,” I whispered to Ethan, still erring on the side of caution.
“Good work,” he replied.
Wes and I both went in. We held our guns at the ready and only put them away when we were absolutely sure we were alone.
As we looked around, however, the biggest problem presented itself before us. All we could see in our view were several rows of aisles containing endless vaults.
Instantly, I had the same feeling I experienced when I first saw Hangar 51 in Raiders of the Lost Ark. The military installation was a repository for secret items held by the government. There must have been a million crates and containers in there containing all manner of shit.
I remembered looking at it and feeling doom because you knew that once something ended up there it would never be found. That was how I felt now. Instead of the crates though, these were vaults.
All looked the same.
Each and every one of them.
“Well, this sucks,” Wes stated, seeing the problem. “How the hell are we supposed to know which one it’s in? Looks like there’s a million vaults down here.” He frowned.
Fuck.
He wasn’t kidding.
Thinking back to the space I’d seen on the map Wes got of the place, there was easily space for a few hundred vaults so Wes wasn’t wrong in his exaggeration.
“There’s no way we can look through all of them.” I sighed, looking down the aisles before us. The place actually looked like a damn maze.
“What else can we do? I can set up cameras, but what if no one comes down here?”
Damn, there was never a dull moment. There was always something to make each step of the way harder and harder.
Right from the fucking start of this mission there’d always been something to piss me off. Right from the point where I realized I’d actually have to go searching for the blueprints. We all thought the knights would be guarding it in some encasement and I’d be told where it was. Nothing like that happened. hence why we were here.
Now this fucked up shit.
How were we supposed to look throughallthe fucking vaults?
But… if we didn’t what else would we do?
“Fine… yeah we’ll have to do that.” I bit the inside of my lip. “Set the cameras up and hope for a lucky break. Maybe he’ll come down here. If not we’ll use them as surveillance.”
“Maybe we should just spend the rest of tonight setting up the cameras and motion sensors. That way we can see if Giovanni or anybody else comes down here,” Wes suggested.
If we happened to see Giovanni on camera down here going into a vault then that would obviously work to our advantage. But, since it looked like he might not come down here often we couldn’t just wait for that. Waiting could mean that he actually came to pick the blueprints up to move them or hand them over to The Chameleon. I couldn’t let that happen.
We’d gotten this far. Whatever we did, no matter what we did, or what happened, we had to keep moving.
“Yes. Let’s do that,” I agreed. “Then we can come back tomorrow night to start looking through the vaults.”
He nodded and looked on ahead. “Bro, I think we’re gonna need help. It’s going to take forever to look through this many vaults.”
We’d absolutely needed help. There was no way the two of us could look by ourselves.
“Ethan’s guys will have to chip in. More hands less work.” Ethan had six guys with him. The eight of us working together, putting our brains together, could make this go much quicker than just me and Wes looking.
