She tries to focus her eyes across the dark room, in the direction she entered. There’s something different. She can’t tell if it’s a mirage brought on by her various, now severe injuries, or if it’s real. But the darkness seems to lift ever so slightly at the other side of the room.
Nina stumbles up to standing and gently bends to hover a hand over the ash-covered floor. It reached as high as seventy-seven Celsius the last time she checked the screen.
She can still feel the radiating heat of it. She lowers her hand closer to its surface; it’s hot, unbearably hot. She listens in the silence and thinks she can make out the distant sound of an alarm blaring.
Perhaps this is it, perhaps this is her being saved. But no one is here.
She might have only one shot.
Her mind weighs the choices and without missing a beat she flies across the burning-hot floor in great stumbling fluttering strides, plowing toward the open door that leads back up the stairs, her rasping breath tearing at her throat.
CHAPTER 45
JOE
J oe tries to ignore the alarm blaring around him. He tells himself to focus, to stay alert. In his hand is a mop, its head ripped off, the only weapon he’s managed to find and fashion from the utility room beside the locked basement door.
He watches as the door slides open, bracing for whatever lies behind it to emerge.
When it’s fully open, he steps forward to peer in. Inside is only darkness. He pulls out his mobile phone and turns on the light.
The space beyond the door is cavernous, an empty white room. Nina is not there. Then as his light swings across the back wall, he sees another doorway leading deeper into the house.
Joe looks behind him to the stairs, unsure what to do, but a certainty hits him: no one is coming to rescue him, or Nina. He is the rescue mission, he alone, and if Nina is going to get out of here he will have to go in and get her.
He licks his lips, his phone in one hand, his weapon in the other, and steps into the darkness.
CHAPTER 46
LUCINDA
W hen the alarm begins Lucinda stops what she is doing, the light on the flash drive pulsing red, downloading everything she can fit onto one after another drive from the house’s hidden camera hard drives.
She will need a lot of bargaining chips. She will need a lot of leverage to get herself out of the hole she willingly jumped into. The cavalry is coming and if she doesn’t want to go to jail for a very long time, she’ll need to offer something in return.
But as she looks out across the lawns she feels the possibility of rescue slip away from her. A black-uniformed figure crests the summit of the beach staircase, and then another and another. House security guards, three of them, armed and sprinting flat-out toward the house.
She is not going to make it out of here. This information is not making it out of here. Nothing is.
She scrambles back to the house’s hub screen and with shaking fingers initiates the external door locking system. The power might be cut to the rooms beneath them but it is not cut to the main building. And while the external security system is no match for the lockdown protocol downstairs, the shatterproof glass in the external doors will hold the men back for a few minutes at least.
Lucinda jumps as the first gunshot sings into the patio glass, turning it instantly milky, beyond their approaching bodies, now blurred. She cannot see them, but she knows what will come next. One by one the vast windows catch bullets and milk to opaque before her eyes.
She looks down at the four flash drives in her hand, the final one in the machine blinking and then flashing green. She has it all.
She removes the last drive, slips them all into her pocket, lifts the heavy bucket of water high over the hard drive unit, and pours. She leaps back as it fuses in a bright flash of white, crackling and fizzing as she flinches away.
The men behind the glass begin to pound on the weakened areas. They will be in soon. She doesn’t have long.
She thinks about running, she thinks of every possible choice she could make, but instead she runs to the top of the basement stairs and calls out, “Is she alive?”
Because suddenly that feels like the most important thing in a world of incredibly important things.
And then in the silence that follows as she strains to listen, she hears the gentle, godlike thud-thud-thud-thud of helicopter rotor blades getting closer. The cavalry.
Behind her the sound of smashing suddenly stops and a flicker of hope flutters inside her.
CHAPTER 47
