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“It’s totally unfamiliar software,” Jack said.
“Nothing you can’t handle, though. Right?”
“I can’t do it very fast,” Jack said. “I have to work through it.”
The hand on his shoulder tightened its grip. “How long, Jack?”
“Hey, I’m hurt, all right? I got shot!” When Caine just stared at him, he lowered his voice. “I don’t know. It depends.”
He could sense Caine’s tension, the bottled-up rage that fed on fear. “Then don’t waste time.”
Caine released him and turned back to Drake. “Put the hostages in the corner.”
“Uh-huh,” Drake said absently. He was still fondling the submachine gun.
Caine strode quickly up to him and smacked the barrel of the gun. “Hey. Take care of business. Brianna could be back here at any second. If it’s not her, it’ll be Taylor. You’d better not be screwing around.”
Brittney lay on the floor, not moving, not making a sound. Was she alive? Jack wondered. Given how badly she was hurt, and knowing now how much pain even a grazing wound could cause, he wondered if she might not be better off dead.
Jack found an ancient loose-leaf binder, smallish, with torn page ends sticking out here and there, festooned with age-curled Post-it notes marking pages.
He started to work his way through it. He was looking for a guide to the function keys. Without that he had nothing. The lack of a mouse was crippling: he’d never seen, let alone used, a computer without a mouse. It was amazing that such things still existed.
“Diana,” Caine ordered. “Read our two hostages. I don’t want to find out they’re hiding some power. Drake? How’s it going?”
“I’m going to string the wire,” Drake said.
“Good,” Caine said.
Jack stole a glance and saw that Drake was holding a spool of bare wire, quite thin but strong looking. He was surveying the doorway, looking for something.
Drake shrugged, dissatisfied with what he was seeing. He began to wrap one end of the wire around the broken middle hinge where it was still attached to the wall. It was a tall door with three hinges, one that was just above head level, one at ankle height, one splitting the difference.
Drake stretched the wire from the hinge to a heavy me
tal filing cabinet against the wall. He passed the spool through a drawer handle and pulled it tight. He cut the wire with a pair of needle-nose pliers and wrapped the wire back on itself, tightening it further.
Diana stepped back from the two hostages and said, “They’re both clear. The one may be a one bar, but at that level he doesn’t even know what powers he has. If he even has anything at all useful.”
“Good,” Caine said.
Diana sauntered over and flopped into the swivel chair closest to Jack. She stared moodily at the monitor in front of her.
“What’s Drake doing?” Jack whispered.
Diana turned her languid eyes on him. “Hey. Jack wants to know what you’re doing, Drake. Why don’t you tell him?”
“Jack is supposed to be working,” Caine interrupted. “He’s busy.”
Jack turned hastily back to the notebook. There it was: a list of function keys. He frowned and began to work his way through the keys, pressing, seeing the results, moving on methodically to the next key.
Drake had finished with the wire. He ducked beneath it and disappeared down the hallway from the direction they had come, uncoiling wire as he went.
“I’m in the main directory,” Jack announced. “This is so old. This is, like, DOS or something.”
Despite himself he was becoming fascinated by the challenge at hand. It was computer archaeology. He was deciphering a language that was pre-Windows, pre-Linux, pre-everything. It took his mind off the pain. Mostly.
“I hope you weren’t too madly in love with Brianna, Jack,” Diana said.
