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Picturing Janelle’s face, she turned to the left and started walking. As she went along, motion-activated lights set into the tunnel’s ceiling flared to life, and she could have done without the help. But like her flashlight wouldn’t have given her away?
Walking toe-heel helped her keep the sound of her footsteps down, but it did absolutely nothing for the beating of her heart. The sense that she was in way over her head made her feel like someone was choking her, but at least the stalking thing was an easy monitor.
She looked behind herself every three feet.
And then she came up to a solid metal wall. Taking out the pass card, she swiped it by another blinking red light and shifted to the side, trying to take some cover as the panel slid back.
The scent of the earth made her recoil.
What was on the other side was bare rock.
I should not do this, she thought. I need to turn around, right now.
Over the course of the century he’d been down below, the Jackal had made a study of the guards. Their ranks and shifts. Their pairings and solo trips. Their territories within the prison complex. He knew their eye and hair colors, and which ones were distractible, and who was cruel. He was aware of who had let their physical conditioning go and who was lean and muscled. He tracked them from where they entered the common halls from the Command’s private area to the furthest reaches of their responsibilities.
He witnessed them dealing drugs to prisoners. Having sex with the incarcerated. Throwing punches that were deserved and tormenting people who were following the rules. He knew their secrets and their vices, their blind spots and their fields of vision.
He was careful never to get noticed. It was not hard. There were so many prisoners.
One thing, among many, that was not readily available in the down-below were clocks, but the guards helped with that. With their regular schedules and routes, they were a metronome, a way of marking the passage of time. Provided he kept his stride at the same distance and at the same cadence, he could track and anticipate the shifts and their responsibilities and, thereby, the cycles of night and day. Or something close to night and day.
The Command made sure that people stuck to their duties.
And that was how he knew something was wrong.
Dropping his eyes, he looked down at the handmade leather slips on his feet. His stride was correct, an easy extension of his thigh out of his hip socket, and his speed was on point. He was in the right tunnel, too. Wait . . . was he?
The Jackal stopped and looked over his shoulder. Retracing his left and rights mentally, he thought . . . no, this was the correct location. He’d run his D, E, and F routes in the last three nights/days. This was G. He was supposed to be doing G.
So this was right.
Where was the damn guard?
Narrowing his eyes, he regarded the tunnel ahead of him. And waited.
Warning bells started to sound out in his head. The guard should have been passing by now, transitioning to being off shift. Had they changed their schedule?
That would be a problem. Their predictability was critical.
Pressing on, he made a turn, hit a straightaway, and then came up to a branch that was marked with a white paint spot on the rough-cut archway of the tunnel head. Before he penetrated the area, he made sure he was not followed. Then he strode forth, staying close to the left-hand side of the walling. His black and gray clothes, loose garments that allowed him to move freely and fast, were the color of the walling, but the bald lights strung every twenty feet overhead on wire meant that he was a sitting duck—
The Jackal stopped dead.
Lifting his nose to the air, he breathed in deep.
The scent that came down to him was tantalizing on a level he had never known before—and it was utterly foreign. For all the years, the decades, the century, he had spent here underground, he had never come upon it before, and it was a sad commentary on his life that he had to reach so far back in his memory to put a definition on it.
Fresh flowers.
Closing his eyes, he drew in another breath, greedy for more of the fragrance. Yes, fresh flowers, and not the sickly sweet kind that had proliferated in the grand houses he had once visited and lived in. This was lush and lovely in an honest way, not a cultivated one.
And it was getting stronger.
The Jackal willed off three of the loose light bulbs, creating a sixty-foot-long stretch of darkness.
The sounds of footsteps were faint, and on the approach, there was one and only one explanation for them.
