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The President looked questioningly at Kian. Kian looked me in the eye, then nodded. “You can trust what he says, Sir.”
The President nodded curtly. “Alright then. Sound the alarm, let’s get everyone out of here.”
The female Secret Service agent shook her head. “No sir, protocol is to get you out first.”
“Goddamn it, there are women and children here!” snapped the President. “I’m not running and leaving them here!”
I spoke up. “Sir, she’s right. Right now, everyone who knows that Steward’s behind this is in this building! We need to get you out safe so you can catch the fucker.”
The President scowled but nodded. He turned to the female agent. “Sierra, stay here and help.” She nodded.
Kian turned to the woman sitting next to him. “Emily, go with your dad. I’m staying too.” Emily, the President’s daughter, hugged him tight and kissed him, then allowed herself to be hustled away by the Secret Service. Kian caught one of the agents as they hurried past him and said something, and the guy gave Kian his gun.
“What do you need from me?” asked the blonde-haired Secret Service agent, Sierra.
“Your guys have our friends in custody up there,” I said, pointing. “Can you set ‘em loose?”
Sierra spoke into her radio and, a few moments later, JD and the rest of the team hurried down the stairs to join us. Gabriel gave Kian a radio and passed us our weapons.
Sierra listened to her earpiece. “The President’s out,” she said. “We’ll start evacuating people, but—” She looked around the stadium to indicate the scale of the problem. It would take time to get this many people out. “We’ve gotta stop them releasing the gas. Who are we looking for?”
“Four guys in maintenance uniforms,” Tanya told her. “Led by a big guy, late fifties, white hair.”
We all looked around the stadium. The place was vast. How the hell were we going to find them? They could release the gas any minute. The President was safe but they’d still kill tens of thousands of people.
“This gas,” said Sierra. “Heavier than air or lighter than air?”
“Heavier,” said Tanya immediately.
“So they’d have to release it high up so it sank down,” said Gabriel.
We all looked up at the roof, searching frantically.
“Got ‘em!” called Cal, pointing. He had his rifle’s scope up to his eye.
I followed his finger but I couldn’t see anything. He passed me his rifle for a second and…yes, there they were. They were in maintenance uniforms and baseball caps, but I recognized Maravic’s hulking build. They were climbing around on a catwalk which was—
I took the rifle away from my eye and the catwalk seemed to shoot away from me, becoming tiny in the distance. My head swam and my skin went sweaty with vertigo. The catwalk was right up in the roof, hundreds of feet above the football field. Shit.
“We’ve gotta get up there,” said JD. “Bradan, you stay with Kian in case any of them are down here. The rest of you, with me.”
60
TANYA
We pounded up a stairwell, corkscrewing up and up, then up narrower stairways, each one marked with more and more warning signs. We barreled through the final door and—
Chyort!
We were at the edge of a network of flimsy-looking white metal catwalks. Most of them ran around the edge of the huge, oval stadium, with a few leading in towards the center like the spokes of a wheel. They didn’t join in the middle, they just ended, hanging out over space like diving boards.
The catwalks were only a few feet wide and the walls only came up to knee height. Worse, they were made in ten-foot sections and there were gaps between each one we’d have to step over. It was designed for workers with climbing harnesses and safety lines, neither of which we had. And the catwalk sections hung from the stadium roof on steel cables so the slightest movement made them swing and sway. They really weren’t designed for running around on.
Worst of all, the floors were metal mesh, to reduce the weight. We could look down and see the drop beneath us and that’s when it sank in that we were three hundred feet up. The football field looked like a child’s game, the people dots. I gulped, feeling my stomach knot. Then I looked at Colton. He was just behind me, standing in the doorway with his face sheet white, staring at the tiny rectangle of green far below. My chest ached for him: this was his idea of hell.
He swallowed. Looked up and met my eyes. And then he stepped bravely onto the catwalk.
We moved slowly forward, shuffling carefully, arms outstretched for balance. Then, a hundred feet ahead of us, we saw one of Maravic’s mercenaries walk across our view, a gas mask on his face. He was carrying a metal cylinder. Danny snapped his gun up to shoot—
