Four floors down, the Assassin X fully assembled and slung over a shoulder, Jack stopped and fished Maxwell’s phone out of his pocket. He keyed up the video feed from Ethan’s cell.
A body lay sprawled on the floor of the cell. One of the armoured and gas-masked guards. The door was closed and there was no sign of the other guard, or Ethan.
Jack quickly flicked back to when the gas had been released. Heart slamming against his heaving ribs, he watched as Ethan collapsed to the floor, hands clutching at his throat. A full minute passed—Jack sped through the footage at five times normal—before the door opened and the gas-masked guards came in. One crouched by Ethan, the other covering them with a tranquilizer gun.
From his prone position on the floor, Ethan spun and took down the first guard with a series of insanely fast sweeps and punches. Then he flipped to his feet, the downed man’s tranq gun in hand. The second guard backed out of the cell, yelling for help, reaching for the door lock. Ethan fired through the rapidly narrowing doorway, then dove through.
Ethan was out of the cell, but he wasn’t completely free yet. Putting the phone away, Jack kept going.
By the time he encountered opposition, he was three floors off his destination.
The only lock the sec-tab couldn’t access was on the door to the sublevels, where the cells were. It was guarded by six security personnel and two key-code locks with randomised codes generated by an isolated system in the sublevels. The three guards on the outside of the door knew one code, those on the inside the other. Both codes were needed to open the door, which had undoubtedly happened to allow through the security team that had set up a barricade on the fourth-floor landing. They crouched behind a line of bulletproof shields, firearms at the ready.
Jack studied them from the landing above. A team of six with rifles modified to fire rubber bullets. Painful, but survivable. Either way, he couldn’t afford to get caught up here. The techs would be hard at work on cracking his encryption. He only had about eight minutes left.
Settling the Assassin X to his shoulder, Jack rested the end of the barrel on the staircase railing. The height advantage gave him a line of sight over the top of the shields.
Jack sighted his targets, then fired once, twice. Both point riflemen went down, the little black tufts of tranq darts all but invisible against the black of their uniform sleeves. The Assassin X wasn’t a tranq gun, and the darts hit with close to the force of a real bullet, but his victims would survive. Jack adjusted position and took out another.
“Stand down, Reardon,” one of them shouted. “You can’t get past us all.”
Ignoring the effort to delay him, Jack fired two more wild shots as he flung himself over the railing and dropped to the lower stairs.
Shields worked both ways. He ducked into the cover they offered from those crouched behind them. They’d now have to lean over their protection to get a shot at him. Feet against the bottom of the nearest shield, he grasped the top of it with his free hand and pulled it over on top of him. Lifting the bottom up with his legs, he fired between his feet, taking down the last three people.
Jack shoved the shield away, stood, and kept going.
Barrelling down the final flight, he ejected the magazine from the rifle and slammed in another one. This one held only a single round. He racked the bolt coming around the final turn. Another team waited for him. No attempt at negotiation this time. They just opened fire.
Scrambling backwards, Jack crouched behind the railing. A bullet cracked off the cement so close to his head grit flew into his panting mouth. Spitting, he risked a quick look.
With more room to work in, this lot had crafted a dead end with their shields. If he charged, they’d hit him from both sides. There was no time to take them out, however. He had only the one shot available.
Jack breathed deep, reaching for a level of calm. The tactical moves were coming back with all the unconscious precision of muscle memory, but the emotional detachment hadn’t quite kicked in. Another fallout of the desert. His ability to compartmentalise had been tested and broken on the sun-blasted rocks.
Damn it. He had to get his shit together. If this didn’t work, the results didn’t bear thinking about. So he didn’t.
Another peek and he saw what he had to do. He waited out the volley of shots, pulled out the empty mag and, rolling out into the open, tossed the empty mag at the gathered guards.
The small black projectile looked enough like a grenade the guards didn’t wait to make sure it was. They scattered, leaving the door to the sublevels exposed. The door standing between Ethan and relative freedom. The one with the lock Jack didn’t currently command.
Coming up on one knee, Jack slammed the rifle to his shoulder. “Fire in the hole,” he shouted and pulled the trigger.
The Assassin X took .22 LR rounds, a small bullet that generally did comparatively little damage. A .22 LR modified into a high-explosive incendiary round, however, was just enough to take out a lock.
Jack didn’t wait around to see the results. There was barely three minutes left on his timeline, and he had to climb back up twelve flights. He took the stairs three at a time. His part in the plan was done. The rest was up to Ethan.
On the tenth floor, his implant pinged. Trusting his body to keep going, Jack checked the message. His encryption was crumbling before the combined might of the Office techs. He had mere seconds left.
He was going to make it. He had to make it.
The lock to the door to the roof flared in his implant. He unlocked it an instant before he body-slammed it. The door opened just as the encryption failed and Jack’s command of the electronic locks vanished.
He fell through the doorway and hit the cement of the roof hard. Rolling, he kicked the door shut, and it locked under the command of the Office. Hopefully it would take them another couple of minutes to realise he was on the other side of it.
Jack leaned against the door, dragging in massive gulps of air to help soothe his burning lungs. Blood pounded through his ears, deafening him to the quiet hum of the air-con fans, to the gentle whipping of the streamers, to the voice in the back of his head telling him he’d really screwed up this time.
No going back now. He had no idea how many people he had hurt. People he’d worked with for six years, who’d accepted him into their ranks after the military abandoned him. This building had been more of a home to him than his own apartment. For God’s sake, he kept the few things truly precious to him here, and now he’d left them behind.
Ethan better be right about the traitor.
Ping. An incoming call. McIntosh’s ID.
“Jack.” McIntosh had found her inner ice-queen again.
“Ma’am.”
There was silence for a long time, then softly, “You promised me.”
“Yeah, I did. And I didn’t lie about that.”
“All evidence to the contrary.”
Jack huffed. “I suppose that is how it looks. I guess you’ll just have to trust me on this.”
A sudden gust of wind snapped the streamers taut, stretching them out like spindly fingers reaching for the sky. The black and white of the Office building’s decorations gave way to a rainbow of colours on the next—red, purple, yellow, orange, and right on the far edge, a single blue ribbon. A vague connection sparked in Jack’s head, but McIntosh interrupted before he could pursue it.
“How am I supposed to do that? You took out two security teams, broke the head of security’s face, and let a proven killer loose in a locked-down building. You’re not exactly behaving like a loyal asset of this organisation, Jack.”
Jack wondered how this conversation would go if it were Tan on the other end. “Just tell everyone to stay out of Blade’s way. Let him do what he’s got to do. He won’t hurt you if you leave him alone.” Unless she was his target.
What was the order? Vanquish, Maserati, Camaro, Lamborghini.
“What he’s got to do?” The chill was starting to melt under a growing anger. “What the hell are you talking about?”
Jack almost laughed. “You see, ma’am, the man has his own code. Once he’s hired to do a job, he does everything he has to until it’s done. It’s nothing personal.”
Black, blue, yellow, white. Jack’s means of transport out of here.
“This is about as personal as it gets, you fucking bastard.” McIntosh never swore, which made this poisoned barb sink deep. “He destroyed one of my long-term, vitally important operations. He turned one of my best assets. He led this entire building around by its collective nose for twenty-four hours and now, he’s ploughing his way through my staff like a plague on nine different stimulants! How is that not personal, Jack?”
“You forget one thing, ma’am. This is a job, for you, for me, and for him.”
Another protracted silence. “That isn’t very reassuring.”
“No, it isn’t.” He could appreciate the sentiment. It hadn’t been reassuring when he’d found out he was just a job to Ethan, too. “But it’s better than the alternative.”
That was when he heard it. A soft click close to his ear. He turned his head and it came again, muffled by layers of steel and wood. Someone coding through the locks on the door.
Shit. McIntosh hadn’t called to talk. She’d called to distract him.
“Come in now, Jack, and it won’t be so bad. No one’s—”
Jack hit the kill switch on his implant.
Slinging the Assassin X over his shoulder, he trotted through the web of streamers, looking for the one he’d noted earlier. There it was, on the east corner of the building. Right where he needed it.
He’d just finished untangling the long black streamer when the door burst open. A heavily armoured strike team poured through it, laser sights converging on Jack like flies to a rotting corpse.
Jack thought of the dingo, the red dot of his laser sight glinting on its chest.
If only Ethan were here to tell these guys Jack was just doing what came naturally to him. Protecting his own.
No friendly warning this time. The team opened fire.
Jack raced for the edge of the roof, wrapping the streamer around his hands. The strands of high-tensile wire woven into the material gripped him back. Bullets chasing him, gaining on him, Jack threw himself up onto the edge of the building and kept going.
Behind him, the satellite dish screeched as his weight pulled it around sharply. The sudden movement flung him out further, snapping the streamer taut. At the peak of his flight, Jack shook free of the material. He landed in a controlled tumble on the roof of the next building.
Immediately, he was up and racing for the far edge, aiming for the blue streamer. On the next, lower building, he found the yellow one, and beyond it, a single white in an undulating sea of red. His last ride. He flung himself off the top of the building and arced out over empty space, a hundred feet up and nowhere to go but down.
Jack twisted in mid-flight, then hit the water of Darling Harbour like an Olympic diver coming off a very high board.