Page 62 of A Touch of Treachery (Section 47 #3)

CHARLOTTE

E veryone’s eyes zipped over to the clock.

“Please tell me that is not some cliché self-destruct countdown ticking off the seconds until this place is blown to smithereens,” Gabriel muttered.

No one responded. We all knew that was exactly what it was.

“We have to move,” Joan said. “Desmond, which one of these laptops did Henrika use?”

He pointed out the laptop. Joan grabbed it off the table, tucked it under her arm, and ran over to the open lab door. I wrapped my arm around Desmond’s waist again and helped him in that direction. Gabriel brought up the rear.

Joan veered to the left, back the way we had come, but I shook my head.

“No. It’s too far. We’ll never make it back to the stairs, much less all the way out of the mine. None of us has seen Henrika, which means she got out through some other exit on this side of the facility. We have to find it before the countdown ends. It’s our only shot.”

Joan nodded, a grim expression on her face.

The four of us moved away from the lab, racing from one corridor to another.

I helped Desmond as much as possible, but he was in a tremendous amount of pain, and I could tell it was all he could do to keep putting one foot in front of the other.

He kept one hand on the wall, and the lights overhead flickered as we moved under them.

Desmond was channeling the electricity into his own body, but he was still extremely weak and wobbly.

Gabriel took the lead, gun in hand, but no more guards appeared, and the entire facility was eerily quiet, except for the quick rhythm of our footsteps and Desmond’s labored breathing.

“How much longer?” I asked.

Joan glanced at her smartwatch. “Twelve minutes.”

“How big is this place?” Gabriel muttered.

He quickened his pace, and we all did the same, even Desmond, despite the sweat streaming down his face. A minute later, we reached another junction with three corridors splitting off in different directions.

Gabriel paced back and forth, peering down each corridor. “They all look the same,” he growled. “I can’t tell which way to go, and we don’t have time to backtrack if we get it wrong. Any ideas?”

Joan shook her head, while Desmond braced a hand on the wall, his head hanging down and his chest heaving from exertion.

I also glanced down all three corridors, but I didn’t see anything that would tell us which way to go. I reached out with my synesthesia, but for once, my inner voice didn’t whisper, and no telltale flares of light appeared.

Frustrated, I prowled back and forth just like Gabriel was doing.

“We need to make a decision, Char,” he warned. “I’d rather die trying to get out than just stand here and get blown to bits.”

“I know, I know,” I snapped back. “Let me think.”

Gabriel fell quiet, but he kept staring at me, as did Joan. Desmond kept his head bowed, his hand on the wall, still pulling electricity into his body.

My eyes narrowed, and a thought sparked in my mind like the proverbial cartoon light bulb appearing over my head. “Desmond? Can you feel all the electricity in the facility?”

He lifted his head, a weary expression on his face. “Yeah. Why?”

I gestured up at the lights. “Can you separate the feel of the lights from something else? Something bigger that would require more energy?”

“Like what?”

“An elevator,” I replied. “Henrika wouldn’t have wanted to walk down rough stairs like we did every time she came to the lab. Plus, she had to have some way to get all that heavy equipment down here.”

“Which means there has to be a freight elevator at this end of the facility.” Joan gave me a look filled with grudging admiration. “Clever deduction.”

I tipped my head, acknowledging the compliment. “Can you find it, Desmond?”

He nodded, but it was a slow, exhausted motion. “I can try.”

Desmond closed his eyes and flattened his hand on the wall. The lights above us flickered, and an electrical charge filled the air, along with a faint stench of ozone, like a violent thunderstorm was about to blow through the corridor.

Joan held up her fingers where Gabriel and I could see them. Seven minutes and counting down. Gabriel opened his mouth, probably to urge Desmond to work faster, but I shook my head. He was injured, and rushing him wouldn’t help anything.

We stood there and waited, the lights still flickering, the steady pulses keeping time with the mental countdown clock running in my mind . . .

Desmond dropped his hand, opened his eyes, and pointed to the right. “That way. Something at the end of that corridor is using more power than the surrounding lights.”

“Good enough for me, Slick,” Gabriel said. “Let’s move.”

He holstered his gun, stepped forward, bent down, and picked up Desmond, slinging the other cleaner into a fireman’s carry across his shoulders. Desmond hissed with fresh pain, but it was a necessary evil. Gabriel headed down the right corridor, and Joan and I followed him.

Gabriel seemed to jog along with ease, but his face was twisted into a tight grimace, and the muscles in his neck stood out in stark relief from the strain of carrying Desmond so far so fast. Joan raised her eyebrows at me.

She had noticed it too, but there was nothing we could do to help either one of them.

All we could do was run.

Finally, we turned a corner, and there it was—a large freight elevator.

Even better, the car was on this level, as though it was waiting for us to arrive.

Weird. Why would the car be down here? If I were Henrika, I would have left it up at the top and then disabled it so that no one else could escape.

Gabriel hustled inside, still carrying Desmond. I followed him, as did Joan, who punched a green button on the control panel. A metal grate rattled into place, and the car slowly started to rise.

“Time?” I asked.

Joan checked her watch. “Three minutes.”

I willed the elevator to rise faster, but of course it didn’t.

Five seconds . . . ten . . . twenty . . . forty-five . . .

At the sixty-second mark, the freight elevator finally floated to a stop, and the grate rattled back.

We raced through a short corridor and up a set of concrete stairs to a low ceiling. Joan punched another green button on the wall, and the ceiling slowly slid back, revealing the winter sky above. I drew in a breath. I had never been so glad to smell fresh air, no matter how cold and snowy it was.

“Ninety seconds,” Joan called out.

“Go! Go! Go!” I yelled.

The instant the door was out of the way, Joan sprinted up the stairs, her gun in her hand, just in case any guards were stationed outside. “Clear!”

Gabriel went up the stairs next, still carrying Desmond, while I brought up the rear.

I cleared the last step and skidded to a stop.

A spotlight burned over my head, and the unexpected glare made me blink in surprise.

After being surrounded by gray walls for the last hour, it took me a moment to orient myself and realize where we were: the clearing where Henrika had conducted the Redburn demonstration.

Joan was already running toward the woods in the distance, along with Gabriel, who was still carrying Desmond. They stopped at the edge of the trees and turned around. Gabriel lowered Desmond to the ground, then gestured at me.

“Charlotte!” he yelled. “Run!”

But I couldn’t run. Not without closing the door behind us. Henrika had probably packed her lab with enough explosives to blow it up ten times over, and I had to contain the blast as much as possible or we might still get fried to a crisp.

I whirled around, searching for a way to close the secret door, but it was embedded in the ground, and I didn’t see a way to pull it shut.

Henrika would have wanted to be able to access—and hide—the lab entrance on a moment’s notice, which meant she had to have installed a way to open and close the door from this side.

I spun around in a circle, and my gaze landed on the spotlight. It was the only thing that didn’t belong here. I raced over to the pole and ran my hands over the cold, slick surface. It had to have a hidden button or switch. Where was it? Where was it?

My hand brushed up against a tiny button, so small that it blended in perfectly with the rest of the metal. There. I jabbed the button, and the door slowly started to slide shut.

“Fifteen seconds!” Joan screamed in the distance.

“Move, Charlotte!” Gabriel yelled.

I whirled around and sprinted in their direction, running as fast as possible, even as I counted down the remaining seconds in my mind.

Ten . . . nine . . . eight . . .

I was a quarter of the way across the clearing. My lungs burned, and my legs felt like jelly from our long run inside the facility.

Seven . . . six . . . five . . .

I forced myself to move faster, even though I was doing little more than plodding through the snow, which had piled up past my ankles.

Four . . . three . . . two . . . one . . .

I threw myself forward, trying to put a few more precious feet between me and the explosion—

BOOM!