Page 122 of Nothing to Fear

A riot of gunfire kicked off. Copper-jacketed lead poured through the doorway, raining hot bullets on the stairwell.

Reece raised the ballistic shield. Gideon and Castle lined up behind him.

A tap on Reece’s shoulder signaled go. They moved single file, crouched as one unit to the right of the doorway.

Alistair led the rest of the team behind his shield to the left.

They each took turns, exchanging fire with the mercs. Shots whistled overhead, pinging the railing and biting into the concrete wall on the other side. Gideon pumped three shells into the room, taking out one man and leaving him with two in the shotgun. Daedalus’s men were dug in and picking them off like this would take forever. While Gideon’s team continued their assault, he looked for a different angle of attack.

At the end of the short hall, he spotted a door. It was a tiny storage closet—mop, bucket, old cleaning supplies, rusty sink. Nothing useful.

Damn it. As he was about to rejoin the firefight, he spotted the vent on the wall near the ceiling. It was one of those eighteen-by-eighteen-inch industrial covers. He turned the mop bucket upside down and stood on it. Something inside the lockpicking kits they carried should work. He found a tool to fit in the grooves of the screws and removed them.

Taking off the slatted cover, he set it to the side. Gideon went back to update Reece.

“I found a vent,” he said over the raucous hail of gunfire. “If I’m able to turn off the jammer, I’ll let you know over comms. Then use the tympanic disruptors to shut these assholes down and end this shit.”

“Roger that.”

Gideon returned to the supply closet, adjusting the submachine gun on his back, and hoisted himself up into the darkness of the metal air duct. He belly-crawled through the square tunnel, going slowly, partly due to the constricted area but also so that his thigh rig, the tip of the Rattler on his back, and the shotgun in his hands didn’t make any noise.

Not that it was easy to hear over the deafening staccato of the automatic-fire storm.

Gideon crept past two vents off the room with the bulk of Daedalus’s men. Some were wiping their eyes and coughing. The pepper spray pellets were working, slowing them down and throwing them off their game. But their arsenal still presented a serious issue.

Someone was setting up an M2. The Ma Deuce was a .50-caliber heavy machine gun usually attached to vehicles and aircraft.

Gideon wished their comms were operational so he could warn the team.

Bypassing another duct that connected to the one he was in at a right angle, he finally made his way to the end of the air shaft and peered through the vent in the office. He couldn’t see anyone or a device that looked like a jammer, but voices carried over the gunfire. A conversation, three men. It seemed to be coming from the right, back three feet down the cross vent. He squirmed and shimmied in reverse to the intersection and barely made the tight turn.

If he made any noise in the cramped space, not only would he lose the slight element of surprise, but he’d also draw gunfire.

Through the grate, he saw a filthy bathroom. A large window let in natural light.

A woman, bound and gagged with duct tape, sat in a chair. It had to be Laurel. She was alive. Other than a pink face puffy from crying and some smudges of dirt, she didn’t appear hurt. But she was wearing a vest rigged with grenades.

Omega told one man to go wait by the chopper on the roof, and he sent the other guy, called Rho, back into the office. Then he spoke to the man in a dark suit responsible for all this violence. Daedalus. Same suave, upper-crust looks, slicked-back hair, and clean-shaven face from the photo that’d been in Gideon’s digital case file two years ago. Only then he’d been identified as an asset, and another man—the wrong man—had been listed as Daedalus.

“I want you to go and take the woman with you,” Omega said.

“I’m not leaving you.” Daedalus put his hand on Omega’s shoulder. “You don’t know what it was like, wondering if you were alive or dead. It was torture. I won’t go through that hell again.”

“You’ve done it before. You can do it again.”

“No. This time was different. The only way I leave is if you’re with me.”

“I won’t leave my men to fight on our behalf while we slink off like cockroaches.”

“Then it’s settled. Neither of us will be a cockroach.” He laughed, calm, self-assured, like this was any ordinary day. “We’ll see this through together. Side by side.”

“You can really be a stubborn dick sometimes.”

Another caramel-smooth laugh. “That’s what you love about me.”

“No. It’s not. Stay in here so I don’t have to worry about you taking a stray bullet.” Omega left the bathroom, closing the door behind him.

Daedalus turned to Laurel, gun in his hand. “All that racket out there is over you.”