Extinction (24 page)

Stevens thought. ‘Well, there is one way,’ he said finally, ‘although I don’t know if it will do us any good.’

Jack gripped him. ‘What is it?’ he demanded.

‘There.’ Stevens pointed towards another elevator door, positioned in a corner of the room behind a huge potted plant.

‘Why didn’t you mention it before?’ Alyssa asked as they raced towards it.

‘Because it doesn’t go down,’ Stevens said evenly. ‘It goes up. To the roof.’

Santana re-checked his assault rifle, making certain the magazine was properly inserted and he had one round chambered, ready to go.

They would be in the foyer in seconds, and he flicked the safety catch of his weapon to the ‘off’ position, watching as his men did the same. Drilled into keeping the weapon safe until a target was identified, the SWAT officers sharing the elevator with them decided to follow normal protocol with their own; but Santana was too far gone now to worry about protocol. The three people upstairs had to die, and they had to die the second those elevator doors opened.

There would be no more mistakes, Santana promised himself as the elevator began to decelerate, weapon coming up to his shoulder as they came to a stop on the hundredth floor.

The foyer’s fifth elevator, Stevens explained, was to access the building’s rooftop helipad. Stevens had to admit that there was no helicopter there at the moment, and he wouldn’t be able to fly it even if there was, but it was mutually decided that it was better to avoid the destruction that was about to be brought down upon the executive private lounge. They would keep heading up, until there was nowhere else to go.

Stevens keyed in the code and the steel doors slid open. Stevens and Jack hurried inside. Alyssa, however, paused, her eyes drawn to the far side of the room.

‘What are you doing?’ yelled Jack, reaching out to yank her inside.

She snatched her arm away, pointing to the bar in the far corner. ‘Is that a radio?’ she asked Stevens.

‘I don’t know,’ the big man snapped. ‘I suppose it could be, the staff use them. What does it matter? Get in the damned elevator!’

Alyssa sprinted across the room. If she got that radio, they would be able to get a message out from the roof. Radio communications were always possible; Anderson and his men wouldn’t have thought of this possibility, she was sure.

‘Come back!’ called Jack, but Alyssa ignored him. She grabbed the radio off the bar top and held it triumphantly aloft.

And then the lights above the private elevators clicked off, the doors opened, and all hell broke loose.

Santana saw Murray and a large, heavy man in a suit – presumably Ray Stevens – in another elevator across the foyer.

As the flash-bang grenades went off, Santana opened fire at them, watching as they hunkered down and hit the elevator button. He cursed as the doors began to close, his bullets ricocheting off the metal surface, noticing Murray’s pained expression as he looked across the room towards . . .

Alyssa Durham. She was running through the smoke as rounds from the rest of the assault team tore up the oak floor and wool carpet behind her, grabbing a bar stool as she went.

Santana turned his own weapon towards her, watching in disbelief as she hurled the stool at the huge window on the eastern side of the building. The glass shattered and she followed the bar stool, throwing herself straight out of the window, one hundred storeys above the earth.

Alyssa had placed the radio in her belt as she ran, and with both hands free, she swivelled in mid-air and grasped hold of the bottom window ledge. It was wide, made of rough concrete which gave her fingers purchase, but the wind at fourteen hundred feet was strong, threatening to rip her hands off the ledge and send her into the abyss below her.

But the building
did
have a surprising amount of places where an experienced climber could place fingers and toes. Calming herself, she swung one leg up and levered her body up on to the ledge. She moved to the side of the window and pulled herself upright, fingers sunk deep into the half-inch gaps between the concrete blocks. She shut her mind to the fearsome wind and the freezing low-level cloud, and started to climb.

Santana looked out of the window straight down, but he could see nothing. Then his peripheral vision caught movement to the left, and his rifle came out of the window at the same time as he saw Alyssa Durham’s leg pull round a concrete abutment to the side of the window ledge.

He squeezed the trigger but the rounds ricocheted off alongside splinters of the concrete wall, Durham already safe behind the abutment.

What was she going to do? Hide there forever? Climb to the roof and join Murray and Stevens? The special ops team should have arrived by now but they had hit a delay due to air restrictions over the city and were circling two miles out whist paperwork was sorted.

Santana thought for a moment, then pulled his head back in and ordered men to guard the window while he went further down the wall to another window, to check if the target could be seen from the other side of the abutment.

As he moved down the wall, he called over to the men working at the door to the rooftop elevator. ‘How you doing over there?’

One of the men shook his head. ‘It’s not responding,’ he called back. ‘They must have jammed the doors open up on the roof.’

Cursing, Santana got on the radio and verified the estimated arrival time of the special ops team. The clearance to fly over the city had still not been granted but Anderson was working hard to get it approved.

Santana stuck his head out of the next window but all he could see on this side was another abutment, which meant that she had managed to find a channel between two abutments and was now covered on both sides.

He wouldn’t normally have considered it, but he’d seen the Durham woman putting a radio in her belt as she ran for the window. With that, she might be able to contact the outside world, which Anderson had explained was completely unacceptable.

He called the SWAT officers and his own men into the centre of the room and explained the situation to them; they were going to have to follow Alyssa Durham out onto the building’s exterior.

A plan was quickly agreed upon, and the well-equipped SWAT team began to unravel their rappelling ropes, ready to finish their mission once and for all.

W
HEN THE BULLETS
had come, Alyssa had almost lost her precarious grip on the concrete blocks, at one stage only holding on with two fingers of one hand as she dangled perilously above the cloud-shrouded abyss below. But she had managed to hold on and haul herself back onto the building’s façade.

Her cheek and arm had been cut and torn by concrete chips which had been shot loose from the high-powered rounds, but that only served to increase her focus as she started once again to climb.

Slowly, painfully, Alyssa climbed up the channel between the wide concrete abutments. It should protect her from rifle fire all the way to the top. But what would she find up there? The assault team waiting for her? She had no way of knowing. She hoped Jack and Stevens had kept the presence of mind to block off the elevator doors once they’d hit the roof; if not, then there would surely be a less than friendly welcoming party once she made it up there herself.

When she got to the roof, she figured she’d use the radio to make an emergency distress call. She knew that news agencies routinely scanned the radio waves for such things, and she hoped that hers would be picked up. At the very least, the presence of the media would make it less likely that they would all be shot out of hand.

As her fingers continued to work against the wide edges of the building’s huge block-work, pulling herself as close in as possible to avoid the worst of the buffeting winds, a new sound drifted up to her. The sound of men shouting.

She paused momentarily, trying to identify the words, but she could not. She recognized the tone though; they weren’t shouts of shock or anger, but the shouts of orders being transmitted across open space. She knew instinctively what it meant; they were coming out after her.

‘This is an emergency distress call; I repeat, this is an emergency distress call.’

Anderson looked up as he heard the words coming over the radio network. Who the hell was that? He paused. Alyssa Durham? He shook his head. It couldn’t be. But the message continued, and he knew it was her.

‘Anyone who is on this channel, please listen!’ She sounded scared, desperate, and Anderson knew this would also make her dangerous.
Damn it!

‘My name is Alyssa Durham, and I am heading towards the roof of the Landers Building. Police officers and soldiers are trying to kill me, and they are also trying to kill Jack Murray of the High-frequency Ionospheric Research Project, and Ray Stevens of York Investments.’

Anderson started to pace the enclosed confines of the aircraft, his pulse rate rising. He turned to his communications operator. ‘Is there anything we can do to block this?’ he asked in exasperation.

The operator shook his head. ‘These channels are always open, it would take hours to get them blocked.’

Still with one ear to the message, he dialled the number for General Tomkin.

‘We have uncovered a government plot to use HIRP research as a weapon to—’ the message continued, even as Tomkin answered his secure phone.

‘Colonel Anderson, what’s the situation there?’ came the gruff voice.

But Anderson didn’t answer, all his attention focused now on the radio message. He heard Alyssa Durham’s breath catch in her throat, in shock, no words coming now; and then there was a piercing shriek coming through the equipment, and he realized that Alyssa Durham was screaming.

Aboard the special ops chopper, Major Dan Edwards smiled.
Finally
.

The word had just come through from the state aviation office that they had at last been cleared to fly over the city.

The pilot eased the helicopter out of its circular holding pattern, aiming the nose across the city to the Landers Building just five miles ahead of them.

Edwards nodded to his team. ‘OK, men, let’s lock and load. We have three high-level targets, and it’s up to us to take them out.’ He racked the slide on his personal weapon, putting a round into the chamber. ‘You know the score. No prisoners.’

The radio fell out of Alyssa’s hand as she screamed, grasping onto the ledge above her with both hands and pulling her legs up just instants before the concrete façade below was ripped to pieces by high-velocity rounds.

Without looking back, she pulled herself all the way up onto the next block, instinctively pushing her body further into the left-hand abutment to shield her from the bullets. There was a pause then, and she assumed the men were edging further out onto the building. Without a moment’s hesitation, she used the opportunity to climb even further upwards, hoping the thick cloud might obscure their aim; although she knew deep-down that if they reached the channel, they couldn’t possibly miss.

Santana edged along the window ledge, cursing himself for shooting prematurely, before he definitely had a target.

He looked back at the seven armed men behind him, all joined by the rappelling rope, which in turn was anchored to a table and six other men back in the executive lounge, and nodded at them.

Cautiously, careful not to look down, Santana edged his toes and fingers along the ledge, a slow and painful process that nevertheless brought him closer and closer to his quarry. She wasn’t going to escape this time, he was damned certain of that.

But his mind rebelled at what he was asking his body to do. His conscious mind told him that he was well secured, and even if he fell, he wouldn’t die; but the instinctive side, the part of his inner nature that could never be fully controlled, was horrified by the height of the building, the sheer surface, the fact that they were in the
clouds!
What had he been thinking?

But, despite the reservations of his subconscious, he drove himself onwards step by step, easing across the surface of the huge skyscraper one hundred storeys above the city streets.

He was close now; so close. Just three more painful, tortuous sideways steps and then he would be there in the channel, and then it would be all over.

Two feet now, and he eased his assault rifle forwards on its sling, ready to aim it upwards the instant he leaned around the corner. He looked back to his men, lined up along the ledge, ready to back him up. He edged the final foot to the corner and nodded to them.

Turning back to the edge of the left-hand abutment, he slowly breathed out, trying to calm and centre himself. He wasn’t going to waste any shots this time; each one would count.

And then he was stepping out off the ledge, easing himself around the large concrete post that was providing his target with her protection. One step, two steps, and then he was there, in the channel.

He looked up, raising his weapon skyward as he did so.

And then his eyes went wide with shock; he never had the chance to scream.

Alyssa had looked down, saw the man’s hands reaching around the concrete abutment twenty feet below. She knew that as soon as he was in the channel, her chances were zero.

At least she’d managed to send something out over the radio; maybe it would be picked up by someone. There really wasn’t anything left to do, and so she decided to take her life in her own hands and not wait to die at the gun of some faceless government thug.

She waited until she saw the man’s head and shoulders swing around the concrete pillar, and then let go her grip of the building. Hands, feet, body; she simply let go of everything and plummeted towards the earth.

Santana took the full impact of Alyssa’s fast-moving weight after her twenty-foot fall, her boots planting themselves firmly into his face on her way down.

The savage impact knocked Santana clear off the wall, his own momentum stripping his team-mates from the wall’s concrete surface after him.

As the men fell into the abyss one by one, already the commands for full brace were being given back in the office, the knots attaching the rope to the table checked quickly as the six officers prepared to take the strain.