Page 71 of Gunpowder

Did you just access something on the second floor?

He had muted his phone on the way over but he saw the reply come up immediately.

No.

He turned his phone to show Felix, and they made their way to the stairs on the far left of the room. There was no avoiding the clang of their steps on the metal stairs. He couldn’t see the door from their current position but he kept his eyes on the walkway and his ears open to any movement that wasn’t their own.

“There’s a camera at the top of the stairs, I can see you but I’ve killed its feed to their control panel,” Wren said.

Blair probably came close to giving away their location with how hard he jumped at having the silence broken. He gave the camera a thumbs up as they stepped onto the walkway. No sooner than they started toward the door, there was a clattering sound from below. He drew his gun and aimed between the bars in the railing. He couldn’t see anyone, or what had made the sound, but there was no denying it had been made with the faint echo still fading from the bay.

The smell of cigarettes and expensive cologne overwhelmed his senses as Felix leaned into his ear. “Go check it out, I’ll see who’s up here,” Felix said, just barely audible.

Blair didn’t like the idea of splitting up but he didn’t give the orders. He nodded, and the fur from the collar of Felix’s coat that had been brushing against his neck disappeared. Blair went back the way they came and crouched on the bottom step to look around. He couldn’t do it for long, his right leg protesting immediately, but it gave him long enough to determine that the bay was empty as far as he could see from there.

“We’ve got movement outside,” Spencer said.

Blair didn’t answer in case he was lucky enough for their visitor not to know his location yet. He started through the maze of bunkers to look for the source of the noise. There was only one more entrance to the receiving bay other than the stairs and the one he had entered from with Felix. He approached the service door, gun first. There was a scuffle to his left and he spun toward it, flicking his thumb across the back of the slide to disarm the safety.

The lights flashed. For a moment the warehouse was plunged into darkness, and the comm blasted static into his ear.

“Blair,” Wren said when the connection returned with the lights. “They know you’re there. They’re targeting everything electronic, even their own systems to make sure no signals get through. We’re going to lose connection soon. Be careful in there, they have the advantage.”

No longer seeing the need to stay quiet to protect his location, Blair asked, “But how did they know we were using these? You’re operating them off-site.”

There was a strangled cry that Blair recognized in an instant and he heard Spencer’s voice in tandem with his own: “Julian?”

The lights went out for ten long seconds this time, and when Wren’s voice came back over it was hard to make out over static and background noise. “They know we’re here, too.”

Spencer’s words from earlier came back and hit him hard. We’ve got movement outside.

He heard a commotion on the balcony and the rapid popping of the MAC-10. His heart shuddered out of time as he realized they had been made from the start or close to it. The light under the door, the sound from below. They had split them up on purpose. He just knew it in his gut.

The warehouse went black again and the comms went out. This time, the lights didn’t come back on.

“Wren!” he cried, but there wasn’t so much as a whisper from the bud in his ear. His hands shook around his gun. “Julian? Marie?”

There was only the silence and the dark.

Doors came open above him on the balcony, and then the service door in front of him. A man’s face glowed green from an illuminated pair of goggles. They’re using them to see in the dark. Adrenaline steadied Blair’s hands. They planned this. But how did they know? There wasn’t time for that. He pushed down his questions, and Julian’s distressed voice, and Wren telling him they had been found before—

No. Blair didn’t know for sure what had happened down there, he couldn’t start imagining worst case scenarios.

What he did know was that Wren and the Incindious members they’d left behind were in danger, or worse, and Blair was now face-to-face with a member of Phantom.

The man coming out of the service room was quick in reaching for the holster on his hip, but his hand hadn’t even made contact with a weapon before Blair let off two shots and took out both of the man’s shoulders. Blair flipped the Beretta and struck him in the temple. Before the man had even fully collapsed to the ground, more masked figures started to emerge. A gunshot rang out and a bullet just barely missed Blair’s arm.

The combined glow from their masks gave him just enough light to see. There was half a dozen of them closing in already and he heard the burst of fire from Felix’s Glock on the balcony above. He shot the person directly in front of him while his other hand went to his back. Spencer’s instincts were never wrong. He couldn’t have known how terribly their plan would fall apart, yet he had prepared Blair for that very thing. The feeling of the M9A3 in his left hand took him back to the shooting range when he had first raised two guns at the same time.

Spencer had taken his glasses off to stare at the paper target and the matching holes going down each side. Blair’s arms had ached from the recoil of Spencer’s 22 in one hand and the practice gun the range had loaned them in the other, but it was worth it to hear the awe in Spencer’s voice when he said, “Ambidextrous.”

There was no time to look around and decide who to shoot first. He listened for the nearest footsteps, and pointed to either side. He pulled two triggers and blood splattered his face from the one standing closest to him. They’ve got me in a corner, I have to get to better ground. He made a path through them, the burn in his forearms negated by the hatred blazing much hotter in his chest.

“I swear to god,” Blair growled, spinning on his heel when he heard someone coming from the rows of bunkers. He took him out along with the one he saw approaching from the left. “You better fucking hope you didn’t hurt them.”

He had been counting his rounds and crouched in an aisle of bunkers to reload. He stood up as soon as he locked the slides back in place. More green masks came toward him and he held a gun out to either side, muscles on fire but body steeled with resolve.

Wren has to be okay, Blair decided as he pulled both triggers. He couldn’t accept the alternative.

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