Page 96 of Final Exit

“We’re there. Come on. This will be no different than what we practiced on the balcony at Mason’s house today.”

Devlin leaped from the opening and was gone.

“Oh my God,” Bailey said.

“Are you afraid of heights?” Kade demanded.

“I’m afraid of landing!”

His eyes filled with pity. “The plane. I should have thought of that. Do you want to stay here?”

“Yes!”

“Okay. The pilot will take you back to—”

“No! Iwantto stay. But I’m not going to. I’ll do it. I just don’t want to.”

Another Enforcer, one of many that they’d gathered together this morning to help them with the assault, jumped out of the chopper.

All too soon, the only ones left were Kade and her.

He tugged her toward the opening.

“Wait,” she said. “I’m not sure I can do this. Rappelling from a balcony is one thing. There was a pool to fall in if I screwed up. If I screwthisup, I fall off the top of a building.”

Click. Click.

She looked down to see what had made the noise. A short length of cable with two carabiners connected Kade’s harness to hers. She was snugged up against him, chest to chest.

“What are you doing?” she demanded.

He leaned down and whispered in her ear. “Taking care of you.”

And then he leaped out of the helicopter, pulling her with him.

She would have screamed, but the terrifying fall stole her breath. And then, they were landing on the roof of EXIT Inc., as gently as if they’d bounced on a trampoline, because Kade had taken the brunt of the landing, lifting her up so that she didn’t feel the full force of rappelling onto the roof. How he did it with his bad leg, she didn’t know. Now it was probably hurting again, because of her.

With practiced ease, he disconnected their equipment and waved to the pilot. Soon the chopper was a dark dot against the sky as the pilot returned to whatever airfield Austin had bribed him to come from.

Kade dropped the harnesses and ropes on the roof and pulled his gun out. “Ready?”

She pulled her Sig Sauer out. “Ready.”

Jace passed her and Kade, leaving Bailey to close the door. She gently pulled it shut so that it wouldn’t echo through the stairwell. Their little army might be small, but if things worked out as planned and they disabled the security systems from the inside, Mason had lined up a score more men and women to breach the building from the outside. It was a good plan, as plans went. But there were a host of unknowns that elevated the risk to extraordinary levels. The riskiest part being that Mason and Devlin only had one full day to perform reconnaissance.

Normally a mission like this required weeks of surveillance, so they could be sure how many enemy combatants they had to deal with and what weapons were at their disposal. But with potential hostages down in the tunnels who could be killed at any moment, they were taking more risks than usual. And Mason believed the manpower losses at the caves meant that Faegan was operating with a skeleton crew.

The Asheville building was smaller than the one in Boulder. There were only three floors, and the executive offices were on the first level. Security was too tight to approach the building from the ground, thus Austin’s genius suggestion to rappel from the helicopter onto the roof. Sure enough, they’d encountered no alarms and no security forces so far.

They’d decided the best approach would be to sneak into the security offices on the first floor to disable the alarm and hopefully take out a few guards while they were there. So the team split at the first landing, with Devlin, Mason, and two of the other Enforcers heading down the stairwell to the ground floor.

The remaining six of them stood ready to clear the third floor, believing that it would be empty since the sun was going down soon and the parking lot only had a handful of cars left. Even Faegan and his men had to keep some kind of work hours. And since they wouldn’t expect an assault here, hundreds of miles from the caves in Colorado, the only people left in the building should be Faegan and whoever he considered to be his most critical support staff. Kade was betting that Faegan would keep the same habits he’d always kept in the past, of working well past sunset every night. The man was committed to his cause.

Jace held up a hand to ensure silence, then slowly pulled the door open and peeked through the slit. He gave them a thumbs-up, then yanked the door all the way open and motioned for them to hurry through. As if they’d been a team for years, they worked perfectly in tandem, clearing one room at a time before moving to the next. In little time at all, they’d confirmed the entire floor was empty.

Two more floors to go. Then they could hit the tunnels.

They raced to the bank of elevators to secure them. They flanked them on either side while Kade pressed the button. A few seconds later, a small chime announced the elevator’s arrival.

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