Page 97 of Sloth
Invisible energy whooshed from her body as she continued her descent. The bomb squad officer slumped to the ground. Sloan barely made it to him in time to stop him falling hard on his head. She guided him down gently.
“Night. Night,” she murmured, and then launched back up the steps toward Parker and Max. A shout from another cop stilled her. She paused, looked back over her shoulder to see a row of police aiming their firearms at her.“Greed?”she barked into her hood-mic.
Within seconds, guns flew out of hands, hovered in the air and then dropped to the ground. Good. She raced up the steps to relieve Parker of the tablet. “You better go. We’re pushing our luck with you here. Daisy still might shoot.”
He made to leave before hesitating and turning back. His brows drew low over his eyes. “Obviously, I found nothing, and… there’s a deadman’s detonator in Max’s hands. You can’t cut the C4 off unless you’ve disarmed the timer, and then the bomb. I’ll talk you through it when you get to that point.”
Then he jogged back down the steps to haul the bomb squad officer away, booming at the police: “Consider that a warning. Next time you pull a weapon on one of us, you won’t get it back.”
She couldn’t let that new complication affect her, so shoved the panic aside and continued. As she crested the concrete steps to the platform, Max’s eyes flared wide with relief. Then panic flittered, then anger. Before he had the chance to open his mouth to no-doubt admonish her for putting herself in danger, she sat down next to him.
“Shut it, Max. I’m here.”
“You shouldn’t have come. It’s a trap.” He lifted his hand, the one with his thumb trembling over a detonator wired to the bomb around his chest.
“Doesn’t matter.” Before she unpaused the visual algorithm, she finger-tapped the offending cell phone, just in case she could stop it manually. Nope. Didn’t respond to her touch. Worth a try.
“Don’t suppose you know the passcode on this thing?”
“Yeah, sure.Five-five-five, this sucks. How’s that?”
She snorted, set her jaw, and then unpaused the iPad, zeroing in on the fractal images flashing on her screen. She sifted through them, looking for the identifying pattern that would point her to the timer program on the cell. “I’m hacked into the cell, Max, don’t worry. I’m just looking for the timer program, then it’s a simple thirty-second adjustment. Once that’s done, I’ll disconnect the deadman’s switch. I’ll stop this bitch.”
While the algorithm worked, a few moments of charged silence passed.
“Heard about your little mishap with a bus,” he said. “You good?”
“Let me concentrate,” she snapped. “It’s not the time for idle chit-chat.”
A few more moments of scouring visual code. Nothing. Her heart-rate picked up and she had the irrational thought that she didn’t want last words to him to be an angry snap. She knew why he tried to make conversation.
“Don’t worry about me,” she murmured.
“I’ll always worry about you.”
“I got this.”
“I know.”
Her throat closed up, she held her breath, but she refused to look at him.
“I came,” she said, words hanging in the air.
The two simple words made him tear up, she heard it in the tremble of his voice when he replied: “Knew you would.”
She wouldn’t let him down. Not this time. Never again.
She wanted to say something to him, to tell him she loved him. That she was going to sit right there and be with him, even if she couldn’t get the timer to stop, but nothing came out. Time was ticking away. Instead, she immersed herself in the patterns forming on her screen.
Focus.
And then, suddenly, a recognizable pattern formed before her eyes. An Atari Space Invader.Holy shit.“I think I found something…”
While she narrowed down the offending code location, following the trail of Invaders, he kept talking, never once letting an iota of doubt slip into his voice. “Been thinking about where we can go after this… Gale told me about this little place down south… few hours away… been saving it… Waterfall…”
His voice became stilted, his breathing labored. Something was wrong. But Sloan forced herself to keep working. Like a drug, the closer she got to the prize, the harder she worked, the greater the pull. She came alive.
Three minutes.
