Page 42 of Avenging Jessie
And just beyond that stairwell…another heat signature.
Taller. Broader. Moving at a measured pace like a man who owned the place.
Hastings. Had to be.
Spence’s gut knotted. If she kept going, she’d cross his path in under a minute.
They weren’t wearing comms, so there was no way for him to alert her outside of intercepting her. The temptation to call her off was strong, but another part of him—the one that had been doing this far too long—wanted to see what Hastings would do if he stumbled across her. How he’d play it. Whether she’d take him down or end up dead herself.
Of course, he wouldn’t let that happen.
His ability to step back and see a bigger picture on missions—to look at them like a game on his computer—allowed him to stay unemotional even in the tightest and most dangerous situations. That made him an asset to the swans as much as his tech skills. Thanks to growing up under Ian Bastion’s thumb, he’d learned early on to detach from any outcome because he could pretend it was a game.
Not with Jessie.
He eased forward, his boots making no sound on the polished concrete. The feed zoomed tighter on Hastings’ heat signature as the two shapes drew closer. Jessie paused at the corridor’s mouth, no doubt scanning for cameras or guards. She didn’t know Spence was watching her every move, his pulse hammering in his ears.
Thirty feet.
Twenty.
Spence’s finger twitched above the keys. He could use the building’s internal comm system to warn her. Call her off or let it run?
The choice burned in his chest like acid. She could end up in Hastings’ hands, or they might get the kind of proof they’d been chasing for months.
Jessie stepped forward, crossing the invisible threshold.
His fingers dropped to the keyboard. Just as he was about to force the fire alarms to go off, she stopped, backtracked.
He let out a breath.
The taller figure passed within a few feet of her. Jessie went on the move again, trailing him. If she played it right, she’d stay in the shadows.
Spence followed, only a few yards behind her. They cut through a maze of narrow hallways, past more closed doors.
The air grew cooler, tinged with the metallic bite of recycled ventilation. Somewhere below, a deep thrumming pulsed like a heartbeat—the unmistakable sound of high-density servers running at full throttle.
From the end of a long corridor, Spence watched as Hastings swiped a keycard at a reinforced steel door. A red light blinked to green, and the lock disengaged with a heavy thunk.
Jessie slipped out of a shadowed hall between him and where Hastings had entered and raced down to use a keycard on the lock. No doubt stolen from the downed guard outside.
She never looked back, or she would have spotted Spence. His long legs ate up the space, and he caught the door on the barest edge of it closing and eased it open enough to slide in.
A stairwell yawned before him, spiraling down into blue-lit gloom. The noise of the machines swelled, and voices—faint, quick, energized—echoed up from below.
Spence descended one step at a time, keeping to the inside edge to minimize noise. From this vantage, he had both of them in sight: Jessie hugging the far wall, Hastings striding straight into an open den.
More voices and the smell of…pizza? Spence’s hand went to his sidearm. Whatever waited in that basement, it wasn’t just hardware.
Seventeen
Jessie
Jessie easeddown the narrow stairwell, keeping her weight on the edges of each step to kill the sound. The concrete was cool under her gloved fingertips, the air growing chillier with every foot she descended.
At the bottom, the space opened into a long, low-ceilinged room. Rows of black server racks stretched into the distance like sentinels, their blinking green and amber lights casting an otherworldly pulse. The air thrummed with the low, constant vibration of hundreds of processors working in unison.
She slid along the wall, her back brushing chilled metal piping. Somewhere ahead, the muffled clack of rapid keystrokes and quiet voices blended with the rhythmic hum of the cooling fans. The noise wasn’t loud, but it was enough to mask her breathing and the whisper of her boots on the smooth floor.
