Page 76 of The Last Kingdom

He entered.

Gray featureless walls wrapped the warm rectangle at the top of a lighted stairway. He peered over the railing down the center space that faded twenty floors below. Fluorescent panels illuminated each landing, where concrete steps turned one hundred eighty degrees. Knight was dressed as a security guard.

“How’d you manage that?” he asked.

“Opportunity presented itself. I took it.”

He’d have expected no less. “Anybody dead?”

Knight shrugged. “Do you really want to know?”

No, he didn’t. “Are they still on the eighteenth floor?”

Knight nodded. “In the main office. You know where.”

Yes, he did. Having been there several times before himself back in the supposedly good ol’ days. “Anybody else on the floor?”

“Not that I could see. I found out no one was to report until noon. My guess is Koger commandeered things for a while.”

“Is the stairwell door open on the eighteenth?”

Knight displayed a set of keys. “I unlocked it myself on the way up.”

“Does one of those keys control the elevators?”

Knight nodded and identified the right one.

He searched through the vinyl bag and removed a short-barreled automatic rifle, draping the sling around his left shoulder. Then he found two sound-suppressed automatic pistols.

He kept one and gave the other to Knight.

“Stay here and watch the chopper.”

Then he advanced two floors down to the unlocked door marked 18. He clicked the steel door’s handle to open it and peered through a tiny slit into the hall beyond. He knew there was no closed-circuit TV monitoring. The last thing the CIA wanted was for someone to have the ability to electronically observe anything that happened on the floor. The security for this place came from anonymity.

No one was in sight.

He slipped through the doorway and turned the corner, heading toward the elevator bank. There, he pressed the down button. Thirty seconds later the car arrived empty. He used the key Knight had procured to shut off the elevator. He exited and pressed the up button. A minute later the other car arrived, which he also disabled. He knew about the freight elevator on the other side of the floor, but it stayed locked with restricted access. Koger might have access, so he had to make sure it did not become an avenue of escape, along with the four stairways.

His targets waited across the floor at the south end.

He re-gripped the semiautomatic, his finger loose on the trigger, and stalked ahead. Along the way he passed dozens of closed doors. He tested a few knobs. Locked. Good. At a corner he inched his head around the edge. The main office was straight ahead. Suddenly, Paul Bryie pushed through a hinged sheet of glass and headed in his direction, apparently for the elevators.

He quickly backtracked.

On the wayhe passed a recessed door labeledMEN’S ROOM. He pushed through and waited. Bryie passed a few seconds later. He slid the semiautomatic around to his back, resecured his grip on the sound-suppressed pistol, and followed. At the corner he stepped around and confronted Bryie at the elevators.

The thin man turned around and faced him. “Do it.”

He nodded. “Knight’s on the roof with the chopper.”

“I’m leaving the way I came. Good hunting.”

Bryie entered the stairway and left.

He headed back for the office.

Chapter 41

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