Page 118 of The Devil's Ransom

“Pull up front. Knuckles, you have breach. Jennifer, stay with Creed until we call. Your other duty is going to be security for the people we find inside who aren’t Dylan. You have enough flex-ties?”

She nodded, and I said, “Veep, Brett, stack with me.”

We screeched to a stop, everyone bailing out on the run. There was no door at ground level that we could see. We found a flight of stairs and raced up them to the second level. There was a steel door with a small sign stating, “Second Day Solutions. Ring the bell for service.”

Knuckles tried the handle, shook his head, and slapped a charge on the frame right next to the lockset. We scooted together behind him, getting out of the blast radius and drawing our weapons. He crouched, I cleared the radius, making sure everyone was behind me, then rubbed his shoulder.

The door lock shattered in a blinding flash, the overpressure slamming into us, the noise splitting the air, and I was moving, running around Knuckles and kicking the door open on its twisted frame.

I entered an anteroom with two people in it, neither of them Dylan Hobbes. I pointed my weapon at them and shouted, “Down, down. Get the fuck on the ground.”

They did so, and I went forward to an office, saying on the net, “That’s the holding area. Koko, flex-tie them and don’t let them use a phone.” I stopped at the door, felt a squeeze, and entered, seeing a man behind a computer looking at me in shock.

I jerked him to his feet and flung him into the anteroom, letting Jennifer take over. I didn’t even wait for him to hit the ground, racing to the next office, Veep behind me. I saw Knuckles and Brett on the other side of the room doing the same thing, going into one office and extracting people before moving to the next. I reached the last office, finding yet another man behind a computer, and instead of jerking him out, I pointed my gun at him and said, “Where’s Dylan Hobbes?”

He raised his hands in the air and said, “In the SCIF. In the lab SCIF.”

“Where is that?”

“Downstairs. It’s downstairs.”

I broke out of the office, saying on the net, “All elements, all elements, downstairs. Koko, get those last two on the ground, get their cells, then bring Creed.”

Knuckles was first in the stairwell, me right behind him. We took the steps two at a time, leapt over a landing, and continued on to the bottom. Knuckles jerked the door handle and we met Dylan Hobbes, his hand out like he was trying to open it.

He said, “What was that explosion?” Then he saw us with our guns and said, “What—”

Knuckles stunned him with a jab to the face and grabbed his arm, planting a hip into his body and rotating. Hobbes flipped over Knuckles’ back and slammed into the ground, hard. Knuckles rolled him to his stomach, then flex-tied his hands together, Hobbes screaming the whole time.

Knuckles jerked him to his feet and I leaned into him, pointing my weapon at his nose. I said, “You have about five minutes to live. Where is the ransomware computer?”

“Wh... what?”

I theatrically racked my slide, a round flipping through the air, then shoved it into his temple.

He pointed with his head, saying, “In there. In there.”

Chapter71

Gordan Dillard looked at his watch, saw they were out of time, and pressed the mike, resigned to the fact that he was about to kill four people. But four was better than the entire space station.

“Fabio, Fabio, this is NASA, do you copy?”

“This is Fabio, go.”

He took a deep breath, then said, “We’re out of time. I’m sorry. It didn’t work out. Go ahead and abort.”

Sounding as if he were ordering a pizza, Fabio said, “Roger. Copy abort. Confirm?”

“This is NASA. I confirm.”

Inside the capsule, Fabio looked at his fellow travelers and said, “It’s been good to know you. Everyone take fifteen seconds to pray or do whatever you need to do.”

The time elapsed and he reached for the button, flipping up the Plexiglas shield. He glanced once more around the capsule and put his finger on the button.

His helmet came alive, someone shouting, “Stop! Stop! Stop!”

He pulled his hand back, saying, “Mission control, this is Valkyrie One. What’s the situation?”

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