Chapter 22 - The Ghost on the Ramp
The downwash of our rotor blades shredded the rain into a white fog as Viktor flared the bird ten feet above the empty asphalt of the abandoned maintenance lot off Vernon Boulevard.
We didn't wait for the skids to touch the tarmac.
Dante jumped first, boots splashing into three inches of gray slush, his long coat flaring around his broad frame like the wings of a raptor. I dropped right behind him, the weight of the tactical sidearm Arthur had given me heavy against my hip, my fingers white around the shaft of the silver key. Clara came last, her breathing ragged, supported by one of Dante’s lieutenant-tier guards who stayed behind to secure the perimeter.
The air smelled of ozone, burnt transmission fluid, and wet road salt.
Fifty yards ahead, the black Suburban lay like a dead beast on its crushed roof. Its front axle was snapped clean, wheels still slowly spinning against the gray sky. Steam hissed from the ruptured radiator, mingling with the low cloud deck.
Croft was gone.
"Movement at the retaining wall!" one of Dante’s men barked, bringing his rifle up.
"Hold fire!" I screamed, lunging forward and knocking the barrel toward the dirt. "Hold your fire, damn you!"
A figure was huddled against the concrete barrier beneath the massive steel girders of the upper bridge ramp. Wet wool. Trembling shoulders. Long, silver-streaked hair plastered to a hollow cheek by the freezing downpour.
I stopped five paces away. My knees felt hollow, the old waitress uniform beneath my wet tactical shell suddenly feeling like a shroud.
"Mom?" The word tasted like twenty years of ash and cheap diner coffee.
The woman raised her head. The blood running from a laceration across her forehead was dark, sluggish, and real. Her eyes—the same washed-out hazel as mine—flickered with a sickening mixture of terror and calculation.
"Sarah," she breathed. Her voice had the same low cadence that had sung me to sleep in a railroad apartment in Sunnyside before the fire, before the debts, before Marcus Vance had supposedly burned our lives to the ground. "You shouldn't have brought him here. You shouldn't have given Dante the key."
Dante didn't stop. He crossed the distance between them in two strides, his shadow swallowing her completely. He didn't draw his weapon. He simply reached down, grabbed her collar with one massive hand, and hauled her to her feet until her toes barely scraped the slush.
"Where is my daughter?" Dante asked. He didn't shout. The quietness of his tone was worse than a roar. "Where is Mia?"
Elena coughed, a thin line of pink foam bubbling at the corner of her lips. "She isn't your daughter, Dante. Not really. Look at her medical profile. Marcus didn't take her to hide her from you. He took her because Croft owns the facility that created her lineage."
"Lie to me again," Dante whispered, his grip tightening until her breath rattled in her throat, "and I’ll drop you into the river before the ambulance leaves the precinct."
"Dante, wait," Clara’s voice cut through the rain. She limped past me, her pale face taut with fury. "Elena... you were Marcus’s courier. You weren't in the car when it burned. You were the one who signed the release for Mia at the private clinic in Bern."
Elena looked at Clara, and a miserable, broken smile touched her split lip. "Clara. Still alive. Marcus always said you were too stubborn to die in a hole. Croft didn't crash this car, you fools. Mia did."
My heart hammered against my ribs. "Mia was in that car?"
"She had Arthur’s backup transponder," Elena wheezed, her eyes shifting toward the dark, yawning entrance of the abandoned subway ventilation shaft fifty yards behind the retaining wall. "She grabbed the wheel from the rear seat. Forced us into the pylon. When Croft pulled me out, she had already crawled through the intake grate. She went down into the Lower Loop."
Dante dropped Elena back into the slush. He turned his eyes toward the dark square of the grate. The heavy iron bars had been wrenched open with an emergency jack from the truck’s tool kit.
"She has twenty minutes of air before the low-pressure ventilation system cycles the steam from the midtown lines," Dante said, turning toward his surviving men. "We go down."
"Sarah," Elena called out, reaching out a claw-like hand to snag the hem of my trousers. "Don't go with him. The key in your pocket... it doesn't open the override. It locks the vault from the inside. Croft isn't trying to steal the network. He’s trying to trap Marcus Vance inside before he dies."
I looked down at the woman who had let me believe I was an orphan for half my life.
"Marcus died ten years ago, Mother," I said flatly.
May you like
Elena looked up at me through the rain, her eyes wide with a horrific pity. "Then who do you think has been paying the lease on your little diner every month for the last ten years?"
***
