“Run,” Jet whispered and then spun, tearing back up the stairs.
Rob stood by the car for a second, unsure of what was happening, and then ducked and darted for the front door just as a shot gouged a chunk of plaster out of the entry foyer wall by his head. He was a third of the way up the stairs when the glass door behind him exploded, showering him with tiny glittering shards. He scrambled the rest of the way to the landing and heard the sound of running footsteps from the street below, then darted down the hall to where Jet had sprinted for the doctor’s office. He was just through the door and twisting the deadbolt shut when rounds thudded into the steel. The doctor gaped around, panicked.
“Is there another way out of here?” Jet asked in a low voice.
He nodded, pointing. “Back exit. What on earth is going on here?”
“Come with us. It’s not safe. They killed the driver,” Jet explained, then threw the back door open. A raw concrete landing led to another metal door that was bolted shut. She caught Rob’s eye.
“They tracked us here. Go down the back stairs. I’ll be with you in a second.”
The front door groaned on its hinges as the attackers threw their weight against it. Rob nodded, grabbed the doctor by the arm, and led him to the rear stairs. Jet dashed to the drawers and opened them, finding what she wanted in the second one. She grabbed some gauze, a small plastic bottle and the paper-sheathed disposable scalpel and then ran for the stairwell, where she could hear Rob and the doctor clumping down to the ground level.
If they were lucky, they would have a minute or two before their pursuers began looking for another way in. Her only hope was that it wasn’t a large team. If it was, they were screwed.
Rob and the doctor were waiting at the bottom of the stairs.
She thrust the scalpel at the doctor.
“Quick. You need to cut this thing out. Now.” She unbuttoned her top and slid a sleeve off, pointing to the spot where the chip had been imbedded just a few days earlier.
“What am I cutting out?” he asked, hands shaking as he fumbled with the paper wrapper.
“A microchip. Tiny. But you have about twenty seconds to get it or we’re all dead.”
She gritted her teeth as he sliced her flesh open over the small bump and probed around with the sharp tip of the blade until he extracted the shiny silver disk. Thick, red blood dripped from the incision, but she ignored it.
“Blot it and glue it. Rob. Take this chip, and throw it back up the stairs.”
The doctor wiped away the blood, then squirted Dermabond into the incision and pressed the two sides together. He took his hand away ten seconds later, and she clenched the wound, applying pressure.
“Get ready to run,” she whispered to the doctor, who nodded. She pulled her blouse back on and buttoned it, the gash now sealed tight.
When Rob returned, she opened the rear door, peering into the half dark of the service way that ran along the backs of the buildings. There was no sign of life.
A crash echoed from upstairs — the attackers had knocked the doctor’s front door down.
“Now,” she said and bolted, Rob and the old man trailing her.
As they neared the end of the block, the hulking outline of a construction project loomed on her left — an older building that was being renovated. A chain-link fence circled it, but there looked like enough room at the gate for her to squeeze in.
“Can you make it?” she asked Rob and the winded physician.
“We’ll have to.”
Jet went first and slid into the gap, clutching her purse as she beckoned them to follow. “Hurry.”
Rob went next, his dog shirt tearing as he struggled to get through. He finally made it, then held out his hand for the doctor.
“Come on. Now.”
The old man wedged himself into the gap and then stopped, his white exam coat snagged by the raw wire jutting from the fence.
“Tear it. Let’s go,” Rob urged, as his eyes swiveled down the alley.
Three men toting assault rifles emerged from the doctor’s building, gun barrels sweeping the street.
The doctor gasped at the sight of the gunmen and renewed his efforts to get free, but the only thing he accomplished was to make the fence rattle, drawing the gunmen’s attention.
The night exploded with the stutter of automatic weapons, and the doctor’s body jerked spasmodically as a succession of white-hot rounds tore through him. Rob ducked back into the building where Jet was waiting and shook his head.
She turned and mounted the concrete steps to the second floor. It was gutted, empty except for a workbench, with no place to hide, so she continued to the next level, Rob behind her.
They heard their pursuers trying to pry the doctor’s corpse from where it blocked the gate, and then another blast of gunfire shattered the night as one of the men shot the padlock off.
Jet pointed at a far window and then broke for it. Peering over the edge, she calculated the distance to the next building and then backed away from the empty aperture before hurling herself through it feet first.
She landed in a pile of broken glass. She’d kicked through the window and was lying on the floor of a darkened office.
“Jump,” she hissed at Rob, who was still standing in the other building, then she sprang to her feet and took off into the space beyond, looking for an exit or something that could be used as a weapon.
Rob pounded after her and found her at a stairwell.
“They’re right behind us,” he rasped.
“I know. If we go down, we run the risk that one of them stayed on the street.”
“So what do we do?”
She cocked her head and pointed.
“We go up.”
Chapter 17
A crashing sound reverberated through the empty building from below as the gunmen leapt across the chasm and landed on the glass. Jet and Rob took care to climb the stairs to the roof as silently as possible, hoping that their pursuers would think they had made the predictable choice and had gone down to the ground level.
The door to the roof was old and rusting from years of exposure to the salt air and the elements. Jet listened, finger held to her lips, for sounds from two stories below and was rewarded by a door opening and then footsteps moving stealthily down the concrete stairs. When they had faded, she shouldered the roof door open.
The rusty hinges springing wide sounded like a grenade detonating to her ear.
A door slammed beneath them, and the clump of boots ascended steadily from below.
She reached into her purse and withdrew the phone she’d gotten from Edgar and keyed the sequence that would convert it into a gun.
“Go see if there’s a fire escape or a building we can jump to,” she whispered. “I have three shots in this thing, and it should stall them when I start shooting. But that will only last so long. If we don’t get off this roof, we’re dead.”
He took off across the roof as she held the door ajar. Three yards of range wasn’t ideal, but maybe she wouldn’t need that much.
She sensed rather than heard the lead man, and a second after his gun barrel came into view, she depressed the fire button, and the little phoned popped like a small pistol, the shell bouncing to the side through a sliding port. She heard a grunt of surprised pain and then gunfire filled the stairwell. Jet threw the door shut, allowing the fire to ricochet back on the shooters. Hopefully at least one stray would hit them, further adding to the sense that she was shooting back. She knew from experience that things could get weird fast in a firefight, and perceptions could play tricks on you. That was her only bet at this point.
“Over here!” Rob called. “There’s a building next to us we can get to. It’s a story lower, but I think we can make it.”
Jet leapt to her feet and ran to him, took one glance over the side, and then backed up and tore off at full
