There were medical labs on Sublevel Five, and because every single person in the Centre was trained to recognize Jarod's face, Kate would be doing most of the legwork. There was a locker room down the hall to the right, and when the hallway was clear, Kate snuck out of her hiding place at the mouth of the passageway and walked down the hall, invisible, until she made it into the locker room. According to Jarod, the Centre was busy twenty-four hours a day, and this wing of Sublevel Five would be just as busy now, in the middle of the night, as it would be in the middle of the day.
She counted twelve lockers down the third row and swung the door open. Inside was a lab coat and an ID card. She slipped the ID in the coat pocket and slid the coat on. She buttoned up a couple of the buttons, took a deep breath to try to calm her racing nerves, and walked out of the locker room.
The hallways were mostly bare; anyone working would be in a lab or an exam room. As she walked through the hall, she looked in the windows of the rooms she was passing. The first set of windows looked in on small offices with technicians hunched over machines and computers. After the offices came a series of testing facilities, with big imaging machines and scanners, and then exam rooms. Many of the rooms were empty, but there were a few with patients. Some of the patients wore lab coats themselves, and one patient was a girl of no more than six with dark brown hair, dressed in a grey jumpsuit. As Kate passed, the girl looked to the physician.
Kate blinked and shook her head. She had to have been hallucinating. She hadn't gotten any sleep in the car or on the plane, and if it weren't for the adrenaline, she would have been asleep on her feet. But the girl's eyes were the exact same shade as Kate's, and she looked like she could have been Kate's sister.
It was probably just a coincidence, Kate told herself as she found a gurney in an empty exam room. She looked up and down the hall before she took the gurney out, hoping to make it back to the passageway without any questions. Nobody noticed her on the way back, or if they did, they didn't think anything of her. When she got back to the passageway, she picked the sheet up and Jarod expertly climbed onto the gurney. Kate settled the sheet over him and was impressed at his ability to play dead.
The elevator wasn't far, but they would have to pass a few offices, and while Jarod had told her that loaded gurneys weren't uncommon, Kate was still nervous about this part. The gurney rolled surprisingly easily, even with Jarod on top of it, and Kate wheeled him down the hallway to the elevator. Another lab tech walked in and gave her a sympathetic look, but he didn't ask questions. Kate pushed the button for Sublevel Seven—the level for the morgue—and the other tech pushed the button for Sublevel Six.
No one got on the elevator at Sublevel Six, to Kate's relief, but a group of people were waiting to get on the elevator when she got off. She kept her head down, avoiding the gaze of thewheezing bald man with the oxygen tank. He stared at her as she walked away, and she forced herself to keep her pace steady even as she expected him to stop her. She heard the doors slide shut a few seconds later and shivered with relief as she turned down a dimly-lit hallway and into a deserted room.
The second she closed the door, Jarod sprang out from under the sheet. He nodded to Kate. "Well done," he whispered, smiling his winning smile. She shucked her lab coat and they snuck out of the room and down the hall to another maintenance shaft. They paused there for a moment and Kate breathed deeply, trying to calm her nerves.
Kate crouched at the beginning of the ventilator shaft. It was pitch dark in the space between Sublevels Eleven and Twelve, and they would have to rely on the map in Jarod's mind to get them across the central part of the Tower and into the data room.
Kate wished they'd done this during the summer, when the air blowing through the ventilator shafts wasn't heated. She was sweating by the time they made their third turn, and she could feel her shirt sticking to her back. She'd known it would be warm, but this was just gross.
When Jarod finally stopped, Kate nearly ran into him, occupied as she was with thinking about anything but the sticky, sweaty heat. He crawled over the grill, then carefully unscrewed it and pushed it to the side. Kate went first, and the opening was so small, she was amazed Jarod ever got through. She dropped to the floor with as little noise as possible, and moved off to start her work. She barely heard Jarod drop down behind her, and she was surprised he'd gotten through. She searched the panels for the switches she was supposed to flip. It took a fair amount of searching, but she discovered a pattern in the labels, making finding the switches much easier. She flipped them, and each one made a loud snap.
Jarod's fingers flew over a console keyboard, diving straight past any firewalls into the Centre's databases. He'd said he was going to plant a virus, one that would cause all kinds of leaks and that was designed to mutate whenever the Centre's IT techs tried to block it.
When he was finished, Jarod took a small, folded piece of paper and, tugging on a few corners with his fingers, set a miniature bird on top of the keyboard. He turned to Kate. Ready? his smirk asked. Kate nodded.
They weren't going out the way they'd come in. Part of Jarod's database-hacking had involved a quick but temporary confusion of the security system that would allow Kate and Jarod to get out by a path that was less complicated than their entry route.
Kate eased the door of the data room open and scanned the hallway: empty. She and Jarod slipped out quietly, and Kate followed him through the maze of corridors to a maintenance shaft that took them to the sixth level. They waited for the security guard to walk by, and then Jarod got the door to the stairs open. They jogged up four flights of stairs, and were nearly free when a pair of Sweepers met them coming down. They kept their faces down, hoping they wouldn't be noticed.
"You never see people on these stairs," one of the Sweepers muttered to his companion as they descended.
"Well, we're on the—wait, is that—"
Kate didn't hear the rest of the second Sweeper's comment. Her heartbeat pounded in her ears as she sprinted up the last flight of stairs. Jarod was just behind her, and the Sweepers, lacking the fatigue of four flights of stairs, were gaining on them.
"That door!" Jarod said. "That one. Go!" Kate threw the door open and sprinted out, retracing the path she and Jarod had taken in. Two shots rang out, and Kate abandoned the carefully planned path, zig-zagging across the lawn toward the ocean.
She heard a soft thud, and then the erratic beat of Jarod stumbling down the grass behind her. "Jarod?"
"Just go! I'm right behind you!" he shouted breathlessly.
Kate went around an outcropping, ducking out of sight and sneaking into the abandoned trailer. Jarod stumbled in after her, breathing heavily.
"Out of shape?" she asked, tugging on her wetsuit as quickly as possible. It was still wet and Kate got stuck more than once. She helped Jarod into his own wetsuit—he was having more trouble than Kate would have expected from him—and Jarod zipped up the back of hers. It was too dark for the Sweepers to have found them without flashlights, but Kate could see a dozen men in suits running down to the oceanside.
"Let's go," Jarod said, holding the back door open. Kate followed him into the water and around the cliff, trusting his knowledge of the coast far more than her own.
Jarod let Kate drive this time, not because she was the better driver, but because the Sweepers hadn't gotten a good look at her face. She stripped out of her wetsuit and threw on the blue sweater Jarod had been wearing earlier. It made her stifling hot, but at least it covered the tight black uniform she'd been seen in. She forced herself to drive just under the speed limit to the airstrip. The pilot who had kept the plane ready told them a second jet was asking the local air traffic control for clearance to leave. "A Centre plane?" Kate asked Jarod.
"Probably," Jarod said. He thanked the pilot for keeping the plane hot, and within ten minutes, they were in the air, headed away from Delaware. Kate dug through a box in the storage compartment and pulled out some high-energy food. She wasn't hungry, but she knew she'd need to eat something before the adrenaline wore off. She handed a granola bar and a protein shake to Jarod, sat in the co-pilot's seat, and put on her headset.
"That went well," Jarod said.
"Yeah, I'd say, since the alternative was one or both of us captured or dead."
Jarod shrugged. Kate saw him wince in the dim light from the control panel.
"Jarod, are you okay?"
"Just fine," he said.
"I heard you fall," Kate said.
"Oh, that. Just tripped, that's all."
"If you say so." Kate dozed on and off as the darkness out the window turned to dark grey and they flew in to Queens. Jarod had radioed ahead and Kate called Castle, who was on the tarmac when Jarod landed.
As she and Castle drove away, Kate saw a group of men in suits pile out of another plane, but Jarod was already lifting off the runway, headed north.