Chapter 9

"Benji, calm down," Ethan's voice was still sympathetic, yet there also was a hue of annoyance. It was understandable that the technician was somewhat freaked out by what had happened in the last few hours, however he had been babbling the whole ride back from Lambeth and as they had come right into the evening rush-hour, by now that was a full fifteen minutes. Still, there was no end to be seen.

"How am I supposed to be calm?" he asked, impatiently drumming his fingers onto his knee. "Those people have access to classified IMF information, and we still don't have an idea how. Neither do we have a plan to stop them, because we've got no idea what it actually is they are doing and meanwhile ten other versions of me are running around the city, doing god-knows-what. How am I supposed to be calm?"

"That's twelve actually," Brandt put in dryly. He and Luther had started working their way through the servers, but things were going slowly and with not much else to do, the analyst was slowly getting bored. "Eleven, if you don't count yourself and the dead guy that is still lying around in the apartment."

"Oh, great. So now it's eleven guys..." Benji started, but was interrupted by Skye.

"Don't work yourself up about it," she said. Although her voice wore traces of exhaustion, he could distinctively hear her smile, and it calmed the Brit somewhat. "Don't forget, you're not the only one with doubles running around and at least you don't have to climb through an elevator shaft."

"OK, right," the technician said and took a deep breath to keep himself from starting to talk again.

Going through the building's schematics again, Brandt had found a connection between the elevator shafts and the ventilation system and so Skye now planned to get back into the basement the way he had originally come in, going into another room and later unlocking the server room from the outside. However after Benji had left, the cabin had stayed where it was, and so she had had to pass around it in a small maintenance niche between the two elevator shafts, first going all the way up to get there, and now going all the way down again.

Meanwhile the van had finally reached the apartment. "See you inside," Luther called, before they went off the radio.

Walking up the stairs, Benji couldn't quite believe that it had only been this morning that he had come in with Skye, looking forward to three weeks of relaxed vacation. To him it seemed like that had happened ages ago, but actually it hadn't even been twelve hours yet.

With a sigh he followed Ethan up and waited as the senior agent unlocked the door, when suddenly he rather sensed than otherwise detected someone behind him. Instinctively Benji wanted to turn around, but was held back by a sharp metal object that was held to his neck from behind. "Don't move," a male voice whispered behind him, and a cold shiver ran down his spine when he recognized it. "I told you not to be smart."

"Benji, are you coming?" Ethan asked from inside the flat, but Benji didn't dare to call out to him. That, however, was not necessary, for the other agent was already turning around, to see what was keeping him and instantly had his gun drawn.

For a second the two men just stared at each other, Benji in the middle. Awesome holidays, he thought, as it all suddenly came up again. He had been chased, shot at, had stolen a Royal Mail van and driven it into the Thames, had seen his own death, broken into a building impersonating himself, twice, been beaten up by his own girlfriend, all just to be stabbed now. And somehow all of this was still Nolan's fault. He knew he would have sworn to kill the man, if he hadn't been dead already.

"If you move only one inch, sir, Mr. Dunn dies," Ian Stuart said, almost politely. Ethan didn't move, but he didn't put his gun down either.

"You're not going to kill him," he said calmly, coldly, and with a self-assuredness he did not actually have. "Because you need him alive."

"I wouldn't be so sure of that," Benji put in with a thin, shaky voice, as Stuart pulled him closer. His back was arched back painfully, as the other man was smaller than he was and as that held him in an uncomfortable, backwards bent position. Where he couldn't give in any more, the knife sharply cut into the soft skin, a wet-warm trickle of fresh blood running down the side of his neck.

"And Mr. Dunn would be right," Stuart said with his predator-grin. "It would be a nice bonus if I could bring him alive, but I'm going to kill him if I have to."

"If you move, you'll be dead," Ethan assured him, but the red-head only smiled back coldly.

"And Mr. Dunn would die anyway," he said, his voice still losing nothing of his English politeness. "Now, if you value your friends life, sir, you should put down your gun."

Grudgingly Ethan lowered his gun and tossed it over. Either Stuart didn't notice that the weapon was still loaded, or maybe he just didn't care. However, he started to shove Benji towards the stairs, making sure that he was still mostly behind the taller man. "And now we thank you for your hospitality, but I'm afraid we have to leave," he said as they started to proceed down the stairs.

Their descend was terribly slow. Stuart didn't loosen his grip and, bent back as he was, Benji was not only rather unsteady on his feet, he also couldn't see all the way down to the floor and had to feel his way around. Additionally he was being pulled sideways and to the right, so that the agent had the constant feeling of falling into the knife. On shaky legs he made his way downstairs, an inch at a time, knowing that any sudden move could be the last. But the stairs were wet and slippery from the rain outside and so a few steps down he missed the edge, slipped and fell.

While his body was instinctively lunging forward to regain balance, his head was ripped back sharply. The only way to get out of this paradox situation without dislocating or breaking any bone-structures, was a sideways rolling motion that sent both men tumbling down the stairs in a tangle of arms and legs.

At some point, Benji noticed that the world around him had stopped moving. His head felt like a pressure-pot, blood pounding in his ears, but shrouded in a strangely lightheaded, floating sensation. Not daring to move, he kept still, waiting for something to happen. It took him a while to realize that he was still alive, lying face-down on cold stone floor. With that realization his senses slowly returned, pain above all, a dull, aching pain in most of his body and a more intense sharp sting just above his neck.

Then he could also hear the voices, laden with concern and fear, although with the noise of his own heartbeat still drumming in his ears he could not understand what they were saying. He tried to reply, but all he managed was a hoarse groan. With the sensation slowly returning into his limbs, he decided it was time to have a look around. Carefully he sorted his arms and legs, and with a larger effort than he would have thought, he turned onto his back.

Opening his eyes, he blinked into the shrill light of a neon lamp. It took a moment until he had oriented himself and could make out that the voices were coming from above. Tilting his head backwards, he could see Ethan and Luther running down the stairs, guns drawn. He still couldn't make out what they were saying. From his strange point of view, lying on the back at the bottom of the stairs, it was however a somewhat surreal sight and made his head spin.

Instantly he closed his eyes again to get rid of the nauseous feeling before it could get worse and thought that it might help his sense of direction if he sat up. Searching for a good spot for his hands to push himself up, he found something strangely soft at his side. Rather out of instinct than anything else, he turned his head to look at it and suddenly stared into horribly contorted face of Ian Stuart.

Startled by the unexpected sight, Benji shrunk back, hitting his head on the wall, but he almost didn't notice. The adrenaline rush elicited by the sudden shock at least lifted the fog from his mind and brought him back to reality. His heart racing, he was leaning against the wall, unable to take his eyes off the deformed figure. Stuart was lying spread-eagled, his head turned away from his body in a grotesque angle, staring at him with cold, dead eyes. He had broken his neck in the fall.

"Benji, are you alright?"

The technician flinched at the touch, but finally managed to look away from the dead man. "Yeah, I'm fine," he said flatly, shaking his head to get the picture out of his mind. Careful not to look back, he sorted his legs and tried to stand up. He only wanted to get away from that scene as quickly as possible, but he was glad that Luther was there to hold him steady. Still, he determinedly walked towards the stairs. On his way up, he noticed a red trail of blood on the steps. He did not think about whose it was.

\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/

Skye was glad when she finally reached the end of the ventilation shaft. Although she was smaller than Brandt, after having been tied up for hours, she had not been happy to find herself cramped into the narrow pipeline. With a sigh, she let herself fall out of the ventilation system and stretched her stiff muscles. She did not have the means to pull the grid back over the hole, but that didn't matter much.

Looking around, she found herself back in the maintenance room that had been her prison cell, only that this time she had a way out. Everything was the way they had left it, and actually it was a good thing she had ended up here, she thought. That way she at least knew her way around, even in the darkness. She mused that maybe she should have brought a torch.

Quickly orienting herself, she headed straight for the door and allowed herself a satisfied smile when the skeleton key opened it with an obedient click. Cautiously she looked up and down the corridor before she stepped out, but there was nobody there. She had passed over the server room where Brandt was trapped in the ventilation shafts, so she knew where she had to go and headed straight down the hallway.

The lock on the server room door, other than the one on the maintenance room, was a security lock and somewhat harder to crack, so Skye was still in the middle of working on it, when she heard the soft chime that announced the elevator doors opening. Instinctively Skye pressed herself against the door, although the frame provided very little cover and watched as two versions of Benji, one slightly taller than the other, stepped into the hallway.

However they did not look in her direction, but headed straight for the second door to the right. The door, Skye realized with a cold shiver running down her spine, which was the one that led to the maintenance room she was supposed to be in. She knew she might not even have a second until her absence was discovered and that she had nowhere to run. The corridor ended behind her and to get to the elevators she would have had to get past the maintenance room where she was sure to be seen by the masked men. The chance that any of the doors along the hallway up to that room were unlocked was virtually nonexistent.

Her only chance, she figured, was to get the door of the server room open and hope she could get inside before anybody noticed her. However, when she almost had it, she could hear raised voices from the other end of the corridor and footsteps approaching quickly. They had spotted Skye, and with that, she knew, her time had run out.

She knew her capture was all but inevitable now. She had a gun, and of course she could have shot the two guys, but then they most likely had already called for backup. And even if not, as soon as the bodies would be found, and someone was bound to find them, they would know about their operation. Also it would not increase her chances to stay unseen for long.

If she let herself be captured, however, she might still be able to make them believe she had managed to escape her prison all on her own. She made that decision in within a second, but meanwhile the men had spotted her and were coming straight at her.

Her foremost objective now was damage control. She had three things on her that might give her away. The first was the earplug. Of course there was a chance it might not be noticed, however if they did find it, she would have no chance of explaining it away, so she simply ripped it out and threw it on the floor.

The skeleton key was somewhat harder to get rid of, but since the bare stone corridor didn't give Skye any possibility of throwing it away, she decided to instead hide it in a place she just hoped none of them would ever look. The last and biggest problem was presented by the gun, but by the time she got to think about it, the two men were only one door away, and even if she had a way to let the weapon disappear, she knew that she hardly could do that without either of them noticing. She would have to solve that problem on the way.

Since there was no space to escape between them and the wall, she had only two options: Either back up against the wall and let herself be captured, or attack, with the minute chance that she might even be able to take them down and find somewhere to hide before their backup arrived, without being shot in the process. Skye decided that if she would be captured, after all she could at least give them a good fight.

Determined she lunged at them, ramming her shoulder into the one on her right, while grabbing his leg, so he sailed to the floor behind her before he even knew what was happening. The second man was meanwhile reaching for his gun, but Skye twisted it out of his hand in a move that shifted some structures in his wrist into relative positions to each other they were not naturally meant to be in. In the same flowing motion, she bent his arm to his back, tripping him over her right foot which rammed him face first into the wall with her left knee in his back.

However she had not thought that her other attacker would recover as quickly as he did, so in the same instant she was grabbed by the shoulder and did not completely manage to avoid a blow that, had it hit home, would have broken more than just her nose. The man already prepared for a second blow, but Skye recovered quickly and grabbed his elbow with both hands, her fingers tightening around the pressure spot that made his arm bend. Once it did, she yanked him down, stepping to the side, and he followed his colleague with a painful groan. The sound made her skin crawl, it sounded too much like Benji himself. With a deep breath she told herself that that was completely impossible and that it was only a voice chip, and the masks coming away in strips from the men's crushed faces helped a bit.

Skye had been distracted for only a moment, however that had been a moment too long, for she had missed the chime of the elevator and suddenly four more men, more than six feet tall each and at least half as much in width, came at her. Before she was able to react, one of them seized her by the arm and lifted her up. She managed to kick him squarely in the chest, but that didn't seem to impress him much, nor did anything else she could do. Calmly he forcefully folded her arms behind her back, while one of the others wrapped her in duct-tape, despite her best efforts to resist. Once she nearly came close enough his shoulder to bite him, an act of desperation, which had her end up with a piece of tape across her mouth, carried away over his shoulder in a writhing bundle. Nobody took special notice of the discarded gun lying a few feet from the two unconscious bodies.