NOTES: Yes, it's been a year since I updated this story, but I have not abandoned it, it's just that real-life issues have been eating most of my spare time. Hopefully I can update further in the not-too-distant future, but no promises, life decides how much time I have.
CHUCK vs. THE NO-WIN QUESTION chapter 31: Desperate Measures 1
Somewhere in Moscow, Russian Federation, Friday, June 5th, 11:45...
Sarah Walker waited in the empty room, her mood a long-familiar mix of nervousness, anticipation, fear, excitement, and dread. It was the same feeling she always felt just before going into a dangerous, violent situation, a mixture of rational fear, irrational excitement, adrenalin, dread, and at the same time a wish she could be somewhere else, anywhere else. It was a feeling she had periodically known since before she was fully an adult, and by now she knew well how to control it, channel it, turn it to her advantage.
Sarah was positioned in an empty room in a building across the street from the building at which her teammate Lana Peyton was being held. She was clad in a form-fitting but padded black outfit, black boots, and a black pullover mask.
Her fellow Senior Cats were staking out their own locations as they prepared for a 'penetration op' to get into the target building. Below, the streets surrounding the area had been evacuated by the Moscow police, who were staking out the streets and trying to decide how best to proceed to deal with the madmen ensconced in the skyscraper.
After the chaos of the previous two days, the Moscow authorities were on edge, both the local municipal ones and the federal authorities as well. Though Sarah was not privy to such things, she had no doubt that allegations and counter-allegations were speeding back and forth between the Russian Federation government and the other major states. At the moment, she was less concerned about such rarified matters and more about the safety of her teammates and the weird situation that was unfolding.
The target building was a bank, nothing especially interesting, and it was all over the news in Moscow that some unknown criminals, for unknown reasons, had been firing shots into the crowd since just past daybreak. Now that the police had cleared the area, the shooters had ceased firing...for the most part. Now and then, the men on the upper floors with their rifles would take a shot or two at the police on the streets below, but with little effect, the police were behind armored barricades now and little exposed.
Earlier in the day, the criminals had hung a woman over the edge of the roof, just long enough for the TV cameras to capture an image that the CATs recognized as their teammate, Lana Payton. Of course the media only knew her as the Russian version of 'Jane Doe', and speculations ran rampant about who the men in the bank were, who the woman had been, and what was happening now that she had been taken back inside.
Sarah and her fellow CATs had some better idea of who and what, but little idea of why. They knew perfectly well, of course, that this entire situation was a trap to force the CATs into action, but they had little choice but to walk into the trap anyway.
Sarah took a deep breath, double-checking her watch. It was almost time, and she raised the device in her hands, a machine vaguely resembling a high-tech cannon, but with a coil of cable hanging out the back, braced it against the open window, aimed it at a fire escape platform on the bank building opposite, and fired!
Something leapt from the barrel, not a bullet or a shell, but an electronic device of some sort, shooting across the gap between the buildings at a tremendous rate, before coming to rest hard against the metal of the fire escape platform, which it clung tightly, held in place by a strong magnetic field. The device Sarah had just used was not a weapon, as such, though it surely would have done grievous harm to someone struck by the magnetic 'head' during its fast flight. Instead, the head pulled the cable through the barrel, and when Sarah locked the mechanism the cable hung straight and taut between the buildings.
Now she had to move swiftly. Out came another mechanism, a sort of wheel with ropes attached, which she locked to the cable, and then with a deep breath and a kick, she slid out the window, and rappelled along the cable across the street to the fire escape landing! Her heart raced as she slid across the vertiginous gap, hundreds of feet above the street, hanging for dear life to the handle-ropes. Part of her was acutely aware that the only thing keeping the cable attached, and her from plunging to her death, was a magnet. No hook, nothing solid, just a very strong, but intangible, magnetic field. A field, she knew, that was very strong but would last only as long as the batteries in the 'head', which would be only a few minutes at most!
Though it took her only seconds to slide across the gap, it seemed like forever. Her heart raced, the muscles in her arms ached, one part of her was exhilarated and most of her was terrified. Then, after a timeless forever, she reached the fire escape, caught a railing, and pulled herself safely onto the platform. Even as she did, she saw warning lights on the 'head' turn from green to yellow, and moments later the electromagnets failed and the cable dropped from the landing!
Eleven seconds to spare, Sarah thought, I'll have to talk to the techies about that! They said it should be good for at least a three minute margin!
Sarah paused just barely long enough to look back across the street at the building she had just left. As she had hoped and expected, the launcher mechanism was rewinding the cable, pulling it back toward the window from which she had emerged. As soon as the cable rewound, a self-destruct system in the launcher would ignite and melt the whole machine into a glob of metal, leaving little for whoever investigated to learn.
It was a certainty, of course, that someone would come to investigate!
There were TV cameras aplenty focused on the bank, as well as any number of cell phones and other observing devices, it was a certainty that her fast rappel across the street, two hundred feet in the air, had been watched and noted! She was across and done, and the device would be self-destructed, though, long before anyone would be able to get close enough to learn anything. Her black outfit covered her from head to toe, and the padding would conceal any tell-tale curves, so that even her gender would not be visible to anyone studying close-ups of the videos.
One of the reasons that the FULCRUM teams had been so public about this entire operation had been because it was a trap. They were not even being subtle about that. They probably also thought that the public nature of the situation would limit the CATs options. Which, of course, it did. Still, earlier in the day, the Senior CATs and General Beckman and Roan Montgomery had concluded that their best counter to a blatantly obvious trap was to be obvious themselves. That might catch the enemy by surprise, and sow sufficient confusion to give them time to turn the tables.
It was risky...but there were no safe options available.
So it was that Sarah Walker had just violated at least fifteen basic rules of tradecraft by her blatant, broad-daylight rappel in front of TV cameras connected to the world media. If all went well, though, all that would be seen was another unknown 'player' doing something bizarre in the middle of a bizarre situation.
In any event, Sarah had no time to waste, she had smashed a window and moved inside the bank building within seconds of arriving on the platform. As she did, she hoped Carina and Zondra and other members of CAT Two were as successful in their parts of the operation as hers had been...so far.
A clinic in Paris, Friday, June 5th, 2020, 10:15 a.m. local time...
Dr. Noemie Duplantier opened the file folder on her desk, and pulled out several pages of charts, graphs, pictures, and other hard copy information, all of it derived from a single 'patient' of the secret part of the clinic. A wry smile crossed her pretty face as she mentally bracketed the word 'patient', she tended to doubt this particular subject would use that word.
Not many of our subjects would, Duplantier admitted to herself as she began to read the medical files on Bryce Larkin yet again. Even those who survive.
The clinic at which Dr. Duplantier worked was not a front. At least, not exactly. The above-ground part of the medical complex was indeed a working hospital, private, and expensive. Their patients tended to be at least moderately wealthy, able to pay for the best of exclusive and very discreet care. Many of the patients were not themselves French, many of those who were had the wealth and connections to bypass the public health care system entirely. The precise legalities of this depended on the situation, but the clinic had good lawyers.
The clinic was real, but at the same time also a cover for a medical research center that was rather more secret, and most definitely entirely illegal.
FULCRUM was the current organizational master of the Clinic. The Clinic predated FULCRUM, though. FULCRUM was a relatively new power within the global Conspiracy, it had been formed only a few decades before. It had more or less 'inherited' the Clinic from a previous cell of the Conspiracy, one that had not survived the upheavals of the Cold War.
The Clinic itself dated back to 1943, and it had been established by a conspiratorial organization that had infiltrated the Nazi Party and the German military apparat during World War II. From its beginnings, the secret complex had been the site of cutting edge biomedical research, and in 1943 there had been no shortage of 'subjects' for such experimentation ready at hand. Civilian prisoners from the camps, Jews and Romany and the other 'undesirables' of the Nazi programs had provided some. Others had come from prisoner of war camps, captured Americans, Britons, and Russians. Still others had been civilians, Germans or French in the wrong place at the wrong time, easily disappeared in the confusion when a subject was needed quickly.
The large supply of test subjects, and the freedom to experiment without regard to such niceties as consent or the suffering of the subject, had paid off in terms of knowledge. But when the war ended and a state of semi-sanity fell across Western Europe once more, it had become necessary to exercise greater caution and more care in choosing test subjects. Some of the work had been transferred to facilities in the Soviet Union, where ruthless efficiency in test subject selection was still possible in the gulags and through the actions of the infiltrated KGB. Other projects had been retained in Paris, but slowed down.
Eventually, the rise of the Ring organization, and FULCRUM's apparent participation in it (while always retaining its links to the real Conspiracy that ran far deeper and wider than the Ring Elders ever dreamed) had permitted some of the valuable data the Paris Clinic had gathered to be transferred to Zamibia and the research of Martin Kowambe. However morally challenge Dr. Kowambe might have been, his scientific talents were impressive, and he built extensively on the Clinic data, and that had been fed back to the Clinic in turn.
The Clinic had several ongoing projects. One of the most important of them was the effort to be able to rapidly heal damaged tissues, to restore wounded personnel to the field quickly and repair damage that would otherwise be crippling. They had made impressive progress in their goal. Unfortunately, their techniques to restore the body tended to be somewhat unstable in some cases. Even when they worked physically, there were almost always extensive mental side effects, ranging from mild personality changes to radical psychological instability, and in some cases total gibbering insanity.
But in a few cases, it worked well. One of those cases was an American CIA agent named Bryce Larkin.
Duplantier could still remember that night, back in 2007, when Larkin had been rushed into the Clinic, under the cover of darkness. They had been informed that saving his life, and restoring him to a point where he could at least be interrogated, was the first priority of the Clinic. It had not been an easy mandate to fulfil.
The man had been shot multiple times, by someone who knew how to use a gun to maximum effect. There was extensive organ damage, a collapsed lung, shattered ribs and perforated intestines, and heart damage. He was alive when they brought him into the underground complex of the Clinic, yes, alive, but only just barely.
Duplantier had not been optimistic about their chances. At that time, she had been a very junior member of the staff of the secret complex, her role in the work had been to assist more senior doctors and scientists. She remembered thinking that Larkin must have been amazingly good looking, before whoever had perforated his body with bullets had done his work.
I was only 32, Duplantier thought as she recalled her reaction to the man's appearance. That's young enough to be flighty.
As it happened, though, her first assessment of the man's prospects had proved overly pessimistic. Larkin had responded to the experimental tissue regeneration drugs and treatments with amazing effect. Something about the man had enabled the process to work in practice the way it was supposed to work in theory, in a matter of weeks he had gone from barely alive to rapidly recovering. Within months, he was effectively back to full health!
Moreover, his mind had rallied and stabilized, Larkin had been one of the very few successful test subjects to show no psychological damage! His personality came through intact, his intelligence as high as ever, his emotional balance returned to its former stability. Duplantier and her senior colleagues had wanted desperately to be able to experiment further, to try and figure out what made Larkin so special, but as soon as he had been more or less healed, their masters in FULCRUM had whisked him away for their own unguessable reasons. Rumors within the organization that had reached Duplantier's ears had whispered of something or other about an 'intersect', but she had no idea what that might mean.
Ever since 2007, Duplantier and her colleagues at the Clinic had been pouring over the enormous amounts of data they had gathered while they had Larkin to work upon, trying to understand why the processes that went so wrong in others had worked with him. They had made some progress, but frustrating questions always remained. Duplantier herself had gone over the files she was now studying many times before, she had some parts of the reports and test results practically memorized, but always she was looking for something else, something she and the others had missed.
There were actually two sets of experimental results, of course. The first dated back to the incident in 2007, when they had first restored Larkin to health. After that they had spent endless hours trying to understand why the processes had worked on Larkin and failed on so many others.
Then, in 2009, out of the blue, another opportunity to experiment on Larkin had presented itself. Once again, the man was brought into the Clinic, this time apparently dead. It had been quite a surprise to everyone involved to discover that this was not quite true.
Somewhere in Moscow, Russian Federation, Friday, June 5th, 2020, 12:25 p.m. local time...
Tommy Delgado stalked through the hallways of the bank building that they had taken control of, anger struggling with nervous worry for the upper hand in his mind. His external mien was as cold and controlled as ever, none of the men with him had any idea of the roiling emotions in their field leader's mind just then.
Their trap to lure in the CATs had been a high-profile exercise, violating many of the usual rules of tradecraft, but circumstances were such that it had seemed like the best option available. Unfortunately, now that they had baited the trap, all they could do was wait for events.
Already, Delgado knew, someone had responded to the bait. In fact, the whole freaking world knew about it, which was part of why Delgado's nerves were stretched taut. The 'hostage situation' in the bank had TV cameras pointed at the building from all angles. That was part of the point, really, it made sure their quarry would know. That was why they had dangled Lana Payton over the edge of the building earlier that day, to make sure the TV cameras were able to get a good look at the woman. The CATs were sure to have seen the coverage.
Now Payton was securely held in a locked room under guard and sedated. They had not left her dangling, for various reasons. She was potentially useful as a hostage, and leaving her dangling hundreds of feet above the street risked a fall if the ropes broke, or a rifle shot if someone (and there were any number of people and groups that might do it) decided to remove the hostage issue with a bullet.
About forty-five minutes earlier, someone had rappelled across one of the side-streets and into the bank building. Since Delgado did not have enough people to watch all approaches and sides at once, they had learned of the incident when they saw TV coverage of it. Already reporters were speculating about what was going on with the rappelling incident. When they reached the room the TV video showed that figure entering, it was too late, he or she was already long gone, somewhere inside the bank tower.
It had been impossible to tell anything about the figure from the video. The cameras had been hundreds of feet below, and the figure had been dressed all in black, including a full-coverage mask. Even 'blow up' of the video only showed a blurry figure, and there what Delgado recognized as layers of padding in the outfit. Thus they could not even be sure if the intruder was male or female, though the latter was Delgado's guess and instinct. He strongly suspected that the daring aerial intruder was a CAT. But which one? Was it Miller? Walker? Rizzo? Or was it one of the other three junior CATs that were backing them? Did it matter which one it was, if it was in fact a CAT?
Delgado was not sure about the answer to that last question. One thing he was sure about was that it was vanishingly unlikely that just one CAT would enter the situation. Whoever the aerial intruder had been, Delgado was quite sure that others were either already in the building or soon would be so. He just simply did not have enough men to cover all the possibilities.
To make matters worse, their other prisoner had disappeared!
The evening before, two of his men had been spotted, or thought they might have been spotted, by someone that they had recognized as a Carmichael Industries operative whom they had encountered previously. Taking no chances, they had tranqed him and brought him in for interrogation, and again for possible hostage value. Normally, they would have kept his properly guarded and secure, but again, they were desperately short-handed, they simply did not have enough agents on-site to cover all the tasks that needed to be done.
So they had sedated him and left him tied up in an office on the ninth floor. They could not watch him constantly, they did not have enough personnel to spare someone for that, but still, the CI man had been unconscious, and tied up, and at that time they had control of the entire building (the few night-shift personnel who had been working there when Delgado and his men arrived were all now dead). Unfortunately, before Delgado had been able to get a few minutes to see if he recognized the man, the guards found him gone! The ropes had been lying on the floor, but there was no sign of the prisoner!
The men who had captured him swore he had been sedated and securely tied, they found him gone when they had gone in to give him the next dose of the drug to keep him harmless. Delgado believed them, both men were competent. Yet somehow the man was gone...which meant that they had at least two unaccounted-for players loose within the building, and if his men were right, one of them was a CI op, which was worse.
Two confirmed loose, possibly more present or about to arrive...and all this happening while TV cameras were pointing at the site! Delgado was a professional who preferred to work in quiet darkness, attention was anathema to this sort of work, and now it was playing out on live TV!
Little wonder my nerves are on edge, Delgado mused, as he and his lieutenants arrived at their makeshift command post.
"Any new developments?" Delgado asked curtly of the men standing near their communications gear, along with some television sets covering current news.
"No, sir," one of the men replied. "Not since the mystery man rappelled in earlier."
Delgado paced back and forth in the room they had converted as a command post. It was not a large room, but it was centrally located on the fifth floor, and windowless, which suited Delgado for security reasons. There was not much room to pace, but Delgado felt a need to move, to burn a bit of the nervous energy that was building up within him. Even that much of a 'tell' was unlike him, but few would have had any suspicion of the turmoil in his mind.
If that acrobat was a CAT, Delgado mused, she won't be alone. We've got, presumably, at least one CAT loose in the building, along with our unknown, who is probably CI. Damn, I wish I had had time to check out who he was before he escaped! So, at least two uncontrolled players loose, and probably more, if not now then very soon. Not enough people to cover all the possibilities...and the whole fucking world watching on TV! Could this possibly get any more fucked up?!
Delgado paused, running through his options in his mind, his mind now back to its normal ice-cold state as he narrowed down the possible options for action.
"Shelby, Dale," he said to two of his men, addressing them by names he knew perfectly well were fake, "get their Kitten ready for our 'special' reception."
As the men moved to obey, Delgado mused to himself, the whole point of capturing Payton was to use her as bait. That's already worked to some degree, let's see if we can use it some more.
Somewhere in Moscow, Russian Federation, Friday, June 5th, 2020, 12:35 p.m. local time...
Sarah had made her way, cautiously, through the corridors of the ninth floor of the mostly-empty bank building. Many parts of the interior had video surveillance systems, which Sarah was sure their enemies had tapped into, but there were also gaps in the coverage. The bank executives had skimped on security, which was coming in handy now. Sarah was a past master at evading video surveillance, as long as there were gaps to evade it with.
As she neared the bank of elevators, she looked around, confirming that there was nobody nearby.
It looks like we guessed right, Sarah mused to herself, as she approached the elevator doors. The enemy appears to be almost as short-handed as we are, or this place would be crawling with them.
At the elevator, Sarah took out a couple of tools, rapidly dismounting the buttons that would call the elevator, and moments later, the doors opened onto an empty shaft, the actual elevator car several floors above. Moments later, a tall figure clad in a black mask, a padded black bodysuit, and black boots emerged.
Passwords were exchanged, though needlessly. Sarah Walker and Carina Miller knew each other's body language well enough to be sure of each other's identities even with the masks.
"Yeah, it worked," Carina told Sarah, as the two women made their way through the mostly-empty building. "I was able to get in through the cable and pipe access area below the street. Then I just climbed up the shaft and waited for you! What kept you?"
"What kept me?!" Sarah snapped, though at a whisper volume. "You try doing a highwire act in midair in the middle of Moscow and see how long it takes you! Anyway, did the others get in with you?"
Carina began to answer, then hesitated, as both women paused. For a moment, they thought they had heard...something...a faint sound that seemed to be coming from above. If there was such a sound, though, it was faint and passed quickly.
"Yeah, Carla and Sharon are in the basement, waiting for our signal," Carina continued in a low whisper a moment later. "Seen Zonnie?"
"Not yet," Sarah replied equally quietly. "But-"
At that moment, Sarah fell silent as the two women came around a corner and face-to-face with the enemy.
Somewhere in Moscow, Russian Federation, Friday, June 5th, 2020, 12:55 p.m. local time...
"I'm-out of shape," Morgan Grimes admitted, as he and Lone Wulf crawled through an accessway between the ninth and tenth floors. "It's been a while since I did field work and I've let myself go a little."
"You're doing OK," Lone Wulf whispered back. "I'm still kind of groggy from the damned drugs, too. But maybe we can get out of here before whatever's happening gets any worse.
The two men had almost been captured together earlier, when Morgan had just freed Lone Wulf. The door had actually been opening to admit Lone Wulf's captors, ready to give him another dose of sedative. In that moment, though, Lone Wulf had 'flashed'. His Intersect had dumped data into his mind in response to subconscious perceptions.
The company that owned the building they were in was known, to CI and the CIA, to incorporate actual secret doors between some of the rooms, for reasons of their own. One of those doors had been present in the office that had been serving as a makeshift prison cell, and Lone Wulf had suddenly known about it, or rather, had suddenly known that he already knew about, as data had come up from the depths of his mind.
Apparently their captors did not know about the doors, and that had enabled Lone Wulf and Morgan to slip into the next office, and through yet another such door into a service corridor, and from there into the web of tunnels that held pipes, cables, and other support systems for the building. Since then, they had been trying to work their way toward the central elevator bank, which might serve as an escape route. In the process, the two men had passed directly above Sarah Walker and Carina Miller in the hallway below, neither pair being the wiser.
There had not been time for much discussion, but Lone Wulf had been shocked to learn that Ellie Woodcomb was apparently already in Moscow, but that the Russian authorities had arrested Morgan. Morgan had no idea what was going on with the rest of the party since then, but both men had become aware that Moscow was absolutely crawling with agents of various governments and private interests.
Neither man knew what was going on in the building, either, except that something was. They had lots of questions and no answers.
Still, Lone Wulf mused, they could worry about that after they were out of the building themselves!
Somewhere in Moscow, Russian Federation, Friday, June 5th, 2020, 1:00 p.m. local time...
Lana Payton was only half-awake. She knew she had been drugged, but her mind was half-coherent rather than out cold. She tried to focus, to understand what was happening, but the drug-induced lassitude made it difficult to even think in any coherent way.
Still, Payton was aware enough to know that her captors were carrying her, hands and ankles tied, like a sack of potatoes, through the hallways and into a room on the highest floor of the building. Or she thought it was the highest floor, anyway, she was so bleary that she could not be sure. Part of her even wondered if she might be dreaming all this, but anyway, she sort of thought it was the top floor, anyway. She also knew that they had taken most of her clothing, leaving her in a bra and panties.
When they entered the room, there were other men present, including their leader. The men seated her in a high-backed chair near a window, tying her in place. They handled her with rough indifference. None of them groped or her tried anything of the sort, but nor were they in any way gentle. It took them only a few moments to tie her arms to the arms of the chair, her legs to the front chair-legs, and to secure her neck and head to the high back. For all the interest they showed in their prisoner, she might as well have been a sack of flour. She was focused enough to be relieved that they had not taken her clothes with sexual intentions in mind, but if not that, why?
While the three men near her were tying her to the chair, she half-perceived that the others were installing electrical leads to the metal chair, and some kind of mechanism to back legs as well. She was far too 'out of it' to understand what any of it was supposed to do, however.
When they finished securing her in place and installing their mystery-devices, one of the men went over to a window behind the chair, about ten feet away from it, and did something. Payton could not see exactly what he was doing, between her foggy state and the fact that he had his back to her.
"It's ready, sir," one of them said to their leader.
"Good, now let's spread some chum in the water and see if we can draw the CATs up here."
Somewhere in Moscow, Russian Federation, Friday, June 5th, 2020, 1:17 p.m. local time...
Sarah and Carina were making their way back to the elevator bank. Their guess about where Payton was being held had been wrong, which meant they would have to try something else. Time was critical, so they would have to risk riding the elevators. As the elevator doors opened, though, they saw something that made both women freeze in place: right in the middle of the elevator car floor sat what they recognized as a shoe belonging to Lana Payton, and her personal CAT communicator.
They exchanged looks, both women understanding what this meant instantly.
"Bait," Sarah whispered. "They know we'd probably have to use the elevators at some point, so they left this in there knowing we'd see it."
"Yeah," Carina said slowly. "Safe bet there's other stuff of hers in each elevator car in the building."
They summoned another elevator car at a different shaft, and sure enough, it contained another item of clothing and Payton's now-empty purse. There was also a note in the purse, hidden in a concealed pocket, with code that indicated that she was being held on the top floor. In the shoe from the first elevator car, they found a similar note hidden as well. It was the sort of hiding that the CATs knew how to do well, but neither woman believed for a moment that Payton had left the notes.
Carina laughed softly. "As if she'd take off all her clothes to leave a message for us. Besides, that's an out-of-date cipher in those notes. Somebody that knows our older ciphers left those notes, and put the clothes with them so we'd know they really do have her. This is an in-our-face invitation to walk into their trap."
"Which we'll have to do," Sarah replied softly. "What other choice to do we have?"
"Which means...the shaft?"
"Afraid so," Sarah replied. "Obviously we don't dare use the elevators now."
The shaft in question was a vertical air shaft that ran the entire height of the building, connecting to the basement areas below. The CATs had not had time to properly study the layout of the building, but they had managed to lay hands on some information, including the existence of that shaft. It could, in theory, be used to climb all the way to the roof, and from there, they could try to access the supposed location of Payton from above. That meant an unpleasant climb in a vertical shaft, though, and it was always possible the enemy knew about it. Sarah had dreaded that they would end up having to use it from the moment she learned that it existed. Still, it looked like a better option than the elevators, now that they knew the enemy had been baiting them.
A few minutes later, Sarah and Carina were climbing up that shaft. It was not extremely wide, perhaps ten feet, and it had a ladder, of sorts, within it. The ladder consisted mainly of bars of metal extending from the circular wall, and it was a laborious and vertiginous climb toward the roof.
Sarah was not acrophobic, as such. If anything, she usually actually [i]liked[/i] heights. She sometimes enjoyed teasing Chuck about his fear of heights, in fact. Still, climbing the interior of an enclosed shaft, hundreds of feet of air below her feet, left her feeling slightly less amused.
At last, though, they reached the top of the shaft, and emerged onto the roof, half-expecting to be shot at as they did. In fact, there were enemy personnel on the roof when they emerged! Luck was with them, though, both men were at the edge of the roof, kneeling behind the raised 'wall' around the edge, looking outward. It was almost trivial to take them both out with tranq darts. Neither Sarah nor Carina would have had any qualms about killing them, but they did not want to risk the sound of gunfire under the circumstances.
With the roof guards disabled, Sarah and Carina found the stairwell that was the main access to the roof, and tranqed another enemy agent at the foot of the stairs. A quick search of the rooms on the top floor revealed their captured teammate, sitting in a stupor, clad in her underwear and tied to a chair in a corner office. There were electrical leads linked to the metal chair, presumably designed to electrocute her if someone tried to release her.
Carina disabled the electrical system, and Sarah began to examine the bonds holding the barely-conscious Payton to the chair. As she did, though, she suddenly became aware of the real nature of the trap!
The floor seemed to suddenly shift, and Sarah felt herself sliding toward the window, which suddenly slid open! What had seemed to be carpeting had actually been cut loose and linked to some kind of lever mechanism, triggered by touching Payton, and now Sarah, Carina, and Payton were all sliding toward the open window and a drop of hundreds of feet to the street below!
Sarah scrambled to save herself, to catch something, anything, to hang onto, but there was nothing. It all happened over the course of seconds, and then Sarah Walker found herself outside the building, falling toward the street far below.
Her life did not flash before her eyes. Time did seem to strangely slow down, though, and in the course of a couple of seconds something did come into her mind: a little girl, with long blonde hair, a gap-toothed smile and a squeaky little voice, a girl she had not seen in many weeks and who she suddenly now thought she was never going to see again. The thought that she was about to die without ever seeing her little girl again was the devastating thought in her mind as she began to fall.
CHARLOTTE-MARY! Sarah thought to herself in maternal agony as she fell...
To Be Continued...