"Easy, Jack, it's just me."
The older agent had twitched violently before freezing in a half fetal position, his white teeth visible in the dim as he clenched them. He still had his tux jacket held tight against the wound, and Mac could only hope Jack hadn't done much more damage since his mad scurry back down the hole in the ceiling and back to the toolbox Murdoc had so kindly left for him.
The one that contained two of Mac's go-tos—duct tape and superglue.
"Keep pressure on that while I get this set up," Mac added, dropping the scant armful of supplies beside him. Several ravens commented on the assortment, and a few fluttered to find new roosts on the rebar. Now that Mac had wedged chunks of drywall under the 'shutters' that had slammed down around the windows, there was enough light to see by, even if not well. Enough to make out a small eave door on the far wall beyond the one Jack had shattered.
Obviously their destination. He just needed to get Jack travel ready first.
Jack didn't respond, using a tried and true breathing technique against the pain, and Mac didn't prod him further. The older agent was still jumping every time one of the ravens found a new perch—or worse, hopped down to the ground. There were at least twenty of the birds, all fairly agitated and spread out on the rebar spikes like living Halloween decorations. And it was old rebar, half an inch in diameter, far too small to be code for multi-story concrete walls like these. At this point Mac wasn't worried about the probable contamination from their corvid friends—he and Jack would either be dead or released from the hotel long before Jack was liable to fall victim to bacterial infection.
Besides, he'd have to go back to Jack's hotel room to get disinfectant—in the form of Jack's cologne—and he wasn't willing to abandon the other agent that long.
Right now, his concern was whether that rebar had penetrated far enough to hit organs.
Once he had everything where he needed it, Mac took a breath, and pitched his voice to be low and soothing. "Alright, Jack, you with me?"
The older agent's lip curled, and Mac pretended there was no tremor to it. "This is gonna suck."
"Yeah," Mac agreed. "It is. I'm sorry." One more apology Jack wasn't interested in hearing.
"Jus'—do what you gotta do."
"I'll be as fast as I can," he promised, bracing himself. "I need you to give me the jacket."
It took a moment, of the former Delta steeling himself and Mac waiting as patiently as he could, before Jack was able to unclench his fingers from the fabric. The moment the black fabric was pulled away Mac could see the sheen of fresh blood welling up, and before he could talk himself out of it, Mac passed the sodden jacket under his nose.
The copper tang of blood assaulted him, turning his stomach, and Mac fought past his urge to vomit, and took a deeper whiff, trying to hide the action by folding the jacket.
If Jack realized what he'd done, he was too breathless with the pain to call him out. Either way, Mac didn't smell the weird tang of liver enzymes, and that was the most likely organ to have been pierced. The flashlight on his SAK was helping, but it wasn't even close to the required lumens to get the necessary look at the wound, so the sniff test was really the best he could do. They had to get the bleeding stopped before Jack tore the wound any further.
"I think—I think I can close it up," Mac managed, using the knife's smaller blade to rip the slick liner from the outer linen of the tux pocket. Linen was actually fairly absorbent, and it was this he folded several times into a makeshift gauze pad. "Superglue's going in. It's gonna sting like hell."
There was really nothing else to say.
Mac pressed the makeshift gauze back into the wound—hard. Once Jack got a handle on his physical reaction, the younger agent gave it thirty seconds to slow the bleeding before peeling the linen away and carefully running the nozzle of the superglue across the interior section of the wound, before fresh blood could interfere.
Dalton growled out a shuddering exhale, then a second one, and that was all the time Mac could give him. He flipped the pad and repeated the process on the exterior portion of the wound, tossing the now-soaked linen in favor of using his hand to pinch Jack's skin closed. Another pass with the superglue, and Mac dropped that as well, fanning the glue to help the alcohol evaporate.
This time the former Delta's growl contained several expletives. Mac wasn't sure if any of them were directed at him or not.
He gave the glue a sixty count to cure, then slowly released the pinch. The red, swollen flesh around the puncture wound and tear held closed. "I think it'll hold. Let's just give the internal glue a little more time."
Jack grunted out a few more exhales. "You really think—it'll dry with all that blood around?"
If his head still didn't hurt so much, he would have welcomed the invitation to geek out. His hands were still moving on automatic as he crafted another makeshift pad out of more of the jacket linen and the duct tape. "Short version, yes. There are hydroxyl ions in water—and blood—that will bond to form a hardened compound. It won't last forever, but it should get you through the next few hours as long as you're careful." Without giving the older man time to react, he pressed the new self-adhesive pad into place.
Jack exhaled sharply through his nose. "Yeah, I'm sure—it'll be a cakewalk after this."
That was about as probable as Jack apologizing for the last few months, and Mac sat back on his heels and ever so tentatively rolled his neck on his shoulders. While it wasn't comparable to a puncture wound in his abdomen, damn near everything hurt, and an ill-time caw from one of the nearby birds made them both flinch.
"I didn't know you...uh...had a problem with ravens."
"Not the time," Jack snapped, slowly pulling himself up into a sitting position with a hand pressed tight to the wound. "Get that damn door open so we can get the hell out of here."
Now that they could see, the eave door was readily obvious along the far wall. It was fairly short, about three feet high, and the only section of the wall not covered in protruding rebar. Mac waited until Jack was back on his feet and reasonably close before he led the way. He moved slowly, trying not to spook the ravens into another frantic flight, but for the one that had chosen the rebar right above the door, he had no choice.
"Sorry buddy, you gotta move," he told it quietly, reaching up until it was forced to take flight. Several other ravens responded by also abandoning their perches, and Mac made quick work of pulling open the small door. The interior was pitch black, and he had no time to inspect it before someone behind him roughly shoved him through.
Mac managed to crouch-stumble a few steps into open space and heard Jack give a grunt of pain, then the door slammed shut behind them, preventing any of the birds from following. There was no warning; a blinding light clicked on, and then it was Mac's turn to groan, falling to his knees and squeezing his eyes shut as the light burned into his brain.
If there was any other threat in that room, he had to trust that Jack could handle it.
For a long moment, all he heard was his own heartbeat, thrumming in his ears. Even his gasps of pain seemed muted. Either there was no danger, or it was content to wait for him to get his shit together; nothing touched him, and Mac waited a long time, longer than he had to, before he was willing to squint his eyes open and try to get the lay of the land.
To his surprise, Jack was still relatively nearby. There was nothing in front of them beyond a brightly lit hallway, the same as every other in the hotel. Same décor, same doors—but the floor was different, and Mac tentatively brushed his fingers over the surface. It was painted to look like carpeting, but it was something else, with the texture of a very thin layer of rubber. He tested a bit of it with his fingernail, but he couldn't really get under it to peel any of it up. Applied over an adhesive, then. Between the rubber and the paint job, the surface was matte, and it would be difficult to pick out blemishes or imperfections—like, say, a pressure plate.
The older agent cast a distracted look over his shoulder, like he'd done it ten times already, then did a double-take when he realized Mac was looking at him. "You wanna just sit here all night, or...?"
Right. Bozer's room. Mac made no move to get up. "The floor's coated in something rubber."
He got about ten percent more of Jack's attention. "Rubber?"
Mac didn't feel steady enough yet to offer up a shrug. "Not enough to save us from an electrical shock." Really not enough to do much of anything, and after Jack continued to stare dispassionately at him, he gave up. "Just keep your guard up. Room's five...uh—"
"Twenty." Jack's tone was clipped. "Get up or stay down, either way I'm goin'."
"It's fine." The words were automatic, and Mac reluctantly pushed himself to his feet. Some of his dizziness was caused by his concussion, sure, but the rest was probably attributable to a drop in his blood sugar thanks to all the adrenaline dumps, and there was no way Jack wasn't going to be the same soon, if he wasn't feeling it already. "Just wait."
"To what? Pass out from internal bleeding?" He gestured with his right hand at the hallway. "We hit an obstacle, we get a clue. The goddamn birds were the obstacle. Let's move."
Mac had also noticed that pattern, and it had been pretty consistent—the next threat should be inside Bozer's room, not outside. There were no insets in this hallway to hide suits of armor, no decorations, no plants—not so much as a lamp on the floor with them. If the next threat involved electricity to go with this rubber, there was no indication where it would come from. If there was a booby trap, they were going to have to set it off to find it.
Mac dipped his head once, fractionally, to show he agreed. They really had no choice but to continue. Still. "Weren't you the one telling me there are no rules?"
Jack rolled his eyes and took three steps before the floor shattered out from underneath him.
It was just like the wall Jack had kicked earlier. It broke more like Styrofoam shattering than glass, and Mac's reflexes were so impaired that he wasn't able to get there in time. Jack caught himself, one arm on apparently firm flooring, and Mac managed to snag that forearm before Jack slithered completely out of sight.
Jack shouted with pain, probably tearing his wound, and there was nothing they could do about it besides wrestle him back up and onto solid ground. Mac grabbed the waistband of his tux pants to try to take the strain off his abdomen, and then Jack was clear to roll back the way they'd come. Which, Mac saw as he also sank back on his haunches, was nothing but a flat wall containing only the door they'd come through.
Jack groaned loudly and curled up around his stomach, and Mac stared hard at the floor, going so far as to lay down as well and survey the surface, like he had the last time.
It was perfectly flat. The rubber was apparently for friction's sake—or maybe to hide the texture of the breakaway flooring—and likely the only thing that had allowed Jack to catch himself. It sure as hell hadn't kept the floor from giving way. The gap in the floor, oddly square, showed only darkness. Even using the SAK's flashlight didn't get him anything, not so much as a single weak reflection of structure of any kind.
Dawning realization had Mac suppressing a groan of his own.
"Inside's painted matte black, like the behind the scenes. I can't see what's under the floor to find us the safe path."
Jack was still holding his wound and fighting the pain, and it was impossible to tell if it had started bleeding again. Either way he didn't reply, and Mac cast around in the otherwise empty hallway before turning for the eave door. "We can use part of the ladder to break the floor, or maybe stretch across it..." His voice trailed off as he pushed on the eave door, which he noticed belatedly did not have a knob on this side.
Nor did it budge.
This time Mac took a page from the older agent's book, and gave the door a kick he could feel reverberate through to his molars. It didn't make any difference. The wall around it was definitely not just drywall, it was reinforced, and Mac broke out his swiss army knife, selecting the largest blade to try to pry the door's molding from the wall. It wasn't nearly long enough to make any sort of bridge spanner, but at least it was longer than an arm or leg for testing the flooring—
The blade met only hardened, cured adhesive. It would take him an hour to work the frame off the wall. Mac whittled at it for a moment before stabbing the blade into the frame with a wordless shout of frustration.
It didn't help, and he caught his breath, surprised that he had to. "Well, looks like we're going to have to figure out a way to cross that floor," he grated, prying his knife out of the hardwood. "So much for the one-challenge-one-clue rule."
"I figured that out," Jack grunted, rolling onto his knees with an arm wrapped around his stomach. "Mebbe this is what we get for takin' the 'safer' route."
"No," Mac disagreed immediately. "He knew your fear. My guess is there would have been birds in the elevator shaft too." In which case Jack had been very, very right about the path he'd insisted on.
The older agent shot him a venomous look—probably for mentioning the birds again—and then shifted that glare to the hallway. "You see somethin' I don't?"
Probably a lot of things, but he knew what Jack was asking. "Ceiling is drywall, so no drop ceiling tiles we could use to go above. We know where the line of the floor is solid, and we can break the first row to find the next safe area, but after that—after that my guess is it'll be a jump. If all the squares are that size," and Mac gestured at the very symmetrical hole in the floor, "it'll be a significant gap."
"Real leap of faith," Jack growled, staring down the hallway. "Guess he knows we're short on those."
"Yeah, guess he does," Mac agreed quietly. His mental Jack would have made an Indiana Jones joke, about the leap of faith in the Search for the Holy Grail, but the real one didn't.
...leap of faith...
Mac turned around, approaching the last section of flooring he knew was solid, and he studied the carpet, particularly around the edge of the gap. And once he knew what he was looking for, it was easy to pick out.
Under the very busy swirling pattern, there were squares of solid colors. Subtle variations of taupe that the pattern above distracted from. but variations nonetheless.
"Chessboard, maybe?"
"What did you say?"
Mac's hand drew invisible lines, trying to link some of the same color. "No, there's more than two." He could pick out three, maybe four different shades. No wonder the hall was so brightly lit. The hallway was seven squares wide, so some colors repeated along a row, and there didn't seem to be a pattern to the placement of each color.
"More than two what?"
"Different colored squares." Not a chessboard, not matching, shades of the same base color...it was more like a grid than anything else.
Mac blinked, then snapped his fingers at Jack. "The handkerchief—you still have it?"
Jack looked at him almost owlishly, then his mouth twisted. "Fuck, I shoulda been usin' that—"
"No!" Mac was on top of him in three long strides. "The mural in your-Riley's room. The brick pattern. I think this is where we use it."
The former Delta scowled at him, but did loosen his hold on his gut long enough to fish around in his pocket with a bloodied hand. Sure enough, the handkerchief Mac had given him in the 'safe' room was still in his trousers. Which were wet with his blood. The white fabric was spotted through, and Mac took it from him, gingerly opening the many-folded square.
The pattern he'd copied from the mural with cologne was still there—with a large bloodstain on the right side, and several smears throughout. He hissed aloud, turning the handkerchief in the light, but the blood was much thicker than the thin layer of paint he'd transferred.
"Well...we've got some of it," Mac told him grimly, changing the orientation to try to match up the brick pattern to what they knew was the starting line, and a broken 'brick'. A few careful stomps found the remaining breakaway places, and thankfully, only one side of the brick pattern matched the intact floor square with the brightest red brick from the mural.
At least, he was pretty sure. There was too much blood staining one side to be one hundred percent certain. If he'd gotten it right, the last few bricks were going to be very hard to figure out. If he'd gotten it wrong—
Well, then he'd fail very quickly. "Jack, let me go first on this one. It's going to be hard enough without that injury."
"Yeah?" His tone was challenging. "If you guess wrong and fall through, you'll be takin' the map with you. What then, genius?"
That was unfortunately a good point. Mac hesitated. "Jack, this is difficult to make out—"
"I've read from worse in the middle of a sandstorm," he interrupted, voice hard. "Give me the damn thing."
Mac found himself hesitating again, and it was harder than it should have been to reluctantly hand over the map—oriented correctly—to the other agent. "The last two blocks are going to be a challenge to decipher," he warned. "If you're not a hundred percent sure—"
"You're never a hundred percent sure of anything, and you still expect the rest of us to fall in line," Jack cut him off flatly, staring at the handkerchief. "If this is even the right map, you want the brick one up, two over."
Mac had already memorized the next two 'bricks', and Jack was quite right, if this was the right map, and he was supposed to pick the reddest blocks. It was surrounded on all sides by the wrong kind of blocks, so if he jumped and got it wrong, there would be no catching himself like Jack had. Mac briefly considered turning his pants into a safety rope, but that would only get him so far, and he was loathe to reveal the ink on his skin, the measurements Murdoc had left.
Not that Jack hadn't seen the same trailer he had, and didn't already know all about them.
Leap of faith. Not so hard.
Mac took a deep breath, and then he jumped.
He had aimed for the center of the square, since there was no catching himself if he was wrong, and Mac found he was honestly surprised when he landed on firm ground. And it was easy enough for him to mark the correct path; he stomped the fake floor in all directions, confirming for himself that indeed, it was the only reinforced piece of flooring on the checkerboard.
"Sounds like a twelve foot drop," he reported, and safe on terra firma, Jack gave him a droll look.
"So only a one story fall."
"Plenty long enough to break an ankle. And no way to know what you're landing on."
"I'll keep that in mind. What are you doing?"
Curiosity got the better of him, and Mac knelt on the edge of the piece of flooring, feeling underneath. Even with the pieces all around him broken, and the bright lights of the hallway shining down from above, he couldn't really make out any details. "It's a—piece of subfloor," he called over, feeling the rough texture of particleboard beneath his fingers. Reaching deeper under the platform, he finally found what was holding him up—a metal pipe, fitted into a bracket that was screwed into the wood.
Not the most durable of supports.
Mac carefully shifted his weight back towards the middle of the platform. "Uh, when you jump, try not to land on the edges. I'm not completely sure they'd hold."
"Don't dangle from the edges like an idiot. Copy. Next brick—your twelve o'clock, skipping the big hole, obviously."
Mac dutifully jumped over the gap he'd created, finding once again a steady platform. "Next one is diagonal on my ten o'clock, skipping one, yeah?"
Jack was quiet a moment, and Mac turned to see him squinting at the handkerchief. "I guess," he confirmed doubtfully, and Mac almost stumbled as he struggled to stop himself mid-leap.
"Is it or isn't it?!"
"...yes." A little more decisive. "But then it looks like the one directly beside it on the right's the same color."
Mac's head was aching too much to try to recall the handkerchief, so he did it the old fashioned way. He leapt to the brick he recalled, and then he gave the one to the right of it a firm tap.
It also held, so he moved to that square, smashing the breakaway blocks as he went. "Halfway there."
"Yeah, congrats." It was flat. "Looks like your next one is eleven o'clock."
"Hop a row?"
"Hop a row."
That left him with two moves that were most definitely smeared with blood, and a glance the way he'd come showed that Jack was frowning at the map in earnest. Mac went ahead and tested all the blocks around him, and shortly found himself on an island.
He could jump in one of eight directions, and be assured that at least six of those would be a really bad idea. There was no going back to Jack and Riley's room to get another copy thanks to that locked eave door, and no way to get around the obstacle without lowering himself off the end of the platform and dropping into at least seven feet of empty space before landing on God knew what.
If he jumped spread eagle in one direct and got it right, he had a chance at catching himself if his hands happened to fall on solid ground. Otherwise, at the very least he could mark the safe path for Jack.
But it still left one more leap, and Jack would have to get lucky, or they'd both be subject to whatever was below them. Given the knives and rebar earlier, Mac was fairly certain he did not want to find out what the floor below was made of.
"You're the one with a perfect memory," Jack grumbled, almost to himself, eyeballing the fabric against the ceiling lights.
Murdoc might as well have come over a PA system, his voice was so clear in Mac's head. You know that you. Aren't. Enough.
He did have a near eidetic memory—when his brain wasn't reeling from a TBI. Jack knew he had a concussion; he couldn't really expect him to—
But he always had before. Mac wasn't even sure what had made him take a copy of the mural in the first place. It's not like he knew he was going to get knocked nearly unconscious.
One by one, they'll see you for what you aren't.
He'd walked into this already doubting himself. He'd already known he was going to fuck it up. That was why he'd made that map of the maze of the first floor. Why he'd taken that copy of the bricks. He knew that in the clutch, he'd make a mistake and Jack would pay for it.
Murdoc told him this was his fatal flaw, and then engineered everything that happened after to make it so.
Mac closed his eyes.
It seemed like he'd woken up in this hotel weeks ago, but it was really only a few hours. He hadn't lost consciousness. Yeah, his head hurt, but he was still standing. The map was a backup, but that didn't mean the primary tool was inoperable.
"...yeah. I do have a good memory, don't I," Mac muttered, maybe to Jack, maybe to Murdoc himself, and then he tried to picture the room. He should have looked at it again when they were there earlier, but he'd been so wrapped up in determining the Riley double's cause of death, and then her username...
What had attracted his attention to the pattern of the bricks in the first place?
Mac took a deep, slow breath, and let it out on an even count. No human-created pattern was ever really random. At some level, he'd recognized something about it. Something that had made him give it a second look. Mac clenched his jaw in an effort to distract himself from his building headache, and he mentally walked back into the room.
Unbidden, Murdoc's sneering face leapt to the front of his mind, and Mac sucked in a sharp breath. It was from when he'd played the Jewel game with Samantha Cage, after escaping Murdoc's sewer. This time it wasn't quite so shocking, he remembered remembering more than feeling any chill of adrenaline, any need to backpedal.
He'd been fuzzy-headed then too. Exhausted. In pain.
Mac frowned, then raised a hand to the bridge of his nose, gently massaging a pressure point there. The sewer was not the memory he needed.
Jack's voice was a distraction. "Think I got it."
"Yeah?" Mac concentrated on the door lock, how it had dangled broken against the white paint. How he'd touched the wire to the metal plate, heard the click of the magnet.
"It's your ten o'clock."
The door opened. The bathroom on the right, the broken closet door beyond it. The smell of Jack's cologne.
"Pretty sure."
"Hang on," Mac muttered, intent on the bed, the way the comforter was bunched a little around her feet. The broken table. The splintered glass on the flatscreen television.
"What, you see somethin'?"
The compact, elegant desk and chair. The curtains, a woven linen in browns and golds. Mac released his forehead, unconsciously, as he parted the mental curtain aside and exposed the mural itself. The fountain with the choking phoenix. The café. Brandon ogling Riley. The laboratory of impending disasters. A tray full of hamburgers with knives.
Mac dragged his mental eye upward, where he knew the brick wall would be. Knew what the bottom should look like.
"Mac."
There was a pattern there. He traced the bricks with his eyes. Made the leaps he already knew.
But the top was bloodstained. He was remembering the handkerchief, not the mural. Mac pinned the tip of his tongue between his front teeth, he needed the sharper pain. Back to the room. The texture of the paint on the wall. The pillow rolling across the surface.
"Hey, you passin' out on me?!"
"Shut up," he muttered. "Thinking." The pillow coming off the wall carefully, he didn't want to smear it. Lifting up the handkerchief, comparing what he copied to the wet paint still on the wall.
Re-recognized the pattern.
Mac slowly opened his eyes, ever-cognizant of the bright lights, and without letting himself hesitate further, without letting himself double-guess it, he leapt to his two o'clock, hopping the block between, and then again. He broke out the adjoining blocks, to make the safe path absolutely clear, then hopped forward and found himself on solid flooring.
"It's safe," he called over his shoulder, and then he leaned heavily on the nearest wall and told himself the weak feeling in his knees was relief.
When Jack spoke, his voice was gruff. "You remember, or was that a guess?"
"A little of both." Mac didn't mind admitting it. "Remember, aim for center."
His mental Jack made a quip about suspecting Mac was calling him fat. The real Jack didn't do anything beyond an irritated scoff. Mac closed his eyes and gently passed his hand over his face, trying to soothe the pain away. He tracked Jack's progress with his ears, and only when the older agent huffed a sharp exhale did Mac open his eyes. There wasn't noticeably more blood on Jack's hand or his shirt than there had been before, but he was holding the wound tightly, and anything could be going on beneath his temporarily-glued skin.
All of the platforms held, and Jack made it across. Neither agent said another word, they simply trudged down the hallway and followed the mercifully numerically-consecutive door numbers. Murdoc hadn't bothered to try to hide 520. It was the corner penthouse suite.
Just the one Bozer would have picked, if this had been one of his movies.
But it wasn't, and Mac merely had to raise a hand to get Jack to slow. This was supposed to be Bozer at their memorial, eyeball deep in a mission to capture their assassin. The penthouse would have been the obvious choice, and Bozer's go-to would be to lull his assassin into a false sense of security before hitting him or her with a plot twist.
"Murdoc's already used the locking door behind us trick, but it would be Bozer's default." Mac eyed the still-barren hallway, then checked his pockets again. They'd long ago abandoned Riley's laptop, probably in the bird room, and all he had left was his SAK and the two key cards. He should have brought the tape, at least he could have put it across the door's latch.
Jack whistled softly through his teeth, and when Mac looked up, he was offering the handkerchief. "Might as well use it for something."
Mac offered him a grateful nod and debated which key card to use, when Jack surprised him again, and pulled one of his own, bearing scratches in the form of an S. The reaction didn't go unnoticed—and based on Jack's tired flash of irritation, he didn't appreciate it. "Come on, man. Even Boze knows the easiest way to infiltrate a hotel is cleaning, maintenance, or security staff. Whatever trap we're gonna trip, it don't matter which card we use."
He was probably right about the cards. Mac simply held up the SAK. "I'd rather avoid it if we can."
It didn't take him long to pry the reader apart, and Mac studied the innards a moment before he decided to simply cut the power supply. Murdoc had had time to study how he'd bypassed Jack's lock, and he wasn't interested in discovering what the psychopath might have come up with in the intervening hours.
Power supply rendered inert, all Mac had to do was reach up into the door cutout and manually retract the deadbolt. Every part of him twinged in complaint as he straightened like a man three times his age.
Jack didn't comment.
Mac thrust his chin towards the wall beside the door. "I'm just going to open it. Bombs aren't Bozer's style, but another gun rigged like Matty's room, or—like a paint can swinging down from the ceiling would be."
Jack gave a tired snort. "Home Alone: Bond style, huh?"
"There's a reason they're called classics." The banter would have been welcome if it wasn't so flat. Mac simply put his back to the doorframe and shoved the door open—hard.
It swung into the room, still counterweighted but not enough to prevent it from slamming into the inside wall. Nothing lunged out at them, paint can or otherwise, and Mac waited a three count for anything on a timer before he chanced a look in the room. The door had swung more than half closed, but any tripwires or motion sensors had been triggered, so he gave the door another hard shove, and checked out what he could see.
Nothing on the ceiling. Several doors to the right—probably the bathroom and closet, like the other floor plans. The nearly-set sun was featured out of the west-facing windows, and the color of the light told Mac they might actually be real.
The room had a wall-mounted TV like Jack's had, and it was on.
With no other recourse, the two agents warily breached the doorframe and ventured further inside.
Much like Matty's room, it seemed untouched. No damage, curiously no luggage. No body, either. The California king was made and the sheets were unrumpled. But there was a laptop on the large and elegant desk, also on, and a piece of hotel stationary placed very openly on the keyboard.
Since his last brush with a very obvious piece of paper had ended poorly, Mac immediately checked out the bathroom and closet, instead. The hotel luxury toiletries were there, including bottled water, and Mac was almost beyond caring whether or not they were spiked. For whatever reason Jack was sticking close to him, and Mac raised his eyes to the other agent's in the mirror. "I can't say it's a good idea..."
"But we're runnin' on empty and about to close the last chapter on this," Jack finished, then reached out and snapped his fingers, twice. "Gimme."
Just like he had with the burger, the last time he and Jack had gone out to save Bozer. Somehow, this time it didn't have the protective vibe from back then. "Jack, if this is drugged, I can't—I don't know that I can drag you through this."
The reflection of the older man's eyes sharpened. "Who the hell asked you to? I'll drink at my own risk. You do whatever you want."
Even more critically than Mac himself, Jack's body needed to replace fluids. He cast another look around the bathroom, hoping a chemistry kit might magically appear, but only a huge pedestal tub—just like Matty's room had had—and a walk-in shower met his gaze. There was every reason to suspect the water that came out of either of those faucets, let alone the sink, could be contaminated in some way.
Although...
Mac's eyes fell on the toilet, with its elegant tank matching the tub, and he approached it and popped off the top. The bowl and tank were full, and there was no sign of a chemical cleaning agent, or anything else. The tank looked clean. No rust, no significant lime ring. The water was clear.
"...you're not serious."
"You said it yourself. Do whatever you want," Mac replied flatly, before he walked back to the sink, grabbing a washcloth on the way. He picked up one of the glasses, making sure to wipe the interior very well before he dipped it into the water. Since he'd snarked at Jack, he was kinda committed, so he gave the water a careful whiff, and then a small sip.
It tasted like tap water, which normally wouldn't be ideal. Mac drained the glass. Then he dipped a second cup, turned on his heels, and left Jack to either follow his lead or do his own thing.
It put him back in the main room, and Mac drank this cup more slowly, taking in the rest of the suite. He wasn't going to touch the bed, and the TV was just showing the hotel screen saver. Even after he warily stepped in front of it, it didn't change. No news reporter came on to tell him that Bozer's body had already been found. The remote was on the table beneath the TV, and Mac flicked it before he picked it up, and hit the Info button.
If Bozer had been watching something on the TV, it wasn't obvious. He got a normal hotel menu, with a few local channels listed as well as the calendar of events. The memorial reception was the only event still listed. Still at 9 pm. The clock in the corner of the screen told him it was just after seven pm.
Meaning they might have a deadline to finding Bozer's stand-in.
"Anything?"
Mac selected one of the TV channels, honestly curious if this TV was legitimately hooked up to cable—and thus a method of communication out of the hotel—but he found the face of fire chief Blevins, wet with rain, talking about none other than him.
"Reruns," he answered, as if it wasn't obvious, and after confirming there was no option to play some other movie or input, he put it back on the main menu. Turning it off could trigger something, and the clock was useful as a timer. "I think we're going to have to read the note."
This time it was Jack who snatched it off the keyboard, and a safe did not tumble down from the ceiling. Nor did the laptop come to life to scan his face. He shook the sheet of folded stationary open, and for a second his expression didn't change. When it finally did shift, it was his eyebrows, puckering in confusion.
"Shit," he muttered, and held it out for Mac to read.
I just heard, I'm on my way and I'll meet you at the hotel. I miss everyone and your Christmas pastrami.
The ink was the same blue as the pen Jack had taken from the lobby. It was signed simply 'Sam', underlined twice in black ink.
Below that, in more black ink and Bozer's unmistakable handwriting, was scrawled a quick note.
Left you both VM—gonna whip up some pastrami downstairs if they'll let me.
"Samantha," Mac murmured aloud. "Cage. Surely he didn't—there's a double for her as well?" He turned to Jack without thinking, trying not to panic. "He didn't even mention her, not once, I didn't even think to warn her—"
Jack shook his head. "Read it again," is all he said.
Mac forced himself to take a breath, and he read it again. "Two colors of ink, clearly the receptionist took a message and Boze left this here for Matty or Riley..." And also left them voicemails, so by then he'd known that they weren't answering their phones.
"Boze underlined her name, twice," Jack pointed out, his voice grim. "We all know who Sam is. And what skills she's got."
Mac balked at the implication. "You're not saying—you think it was Cage in that footage?" Sure, she was a former SASR agent, an interrogator for the Australian Special Forces, but her record had hinted at more. And she was slender, she could fit the build of the shadowy figure in the footage Riley found.
The signatures on the paperwork. An A and a U. Australia.
Jack shrugged a shoulder. "Murdoc's sayin' it. Someone brought in Cage to take us out, maybe they blackmailed her, hell, maybe Murdoc's plannin' on hiring her himself. She knows all of us, she knows our capabilities, where we live, how we investigate. Knows how to fake a CIA murder, that's for damn sure, and down under's got plenty'a poisonous snakes. Maybe that's why Murdoc shot her in the first place. Follow her home to her family, get some leverage on her."
A cold knot began to form in Mac's stomach. Samantha hadn't always been forthcoming, but he knew she had a sister. And he knew she'd go to great lengths to save the people she cared about.
But surely—surely that would extend to them? Surely she'd warn them, and they'd come up with a plan to attack Murdoc together. "Jack, she'd never—"
"He said he'd tell us how he intended to kill them in real life. Tell Matty and Boze and Riles." Jack's voice was hard. "Mebbe he's not just tellin' them how they're gonna die, but who he's sendin'. And maybe it ain't Cage, but it's still someone we know."
That Samantha Cage was on Murdoc's mind was not sitting well with Mac at all. "If Sam's on the list, other people who have helped us in the past could be too," Mac started carefully, but Jack cut him off.
"Stow the fucking guilt, Mac. It doesn't matter 'cause I'm stoppin' him here and now." Jack waved the stationary in his face. "Now, you remember seein' a goddamn kitchen down there, because I sure don't."
"It doesn't matter, Sam would know it takes Bozer hours to make his Christmas pastrami," Mac disagreed. "And that's with my grill, which Murdoc is obviously familiar with. Besides, Bozer's not stupid enough to think he could take on Cage by himself."
"If he's last man standing, you really think he's gonna let our murderer walk?" Jack dropped the piece of paper on the laptop in disgust. "Besides, at this point he knows she's after him. He doesn't find a way to stop her, he's dead."
Mac hesitated. He wanted to say no, to deny that Bozer would walk into almost certain death to face down an adversary who clearly outmatched him...but he had done it countless times. Even as a ten year old, coming to the defense of a scrawny little white kid being bullied in their elementary school.
And again, it was moot. Mac had no more control over where they went next as he'd had this entire time. The clue said kitchen, and the clock on the TV was ticking down the minutes. "...I guess we're looking for the stairs."
Jack gave him a long look, then snorted. "Beats the elevator." Then he gestured at the laptop. "We need this?"
Good question. Mac tapped the spacebar, and a lock screen came up. "Only if we have his name and password. Which we don't. And frankly, Riley wouldn't need." If he'd left them voicemail, he might suspect something had happened, but he clearly didn't know for sure. "We could try her name and password..."
"Yeah," Jack agreed, wincing as he moved his right hand off his wound and into his pocket, and Mac tried not to be obvious as he assessed the other man. There was fresh blood on his hand, and on the shirt. Not a concerning amount, at least not yet, but again, there was no way to know if the glue on the internal injury was holding.
Jack eventually extracted the piece of paper with the password, and Mac pre-emptively covered his ears as the other agent painstakingly typed everything in. He glanced Mac's way, and after receiving a nod, he rolled the chair as far away from the laptop as he could get, and then took it a step further, and picked up Bozer's black pen to hit the enter key.
There was no buzzer. The indication that the name and password combination was incorrect was the laptop exploding.
The blast was relatively small, but still enough to have seriously damaged Jack's hands if they'd been any closer. Hadn't generated much light, either, Mac realized, since he was still able to see. Even having covered his ears, the shockwave was unpleasant, and after confirming that Jack was more or less unscathed, Mac remained slouched on the table below the TV with his skull firmly pressed between both hands, letting the ache and nausea settle.
Jack gave the small crater in the desk a dirty look and helped himself to a washcloth to help staunch any new bleeding, and once he'd re-emerged from the bathroom, Mac figured that was all the rest he was going to get.
"Any ideas where to start?"
It was surprisingly neutral, and Mac accepted the olive branch. "...yeah, actually." Murdoc had helpfully put him in a corner, after all. Once Mac levered himself to his feet and assessed the hallway, he found it to be more or less straight. "Stairs will be an inside door, shouldn't be more than twenty yards away." Then he paused. "I think our odds of triggering an exploding or electrified door are pretty high."
Jack sighed. "How do you want to do this?"
"Actually...I have an idea about that too. Can I have your security card?"
It didn't take him more than a minute to cobble something together—ironically using part of the destroyed laptop. "It'll ground the door to the frame, and the rubber will give us a little protection. Still," he added, gingerly leaning the combination of towel rod, heat sink coil, standing lamp wire, and wet washcloth against the door to room 518, "you should take a few steps back."
Then he used the tube of the standing lamp, with his maintenance card tied on one side, and Jack's security card on the other, and from well to the side of the doorframe, to wave the maintenance card at the reader.
He got a red LED. Security card was the same. When he broke into the room by disassembling the scanner, he found it was staged like every other room in the hotel. Not empty, but no boobytraps, and no clues.
The second, third, and fourth door were the same, and Mac was starting to get the feeling they were going to have to find the elevator shaft after all when the fifth door gave him a green LED on his maintenance card.
Jack started forward, and Mac held up a warning hand. "Give it a five count." Five seconds was the longest amount of time Murdoc could put a boobytrap on a timer and not risk them getting through the door before it went off. And for four and a half seconds, it seemed like a waste of time.
Then there was a sudden smell of burning plastic, and the wet washcloth made a few popping sounds. The closest overhead light flickered, then went out.
Once the sounds faded—and steam started rising from the washcloth—Mac dared to approach the door. He toed the frame of the door with his shoe; the leather was conductive enough to tell him if electricity was still present, but not so conductive that his muscles would lock. When he didn't receive a shock, a tap to the door with his fingertip confirmed.
Remarkably, the card reader was unscathed, and Mac quickly turned the knob and threw open the door.
It wasn't weighted, and it revealed the concrete shaft he'd expected.
It was, however, missing something he'd expected.
Jack peered into the well-lit space. "...can we really call it a stairwell if it ain't got stairs in it?"
The gray, concrete block shaft seemed to go down all five floors, complete with doors for the other four floors. And absolutely nothing connecting them. The echo of Jack's voice confirmed it. While there were lights, they were set into the wall, leaving no hand-hold or anchor point for a climbing rig. Which, frankly, unless they just rappelled down the entire shaft, Mac couldn't really see either of them accomplishing. He wasn't sure he'd trust either himself or Jack on belay at this point.
A glance back at the hallway told him there was no safety code-required firehose in a handy nook in the wall, and Mac barely had the presence of mind to stop himself from leaning against the doorframe in defeat. "At least five of the rooms were furnished, there's probably enough fabric to tie together a sheet rope—"
"You can't be serious." Jack was staring at the empty shaft, his voice a combination of flabbergasted and irate.
"I don't see another way down, unless you plan to sprout wings—"
"I can see that!" Jack roared, gesturing angrily at the scene in front of them. "He can't possibly expect us to go down jail-break style—"
"I can make a ladder out of wire if you really want," Mac grumbled, eyeballing the distance again, "but it'll take...longer..." He trailed off, then cocked his head before blinking, hard.
When he opened his eyes again, the visual artifact, a dark spot in his vision, was still there. In fact, there was more than one, and after Jack followed his gaze, impossibly, he seemed to see it too.
"What the hell...?" Jack knelt at the doorframe, then reached out a bloodied hand to touch what looked very much like drops of his own blood, floating stationary in the air. Mac watched in disbelief as Jack smeared the drops of blood on nothing at all.
Jack dragged one of the drops a few inches, then rapped his knuckles on the air, and they very audibly made contact with something solid. The echo of those sounds slapped back and forth in the shaft, and then Mac realized that it wasn't slap. Not perfectly.
The walls weren't parallel. Something was there.
In total disbelief, Jack stuck a foot into the space and banged firmly, then—clinging tightly to the doorframe—put some weight on the limb. Whatever he was standing on seemed to hold, even after Jack stomped like he meant it.
"Leap of faith," he muttered, then took his bloodied hand and flicked small droplets of blood in all directions.
Just like Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. It was the second time Murdoc had taken a chapter from the movie. "The painter," Mac muttered to himself. "He painted the—it's an optical illusion." Sure enough, some of the droplets of blood seemed to fall on something, and Jack warily stepped out onto the invisible platform, feeling around tentatively until he found what seemed to be a set of stairs, going down.
"You can see it from here—well part of it, anyway." Jack squinted at his surroundings, waving a hand in the air. "No railing though."
"Safety was not a priority," Mac muttered, daring to put some weight on the platform. He expected it to start crumbling, but it felt very solid under his shoes. "Let me grab a bottle of shampoo or something—"
"No need." Another flick of his finger, another few drops of blood found the path. "Let's go."
Once Mac followed him, and his point of view changed enough, the paint job was more obvious. Unfortunately it wasn't terribly easy to spot what was below—only what was above. The painter hadn't bothered to cover the bottom of the steps, and to Mac's eye, the stairs didn't seem to have a metal frame on the exposed edge. The concrete seemed to be jutting out of the wall with no additional support.
There were a lot of issues with that, but they all boiled down to the same thing. "Jack, hurry up."
"Don't worry, I got plenty of ammo," Jack growled, and while he did pick up the pace, Mac was relieved to see Jack was still making sure there was a path before he stepped. He was less relieved that Jack didn't seem to be running out of liquid blood to use as a marker.
He froze stock still when that bloodied hand suddenly came up to Jack's shoulder in a closed fist, the universal gesture for 'hold.' Even Jack had to reach out to the visible wall to steady himself, he stopped so fast. "Dude, hold up. Think we're missing a step."
And they were. Multiple attempts to spatter blood on nothing revealed that an entire step was indeed missing. The second surprise: not all of the stairs were on the perimeter of the wall.
"Well, now we got a problem."
Mac peered around the older man, noting that there didn't appear to be any drops in front of him. The landing simply ended at the wall.
Mac gestured, and Jack gave him a dirty look and knocked 'shave and-a-hair cut' on the very solid concrete in front of him.
"Okay, so no false door." Mac tried to make his tone reasonable despite his growing frustration. He tapped on the flooring around them, gently, and followed the edge back about halfway up the stairs they'd just come down.
One of those stairs was longer than the others.
Mac glanced uneasily at Jack, but kept tapping, and he found a path—exactly one stair tread wide—going out apparently over the middle of the shaft. "It's pretty narrow."
"This is fucking Indiana Jones all over again."
"It's a pretty established trope, actually—"
Jack cut him off with a sharp whistle that echoed painfully in his ears, and after Mac winced, Dalton had the good grace to look slightly apologetic about it. "Nerd out later. Come on back and I'll mark it."
Mac threw a hand out behind him, then wobbled when it put him slightly off balance. "No! The concrete isn't well anchored, and this is a single piece. I don't think it'll take both our weights."
In answer, Jack made a 'get on with it' motion, helpfully adding just a couple drops of blood to what Mac had already discovered.
Had already discovered was an invisible, narrow, potentially crumbling path over a three story drop onto concrete.
The vertigo hit wasn't as strong as Mac figured it would be, because he was already in motion. On the elevator, he'd been afraid to move. On this path, he was afraid to stop. He felt a timer ticking down in his chest, and every granule of concrete or sand beneath his shoe became evidence of the slab's imminent collapse. Remarkably, it was straight, and Mac was about to think that maybe Murdoc was going easy on him when he realized that a cornered or curving piece probably would have been even more structurally unsound.
He made it to the far end, which was irritatingly another set of invisible stairs that he almost tumbled down, and Mac all but threw himself against the wall, fingers digging slightly into the concrete. He didn't realize he was out of breath until he actually tasted dust. And he didn't realize Jack was with him again until he felt a pressure on his elbow.
"Get your shit together," Jack muttered in an undertone, and Mac could only nod—carefully—and force himself to swallow, and take a reasonably deep breath.
In a somewhat louder voice, and probably for Murdoc's benefit, Jack continued. "He can make me bleed all over this damn hotel, but I guarantee you he's gonna lose more than I do."
"How about just focusing on the—"
Crack.
Mac felt the vibration deep in his lungs, and couldn't stop himself from glancing upwards. The bottoms of the stairs were visible, after all, there was no hiding the shadow they cast, and the lights inset into the wall clearly illuminated the cloud of dust that had suddenly appeared at the top of the shaft.
Crack.
The topmost stair tread fell almost lazily off the wall, and Mac had done the math long ago. Each one was the size of a normal stair tread, so thirty inches long, nine deep, and four thick. Concrete was a standard build quality. The treads therefore weighed one hundred and twelve pounds. Apiece.
And one of them was now falling from two stories above them.
The falling concrete landed on the staircase below it, and broke off a significant chunk of another tread. It wasn't a falling boulder ala Indiana Jones, but an avalanche of concrete was just as deadly as one big piece.
Crack.
Another tread broke free from the wall.
He didn't even have to speak. Jack had seen enough to realize that even if they didn't get pulverized by falling concrete, their path to the ground certainly would be. The older agent threw caution to the wind and simply ran like he could actually see the stairs.
"Go go go!"
The one-and-a-half treads tumbled thankfully towards the middle of the shaft, narrowly missing the bridge, and Mac clamped his hands over his ears just before their impact with the floor. He still felt the sound with the backs of his eyeballs.
A rain of small fragments of concrete came next, bouncing on invisible surfaces, and Mac focused all his attention on them, mentally marking the safe path. "Jack, watch for missing stairs!"
Crack.
Jack found the next landing, not looking back, and barely dodged a hefty chunk of concrete. "Sonofabitch!"
"Go!" Mac was almost on top of him, and a spitefully sharp piece of concrete bit into the back of his right hand, still clamped firmly over his ear. He didn't know if it was helping; he couldn't even hear his own pulse over the never-ending cacophony of falling debris. Couldn't tell if the dimming of everything around him was caused by clouds of dust, some of the lights legitimately being turned off, or approaching unconsciousness.
Jack suddenly leapt, a gap of more than one stair, and couldn't stick the landing. Mac briefly lost track of him in an effort to avoid his fate, and realized two stairs were missing—either by design or due to the collapse above. His ankle couldn't take another hit and Mac was forced to slow down, take his hands off his ears, and carefully hop the gap.
Jack was in a ball at the bottom of the stairs, but he was already struggling back to his feet as Mac passed him. There was only half a flight left before the floor, and large chunks of debris were starting to stack up near the innocently marked 'Exit' door.
Crack.
The stair Mac was standing on gave way, but he had enough forward momentum to catch himself on the next one and stumble-slide his way to the bottom. There was no card reader on the door, just a push bar, and Mac hit it with his full bodyweight.
It opened easily, and Mac tumbled head over heels into a familiar-looking hallway.
He continued rolling for what seemed like half a football field, his limbs numb but his stomach feeling every flop, and the sensation didn't recede even after he forced his eyes open, blinking dust and tiny bits of grit away to see that the world was spinning, rather than him. Mac closed them with a groan.
"Jack?"
White noise buzzed in his ears.
"...Jack?" Mac swallowed what was probably concrete dust off the back of his throat, making a concerted effort to keep his eyes open this time. He looked to his right, bracing his arms against the floor as it tilted, and was greeted with what looked like the hotel lobby, only sideways.
No Jack, sideways or otherwise.
Mac watched for motion beyond the spinning of the room, then arduously turned his head in the other direction. He expected the nausea; he also expected the world to hang absolutely still for just a moment as his brain re-achieved equilibrium before it lost it again in the other direction. In that one breath, he identified the section of the lobby he was in—near the same door they'd entered the first time—and a figure leaning heavily on the hunter green marble of the reception counter.
A figure wearing most of a tux.
Mac let himself relax again on the carpeting, taking deep, slow breaths. He was long past the point in his concussion's development where it would help with his symptoms, but it certainly wouldn't hurt. Ever so slowly he tilted his head up, tightening his battered core muscles until he was sitting more-or-less upright, and suffered through the vertigo with his hands flat and firm on the shifting floor beneath him.
"You still in one piece?"
For a long moment, all he heard was his pulse, and just possibly the threads of the lobby music beneath it. The tight gravel of Jack's voice ground it all out. "...y'got any more glue if I ain't?"
Touche. "Well, if it's actually a stocked kitchen..." Not that Jack wanted to hear all of the different ways food could be made into adhesives. He hadn't had the opportunity to enjoy having processed food attached to his face by Bozer, during his very first mission in Amsterdam.
Hands down, Wilt was more resourceful than Mac was in a kitchen. And Mac had to believe Murdoc knew that. That there was still a chance for the last of them. Which meant that he needed to stop wasting time, and get up off his ass. No matter what degree of incline the floor had currently taken.
On the plus side, he might be able to whip them up some kind of electrolyte solution that would taste just as bad as Jack would assume it did.
"Yeah, speakin' of kitchens...I don't remember findin' one on our last pass through here."
And Mac had lost track of who had had the map they'd made. "Generally, the kitchen has a direct path to the conference center for catering. We started on this end, not that one." Not that it was any guarantee they hadn't passed the conference rooms in their exploration of the completely maze-like first floor. "Maybe we'll be able to smell our way. Murdoc already demonstrated he's got Bozer's pastrami recipe."
Mac heard Jack take a breath, some kind of retort, but whatever it was, the older agent chose to keep it to himself, and after another few beats MacGyver sucked it up and slowly—slowly—got himself up. The glass above the lobby's sealed entrance doors—that might actually be an exterior wall—showed him the sun had set. Or at least, the lights had been dimmed. It was truly nighttime in their nightmare. The witching hour.
And finally, one night, when you find yourself truly alone...that will be the night of your final exam. You're going to help me send a little message.
Mac closed his eyes against the unwanted memory of Murdoc's words, and trudged through the lobby, back towards the conference spaces—and his and Jack's remains. Behind him, he heard a pained exhale, and footsteps dragging as much as his own.
He didn't make it more than a third of the way down the conference space hall. "...dammit."
The older agent pulled up alongside him, taking a breath to make a probably snide remark—and also paused. "Yeah, that's the stuff."
Mac refused to suck down a deep breath of it—Bozer's pastrami recipe was too near and dear to his heart to let Murdoc poison the memory of it with this hellscape. "There's no way Boze'd ever make it outside of the Christmas holiday. Not even if we were dead."
Jack was quiet a moment, evaluating the four identical, nondescript double doors in the hall. Just like the ones that led to their memorial space. "Think Cage would know that?"
"Yes," Mac answered honestly. He approached the line of doors, scanning the frames and carpeting for any clues. "Got some wear and tear here." There was no reader to scan, so Mac brushed the door handle with the back of a fingernail, and then grasped the bronze bar and pulled it open.
This one, directly across the hall from their memorial room, was set up like a casual meeting space. There were two couches and a pair of matching armchairs set up in a U, facing an almost wall-sized screen. The décor remained in the style of the rest of the hotel, but the large murals painted on the far wall to look like picture windows, the setup, and most tellingly, the elegant glass bowl full of paperclips sitting on the coffee table completed the stylized replica of the Phoenix Foundation War Room.
Mac approached the sofa, catching just a whiff of something that was decidedly not Bozer's pastrami, and found that someone had carelessly left a bucket of popcorn on the middle seat. He reached over the backrest and held his palm over it a moment. "Still hot." Then he brushed the same hand across the seat back. "Someone was sitting here for a while."
Jack scoffed, then cast his eyes to the door that, if this really was their War Room, would lead to the hallway. Which had a card reader. "Maintenance would have access. So would security."
"The mural...janitor me was fixing an ice machine." He tried to remember if there was a janitor in Jack's mural, but at a warning throb from his brain he gave up. Waving the maintenance key card at the door netted him a green light, and Mac glanced around, then grabbed a frond from the nearby potted fern—which was plastic—and dropped it on the door and handle.
No scent of melting plastic.
Mac gave it an eight count, just to be super certain, and then tried the handle.
The hallway behind it was not a hallway at all, and Mac glanced around the corners warily before he stepped into a giant, pristine hotel kitchen. Stainless steel gleamed from every surface, and the floor was industry-standard red tile. One of the five double ovens on the far wall had its lower oven door ajar, with a towel draped over it, apparently drying. The aroma of cooked pastrami was especially inviting, and on one of the prep islands were two covered plates, two napkins, and two glasses of water, complete with ice cubes.
"...kinda thought it'd be a replica of the studio kitchen," Jack muttered, eyes roving the space.
Same, Mac thought to himself. Aloud, all he said was "Don't touch anything." Even if it didn't look like the studio kitchen, he could be sure this test—this murder—would have something to do with scent. And the plates were clearly the main attraction.
He walked right past them. The priority was finding Bozer's stand-in before he died.
One wall made up the walk-in freezers and refrigerators, and Jack headed right for it. Mac went for the ovens. The stoves were gas, so it was a fair bet the ovens were as well. Their position on the other side of the room meant a substantial quantity of gas could collect before he or Jack might notice it.
He smelled it before he saw it, rotten eggs and pastrami. There was no obvious cut-off valve visible on the wall, and Mac took a breath of clean air and held it, inspecting the open oven door with his eyes. It was hot but clearly not currently lit, and the bulb inside the oven was off. So was the digital display, indicating the ovens currently had no power. Which meant no safety feature to kick on and cut off the gas.
Mac fumbled in his pocket for his knife, using the flashlight to examine the interior of the oven. When he tilted his head to check the inside lip, the world shifted nauseatingly to the right, and Mac actually stumbled to his knees to avoid touching the oven door. A jolt of pain in his leg made him inhale despite himself, and he saw spots of red.
When the floor stopped moving, the red didn't fade.
"Mac!"
"Gas," he muttered, still trying to hold onto the breath he'd taken, but natural gas was thirty percent lighter than air, and since he was basically on the floor he bent his head and took another careful breath. "Stay on that side. I'll take care of it."
This close to the floor and the source of the gas, he smelled mostly rotten egg, but also something else that was tantalizingly familiar. He brought his eyes back up to the interior frame of the oven, the red spots, and he finally, finally put it together.
Sulfur and red phosphorus. If he closed the oven door, he'd literally strike a match.
Fortunately, match heads were fairly easy to defeat, and in this case he didn't need to worry if they were waterproof. The hot interior of the oven proved there was no protective coating of wax. A handy cooking pot and some water from the sink—and Mac made sure it was water—quickly soaked the chemicals, and Mac then eased the wet metal closed. It wasn't as good as turning the gas completely off, but it bought them enough time to clear the room.
As far as Murdoc's boobytraps went, the simplicity of it was a little unnerving. Mac's eyes roved the remaining wall of ovens looking for a secondary incendiary point before the obvious answer hit him.
This trap was meant for Jack. Murdoc had figured Mac would go straight for the freezers.
"Jack, don't open—"
He heard the latch clank before he'd even finished turning around.
Jack did not disappear in a ball of flame. He did disappear into one of the freezers, and Mac felt his heart skip a beat before he sprinted for the swiftly-closing door. He managed to catch it, sliding across the red tile in his dress shoes and wedging his fingers into the seam, and he barely had the presence of mind to at least glance at the frame before he wrenched the cold metal door back open.
The freezer, unlike the ovens, had power, and the bulbs inside were a bright, sterile white. They illuminated over a dozen carcasses hanging from meat hooks set into tracks in the ceiling. Mostly beef, though Mac picked out a couple pigs as well. The details skittered away like roaches when he registered what else was in the freezer.
A black man, mid to late twenties, was slouched in the corner. He was dressed in a snazzy blue suit and an Italian Spread white dress shirt, complete with cufflinks. Everything about him, from the cut of his hair to the shape of his body, screamed Wilt Bozer. Only his nose, which was a little wider than Bozer's, reassured Mac that it wasn't actually his best friend.
How could it be? He was safe in the War Room with Matty, or at least he had been when Mac left and he was one hundred percent certain that Matty wouldn't have let him leave the Phoenix.
Jack was already pressing two fingers around the wide-tabbed collar and into the young man's throat. Even looking at the back of the older agent's head and the line of his jaw, Mac knew.
No pulse.
Mac stayed by the door and told himself it was to make sure it didn't close and lock them in.
Jack threw a glance over his shoulder, then shook his head. "He's gone."
Let's get him out of here. He was so tired he almost said it. But this trap, this one was for him. To let him know how close he came to finding this man before he died. How many minutes ago it was that he failed. Murdoc knew that Mac would want to move the body, if for no other reason than to give this poor man some semblance of dignity.
He had to inspect the body, and Murdoc was going to make that as uncomfortable as possible. He wasn't sure how he knew that the body would trigger something, but he knew. Jack might have already tripped whatever it was. So instead, he caught himself and twitched his head towards the door he was holding. "Switch with me."
"Why?" Jack thumbed over his shoulder. "He ain't even stiff yet. We should—"
"Jack, the body could be boobytrapped." It came out sharper than Mac intended, and he saw a tired flash of irritation cross Jack's features. "Let me check it before we move him, okay? I need you to keep the door open."
Jack looked pointedly at Mac, then the slab of meat hanging beside him, and then back at the door.
His exhaustion made it easy to bite back his angry retort. "...Jack, please."
Maybe it was the word—a word he hadn't said to Jack in however many weeks it had been—that did it. Maybe it was his voice itself. Jack stared at him for a second, then pushed himself up using the freezer wall and walked back to the door. The handoff was wordless, and then Mac was trudging those seven endless yards to the last of the civilians he had failed to save.
Jack was right; the body wasn't stiff. Not only the lack of rigor mortis, but the lack of cold. The man's exposed skin was chilled, but no more than it would be on a chilly day. When Mac eased a few fingers into the Bozer stand-in's sleeve, he found the skin there lukewarm.
It hadn't even been an hour.
"Well, he didn't freeze to death."
"No shit Sherlock."
Mac scoffed, but it lacked any real volume. "I just meant that whatever killed him, freezing him is intended to hide it."
"Second verse, same as the first."
"Your stand-in really was frozen," Mac reminded him, using the snarking to distract himself as he turned over well-calloused fingers. Maybe a guitar or violin player? All of these people were innocent, they had lives before Murdoc chose them for nothing more than their resemblance to the people most important to him.
And while this man was African-American, and moderately complected, like Bozer, the beds of his fingernails still should have been somewhat pink.
Not somewhat blue.
"Cyanosis," he murmured. Hesitating a long moment, Mac carefully extended his hand to the man's face, gently thumbing down his lower lip to find the same.
But there was no damage to the whites of his eyes, no bruising or swelling to indicate asphyxiation or excessive coughing. The muscles of his face and his mouth, however, indicated that he had died in distress.
And this homework is for a grade, Angus. When you see that same expression on their faces...you'll know exactly how I put it there.
It wasn't as pronounced as it had been with Drew; there was no way to have accomplished that kind of torture without obvious signs. But the philtrum of his lip, the cant of his jaw, the tension still visible in the muscles around his eyes...he'd been terrified. Cyanosis meant some kind of oxygen deprivation, and even if it hadn't been through strangulation, there was no doubt this man had felt himself dying.
Mac studied his clothing carefully. His jacket was buttoned, as if in defense of the cold, and it was spotless. The white dress shirt was similarly pristine. No sign of sweat, though Mac couldn't bring himself to investigate with his nose.
"...I've never seen Boze make pastrami without getting overheated," he called back to Jack. "And there's not so much as a spot of oil on these clothes. Whatever he was doing down here, he wasn't cooking."
Jack was leaning against the doorframe, holding his wound with one hand and using his foot to passively keep the freezer door from closing, and he rolled his head against the metal, glancing into the main kitchen. "...I'm not seein' an apron or anything in here." His eyebrows bunched a little. "Figure there's a locker room or somethin' the cooks would use to change clothes or shower?"
Mac cast his mind back to the mural, and then used the freezer wall like Jack had to push himself slowly to his feet. "No. It wasn't about cooking. Bozer wasn't a chef—he was the maître d'. And he died of cyanosis—lack of oxygen in his blood. No sign of physical strangulation, but it could have been a result of the gas."
Of course, all the gas in the murals had been in the laboratory. And it would have taken a lot more natural gas or propane than was in the kitchen currently to suffocate someone.
Jack waited, clearly impatiently, for Mac to make his way back to the door before he pushed off and both men exited the freezer. Only then did Mac realize how warm the kitchen was—or notice how cold he'd gotten in those few minutes. On a whim, he checked the freezer setting. The average temperature for a restaurant walk-in freezer was between zero to negative ten degrees Fahrenheit. The freezer was set to negative 28, and thanks to their being inside it with the door propped open, was hovering right around zero.
Murdoc—or supposedly Samantha—was trying to chill the body as quickly as possible.
"So Sam kills Bozer, throws him in the freezer, and then rigs the kitchen to explode. Conveniently destroying the evidence of what he was killed with."
Jack gave the kitchen a second look, then gestured sarcastically at the plates. "Pretty sure your answer is there."
"Poison makes more sense than gas." Mac took the extra precaution of propping open the door between the kitchen and the faux War Room—which he was able to do —and then looked reluctantly back at the plates. "You know, once we figure this out, it's the end of the...this." This 'exam.' This murder.
Their murder.
"That finally occur to you, genius?" Jack's lip was curled, but even the sniping didn't have the heat it had earlier. They were both too exhausted for it. "Now that we know there's no one here to save, how's about we hit the pause button on this bullshit and make Murdoc come to us?"
No one in the hotel to save, anyway. Mac passed a hand over his face, trying to gently scrub the unrelenting throb away. "He said...something to effect of, if we solved all the murders, he'd warn everyone—the real ones."
A scoff. "And you really think he's going to keep his word?"
A valid question. "I do," Mac admitted softly, making no move to approach the covered plates. "We've seen him keep to his warped code of honor before. He'll do it now."
"Lemme guess. Only if we're good little pawns and do exactly what the psychopath tells us to." Jack removed his right hand from his stomach to gesture flippantly at the room. "And will ya look at that, we just walked nice as you please right into fire and a freezer."
Mac's next breath caught in his throat.
Jack was right. The kitchen was still slowly filling with highly flammable gas. And Jack had walked into an industrial freezer, just like the one—
He hadn't even noticed. Their pre-ordained deaths were right here in this kitchen, and Mac had been too preoccupied with trying to save Bozer to notice.
When the younger agent managed to suck in the aborted breath, it wasn't quite steady. "Well if you figured it out then why the hell did you go in there?!"
"Because you insisted that guy might still be alive!" Jack roared, and Mac actually flinched back a step. "He's not! Murdoc was never gonna let us rescue a single goddamn one of them! Now you're tellin' me what, to stand here and die on the off chance he gives some cryptic-ass clues to the people that we're still alive to save—"
"We're not going to die! Not them, and not us!" Jack tried to interject angrily, but Mac spoke right over him, struggling to bring down his volume. "Murdoc's not going to just blow the room. He's gone to too much trouble, and he wants to draw it out. And if he really does blow the room, then—then you won't live long enough to tell me 'I told you so'."
"Then I'm gonna say it right now," Jack shot back. "I'm not a slave to his rules, numb nuts, and I sure as hell ain't a slave to yours!"
"Fine! If you want a chance at Murdoc, then let's finish this and go see him!"
He turned on his heels, unfortunately now stuck with said plan, and deliberately ignored Jack growling something under his breath. The island holding the plates was the rolling kind, though Mac could see that the wheels were locked, as it would be when it was in use as a prep surface. There was nothing to differentiate the two stainless steel covers from one another, nor the glasses of water, and Mac knew it was supposed to be reminiscent of Bozer's 'exam'.
Left or right.
The one that he'd failed.
Mac stared at the covers a long time. If he picked up those covers, he would see identical meals, and tasting them was absolutely out of the question. The clue had to be in the mural; was Bozer on the same side of the café in both? His cartoon had been glaring at the waiter, there was a puddle in both murals—
Mac glanced at the shining rows of appliances, half expecting to find an ice machine, but if it was there, it was disguised as a normal cabinet. There was no puddle on the floor, for him to slip in or otherwise.
Still...
Mac left the plates untouched, approaching the nearest cabinets. The counter wasn't as spotless as he'd thought; there were smears that showed that something had been prepared there, and some crumbs. On a whim, Mac inspected the cabinet above the mess, and when he didn't find an obvious indication of tampering, he ever so carefully opened it.
"What the fuck happened to don't touch anything!?"
Mac ignored him, and found himself staring at a neat line of oils, herbs, and spices. All the usual suspects were in their place, including everything needed to make the pastrami—sans the starfruit juice. The next shelf held all manner of oils, ranging in colors and helpfully labeled, and Mac stopped moving. He almost stopped breathing.
Every single one of those oils had a plastic screw-on cap rather than a pouring spout, and despite the fact that every bottle had a different level of liquid, none of the seals were broken. Olive oil didn't require a pressurized vessel.
Mac took a slow breath, keeping his hands well off of any surface, and by the door, he heard Jack shift. "Mac..."
None of the bottles shifted. There was no click, nor any visible wires leading to any of the bottles. The lids were opaque, and could contain a detonator and a mercury switch, but there wasn't enough space for a wireless trigger.
It could be nothing. "Not touching it," he murmured, though if shouting was enough to set it off, they'd be dead by now. Whatever this was, picking up and unscrewing each spice on the shelf below to figure out what was in each bottle was going to be a very time consuming, very difficult process.
Physically compromise him, and then present him with an IED. Just like Murdoc had done back at the warehouse.
"Good news, he gave me explosives." Mac meant it as a joke, though he knew it fell flat when Jack didn't say or do anything. Without knowing what was in each bottle, trying to use any of these would be suicide. But if Murdoc had gone to the trouble, then something in this cabinet was important, he was on to something...
Mac tilted his head a little, then winced. "...in your mural, was there a dead rat in the cafe?"
He couldn't really remember looking that closely at Jack's. The waiter had been about to dump the tray of knives on Cop Jack, rather than the burning coffee on Janitor Mac, but he couldn't recall if the snake had been in Jack's mural, or the deceased rat next to the—
To the salt and pepper.
This spice cabinet had those too, on the right-hand side. Various colors of pepper, the normal black corns, some white, some rose, and a similar variety of salts, with white or pink crystals of various size.
"Poison," he murmured, almost to himself. "What poison crystallizes...?" More importantly, what poison was a crystal that caused cyanosis?
Mac backed away from the cabinet, keeping his footsteps light until he was several feet away, and then he glanced past Jack's tense frown to the freezer.
"...sodium nitrite poisoning. That's what killed Bozer's stand-in."
The older agent gave him a look. "Salt? Dude, that causes heart attacks in sixty year olds, not twenty year olds."
"Sodium nitrite is a salt, but it's not the kind you think. It's used for curing meat, it's the chemical that gives beef jerky its reddish pink hue." He motioned at the freezer. "It would have been used to cure some of that meat for charcuterie, and it does have a salty flavor. But it's used in miniscule amounts—less than two hundred parts per million. Even a sixteenth of a teaspoon in a serving would be fatal to an adult human. Bozer would know it wasn't quite right, but..." His gaze moved to the plates. "If he ate a bite of pastrami laced with it, that would be enough to stop the hemoglobin in his blood from being able to carry oxygen. He'd suffocate while still breathing."
Not that he would have been aware for that part, but clearly the poor man had been able to feel plenty before he lost consciousness.
Jack looked at him, and when nothing happened, gave the room an exaggerated once-over. "Okay...so...now what?"
There was still gas leaking into the room and there were potentially explosive liquids in the cabinet in from of him. Mac himself had used an industrial freezer to protect Riley from a gas explosion, and the freezer door was close enough that Mac could have made a run for it from his current position.
Mac looked back at Jack with certainty in his eyes. "War Room. Right now." At least Jack would be clear of whatever happened next.
And true to Mac's instruction, Jack took a step backwards through the propped open door into the fake War Room. Then he yelped as the floor literally gave way under his feet.
"Jack!"
Mac hurled himself towards the older agent. Jack threw out his arms to catch himself. He managed to get one arm on solid ground, and his hand slipped with the squeak of sweaty skin on tile. Just as he tumbled backwards into the black, Mac saw Jack's skull pop forward. Heard a sharp crack.
"Jack!"
Then Mac was sliding across the tile on sore knees, peering desperately into the shaft the trap door had revealed. All he heard was Jack's body, tumbling down a thin aluminum chute. He hit some kind of bend but there was no accompanying grunt of pain. For a horrifying second there was no sound at all, and Mac counted it automatically. One second. Two second-
There was a large splash.
No sound of thrashing.
Without hesitating another second, Mac threw his legs into the chute and slipped in.
It was larger than a typical garbage or laundry chute, clearly designed for objects at least as large as an adult human, and even his long arms and legs managed only to slow his descent, not stop it entirely. The thin aluminum flexed unevenly and the soles of his leather dress shoes couldn't get a firm grip. It went straight down about nine feet before Mac managed to wedge himself into a bend, and he grit his teeth as his sudden stop jostled his aching head.
"Jack!"
He took a breath and held it, listening for a response, a splash, anything, and then the chute wall at his back thumped, and gave way behind him. Mac cried out in surprise, tumbling headfirst into a new shaft, and then he was in freefall. Probably headed for the same water Jack had fallen into.
He was falling back first and rather than curl up and cannonball into whatever it was, he went spread eagle. It would give him the most friction with the surface and prevent him from sinking as far—
His outstretched left arm hit liquid. His outstretched right leg hit solid.
Mac opened his mouth in a scream as he felt his ankle break, and contorting in pain saved his right arm from a similar fate. He'd caught the edge of some kind of pool or tub, and then liquid that wasn't water flooded into his open mouth, and Mac curled himself towards the wall. More than half his body was soaked by the time he managed to haul the left side out of the pool with his right, and he spat the strange-tasting fluid from his mouth as soon as his face was above the surface.
Once he got his left arm on the wall he was able to lever himself out, and he slithered over the edge of the concrete pool, tumbling several feet. Pain shot through his leg as it hit the ground, and another shout was ripped from his throat. Mac coughed out as much of the liquid as he could, using a mostly dry right hand to wipe his face before he dared to squint open his eyes.
He was in the basement, all right. The ceiling was clearly that of a parking garage, built underneath the hotel, and he was lying on black pavement. The space was lit, but not well, and Mac made out large crates and pallets of building materials before he caught sight of a turquoise blue.
Above ground pool.
Mac scrabbled at the concrete beside him, holding his right leg off the ground as he somehow managed to claw his way to standing. The pool he had fallen into was much smaller, a homemade construction of concrete blocks about four feet deep, and whatever was in it was translucent rather than clear. That was when the scent of poison ivy finally registered.
Urushiol. He was soaked in it.
Filing that problem away to deal with later, Mac hopped as fast as his left leg could carry him to the above-ground pool.
"Jack—"
He crashed into the wall of it, barely tall enough to peer over the edge, and he was able to make out something on the surface near the center, almost completely submerged.
"Jack, you with me!?"
He scanned the edges quickly for a ladder or really anything he could use to enter the water, and realized that something else was floating nearby, also nearly submerged. It was roughly textured, a familiar pattern, and once again, Mac's body froze before his conscious mind was able to assign a label to the pattern.
The pattern in skin. He was looking at the back of a reptile. A large one.
Mac's eyes darted back to the object in the center of the pool, and his stomach dropped further. Clearly white fabric. Jack was face down in the water, and he wasn't moving.
Mac held onto the side of the pool, scanning the ground around him, but it was cleanswept and clear of anything he could use as a weapon, not even so much as a stray piece of wood. And the metal frame of the pool was well-fastened, even with the SAK it would take him too long to collapse it.
Jack needed out of the water now.
And if he jumped in there, he would be all but offering himself up as a second snack for the alligators within.
Every fact he had ever learned about Alligator mississippiensis rattled through his aching skull as Mac eyed the nearest six-foot-long animal, then reached for his screaming right ankle. Tears stung his eyes but he forced himself to concentrate, unlacing the shoe and slipping it off as gently as he could. There were spots in his vision before he was finished and he almost lost his grip on the pool framing and faceplanted on the pavement, but eventually his tingling fingers detected that he'd freed the shoe.
Mac straightened, blinking away the gathering gray, and lobbed the shoe towards the far side of the pool. The moment he heard the splash, he gathered every remaining bit of strength in his upper body and vaulted up onto the metal railing. As smoothly as he could, Mac slipped under the shockingly cold water.
The water helped him in a number of ways. It supported his body. It washed away the urushiol on his skin, and he sucked it into his mouth a few times to rinse the taste of it out of it as well. And the breathtaking cold offered the tiniest bit of comfort to him in the form of making his face ache more than his brain. There was no sharp chomp along his abdomen, and the overwhelming agony in his ankle wasn't any worse than it had been before.
Mac used only his arms, propelling himself smoothly through the water, and in only a few strokes he was to the form floating in the pool. One of the alligators was danger close to Jack, and Mac poked his head up, searching for the bottom of the pool with his left foot.
"It's just me, Jack, don't freak out," he muttered, easing Jack's body over so he was face up, and gathered his upper body into his arms. The agent didn't start flailing, which was what Mac wanted and yet dreaded. If Jack wasn't fighting for air by now—
The dark log nearest Jack drifted ever so slightly closer, and Mac used his left foot to hop smoothly backwards, in the direction he'd come. With any luck they were large enough to give the reptiles pause. Mac scanned the dimly lit surface of the water, trying to track down the other alligator, and it was only then he discovered that it hadn't taken the bait of his delicious leather shoe.
He bumped right into it.
It gave way easily, with none of the mass it should have had, and Mac stared at the log in shock as it drifted away as harmlessly as a pool float. With his arms full of Jack, he was in no position to examine it further, and Mac hopped through the water as quickly as he could. The cold had started to numb his ankle, and Mac used the reduction in pain to brace his right hip against the wall, hefting Jack half out of the water to bend him over the pool railing.
It wasn't exactly a chair, and it wasn't going to help that abdominal wound at all, but it would have to do. Mac used his elbow and lent down hard on Jack's back, just above his diaphragm, and was rewarded with the sound of water spilling onto the pavement.
He relaxed the pressure and then repeated the maneuver, and this time there was a weak cough to go with the spattering of water.
Getting Jack out of the pool was easy. He simply picked up Jack's legs and tipped him over the side. Getting himself out of the pool was far more difficult, even though the principle was the same. He used his intact left leg to heft himself out of the swimming pool exactly like he had the urushiol one, and this time was able to swing over gracelessly, but without whacking his right ankle against the side of the pool or the pavement.
Jack was still coughing weakly into the pavement when Mac finally slipped down next to him. He'd rolled out of the pool mostly into recovery position, and while he was coughing, he was semi-conscious at best. As soon as he was certain Jack's airway was as clear as he could get it, Mac slumped back against the pool wall and wrapped his arms around his soggy, shivering chest.
Of course the alligators weren't real. The water was far too cold; he would have been rescuing the reptiles along with Jack. The cold was meant to slow them down, make it harder to get out of the water.
Over his right shoulder, someone started whistling. Mac jerked sideways, towards Jack, but his reaction was too little, too late, and the last thing he felt were the white-hot pins of a taser pressed into the side of his neck.
...Hi.
It's been...a while.
I'm sorry.
Life is hard.
But it's done now! Well the exam is done. Not life. And not here, this isn't the end of the exam, but it's all written! I'll be posting it later this week or early next. I promise. Swear on my life. Swear on my cat's life.
As always, all of my thanks to Haven126, without whom this wouldn't be happening. Seriously. I would've left y'all on a cliffhanger a long time ago. I'm so sorry. ANYWAY
See you guys soon, I promise. For real this time. Okay bye.
