Present Tense (Out of the Fire #3) - Candace Blevins Page 0,91

and they all avoided it until everyone was in place. When they were, Collosa stood tall and waved his arm into it.

And then all hell broke loose.

The idea was to bring everyone in the building to them, to keep them away from Kelsey on the third floor. This room took up a third of the basement level, which was only partially underground. There was a subbasement, mostly storage and mechanicals, but no one would be on that level at this hour.

Best they could tell, four men would be awake and on patrol. No one outside, because the fuckers depended on the fact it was impossible to get here without their sensors picking someone up. Idiots were relying too much on technology, but that only helped the Drake team get in, so it was all good.

The four who were on guard duty came in first, and the Drake people made quick work of them. Another seven came in together, though through different doors, and the firefight lasted nearly twenty seconds before everyone’s target was down.

There should be another eighteen people alive, but some of those people were scientists and geeks — not warriors.

They’d known security personnel would be sent to the director’s room, to keep him safe and to protect the equipment in the secret room. However, they’d assumed only the top-level people would be sent, as it wasn’t likely everyone knew about the room or the offline computer.

Fabio worried they’d miscalculated when more people didn’t come spilling in to stop them. The group made their way towards the door going into the facility. Eunice went through the door first, with Collosa and Fabio right there with him. They cleared the first floor without running into anyone. They found seven people holed in a single bedroom on two, and Jones ordered them to be restrained and watched. Geeks, two of which had weapons, but weren’t fast enough to use them.

Jones left a single guard to watch the geeks, and the remainder of the team went to the third floor, where a firefight was in progress. They’d heard it from two, but you clear areas as you go, otherwise you have people come in behind you and kill you dead.

When they made it to three, they came in from the side, to be certain they hit the bad guys and not their own people. Something had gone wrong, because these people were supposed to have met them in the garage, but they’d come here instead.

Kelsey had known she might have to hack a computer with people shooting in the next room, but knowing it was possible and then actually doing it weren’t the same thing.

Aaron Drake was in the room with her, and everyone else was outside it, shooting at others and trying not to get shot. She had no idea where her men were, but she hoped they stayed away until... crap. No. She couldn’t hope that.

Fuck. She’d made it into the OS, and she had data moving from the computer’s hard drive to a high-speed flash drive as quickly as possible. Meanwhile, she ran an explosives detector around the body of the computer.

“We’re going to need Fabio to open the case,” she told Aaron. Turns out, Fabio is an explosives expert on top of everything else. The idea of him trying to open this case terrified her, but she kept reminding herself he’d be good at any fucking thing he did.

She and Aaron heard the high-pitched beeps of the wall unit on the other side of the wall at the same time. She went to her knees behind the desk, just her eyes over the top to watch the door.

“Get your weapon out,” Aaron told her. “Make sure the safety isn’t engaged. Try not to shoot me, but if you do, it isn’t the end of the world. I’ll heal. Just make sure you get the bad guys, too.”

She wanted to assure him she wouldn’t shoot him, but she remembered how many times she’d shot someone on her side in the simulations, so she kept her mouth shut.

The computer beeped, the hard drive made a grinding noise, and she knew what was about to happen. Someone had engaged the self-destruct sequence from the keypad. No one was coming in. She yanked the USB drive from the slot and leaped to the wall farthest from the unit, grabbing Aaron on the way and dragging him with her.

The explosion slammed her into the wall. Fire was all around her and her arms