Say It Again - Catherine Bybee Page 0,99
not already here.”
Charlie stepped back slightly and let AJ pass.
Good thing it was cold outside or he’d be sweating. AJ rubbed his cheek, spoke in the microphone. “I’m in.”
“Copy,” Neil said. “Team One, what’s your position?”
There was some slight static in AJ’s ear. “Almost there,” he heard Sasha’s voice. She was running.
AJ walked through the main building and back outside onto the lighted path toward the auditorium. He looked around the darkened perimeter of the grounds lit only by a few decorative lamps and the glow from the windows above. Clouds had started to move in, blocking out any help from the moon. He had a general idea of where everyone on the team was. He glanced at his watch and remembered the timeline. Once inside the auditorium, he grabbed a glass of wine from a passing waiter and moved to a more visible part of the room.
He smiled at a few people he passed, recognizing none of them. His parents weren’t there. While English was the language most were speaking in the room, he heard bits of German and something more Slavic in nature. Dating Sasha, he really might consider learning another language. The bad words at minimum. AJ chuckled at the thought.
“Waiting on you, Team Two.”
Cooper made the last strokes on the keyboard, and all the school’s cameras fed to their monitors.
Claire and Cooper scanned them all.
Claire started recording.
Her friends behind them were muttering among themselves.
The camera above the Richter security guard watching the monitors showed two employees wearing faculty jackets and drinking coffee.
“Running a test,” Cooper told the team. “Stand by.”
“Main entrance,” Claire said.
Cooper hit a command, the camera barely flickered, and the few seconds they’d been recording played back on a loop. On their portable monitor, they saw both the live and the recorded feeds. He clicked it off, and the live feed was back online.
Richter security didn’t catch a thing.
“We’re golden here,” Cooper said.
“South dining hall,” Sasha called out.
A button here, command there, and the live feed moved to the recorded loop of zero activity.
“Clear,” Cooper said.
On his monitor, they saw Sasha move into the dining hall.
“There’s activity in the kitchen,” Claire warned.
They watched Sasha move past the doors leading into the kitchen and around to the side doors.
They followed her path, disrupting the live feeds with their recorded ones.
“Is she looking for the stairs to the sublevels?” Jax asked.
“You said they walled them in.”
“They did.”
“All the infrastructure is still there,” Claire told them. “Ventilation, dumbwaiters.”
Sasha disappeared from the camera’s sight.
“Found what I need. Back in three minutes.”
Sasha broke open the freshly painted locked cabinet to the dumbwaiter doors and looked inside. Out of her pack, she removed the cables she needed, secured them to the lift and then herself before crawling inside. She clicked on the light on her pack and closed the doors she’d just crawled through before lowering herself down.
Kicking off the walls, she rappelled down, knocking her foot along the way until it met with a hollow thud. Using as much leverage as she could, she pushed both heels into the door and broke it free.
Inside, she unhooked the cables and spun around in the dark space.
She was in the locker room of Denenberg’s gym. She moved along the wall until she found a light switch.
Fluorescent lighting flickered to life and offered a stripped room. The showers were there, but all the benches and lockers had been removed. They’d even gone through the effort of blackening the tiles and dusting the floors. For a place that was in full operation less than a week before, it appeared to have been left to rot for several decades.
“First subfloor is empty,” she reported as she made her way to the stairwell and down to the next floor.
“Mr. Hofmann?”
AJ turned with the sound of his name and found the stoic expression of the headmistress. She wore a long, formal evening gown, with a modest neckline and sleeves that went to her wrists. She looked less like the dictator of a boarding school and more like a woman in her maturity.
“Ms. Lodovica.”
“Your presence here is surprising,” she told him.
“I’m not sure it should be,” he told her. “Board members past and present, isn’t that right?”
“I don’t recall you on the board.”
“My mother asked me to join her,” he lied.
“Keep her talking,” Neil said in his ear.
AJ tilted his head to the voice. “When I came to you last month, I couldn’t help but think Richter was hiding something.”
Lodovica stood still, her practiced smile in place.
“And