Free Wanted by Emlyn Rees

whipped round to face the double doors. There, at the limit of his hearing, a noise had just registered. A thudding. Muffled. Distant. More a feeling, in fact, than a sound. A vibration. Switching on and then off. Coming from somewhere deep below.
    At first Danny thought it was some kind of machine. A flash memory hit him of the New York apartment he’d grown up in and how the clothes-dryer there had shaken and thumped so loudly in the last minute of its cycle that he’d always watched it, mesmerized, expecting it to tear itself free from its brackets and march across the floor.
    But this sound was too irregular to be mechanical. Boots, he decided. That was what it sounded like. Boots on stairs. Someone was coming towards them.
    Viktor could feel it too: he was staring at Danny in wolfish anticipation. Danny signalled him to hold his position and keep the double doors covered. Then he turned to see the other twin and Spartak emerging from the administration centre. He motioned them back through the doorway and signalled for them to shut the door behind them.
    Wordlessly, Danny and Viktor, now alone in the delivery bay, positioned themselves either side of the swing doors. Through the thin gap between the frame and the door, Danny now detected the faint glow of artificial light filtering from somewhere deeper in the building.
    The footsteps kept coming, closer and closer. One person, Danny decided, which gave him and the twin the advantage in numbers as well as surprise. The timbre of the noise changed now, the boots no longer thudding on stairs, but clacking towards them across wooden tiles.
    Danny hooked his weapon over his shoulder and reached into his jacket pocket, as whoever was heading their way started whistling tunelessly. A sentry’s whistle, a whistle of boredom. A whistle of someone inattentive who’d be easy to take out. Hardly the hallmark of Glinka, or even the Kid.
    Nothing’s ever easy,
he heard an echo of the Old Man’s voice say.
    The light through the frame gap brightened. A flashlight beam? Then
whoosh:
the double door furthest away swung open, obscuring the twin behind it.
    Whoever he was – he was six two, and big with it, about the same size as the Kid – he strode through the doorway and into the delivery bay.
    Danny stepped in smartly behind him, ramming the Taser hard against the back of his neck. He pulled the trigger. A snap. A buzz. The man’s body switched from being as rigid as a board to wilting, as if it had been filleted. Releasing the Taser’s trigger, he caught the man as he fell, supporting him upright.
    Viktor slipped round fast from behind the open door, which the downed man’s body was preventing from swinging shut, and helped take his weight, even catching the flashlight as it slipped from his fingers, preventing it hitting the floor.
    Danny unhooked his weapon from his shoulders and turned to look through the open doorway into the stairwell beyond. No one else there. The man had come alone.
    They laid him on the floor. Danny checked his face. He had never seen him before.
    As Danny rose, Viktor tied and gaffer-taped the man before the effect of the Taser wore off. Danny fetched Vasyl and Spartak, then stepped through into the stairwell, as the twins worked together to drag the already moaning and twitching captive into the administration centre and out of sight.
    The wooden tiled floor of the stairwell was warped and buckled in places. But that was where the decrepitude ended. On the left – set into the external wall, Danny surmised, the one overlooking the car park – there was a modern steel blast door, with galvanized bars locked across. An RFID keypad winked red from its top right corner, showing it was locked.
    No one would fit a door like that unless what was concealed inside the building was of extreme worth. But Danny took heart that no one had yet raised the alarm over the guard he had killed. That and the fact that the guy he had just Tasered hadn’t exactly