Free Wanted by Emlyn Rees Page B

now well within the operation’s security perimeter.
    Ten . . .
    Danny began his descent. The music got louder the further underground he went. Something classical, it sounded like. A swell of strings, no beat. It was so surreal that, under any other circumstances, like Spartak, he might have smiled. But it sent a shiver through him. It was too domestic, too
normal
a sound. It felt so out of place that he couldn’t help wondering who the hell had switched it on.
    At the bottom of the first flight of stairs he found the source of the sound: speakers and a laptop. The table on which they stood was flanked by the twins and was positioned in front of a row of flat-screen wall monitors, showing views of the building outside . . . including the car park.
    How the hell could anyone who’d been sitting there have missed Danny’s firefight outside? Sure, the music would have muffled any noise and the storm might well have covered his team’s insertion through the back of the building, but the muzzle flashes from his running battle with the guard he’d killed would have lit these screens like the Fourth of July.
    Unless, of course, no one had been watching. Danny rounded the desk to see a sleeping-bag on the floor. The remains of a bottle of vodka, too. The guard he had Tasered upstairs should have raised the alarm, but he’d failed. He’d been too drunk, too lazy, and now he was paying the price.
    Two corridors branched off, left and right. Midway between them, beside the surveillance desk, there was another blast door, this time with a small round observation window set into it.
    As the twins and Spartak covered the two corridors and the way back upstairs, Danny edged towards the door, wary that someone might even now be approaching from the other side. But when he peered through the window, he saw nobody. Only another set of well-lit stairs leading further down into the bowels of the building.
    The view was slightly distorted: whatever material the window was made of was inches thick, and he could see that there were two layers, with what he supposed might be a vacuum between.
    He’d visited scientific and medical facilities with contamination barriers like this before. Methamphetamine and cocaine laboratories, too. Anywhere people wanted to be cut off from the civilian world outside.
    But places like this cost money. He wondered who had originally equipped it and who controlled it now, if they were indeed the same people at all. Could be the Russian government or military, or a foreign government, investing in this as a rendition facility. Or even some criminal organization in need of a little privacy to do whatever they needed to do.
    But
the smallpox.
That was Danny’s first thought. Were these precautions because of that?
    He set off along the corridor to the right, knowing that whatever was being protected here would, more than likely, be further below, but wanting this floor cleared and his route of withdrawal secured first.
    Spartak followed, past the desk and the sleeping-bag. With the computer and its speakers behind them, a different noise began to assert itself. The thrum of an engine – a generator, it sounded like. And there, up ahead, was just that. Floor-to-ceiling and noisy as hell up close. The guard had tried to drown it with the music in an attempt to get some sleep.
    Danny’s first instinct was to switch the generator off. Do that, and it was possible he’d kill the power to the entire building, including the lights, giving him and his team with their night-vision goggles an instant and massive advantage. It might not even raise the alarm: whoever else was in the building might mistake it for an accident, rather than a deliberate act of sabotage.
    Then he remembered the RFID-controlled doors leading down and up. Kill the power and he might inadvertently kill those too, trapping himself on this floor at the mercy of whoever was controlling the operation from the outside.
    ‘Clear,’ Spartak said,