Chapter 6 - Blood in the Penthouse
The darkness inside the penthouse became a hunting ground.
Marcus Hale didn't have a weapon, body armor, or radio support, but he had spent twelve years as an elite private security contractor before his wrongful imprisonment. His instincts, buried beneath six years of prison despair, roared back to life with terrifying clarity.
"Stay flat, Ethan. Don't make a sound," Marcus whispered, pressing the boy’s head down behind the marble island.
The two assassins moved silently across the plush carpet, sweeping their suppressed submachine guns in wide arcs. The green lenses of their night-vision goggles glowed like predatory eyes in the dim moonlight.
One assassin approached the left side of the kitchen island, his boots stepping over broken glass.
Marcus waited, timing the man’s shadow against the city lights streaming through the window. As the barrel of the suppressed weapon cleared the edge of the marble, Marcus exploded upward.
He grabbed the assassin's gun barrel with his left hand, shoving it violently toward the ceiling as three suppressed rounds stitched a line of holes into the plaster. With his right fist, Marcus drove a brutal palm strike directly into the assassin’s throat.
The man gagged, his knees buckling. Marcus stripped the submachine gun from his hands, spun him around, and used the assassin's body as a shield just as the second hitman opened fire from the living room.
A volley of 9mm rounds thudded into the first assassin's Kevlar vest.
Marcus dropped to one knee, leveled the captured submachine gun around the body, and fired two controlled bursts into the second gunman's chest. The hitman collapsed backward onto the glass coffee table, shattering it into a thousand shards.
The suite went dead silent again.
Marcus quickly checked the pulse of both attackers. Both were neutralized. He stripped extra magazines from their tactical belts and secured a spare Glock 19 sidearm, racking the slide with a crisp *clack*.
"Marcus?" Diane's trembling voice whispered from behind the refrigerator. "Are they..."
"They're down," Marcus replied, his voice low and commanding. "The elevator power is cut. They used a stairwell breach. That means the street perimeter has been compromised. The syndicate isn't waiting for morning."
Ethan stood up from behind the island, his face pale in the moonlight but his eyes completely steady. "They want the flash drive."
"The FBI has the primary drive," Diane whispered, clutching her phone. "All I have is a decrypted copy on my laptop!"
"That's enough to get us killed," Marcus said. He grabbed Ethan's denim jacket from the chair and helped him slip it on. "We can't trust the local detail. If hitmen breached a state-secured penthouse fifteen minutes after the news broke, someone at headquarters sold the floor plan."
Marcus led Ethan, Diane, and Sarah toward the service elevator corridor at the rear of the suite. He kicked open the utility access hatch, revealing the emergency maintenance stairwell.
"Where do we go?" Sarah asked, her breath catching in panic. "Every hotel in the city is surrounded by press and police!"
"We go off the grid," Marcus said. "To the only place in this state that isn't connected to a computer server."
Ethan looked up at Marcus. "The cabin?"
Marcus looked down at Ethan, a grim shadow crossing his face. "Your grandfather's old timber mill in Blackwood Valley. It's the only place your mother never wrote down in any official report."
May you like
As they descended into the concrete stairwell, the sound of multiple police sirens began converging on the hotel from blocks away. But Marcus knew that among those sirens were men who wore badges by day and answered to Senator Sterling by night.
The battle for the truth had only just begun.
