Bloodshot - Cherie Priest [129]
No matter. It was open, and we dropped down—me first, landing light on my toes, then bracing myself to catch Adrian or at least lend him a hand. It was a solid twelve-foot drop to the steps below, and while it didn’t bother me in the slightest, I didn’t want Adrian to break an ankle.
Much to my delight, he didn’t make a manly show of refusing the assistance. He lowered himself through the hole, hanging by his hands, and allowed me to support his feet and knees, then his thighs and his midsection, as he slipped down onto the landing between the sixth floor and the fifth.
I’m not saying I didn’t cop a feel, but I will cry plausible deniability.
And furthermore, I will add that he was a goddamn magician to get that whole package tucked. I suspect a space–time portal. Or at least I would suspect it, if I weren’t denying everything. Which I am.
He flashed me a look that said at the same time, Hey, I felt that … and I choose to believe it was accidental. For now.
But no time to dwell on the pleasantries. Soon we were inside.
We had no way of knowing how well the building’s interior was being watched, but I’d given him a crash course on how to avoid and disable cameras, and he knew to stay back and let me go first. Not because he wasn’t awesome, but because I was smaller and faster, and when I turned on the vampire speed I could even kick up a pace so mighty that most cameras wouldn’t detect me at all—or if they did, I’d only turn up as a blur. I can’t move that fast for very long, but I’m deadly at a sprint and I had some serious sprinting to do.
We didn’t know where Bruner’s office was.
So it was Adrian’s job to scan for guards and neutralize them in whatever fashion he found most satisfying, and mine to dash from hall to hall in the six-story building, looking for a nameplate or some other indicator that we’d found the bastard’s headquarters. When I found it, I’d send a psychic call over to Adrian—who could apparently hear them all right if I focused hard enough, though he couldn’t reply. (We’d tested it out a little, since it worked that one time in the Poppycock Review.)
We’d meet back at the stairwell, near our entrance hole, in ten minutes.
He headed down. I stayed up top and worked my way from wing to wing, then went down to the next floor and so forth. I kept myself low and thanked heaven that the lights were all turned down or turned off altogether, with the exception of a few safety lights in the stairwells. I ducked from corner to corner, sweeping the rows of doors with my eyes and trying like hell to read as fast as I could run.
I wasn’t finding it, and it was making me mad.
I was down to the third floor and I had about five minutes left on the clock when Adrian hissed at me from somewhere below. He waved to gesture me into the stairwell (where we’d already established that there were no cameras), and then he pissed me right off.
“His office is on the fourth floor. Room four fifty-one,” he whispered.
“I’ve already checked the fourth floor and I didn’t see his name anywhere,” I insisted. “How do you know that’s where his stuff is?”
“Because,” he said with a flap of his hand that meant he’d found it somewhere over there, “there’s a receptionist desk near the elevator on every floor. Receptionists keep directory sheets.”
“Oh. I should’ve thought of that,” I said. “Nice work.”
“Thanks. But I’m sure you would’ve found it eventually.”
“How very kind of you to say so,” I told him, with an undercurrent of irritation that told him I suspected sarcasm on his part. He didn’t disabuse me of the notion. He only started climbing up to the fourth-floor entry door.
I said, “Let me,” in order to reestablish my dominance.
I gave the door a careful yank and dashed down the corridor to the camera at the far end. With a twist of my wrist, I re-aimed it to record a corner of wallpaper. It wasn’t a permanent solution or even a very good one, but it’d do for the moment. If we were lucky, no one was watching and no one would notice for a few minutes. Anyone who saw the viewing area change