Providence Descending, Sarah Boone [online e book reading .TXT] 📗

the fire alarm. It wasn't her. But she had no time to think about it, she rushed into the office, keeping her head down, following the crowds of people as they filed down the stairs to safety.
She stopped at the seventh floor – home of the IT control room – the last place she had to go. All she had to do now was kill the system and get out alive. Finding the control room was easy enough. It was labeled. And locked of course. No huge problem here, save for the dozens of people walking by to get to the stairs. Someone brushed against Lucy. The Warner File slid out of her hands, trampled under the feet of the parade. Lucy tried to swim through them, diving for the folder with no luck whatsoever. Then she tripped. She hit her head against the wall and passed out.

Chapter Seventeen – There Can be No Records Left

Lucy had never made it into the IT Room on the seventh floor. Until now. Scott had keys, and he had to go in because the IT Room had it's own air conditioning unit.
“That explains why your head's bleeding.” Scott said. He scratched his ear with the edge of his wrench. “Here,” he handed her a rag. “you should probably clot that or something.”
Lucy held the rag against her temple.
Scott gave her the hard hat. “Based on the day you're having, I think you should have this after all.”
“If I wanted to erase all the files in this system, how would I do that?” Lucy asked.
“I don't know. These panels are huge. Backed up and looped and titanium cased or whatever the hell they do to make them impenetrable. Blowing them up might do the trick.” Scott joked.
“That's it,” Lucy said. “Why not just let the place burn, Scott? All the records will be erased, and they'll think that I died.”
“I can't do that,” Scott said.
Lucy let the A.C. vent close on his hand.
“Hey!”
“Why not? It's the best way out.”
“Why not? Let's start with the fact that this building isn't empty,” Scott snapped. “I'm a criminal too Lucy. You need to escape, and I get where you're coming from. But I'm also a good guy, and I'm not going to let this place burn if I can do something to stop it.”
Lucy went to the nearest panel and started yanking wires. Scott grabbed her hand. She looked up at him, at the harsh disappointment that now shielded his eyes. “Stop it Lucy. If you make a spark this whole place will go up in flames.”
She flung his arm off. “I don't have a choice.”
“Are you so greedy, so heartless that you would let innocent people die just so you can get away with that file and that transfer? Just because someone is an obstacle to you doesn't mean that they're not human. It doesn't mean that they don't have a life Lucy! They have people in their life who love them. Any life is worth way more than twenty million dollars.”
“Scott, I'm not – you don't understand -”
“Get out!” he yelled. “I'm not helping you anymore.”
“You're right. No amount of money is worth any life to me. But I'm not stealing this money for me. If I don't destroy the computer memory in this room and make it out with the Warner File, the man who forced me to do this is going to kill my father.” Tears escaped from Lucy's eyes. She wiped at them with the other side of the bloody rag.
Scott stared at Lucy. “Are you telling me the truth?”
Lucy held up a hand. “Quiet. Do you hear that?” Footsteps. Approaching fast. She pulled the gun out of her cover-alls and hid in the corner behind one of the large processing machines.
The door flew open and two guards entered, guns drawn. Scott held up his wrench in humorous surrender. “Problem, gentlemen?”
“Where is she?”
“Providence? The bitch that took out five of you guys and threatened my life? Haven't seen her since.”
“I don't believe you.”
Lucy began to step out into the open, gun at the ready.
Scott stopped her with a brief glance. “I'm telling the truth. I don't know where she is.”
“What did she do after she pulled you into that elevator?”
“Do you mean before or after she seduced me?”
“We are on high alert. This is not the time for jokes!”
“She took my hard hat, hit me in the back of the head, and left me in the elevator unconscious. When I came to I went back to work on the A.C. units, which is what I should be doing now. So, if you don't mind, I'll get back to work.” He turned his back on them. “You should get downstairs. It's dangerous up here. Place could explode at any second.”
“Let's go back downstairs and report to the Sergeant,” the second guard said. “if it ain't safe, maybe we shouldn't keep looking.”
They retreated down the stairwell.
“You see that?” Scott said. “You don't need to severely injure everyone who gets in your way.” “I'm not normally like this,” Lucy said, “not since I quit five years ago. I'm not a killer. I'm just desperate.”
Scott nodded. “I see that,” he replied with a sigh. “So I'm going to offer you a deal, Luce. I'm going to assume that all the upper floors are evacuated, which makes it easier for me to help you. But you have to help me help you, because I need two sets of hands to do this, and -”
“Yes?” Lucy asked. “And?”
“You have to go to dinner with me tomorrow.”
“Excuse me?”
“Since the upper floors are evacuated, I have no problem letting this place blow, at least this section of it anyway. I can contain the explosion between the seventh and the tenth floor.” Scott reached into his tool box and pulled out a rolled up paper, a blue print of the building. “See, the second main A.C. unit is on the tenth floor. From there I can cut off the gas flow from the rest of the building. The seventh, eighth, ninth, and tenth floors, if exposed to a spark, will definitely explode, but with a contained explosion, anyone below us should still have time to get out. The IT room will burn and your records will become ash. All we have to do is set it off on this floor, run up to the tenth and seal the main unit, strap on that parachute, kick in a window, and jump. And you have to go to dinner with me. Tomorrow evening. I'll buy.”
“Are you serious?”
Scott grinned. He tapped the hard hat on her head. “Lucy, darling. I never kid. Now come on, do we have a deal or not? We're running out of time. It's like I said the only way out is up, and this way we both get what we want.”
Lucy blinked, mouth agape, shocked; her eyes watered with gratitude. “Thank you, thank you!”
“Don't get all mushy on me now, we still have work to do. First we make sure no one is on any of the next three floors.” Scott set off into a jog, yelling: “Is anyone here? Hello! Can anyone hear me?”
They ran briskly through the eighth floor and the ninth floor. They found no one. Lucy followed Scott back down to the seventh floor.
Scott reached into his tool box. “Would you like to light the match, Lucy?”
“You go ahead.”
He reached out and held her hand. “You have to be ready to run. Are you ready?”
“Yes. Let's do this.”
Scott lit the match and tossed it down the seventh floor A.C. Tunnel, then he yanked on Lucy's arm and they flew up the stairs as fast as their bodies could carry them.

Chapter Eighteen – Larry, Barry, and Gary

Lucy came to on the ground floor. Two men, office workers, carried her towards the exit. Brenner stopped them. He was pale, a wad of gauze held to his side, but despite these weaknesses, he was more than lucid. He was more than livid as well. He told them to put her down, then he dragged her into a deserted office.
“Where is it?” he demanded. “Where is it?”
Lucy started. She didn't have it. She hadn't had it since she'd dropped it on the seventh floor. “I don't know!” she cried. “I don't know!”
Brenner pushed Lucy against the wall, and held the plastic folder up in front of her face. “That's because I have it.”
“Please,” Lucy pleaded. “I need to -”
“I really don't care what you need. Your needs mean nothing to me. What matters to me right now is my needs. And I need to know the reason you came for this file.” He slapped her hard, so hard she fell back against the wall again and slid to the ground.
Brenner pulled Lucy up by her armpits. “Yesterday a man named Gary came to my house. He didn't tell me anything else about himself other than his name. What he did tell me was that this morning I would receive a file called the Warner File. He said I would have to protect it all costs. I said no, I wouldn't. Gary said that I would, and that he knew that I would because if I didn't bring it back to him at the end of the day, he would kill my wife and kids.”
“Gary?” Lucy asked.
“Yes, Gary!” He clasped an arm around Lucy's throat. “I want to know what's going on now. The earthquake. The threats against my family. The fire. You're involved aren't you? I want to know what the hell is going on!”
Lucy struggled against him, finding no room to breathe or throw a punch. Her elbows dug against the wall behind her. She felt the plaster give. She heard the echoes of crumbled pieces falling down below her – a shaft of some sort. She threw her elbow back harder. There's always a way out, she thought. The skin on her arms broke but she kept swinging, harder and faster, trying to knock out the wall.
Her vision began to blacken again. Brenner shook her neck. She snatched the Warner File and leaned backwards into the abyss.

Chapter Nineteen – If We're Lucky

Outside the front desk of the security office, they knelt before the first air conditioning module. “This is going to be more difficult than what we've been doing,” Scott said. He ruffled through his toolbox and withdrew his trusty wrench, a set of pliers, a small blow torch, and pump, small and manual – a ball pump. “You have to use this to siphon the existing gas down from the floors above, sucking it in, while I weld the pipe shut. If we're lucky, the gas won't accumulate and explode right now. If we're even luckier, the pressure within the pipe will concentrate the gas below us, so it will explode when we want it to. All I have to do is toss a flame in. And if we're even luckier, once those few floors go up in flames, the whole building won't collapse, and if it does, if we're lucky, no one will be in it, so we won't have been responsible for any deaths, and my parachute will work and we'll get out of here hunky dory.”
“That's a lot of 'if we're lucky's,” Lucy pointed out. “You forget that I haven't had any luck at all today.”
Scott shrugged. “You met me. And besides, I lead a pretty charmed life. Maybe it will cancel out all of your negative karma.”
“I should have a