Chapter 9 - The Man Behind the Wall
The blast threw Emily across the warehouse floor.
Her head struck concrete.
Sound vanished.
She saw light without hearing the explosion, saw pieces of glass suspended in the air like ice, saw Daniel fall beside her.
When sound returned, it came as a high, unbearable ringing.
Smoke poured from the office.
Sprinklers activated overhead.
Garrett was still tied to the column, blood running from a cut across his shoulder.
Margaret lay beneath the overturned chair.
Victoria had disappeared behind a stack of shipping pallets.
Robert was nowhere visible.
Emily crawled toward her mother.
“Mom!”
Margaret coughed and lifted her head.
“I’m here.”
The tactical team stormed through the warehouse entrances.
Claire reached Emily first.
“Noah?”
“Safe,” Claire said. “The account accepted preservation.”
Emily looked toward the destroyed office.
“Robert?”
“Missing.”
Agents entered the smoke.
The explosion had not originated beneath the building.
It had come from inside the office wall.
A concealed passage had opened behind the shattered concrete.
One investigator called from the darkness.
“There’s a tunnel.”
Garrett was cut free.
He moved immediately toward Margaret.
She recoiled.
Garrett stopped several feet away.
“I was checking whether you were hurt.”
“I’m alive despite your efforts.”
His face tightened.
“I know.”
Paramedics examined Daniel. He had suffered a broken wrist and several cuts, but he remained conscious.
Victoria was found near the pallets with a fractured ankle.
As agents placed her on a stretcher, she looked at Emily.
“You selected preservation.”
“Yes.”
“You saved the empire.”
“I saved the people trapped beneath it.”
Victoria smiled.
“You saved something much worse.”
Emily followed the tactical team into the tunnel.
Claire tried to stop her.
“The structure may be unstable.”
“My father may be inside.”
Garrett stepped beside them.
“I’m coming.”
Emily looked at him.
“No.”
“I know these terminals. My family used underground transport routes during labor strikes.”
“This is not your family anymore.”
Garrett glanced toward Victoria’s stretcher.
“Maybe it never was. I’m still coming.”
The tunnel descended beneath the warehouse.
Electrical cables ran along recently reinforced walls. Someone had maintained the passage.
They reached a steel door approximately two hundred yards from the terminal.
The divided-circle symbol was painted across it.
An investigator forced the lock.
Beyond the door was a furnished room.
A narrow bed.
A desk.
Medical equipment.
Shelves filled with notebooks.
A calendar hung on the wall.
Every day until yesterday had been marked with a black line.
Emily entered slowly.
A photograph stood on the desk.
Margaret holding newborn Emily.
Beside it was a more recent photograph of Emily leaving her office.
Another showed her wedding.
Another showed Noah being carried from the hospital.
“He watched us,” Emily whispered.
Garrett opened one of the notebooks.
The pages were filled with financial diagrams, names, and dates.
The handwriting matched the note in the trust ledger.
Thomas Reed’s handwriting.
Emily moved toward the bed.
An oxygen tube lay across the pillow.
The equipment was still warm.
“He was here,” she said.
Claire examined the medical supplies.
“Someone with advanced lung disease.”
An agent called from the far wall.
They discovered a second door disguised as shelving.
Behind it was a service elevator.
The control panel showed that it had traveled upward four minutes after the explosion.
Robert had escaped through the office passage.
He had not escaped alone.
A smear of blood crossed the elevator floor.
Emily knelt beside it.
Near the blood was a small silver button.
She recognized it.
Margaret had kept the matching buttons in an old sewing box.
They came from Thomas Reed’s only formal coat.
Margaret had shown it to Emily once as a child.
“He’s alive.”
Garrett looked at the elevator panel.
“Or someone wants you to believe he is.”
Emily stood.
The tactical radio crackled.
A security officer’s voice came through.
“Unknown male found outside the east drainage exit.”
Emily ran.
The exit opened near the river, half a mile from the warehouse.
Agents surrounded a man lying in the mud.
He was thin, gray-haired, and connected to a portable oxygen unit.
His face was turned away.
Emily approached slowly.
The man opened his eyes.
They were the same shade of green as hers.
He looked at her for a long moment.
Then he whispered, “Margaret?”
Emily knelt beside him.
“I’m Emily.”
His eyes filled with tears.
“My daughter.”
Before she could touch him, an agent pulled her backward.
A red light blinked beneath the man’s coat.
“Device!”
Everyone scattered.
The man weakly reached inside his jacket.
Emily drew her weapon.
He removed a small transmitter and dropped it into the mud.
“It isn’t a bomb,” he gasped. “It’s a tracker.”
The device emitted one final pulse and went dark.
Thomas looked toward the road.
“They know you found me.”
“Who?”
May you like
His eyes moved toward Garrett.
“The people who own the Lawsons.”
