Chapter 5 - The Siege
The blaring fire alarm echoed through the narrow elevator shaft as the car jerked to a sudden halt.
The emergency lights flickered on, casting a terrifying red glow across the small metal box.
Mara quickly pulled a sleek pistol from her designer handbag and chambered a round.
Her private security contractors immediately formed a protective wall around my wheelchair.
We knew this was not a random malfunction or a simple fire drill.
Julian and the syndicate had tracked the transport van and were trying to smoke us out of the building.
The thick smell of electrical smoke began to filter through the ceiling vents of the elevator.
One of the security guards pried the ceiling panel open and hoisted himself into the dark shaft above.
He reached down and pulled me out of the wheelchair despite the agonizing pain in my broken ribs.
Mara followed closely behind as we climbed the greasy maintenance ladder to the next floor.
We forced the elevator doors open and stumbled into the luxurious hallway of the tenth floor.
The corridor was completely empty, filled only with the deafening sound of the continuous alarm.
We rushed into Mara's reinforced apartment and immediately locked the heavy steel deadbolts.
Mara connected her laptop to the building's security cameras to see what was happening downstairs.
The screen displayed a dozen heavily armed men dressed in tactical gear sweeping the lobby.
They were systematically executing every single security guard who stood in their way.
I watched in absolute horror as Julian walked through the shattered glass doors of the lobby.
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He pointed directly at the security camera and smiled with a sickening sense of complete victory.
He held up a tablet displaying the exact GPS coordinates of the burner phone in my pocket.
