Chapter 5 - The Descent
The elevators were dead. Eleanor and Silas took the emergency stairwell, descending fifty flights of stairs in the suffocating heat of the powerless building. Eleanor ripped a slit up the side of her designer gown to allow her to move faster, her bare feet hitting the concrete as she abandoned her Louboutins.
"Julian’s men will be waiting in the sub-basement," Silas warned, checking his corners as they moved.
"Julian is a coward," Eleanor panted. "He relies on muscle, not strategy."
They reached the 20th floor when the heavy fire doors below them slammed open. Tactical flashlights cut through the darkness. Julian’s private mercenaries had found them.
"Take them alive! I want the drive!" Julian’s voice echoed up the stairwell.
"Go!" Silas yelled, shoving Eleanor back through the 20th-floor doorway into the abandoned corporate offices.
Gunfire erupted, the deafening crack-crack-crack of automatic weapons shattering the silence. Bullet holes punched through the drywall, showering Eleanor in plaster dust. She scrambled behind a massive marble reception desk as Silas returned fire, his suppressed pistol dropping the first mercenary with lethal precision.
"We're pinned down!" Silas shouted over the gunfire. "There's no way to the basement from here!"
Eleanor looked around the dark office. Her eyes locked onto the massive, glass-walled server room at the end of the hall.
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"We don't need the physical vault," Eleanor realized, her mind racing. "The servers! If we patch the flash drive directly into the internal intranet before they reboot the grid, we can override the vault protocols remotely!"
"I’ll cover you!" Silas roared. "Move!"
