Chapter 6 - Glass and Laser Sights
The sharp crack of breaking safety glass drowned out Sarah’s frantic sobs. Shards of heavy windowpane rained across the hardwood floor of the living room like lethal hail. Without a fraction of a second to hesitate, Mark lunged sideways, his military training taking over by pure instinct. He grabbed the back of Sarah’s dark sweatshirt, hauling her violently down behind the heavy wooden frame of the nursery bed just as a silenced rifle round punched a clean, smoking hole through the drywall inches above where her head had been a moment before.
"Sniper!" Mark roared over the chaos, his own gun leveled toward the shattered window in the adjacent room. "Get down, David! Move!"
David didn't panic. With cold, practiced precision, the man with the green eyes dropped into a tactical crouch, sliding across the slick floor until his back was pressed flat against the nursery wall opposite Mark. He didn't look at Sarah; his eyes were fixed entirely on the corridor leading to the shattered living room window.
"Too late," David muttered, his voice dangerously calm despite the smell of cordite filling the apartment. "They tracked the secure frequency on the briefcase chip. The moment you opened those latches, Mark, you rang the dinner bell for the Directorate."
Leo screamed, a high-pitched sound of pure terror, as another round slammed into the exterior brick wall outside, sending a shower of red dust and plaster over his blue pajamas. The stuffed bunny slipped from his trembling hands, landing face-down in the debris near the open silver briefcase.
"What the hell is the Directorate?" Mark yelled back, firing two rapid suppression shots toward the dark living room window to buy them a second of breathing room. The muzzle flash illuminated his strained, sweaty face. "Sarah, you told me you were just running from a bad corporate merger! You said you embezzled from a venture capitalist!"
Sarah was curled into a fetal position behind the bed frame, her hands clamped tightly over her ears, rocking back and forth. "I lied! I had to lie so you would keep us safe! If I told you the truth, you would have turned us in on day one!"
"And now we’re all dead because of your pathetic lies," David spat, sliding his magazine out to check his remaining rounds with a quick, practiced flick of his thumb. He looked across the room at Mark, his green eyes flashing with an unsettling mixture of hatred and desperation. "Put your pride away, Mark. If we don't get out of this building in the next ninety seconds, they aren't going to arrest us. They’re going to incinerate this entire city block to hide the file."
Mark stared at David across the small expanse of the nursery floor. Every instinct screamed that the man was an enemy, a ghost from Sarah’s past who had brought a war straight to a six-year-old boy’s bedroom. Yet, the smoking hole in the drywall was real. The laser sights sweeping across the ceiling were real.
"There’s a service elevator behind the kitchen pantry," Mark said through gritted teeth, his mind racing through the apartment’s blueprints. "It drops directly into the subterranean maintenance tunnel. But it requires a biometric override."
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David smirked grimly, raising his weapon toward the doorway as heavy footsteps echoed loudly in the shattered living room. "Good thing I still have my old clearance credentials memorized."
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