Chapter 4

• Pausing inside the door, he scanned the room until Tess was in beside him. She closed the door and then moved away in the other direction. They’d entered into a room that was roughly twenty feet square and completely empty. The cement floor was covered in dust, making it look like no one had been in it for a long time. They had two doors to choose from to leave the room. “Door one or two, Tess, your call.”
• “Let’s take door number two and see if the grand prize is on the other side.” She moved over and quickly snapped a picture of the pad attached to the doorknob. “Another puzzle for you to solve Gray.”
• While they waited, both looked all around the space. “This is eerily weird, Brody.” She whispered.
• “Yep, I’m with you there.”
• “You sent me a picture of a lock not activated.” Grayson sounded bored through the mic. “Notice there no lit-up lights on the pad?”
• She turned back to the door and looked down at the lock. “That’s why we have you, Gray. We move in, you see to the finer details.” Tess smirked and reached for the doorknob.
• Nodding at her, Brody looked around at the door they’d just come through. “Let’s see what’s behind door number two.”
• Dropping to one knee, Brody aimed and covered Tess as she pushed the door open and moved off to the side. Nothing. More empty space. “It’s a hallway leading to more doors.”
• Standing Brody moved through it and stopped. “Four doors.” He moved along the hall and stopped at the first one. “Lights not on this one either.”
• “Find the one with the lights on and you’ll be on to something a little less dull.” Jennah’s voice whispered through the system.
• Motioning for Tess to move by him and check the other doors, he glanced at his watch. “Any word from Dom yet?”
• “They’re calling it a night and coming back to the house.”
• Tess stopped and pointed at the last door. “We’ve got lights on this one. Same pad as the first door, Grayson.”
• Brody walked over to her and looked over her shoulder at the pad. “Three lights on the top of this one, Gray, first and last are red, center one is off.”
• “Sweet.” Grayson’s voice picked up like it did when something was finally a challenge.
• “Let me know when Dom’s back and what they’ve got. Any word from Joslee?” He scanned the deserted hallway again. Not even a fly was sharing this space with them.
• “Joslee’s on his way back too. The guy he was following is all tucked in for the night.”
• The lack of excitement in Jennah’s tone told Brody no one was finding anything of interest.
• “Ready?” Tess whispered.
• “Let’s open this door Gray.” Brody held his hand over the keypad.
• “Okay, try this—zero, one then hold the pound key.”
• Brody moved his hand away. “What do you mean try? You don’t know for sure?”
• Grayson chuckled. “Pretty sure. I doubt they’ve changed the bypass code on these units since I last dealt with one.”
• Brody pushed the keys and held his breath. The lock disengaged. Turning the handle, he pushed the door open. “We’re in.”
• “The bypass will be the same throughout as long as they used one of the two systems you’ve just gone through. Call me if you find anything challenging.” Grayson muttered in his distracted way again.
• “Got it.” Checking behind them, he moved through the door. The room they entered this time wasn’t empty, not by a long shot. They were now standing in some sort of lab or assembly room. “Take pictures of everything.” He added quietly to Tess.
• Moving away from the door, he scanned the entire room. What the hell was this place? It looked like a cross between some mad scientist’s hide out and a factory. Pulling out his phone, he brought up the camera and started zooming in on anything with a label and words on it. Glancing over his shoulder he watched Tessa go over to an area filled with computers and enough electronic gadgetry to fill the backyard at the safe house. Static filled his earpiece, wincing he pulled it out of his ear, noting she did the same thing. “Dead zone?”
• “Possibly. All this equipment might be interfering.” She continued to take pictures.
• “Get the pictures then we’ll get back out where we can send them.” Going over to a stack of boxes, he flipped one open and found nothing but packing foam. Turning the box, he tried to find a word on it that made sense. Taking a picture of it, he moved around the pile to the table on the other side. More empty boxes sat on it. “I think we missed the fun.” Turning around he watched as Tess sat down in front of one of the computers. “Anything over there?”
• Tess looked through the pages on the desk. “Nothing that says anything I understand. I have no idea how to turn anything on and there’s no place to even copy onto a stick— even if I could turn them on.”
• “Just take a pic of everything at all angles and we’ll get it back to the team.” Moving around the room, he found more empty containers and packages. This whole thing was flashing a high score on his weird-o-meter.
• “I think I can pull the hard drive out of one of these.”
• Eyebrows raised he looked over at her.
• She shrugged. “I was bored, so I hung out with Grayson as he played with his toys—he was showing off how fast he could tear something down.”
• “If you can get something concrete to take back—safely, then do it.” Wandering to the other end of the piles of boxes, he found an open door. A large one, with tire tracks leading through it. “I think we need to follow these tracks after you get that.” Turning, he watched as she tucked a small hard drive into the pack at her side.
• “We’ll need to get out of here soon, if they come back and find a piece of their equipment missing…”
• “We’ll be quick.” Motioning for her to lead, he watched the door they’d come through. “So far we have nothing but some pictures of empty boxes. I’d like to see what they moved down this corridor.”
• “I’m having a hard time with the fact there is no one here.” She moved past him, starting down the corridor.
• “Yeah, it’s not sitting well with me either.”
• As they reached the end of the tunnel, he paused. Sitting side by side were two large shipping containers. The kind that were they loaded on ships and freight trains. Going over, he ran his hand down over the large lock on it. “Did we bring bolt cutters?”
• Tess went over and touched the lock. “Nothing that will cut through this.”
• “Shit.” Moving over to the other one, he took a picture of the alpha numeric shipping number on the side of it. “Get the numbers on that one, maybe we can track it from there.”
• “Tess to base.” He paused as she tried the mic system. Shaking her head she pulled the ear piece out again. “Nothing.”
• “You want to bail or keep going?” He stopped by a door on the other side and checked the keypad, no lights were lit up.
• “Let’s keep poking around and see if we can find anything definitive.” Tess came over and stopped in front of him.
• Brody paused and looked down at her. Glancing at his watch, he noted the time. “Five more than we get back out where the mics work and find out what’s going on.” She nodded.