“Jackie!” I gasped, rushing to her while Jace dropped to the ground and gripped the edge of the door, forcing it closed with a violent slam.
Her back hit the opposite wall and her visor tilted downward, gazing at the area of her suit where her hands were clutching. I grabbed her arms and pulled them away, dread gripping my heart in an ice-cold vice. Montague had said the suits should be more or less bulletproof, but he hadn’t guaranteed it, and I feared the worst as my eyes fell on two deep indentations in the metal.
But then I realized with a gasp of relief that they were just that. Indentations. The suit had been strong enough to withstand the bullets. Just about. If the shooters had been closer… I shuddered to think that they could have sunk right through.
But right now, this meant Jackie was simply in shock.
“Th-They moved so fast,” she whispered, and I could see that her hands were shaking even through the suit.
“I know,” I replied, clutching her shoulder. I was in a state of shock myself at how quickly they’d reacted. They’d fired within a split second of the door opening, which was a faster response than I’d thought possible.
But maybe they’d seen us approach via CCTV. Heck, maybe this was the camera room, and they’d convened here after realizing the decoy was fishy, to see what else was going on in the building. They could have been watching us the whole time. The only other explanation I could come up with was that these men were no ordinary security guards. That they were highly trained, because reflexes like that just weren’t something that came naturally. Which would mean we’d have to hope—
THUD. THUD. THUD.
I whirled back around to see Jace gripping the door’s handle and shoving his weight hard against the surface to keep it from opening—along with Ant, who’d abandoned his camera. It sounded like the men were attacking the other side with some kind of heavy, blunt object, and the door shuddered worryingly in its frame.
“We gotta keep it closed!” Jackie said, her voice regaining some of its strength as she hurried to the men.
We both joined them, but there wasn’t much space left for us to press ourselves against it. Jace, who was clearly doing most of the heavy lifting, was strong enough to prevent the men from getting the knob turned and getting out that way, but I feared how long the rest of it was going to hold up. The door was made of metal, but the way it was starting to quiver in its frame from the force of the men on the other side sent a chill racing down my spine.
Then the thudding stopped.
PING. PING. PING.
We all ducked reflexively, realizing they were now shooting bullets.
“Those sons of bitches,” Ant breathed, he and Jace somehow still able to maintain a decent pressure against the door from their lowered positions.
I cursed. None of the shots had made it through to our side yet. But I had no idea the caliber of the guns they held, or how long the door’s metal could withstand it. They were clearly trying to get us to back away from the door, but we couldn’t do that! Once they got out, the danger would be amplified, without any doors in the way. Not just for us, but for our team, if either of these guys managed to flee and make it upstairs. Besides, the gas from Jackie’s bomb should be kicking in at any moment. We just had to hold out.
“They’re desperate,” Jackie whispered, her voice admirably steady as she voiced my own thoughts. “We just gotta stay strong a bit longer.”
Still, each bullet hitting the surface made me fear for Jace’s and Ant’s lives, given the shooters’ now close proximity, and as the long, nerve-wracking seconds bled into ten, then twenty, I clung to Jackie’s words, telling myself that they were true.
And then finally, they became so. The bullets lessened in frequency, the rolling beat becoming more of a pitter-patter, until they’d faded completely and sputtered out with two heavy thumps.
Ant and Jace held their positions against the door, but Jackie and I dared to rise from our crouched positions.
“What if they’re just pretending?” I whispered, my heart still hammering against my ribcage.
Jackie hesitated. “They could be, I guess, but the gas really should have gotten them by now. They held out long enough.”
Still, we waited another couple of minutes in silence, Jace maintaining his pressure on the door, and then Jackie gently laid her hands over the men’s shoulders, gesturing that they should move backward. They did so, albeit reluctantly, and I worried about Jackie approaching the door again; despite her apparent quick recovery, her nerves would still be shot from her previous fright. So I stepped forward and gripped her arm, tugging her backward. She tilted her head in question, but I ignored it, continuing to pull at her until she was out of my way, and then approached the door in her place.
“My turn to go first,” I muttered, not bothering to look back for her reaction. I set my suit into non-ventilation mode temporarily, to avoid breathing in the gas, then tightened my grip around my gun and held it in front of me. I guessed we could have just turned back now, returned to our group upstairs, but it felt wrong to leave without verifying beyond a shadow of a doubt that our job here was done, and they were down.
I slowly pulled down on the handle, and my heart beat hard at the sight of the hairline crack, and then thundered as I widened it. My index finger twitched, ready to pull the trigger at the slightest movement, but all remained still in the room beyond, and then I’d opened the door wide enough to glimpse the two limp bodies sprawled facedown on the floor, their guns scattered around them.
“Looks like we’re clear, but I’m going in to check. If you wanna follow, remember to switch your ventilation off,” I whispered, then moved in through the wisps of smoke to snatch up both guns.
Jace and Jackie spilled in after me and immediately rolled over the men’s bodies, double-checking to make sure they were definitely out and searching them for other weapons, and I moved in closer to get a proper look at them for the first time.
They were both tall—I estimated around six feet—and thickly built, and wore nondescript black uniforms. From their relatively unlined faces and lack of gray hair, I guessed they were in their late thirties, though one of them had several scars crisscrossing all the way from his jaw to the base of his neck, which seemed to confirm my suspicion that these were seasoned fighters.
Whether they were just hired security or actually a part of this kidnapping gang remained to be seen, but this was a pleasant piece of bonus intel, to be able to get actual faces on camera.
Ant whistled, and I glanced over to see him crouching down with his camera a couple of feet away, doing a slow sweep of the men. “Gonna get these bastards good,” he muttered.
I nodded, then turned to survey the rest of the room while Jace and Jackie bound the men’s hands and feet together with wire—wondering whether there were camera monitors in here. We didn’t have much time to hang around, as I was near certain that backup would be on its way, but neither Julia nor Alexy had given us a warning yet, and I didn’t want to pass up the opportunity for a quick look around for other potential intel while we were all the way down here. I wanted to know, in particular, why the men had chosen to convene in this room, which more or less appeared to be another office, like the ones I’d seen upstairs. Because I couldn’t spot any monitors. At least from what I’d been able to make out through the smog, which still hung heavy, and would take a while to dissipate through the open door.
I approached the nearest table, running my metal fingers gently over the surface as I walked around it. Seeing that it held nothing but unused monitors and IT accessories, I moved to the next one along, which seemed to hold more of the same. Except… I slowed as my eyes fell on a stack of folders propped up next to the monitors at the end of this table. It was the first substantial bit of stationary I’d spotted in this place, aside from the odd pen or blank pad of sticky notes. Which had led me to believe we likely wouldn’t find evidence outside of the computer systems. But maybe I’d been wrong.
; Excitement thrummed through me, and I hurried to the pile and grabbed the first folder, pulling it open.
And what I saw inside made my jaw drop.
Print-outs of children’s faces. This folder was bulging with headshots—and so were all of the folders in the stack, by the looks of it. And not just any headshots. I quickly began flipping through them and saw that the pictures were all of infants. Newborns. And then I noticed the little emblem that watermarked the lower right-hand corner of each of them.
“Guys, check this out,” I managed, hardly daring to believe my eyes.
When they came rushing over, I laid a shaky forefinger on the watermark. It was an insignia I recognized all too well: a black cross, entwined with a serpent.
The symbol of the Ministry of Welfare.
“Whoa,” Jackie gasped. “What… What are these doing here?”
There was a long pause as my mind raced, and Ant got a closeup of the print-outs. What were these pictures doing here? How had these criminals managed to print them out? These looked like they were from the government’s archives. That was what the mark was for, to mark the prints as Ministry property.
Which could only mean that…
“Do you think they’ve somehow hacked the archives?” Jace whispered, and I turned to stare into his dark visor, my heart doing somersaults in my chest.
A burst of excitement coursed through me at the prospect that they could have. Hell, scratch that—must have. How else could these records be sitting here?
“Maybe access to the archives is what’s helping them pull off this whole operation,” Ant whispered. “I mean, helping them decide which kids to target for their site, and their location, and so on. The Ministry has access to every kid born. They mark the ones that are up for confiscation. And this site…”
My eyes shot back to the unconscious men on the floor, and I suddenly felt the urge to race over there and slap them awake. Because, God, these people had the answer. The answer I’d been so desperately seeking. The answer I’d give literally anything to obtain.
They had the key to getting my Hope back.
Jackie and I seemed to be of one mind as she looked back at the men too. I knew she’d lost younger siblings some years back, so we were both dying to finally crack the archives. This was the moment we’d both been waiting for. We still didn’t know if this duo was part of the kidnappers’ operation, or just hired security for the building, but I was itching to try to force some answers out of them.
The problem was, we had no means of resuscitating them. Slapping wouldn’t work. The gas would have them out cold for at least another hour, and we hadn’t brought any smelling salts with us. Which meant we’d be gone long before they came to.
Unless…
I looked to Jackie, wondering if she was thinking what I was thinking. Could we somehow take one of these men with us? Jace was tall and strong enough to carry one, especially with his suit, and we could keep the guy drugged, tied, and blindfolded on the aircraft so he wouldn’t be a danger to us. We’d come with extra sedatives. And if it turned out he had no answers, or proved to be too difficult a nut to crack even after interrogation, then we could just dump him somewhere, let him go. Given the infinite upside, I couldn’t see any downside to the idea.
My lips parted and I was a split second away from voicing the suggestion when Julia’s voice suddenly spilled into our ears, causing all other thoughts to evaporate from my head.
“Um, guys. If you’ve dealt with the hostiles, which it looks like you have, I suggest you head back upstairs. Now. Nelson’s found something.”
Her voice then cut off, leaving my heartbeat racing.
Maybe Nelson had discovered a clue within the computer system itself. Which could mean we didn’t need to bother with these men after all.
“Let’s see what she’s got,” Jackie whispered, then gripped my arm and pulled me toward the door, gesturing for the men to follow.
33
We moved up the stairs at twice the speed we’d come down them, knowing that the building was, at least temporarily, free of hostiles, and arrived back in the room with everyone else within a few minutes.
Everyone was standing frozen around a monitor. Realizing they would all be switched to Nelson’s channel, Jace, Ant, Jackie, and I quickly made the switch as well. I needed to work harder to find a position where I could see the screen, because unlike Jace and Ant, I wasn’t tall enough to see over people’s heads. I managed to nestle my way in between Zion and Kory, finding a place to kneel on the floor, and pulled Jackie through to sit next to me.
As I stared up at the screen, my excitement increased—because it displayed a photograph of an infant, with the Ministry’s watermark, just like the ones we’d found downstairs. Maybe Nelson was on the case already!
But when her voice came through my ears, her tone was… less enthusiastic than I’d hoped it would be.
“This little girl,” she said hoarsely. “I… I know her.”
I frowned in confusion. “Um, I’m sorry, Nelson,” I spoke up. “Robin here. We’ve just rejoined the crew upstairs. Could you fill us in?”
“Uh, yeah,” Nelson replied, sounding distant and lost in intense thought. “I… I managed to force my way into the system, and I’m still going through it, but… I stumbled on a bunch of folders containing Ministry photographs like this one. Each of the folders was labeled as either ‘Potential,’ ‘Upcoming,’ or ‘Recent.’ And I happened to spot this kid in the Recent pile.” There was a long pause, in which I could practically hear the blood pounding in my ears.
“And?” I urged. “Those labels sound similar to what I saw on the front-end webpage Gabby managed to access, so are these folders part of the site’s backend database? Kids that’re in their catalog?”
Or could those categorized folders be pulled directly from the Ministry’s servers—marking the kids’ CRAS status, so the kidnappers knew where the kids were in the various stages of the Ministry’s processing? It could potentially be either, and I needed to know.
“Um, I’m not completely sure yet,” Nelson replied, clearing her throat. “They’re not part of the site’s direct database, because I’m still digging for that. But they’re clearly connected somehow. I found the folders in the general system files.
“And like I said, I know this kid. Remember how I told you about my friend who lost her child, just recently? Well, this is that kid, unless I’m hugely mistaken. And I… I don’t think I am. Those jade eyes are distinct. And combined with that little black tuft of hair and slightly cleft lip, I recognized her instantly.”
My gut clenched. “Oh, God. And you found her in the Recent folder? Could that mean the gang has taken her?” The thought of anyone’s child being on the systems in this building made me queasy.
“Um, no. Not necessarily,” Nelson replied. “It’s what I’ve just been thinking about. I mean, the Recent folders contain way too many children for them to possibly target them all. And I mean way too many. There are probably thousands of them, combined. There’s no way this gang could pull off that scale of operation without the government closing in on their asses.
“I think it’s more like they’ve somehow pulled these folders directly from the archives, and that they’re categorizing the kids. Maybe those who are predicted to be on the list for adoption are under ‘Potential.’ Then those whose parents are likely to sooner become ineligible to keep them ‘cause they’ve fallen below the threshold could be ‘Upcoming.’ And those who were recently taken could be ‘Recent.’ Which would explain why my friend’s kid was tagged in the last one.”
“And if this group has access, it means they’ve figured out how to crack it,” I breathed, as she confirmed my second suspicion regarding these folders. “And they’ve downloaded data from the server. What else have you found in the system? Any names or addresses? Any data at all that goes back past Recent—like, the past couple of years or so?”
I knew the questions spilling out of my mouth w
ere purely selfish now, and not directly related to the task at hand—which was, first and foremost, to retrieve the evidence we needed to rat this group out—but I couldn’t help it. Julia or Alexy could be calling at any moment telling us we had to leave. We’d been in the building about fifteen minutes already. And Nelson might not have enough time to figure out how they’d managed to break into the archives if she was still fishing through system files. It also might be too late to go back for one of the unconscious men. So if there was even the smallest chance that Hope could be on the system, I just wanted Nelson to grab all the data she could and run. I imagined that she had to be thinking along the same lines, given her own lost child. And judging by how intensely the rest of the group was listening, most of us had a vested interest in those archives.
“I’m still digging through,” Nelson murmured. “Though, it doesn’t look like they have older data on here. Maybe it’s less useful to this group, considering the site they’re running. But give me a bit.” She fell quiet again, plunging us back into tense silence, and I prayed she would find it. Granted, even if there was older data, it didn’t guarantee Hope’s would be there. They might not have downloaded entire databases. But still, this felt like the closest I’d ever come to capturing a lead on her, and I wasn’t about to let it go easily.
Hope’s adoptive family’s address could be on these systems, which would mean all I’d have to do would be to swipe her back, as I’d done with so many other children over the past seven months. And then I—we—could get out of this life entirely. Run and hide. Maybe get over the border. Or heck, even join the nuns for a while, and see how staying in the country worked out for us. We could ask them to get us fake IDs, which could allow us both to start our lives afresh. Hope was still so young, not even two years old, so she would adapt, and I knew she’d remember me once I held her in my arms again, even if she’d forgotten my face while she’d been away. She’d see my hazel eyes in hers and remember how my kisses felt. She’d have grown so much since I held her as a tiny newborn, and I’d get to find out if she had developed the color of my hair or Henry’s.