Chapter 386: Taking The Golden Nugget Hotel [2]

The stairwell smelled of concrete dust, old cigarette smoke, and something chemical underneath it all that hadn’t fully cleared out even after however long the hotel had been under Callighan’s control. Our footsteps were fast and quiet on the bare steps, each one placed carefully to avoid the scrape of grit underfoot, and the only light came from the cracks under the fire doors on each landing, thin pale lines that told us there were people on the other side still burning whatever fuel they had for lanterns and battery lights.

Outside, through the thick walls, the fight was already spreading.

It wasn’t just scattered shots anymore. There were sustained bursts of automatic fire, shouted voices cutting across each other, and once a low concussive thump that shook a faint layer of dust from the stairwell ceiling above us. Marlon’s people were pushing hard from the front. That was the whole point, hit loud and fast from the main approach, pull Callighan’s numbers toward the noise, and give us the time we needed on the inside.

It was working, for now.

"Two," Cindy said quietly from behind me. "Coming down toward us. One landing up, moving fast. Left side of the stairs."

Lucy was already stopping on the half-landing between floors, pressing her back to the wall beside the door and bringing her weapon up. I moved up beside her, Beretta raised, Christopher a step behind us both with his AK-47 angled low.

The door above banged open.

Two of Callighan’s men came through at a jog, rifles held across their chests rather than raised, moving fast probbaly heading downstairs to help their comrades against Marlon. The first one saw us with about half a second to react.

He didn’t get to use it.

Lucy fired twice in quick succession and the man dropped sideways into the railing hard enough to make the whole stairwell shudder. The second one had his rifle halfway up when Christopher put two rounds through his chest from close enough that the report in the confined space hit like a physical pressure against my ears. The man sat down hard against the bottom step, tried to say something, and stopped.

"Keep moving," Lucy said, already stepping past them and continuing up.

Nobody argued.

"Clear ahead for the next two landings," Cindy said, her fingers pressed lightly to the stairwell wall like she was reading something through it. "I’m getting movement on the floor above but it’s behind a door, not in the stairs."

"How many?" I asked.

"Three, maybe four. Hard to separate them at this range."

"Direction?"

"Spreading out. Like they heard the shots and they’re trying to figure out where it came from."

Lucy pushed through the door on the next landing without slowing. The corridor beyond was dim, lit by two battery lanterns on the floor at either end, casting long orange rectangles across worn carpet and numbered doors. She went left immediately, moving fast and close to the wall, and we followed in a tight line, me, then Christopher, then Cindy, then Rachel with her hands still glowing faintly red at her sides, then Sydney, and Ivy at the back keeping low with her coat pulled tight and her eyes tracking everything.

"Cindy," Lucy said without turning around.

"Four ahead. Thirty feet. Two stationary, two moving toward us."

Lucy raised her weapon.

The first man came around the far corner of the corridor at a cautious walk, rifle up this time, moving with more sense than the two on the stairs. He saw Lucy before she saw his face and his rifle paused probably shocked seeing a familiar face, but Lucy’s shot caught him in the shoulder and spun him back into the wall, and before he could recover she closed the distance in four steps and finished it with a second round at close range.

The second man was right behind him. Christopher leaned out past me and fired a controlled burst that caught the man in the upper chest and drove him back through an open doorway.

The two stationary ones bolted.

One made it to the far stairwell door and threw himself through it. The other turned and ran deeper into the corridor.

"Let the runner go," I said. "He’s heading toward the front, toward the fight."

Lucy gave a short nod and pulled us back toward the route she wanted.

We moved through two more corridors on that floor, Lucy working from memory, checking corners before committing to them. She stopped once at a set of double doors and held a fist up.

"This room," she said.

Cindy pressed closer. "Nothing inside. It reads empty."

Lucy pushed the doors open anyway.

The room beyond was large, probably a conference space before the world stopped, with the chairs pushed to the walls and the long table shoved into a corner to make space. There were stains on the carpet from spilled equipment grease and old food containers stacked along one wall. Ropes and cable coiled near the window. Cots folded and leaning against the far wall. Whatever this room had been used for recently, it wasn’t holding Zakthar now.

Lucy stood in the center of it for a moment, looking around with her jaw set.

"He’s somewhere else then," she said.

"Taken higher likely," I replied. "The Nexon Battery signal is stronger the higher we go. I’ve been feeling it since the second floor."

She looked at me for a second, recalibrating.

"Then we go higher," she said.

We got back into the stairwell through a different access point than the one we had come up through. Lucy knew the building well enough to route us away from the landings where noise had probably already drawn attention and bring us up a narrower maintenance staircase at the rear of the hotel that ran parallel to the main one and was, as far as she knew, less trafficked.

Cindy tracked the whole way up.

"One on the landing above. Standing. Not moving."

Lucy pointed two fingers at Christopher. He moved up ahead of her on the stairs, took the angle at the top of the flight, and fired once. Clean drop, no noise beyond the shot.

"He was talking into a radio," Rachel said quietly from the back, glancing at the man’s hand.

"Then someone knows we’re in the stairs," Sydney said.

"Someone already knew," I said. "It doesn’t change where we’re going."

Lucy stopped us at the next landing with one hand raised, and everyone pulled up short behind her.

Footsteps above. Not one or two people moving around, but a cluster of them, boots on concrete coming down toward us from the floors above at a pace that said they weren’t being careful about the noise anymore. Someone had either heard us or been told we were in the stairs.

"We change stairwells on this floor," Lucy said, already moving to the landing door without waiting for agreement.

She pushed it open and we followed her through into the sixth floor corridor, Christopher pulling the door shut behind us as quietly as the hinges allowed.

We moved fast through the corridor without speaking, Lucy leading us straight down the middle of it toward the far end. The gunfire outside had thickened into something sustained and overlapping now, different weapons in different positions going back and forth in patterns that meant the fight at the front of the hotel had fully opened up. The walls muffled it but couldn’t kill it entirely. Every few seconds a burst would carry through louder than the rest and rattle the light fixtures above us.

We reached the far stairwell and went up.

"He’s probably kept on the terrace floor," Lucy said as we climbed, keeping her voice low.

"You mean outside?" I asked.

"No. Not outside. Adjacent to the terrace level. We used to keep Zakthar locked in the rooms just beside it." She glanced back briefly. "It’s the twelfth floor. Eastern side of the building, so we’ll have to move through the main aisles to reach it."

"Which means exposure," Sydney said flatly.

Lucy nodded once. "But with Marlon pulling most of their attention from the front, it should be manageable."

I didn’t disagree with the logic, but manageable covered a lot of ground. I could still hear the sustained gunfire well enough to know Marlon hadn’t broken through the front yet. Callighan’s men were holding the entrance, which meant there were still significant numbers inside the building, split between holding the lobby and responding to the breach. The upper floors wouldn’t be stripped, just thinned.

We kept climbing.

Then Lucy slowed again without warning, pausing on a landing somewhere around the eighth floor level and looking off to the side with that particular expression she got when something was competing for space in her thinking.

"What is it?" I asked.

"There’s another possibility," she said slowly. "Eighth floor. There’s an entertainment room on this level, cards tables, open layout, fairly wide. It’s more concealed than the terrace floor rooms, and it’s more defensible from the inside. If they decided to move Zakthar at any point recently, that room is exactly where I’d put him. Less visible, harder to stumble across. And a place they could all gather together, it’s rare in such hotel and in the top floors."

"Or he could be in a completely different floor and a random room," Sydney said.

"They wouldn’t put him in a random room without much vision," Lucy replied. "Not if he’s as important as you’re saying."

"What aisle is the entertainment room in?" Christopher asked.

"We’d have to go back to the other side of the building to reach it," she said. "It’s not far, but it means backtracking."

"Are you even sure?" Cindy said. "He might not be there at all."

"I’m not confirming it," Lucy replied carefully. "I’m saying it’s a possibility we shouldn’t ignore. If we go straight to the twelfth and he’s not there, we’ve wasted time and given Callighan’s people the window to move him out of the building entirely while we’re checking the top."

"So either we push straight for the terrace floor and hope he’s there," Christopher said, laying it out evenly, "or we work the floors one by one and risk running out of time."

"Straight to the top is less risk for Zakthar," Rachel said. "But it’s the harder push for us. But at the same time, if he is really in the top floor and we waste time below checking every rooms, he might be taken out from another ways from the top floor."

I turned it over quickly.

"We split up," I said.

Rachel looked at me like I had said something in a different language.

"Ryan—"

"Lucy, Sydney, and I go straight to the twelfth. You four sweep the floors between here and there, check for the Nexon Battery while you move. Cindy and Rachel should both be able to feel it if it’s close. We cover more ground without losing time on either possibility."

"Separating is dangerous," Cindy said.

"So is letting Callighan’s people move Zakthar while we’re being thorough," I said. "If he’s on the top floor, Lucy and I can confirm it fast and come back down to you. If he’s not, we meet you on the way down and work the remaining floors together. Either way we converge."

"Three of you going to the top," Christopher said repeating again.

"We’ll be fine. You guys are the ones taking the slower, more exposed route," I said. "Watch the aisles and don’t get caught in the open."

"Then it’s decided," Sydney said. "Can we please actually move."

Rachel looked at me for a moment, concerned. Then she nodded, short and tight.

I held Christopher’s gaze for a second.

He gave a brief nod back.

Then we split.

Lucy moved immediately, cutting back into the corridor and taking the first turning that brought us toward the inner staircase on the eastern wing. Sydney followed without comment, her eyes scanning as she walked. I stayed half a step behind Lucy and kept my Beretta up, watching the angles she wasn’t covering.

Behind us, the sound of the others moving in the opposite direction faded quickly into the noise of the hotel.

"This way," Lucy said as she led us deeper into the eastern side of the building and toward the stairs that would take us up to the twelfth the fastest.