“I'm going to open the door and make sure it’s clear. If anything goes wrong — and I do mean anything, Lex — you have to shut the door, lock it, and call 911. You got it?"
“But what if you — ”
“No exceptions,” he said. “Promise me.”
She hesitated. “I promise.”
He turned back to the door and slowly lifted the latch, trying not to make any noise. He waited a few seconds to see if there was a response from the other side. When it didn’t come, he used his free hand to turn the knob, his gun raised in the other hand.
He opened the door quickly, keeping his back to Alexa as he took one step into the hall. The darkness was disorienting even though he’d expected it, and he looked both ways, letting his weapon follow his eyes around the glare of the emergency lights lining the hall.
It was empty.
“Let’s go,” he said.
He started toward the exit sign, lit red at one end of the hall. It was surprisingly quiet, the other hotel guests obviously following the instructions to stay in their room.
Moving down the darkened hall, Nick understood Walker’s strategy — or whoever Walker had hired to deal with Nick and Alexa: the power outage made it hard for Nick to see, but it also meant the hotel would request guests remain in their room for their own safety.
And that meant Walker’s people would have a clear shot at Nick and Alexa — either in their room or as they fled.
They were approaching the stairwell, Nick almost daring to believe they were going to make it unobstructed, when a man appeared at the end of the hall.
Nick processed the details of his opponent — tall and muscular, shoulder-length black hair, black street clothes, a semi-automatic weapon in his hand — while his body went to work raising his weapon and covering Alexa's position behind him.
A round of shots muffled by a silencerwhooshedthrough the hall, a shower of drywall raining down on Nick as he shoved Alexa to the ground. He didn’t have time to do anything but charge the man standing less than ten feet away, assessing the impact of his first round of shots.
He was aiming his weapon for another round when Nick slammed into him. They crashed into the silver bar that controlled the door to the stairwell, and they spilled onto the small concrete landing between their floor and the others.
Nick slammed his elbow into the man’s throat and bent him back over the metal railing. The man tried leveling the weapon still in his hand, but Nick knocked it free and it went clattering down the stairwell, bouncing past the other landings on its way to the ground floor and parking level.
Nick placed his weapon against the man’s throat and fired. He hadn't had time to equip his own weapon with a silencer, and the sound rang through the stairwell, echoing off the metal and concrete until Nick’s ears rang.
Blood seeped from the man’s throat, his eyes going wide in the seconds it took for him to bleed out.
Nick dropped his body behind the door, as far back on the landing as he could. They needed time to get out of the building. The longer they could conceal the body the more time they would have until the cops showed up.
Alexa was standing in the doorframe, her eyes wide, face pale.
“I’m sorry you had to see that,” he said, “but we have to move.”
He took her hand and pulled her into the stairwell. She looked at the figure slumped on the landing as they made their way down the stairs, and Nick said a prayer of thanks that the lights were still on in the stairwell, probably connected to a generator for emergency evacuations.
He was glad Alexa hadn’t listened to him about the Four Seasons. It was possible Walker wouldn't have tried to attack them at such a high-profile hotel, but if he had, they would have been screwed: the suites were on the upper floors of the hotel’s sixty-one story building.
Their suite at the Residence Inn was on the top floor of an eight-story building, and Nick counted down as he and Alexa moved down the stairs, Nick listening for the sound of anyone approaching from the top or bottom. They were approaching the fourth floor when the doors opened on the landing below them.
Nick flattened himself against the wall and put an arm out to indicate Alexa should do the same.
“We shouldn’t be doing this.” A woman’s voice sounded from the fourth-floor landing.
“I just want to see what’s going on,” a man said.
“We know what's going on,” the woman said. “There's a power outage, like they said. They told us to stay in our room for a reason.”
“They can't keep us prisoner. We’ll just say we have dinner reservations. We were going to go out anyway.”
The woman sighed. “Fine.”