Badge of the Death Game

Chapter 045

Cody pressed the handle down and shoved the door open hard.

Soren was already moving. One long stride carried him through the frame, his rifle stock dropping from his shoulder into a tight low-ready as his muzzle swept upward in a tight arc, tracing every corner of the stairwell in a single fluid motion. By the time Cody came through behind him, weapon angled toward the upper flights, Soren had already confirmed the ground floor of the stairwell was clear.

They moved up, backs to the wall, footsteps measured and quiet.

Above them, the stairwell was alive. Flashlight beams strobed down through the gaps in the flights, and the low murmur of voices drifted between the landings. A group of guards, more than a few, moving with the unhurried ease of men who had been called somewhere and weren't in any particular hurry to arrive.

Evan's voice came through the earpiece. "This is Evan. All security personnel inside the building appear to have been mobilized. They're converging on the fourth-floor casino. No other individuals detected at this time. Aside from that, I'm tracking three people on the fire stairs between floors seven and eight, two more on twelve, and two on twenty-three. Estimated time to reach the fourth floor is two to three minutes, but that could change."

Soren processed the numbers quietly and kept climbing.

They reached the third floor. Above them, at the fourth-floor landing, three guards had stopped at the fire door, leaning against the wall with the posture of men who had decided this was a fine place to take a smoke break. Their voices carried easily down the shaft, relaxed and unhurried.

Soren and Cody held. They didn't need to exchange a word. Both men pressed into the shadow of the stairwell wall, weapons angled upward through the gap in the flights, covering the three figures on the landing above. Through his night vision goggles, Soren could see the IR laser from his MCX Rattler sitting cleanly on the forehead of the nearest guard. One trigger pull. But not yet.

They waited. A minute passed. Then another.

Two more guards came down from above and joined the group at the fourth-floor door. Brief greetings, a hand raised in acknowledgment, and then all five pushed through the fire door together and disappeared into the casino floor. The door swung shut behind them with a dull metallic click.

Soren signaled forward.

They moved up through the next several floors without incident, Evan feeding them position updates as the remaining guards filtered down toward the fourth floor. The stairwell thinned out with each landing they cleared.

Then, as they reached the twelfth floor, Evan's voice came again. "They've moved up to fourteen. Coming down to thirteen now."

Soren raised a fist. Both men stopped and took position at the edge of the twelfth-floor landing, weapons raised through the gap in the flights above.

They could see them now. Two guards descending at a casual pace, one of them gesturing with his flashlight as he talked, the beam swinging lazily across the walls.

The guards reached the thirteenth-floor landing.

Soren fired twice in under a second.

Thwip. Thwip.

Both men dropped without a sound, the flashlight clattering down two steps and going still. Cody moved up immediately, confirmed the kills with two quick checks, and switched off both flashlights. The stairwell went darker.

After that, their pace up the remaining floors increased considerably. Twenty-six floors total. The penthouse was close.

________________________________________

Down on the fourth floor, the casino had taken on a strange quality in the dark. The tables sat empty, chips stacked and untouched, the overhead fixtures dead. Twenty-odd security guards milled around the floor, their conversations overlapping into a low, shapeless noise that grated on Duke Calloway's nerves.

He kept checking his phone. The screen stayed dark. No new messages.

By his calculation, Mark's team should have reached the penthouse floor by now. So why had nothing happened? No sounds from above, no alert from the guards posted outside Julian's suite, no sign of anything at all. Had they failed? If they had, Julian would have called the security teams up immediately. That hadn't happened either.

Duke stood, stepped away from the group, and dialed.

"Panther," he said quietly, turning toward the wall. "What's the situation? Where are they?"

Across the street, in a darkened room on an upper floor of a residential building, the man known as Panther lay prone behind a sniper rifle set up on an improvised rest of stacked furniture, scanning the hotel's exterior through his scope.

"I can't locate them inside," he said. "No gunfire, no movement on the penthouse floor. But I spotted something a few minutes ago." A brief pause. "A drone."

"A drone?" Duke's voice climbed half a register before he caught himself. He walked quickly toward his private office, pulling the door shut behind him. "Is it theirs?"

"Can't confirm, but it's been circling the hotel for a while. High probability it belongs to them. And if it does, the operator is almost certainly in whatever vehicle they came in."

Duke stood very still, running through the implications. "Can you shoot it down?"

Panther made a short, dry sound. "No. It's too fast and flying too high. I'm a shooter, not a miracle worker."

"Then go after the operator. That drone is a problem."

"You're sure?" Panther's tone was neutral, unbothered. "You've already paid. I do what you tell me. But the moment I fire, whether I hit or miss, your whole plan takes a hit with it."

Duke pressed two fingers to his temple. He was already regretting that he hadn't hired more people. One sniper had seemed sufficient. He hadn't accounted for a drone.

He thought for two seconds. "Hold your position. I'll handle it from inside."

He ended the call, walked back into the casino floor, and addressed the assembled guards with the measured tone of a man delivering routine instructions. "There's an Audi A6 circling the area outside the hotel. I have reason to believe the occupants may be hostile. Send a team to deal with it."

________________________________________

Less than a minute later, six guards came jogging out through the hotel's main entrance.

Mark clocked them immediately from the rooftop across the street. "Hank, heads up. Six coming out the front. Not sure if they're heading your way."

At that moment, Hank was behind the wheel of the Audi A6, easing slowly toward the hotel's front approach. He heard Mark's voice and stood on the brake without hesitation, jamming the car into reverse.

The six guards spotted the car the instant it lurched to a stop. They broke into a run, shouting, and two of them already had their pistols out.

"They're definitely coming for us," Evan said, his voice tight. He grabbed the drone controller with one hand and keyed his earpiece with the other. "Soren, we've been made. We may need to pull back."

The words were barely out of his mouth when the night cracked open.

The guards opened fire without warning. The range was long, but two rounds found the body of the Audi A6, one punching through the rear quarter panel with a sharp metallic bang. Hank killed the headlights and floored the accelerator in reverse, trying to open distance. The guards spread out and kept shooting, showing no intention of letting them go.

On the rooftop opposite the hotel, Mark exhaled a single quiet curse.

He settled behind the AR-15 carbine, found the nearest guard in his sights, and fired.

Crack.

The guard went down hard, a through-shot to the chest that put him flat on the pavement. The remaining five scattered instantly, scrambling for cover behind parked vehicles and the concrete pillars flanking the hotel entrance, unable to identify where the shot had come from.

The quiet street had become a battlefield in the span of ten seconds.

And on the twenty-sixth floor, at the door to the fire exit landing just below the penthouse, Soren and Cody were already in position.

Stack tight. Weapons up. Ready to breach.