Chapter 7 - Smoke and Shrapnel
The shockwave hit Margot like a physical wall, throwing her sideways against a stack of heavy cardboard archive boxes.
Paper cascaded down like snow, burying her legs as a thick, acrid cloud of gray smoke billowed out from the center of row thirty-nine, smelling intensely of melting plastic and burned insulation. Coughing violently, she scrambled to her knees, waving the smoke away with one hand while desperately clutching the gray notebook with the other.
"Raphael!" she choked out, her voice raw in the smoke-choked air.
"Down!" a voice barked from the gloom.
A heavy hand gripped the collar of her jacket and yanked her hard behind the protective steel bulkhead of a primary support column just as a burst of suppressed gunfire chewed through the metal shelving inches above their heads. Shrapnel rained down like stinging hornets, pinging off the concrete floor.
Raphael crouched beside her, his face streaked with soot, his eyes blazing with cold fury as he peered around the corner of the concrete pillar.
"You alright?" he demanded, his voice tight, not looking back.
"I'm fine," Margot gasped, wiping soot from her eyes. "The boxes—did they hit the primary manifests?"
"They blew the secondary staging rack, but the core archive is still behind the concrete firewall," Raphael said, sliding a fresh magazine into his Glock with a practiced, fluid snap. "The cleanup crew didn't expect us down here this fast. They're panicking."
Across the smoky expanse of the basement, a gruff voice shouted in Spanish through the haze, followed by the frantic clatter of tactical boots scrambling backward toward the service exit at the rear of the catacombs.
"They're falling back to the loading dock," Raphael muttered. He turned his head, locking his dark gaze onto Margot. "Stay here. Do not move an inch."
"No," Margot said, grabbing his sleeve before he could pivot around the column.
Raphael stopped, his eyes narrowing. "This isn't a discussion, Miss Ellery."
"Yes, it is," she shot back, her voice dropping all its temporary-secretary timidity, hardening into pure steel. "You think they're running because they blew a rack? They're running because they have the flash drives containing the digital backups of Marcus’s offshore transfers. If they reach that loading dock, they take the digital proof with them, and Marcus walks free. I know every shortcut through these rows. You need me to cut them off."
Raphael stared at her for a fraction of a second—weighing the insane risk against the absolute necessity of the trap. Then he nodded once, sharply.
"On my left shoulder. Move."
May you like
They broke from cover, sprinting through the dense smoke down the narrow, labyrinthine aisles of the basement archive, plunging deeper into the dark heart of the building where the light barely reached.
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