When the Tower Burns

The first thing Tessa noticed was the smell.

Not smoke yet. Hot dust, singed cloth, and the sharp bite of something electrical burning in the walls. Then the alarm started to scream, and the floor under her heels gave a small jolt from the blast somewhere above them.

Victor grabbed her arm and shoved her toward the concrete pillar by the office door.

“Stay down.”

Another crack rolled through the tower. The lights flickered once, then stayed on in a dead-white wash. On the far side of the office, his security screen went black.

Tessa crouched with one hand over her head. “Your comms are out.”

“I know.”

He was already moving, one hand at his jacket, checking the pistol she had only just noticed was there. He stepped to the glass wall, looked out over the city, then back at her.

“Can you walk?”

“That depends. Are we being blown up?”

He gave her a flat look that almost passed for a smile. “Yes.”

A shout came from the hall. Then another. Someone was pounding on the door. Victor crossed to it, yanked it open, and a man in a suit with blood on his sleeve nearly fell in.

“Fire on twelve,” the man said. “Freight shaft’s locked. Elevator’s dead. Stairwell’s filling.”

Victor didn’t ask where Gabriel was. That answer was in the way the man wouldn’t meet his eyes.

“Take the west stairs,” Victor said. “Get people out.”

The man hesitated, then ran.

Tessa was already looking at the desk, at the black notebook still open beside the ledger printouts. “If they wanted the data, they’d hit the office server.”

“They did,” Victor said. “This is about what they can’t copy.”

He shoved the notebook into a drawer, then stopped and looked at her like he was making a decision he didn’t want to make.

“Come with me.”

She took a step back. “Why?”

“Because I’m not leaving you here.”

“That’s not an answer.”

“It’s the one you get.”

A second blast thumped through the structure. Ceiling dust sifted onto the desk. Somewhere down the hall, glass crashed.

Victor caught her elbow and headed for the service corridor. The air got hotter fast. The carpet ended at a metal door, then the smell changed to detergent and fryer oil from the kitchen below. The lights were on emergency strips now, red and low.

A cook stood in the hallway, white apron streaked gray with ash. “Loading dock’s jammed. Smoke’s coming up from the laundry corridor.”

“Then we use it,” Victor said.

They pushed through the kitchen, past overturned sheet pans and a tipped rack of glasses. In the laundry corridor, damp heat slapped Tessa in the face. A door at the far end stood half open. Beyond it, she heard the clank of a truck gate and the hard voice of someone outside.

Victor stopped at the threshold and listened.

Then he said, “Move.”

Tessa went first. A man in a waiter’s jacket was slumped against the dock wall, one eye open, a knife wound darkening his shirt. The fake waiter’s cap lay on the concrete beside him. Under the hem of the uniform, heavy boots stuck out, black and scuffed, the kind no banquet staff wore.

Tessa stared at them. “That’s our guy.”

Victor’s gaze snapped to the boots, then to the body. “You’re sure?”

“Military issue. Wrong tread for kitchen work. He came in with the shooters.”

Another crack sounded from inside the tower. The dock lights flashed.

Victor nodded once, hard. “Then he wasn’t here for the money.”

“No,” Tessa said, already turning toward the loading dock gate. “He was here for the case.”

Behind them, the tower groaned.

Victor touched her shoulder, brief and firm. “You just earned yourself a very bad night.”

Then he guided her toward the armored sedan waiting in the dock shadow, and she knew he meant to keep her with him.