Bernie’s voice cut in, wheezy and urgent. “Something’s wrong! I think Kincaid’s stopped following me!”
Two things happened almost simultaneously. Hartgrave’s cell phone, set to vibrate only, went off with an audible buzz. And a soft alarm pulsed from above, as if someone had just set off the motion detectors outside.
She looked at him in speechless dread. He fumbled for the button to unmute his phone.
“He’s here—get back home, Bernie, go, now,” he said. “Not you, Willi, I need you to keep those two away from here—we’re almost there—”
Upstairs came a sound that was unmistakably the front door banging open.
“Daggett, for the love of God, please get me to that server.” Hartgrave grasped her shoulder. “I’ll tell you everything when we’re safely out of here, I swear, but we must take this weapon out of their hands!”
He spun on his heel to face the stairwell, a second alarm going off like the keening of a tornado siren. He must have just appeared on the Organization’s tracking program. Charging up. Preparing for battle.
And there, galloping down the stairs, was a man who could only be Kincaid. Silver hair, silver beard, silver spells bursting from his hands. His opening salvo hit like fireworks against the defense Hartgrave erected.
Hartgrave was right—theywereclose to breaking through to the server, perhaps as close as twenty seconds. But now she was choking on horrible uncertainty about the entire endeavor. What else might he have lied about? Did she even have the essentials of this situation right?Shouldshe let him destroy the server?
But the moment passed. Madness! She couldn’t imagine a scenario in which it would be a good idea to flee back to Ashburn and leave the server with its deadly program still operating. Besides—there was no going back to Ashburn. Her life was in total disarray. She had nothing to look forward to now but a future of hiding from the Organization with a man she couldn’t trust.
With a howl, she kicked the barrier she was trying to undo. It was oddly satisfying, so she kicked at the next one in her way, and the next, and after that her foot swung clear through and she lurched into the cabinet.
“Hartgrave! I’m through!”
He and Kincaid were halfway across the basement, separated only by Hartgrave’s nearly see-through barrier. They pressed against it like a warped mirror image: the tall IT director in his well-worn black dusterand the equally tall Organization director in a white trench coat.
“Do you ... Do you see a portable hard drive?” Hartgrave—already sounding overtaxed after just half a minute pitted against Kincaid. But then, he’d had hardly any time to gather magic to him—and Kincaid was so much more powerful.
“Small,” Hartgrave added. “It’s small!”
She cast a frantic eye over the two stacks of identically rectangular electronics, every second increasing the odds of imminent death. Small compared with what? Wherewasit?
Then she saw it, sitting on top of the monitor.
“Here!” she yelled over the din of competing alarms, holding up the storage device to squint at the label. “It says”—she faltered as she recognized Hartgrave’s precise handwriting—“‘locator backup.’”
“Put it back—” He doubled over, coughing. The moment he caught his breath, he said, “Container ... in my pocket—pour it—pour it over—”
Another coughing fit. She thrust shaking fingers into the coat pocket he’d aimed at her and came out with a cylinder full of a dull gray powder. When she’d covered the monitor, the stacks and part of the floor below for good measure, he gasped: “Here! Hurry!”
The second she reached his side, he took one hand off the conjured barrier protecting them and raised his palm toward the server.
“No!” Kincaid—looking not at Hartgrave but at her, his gray eyes piercing, his expression thunderous. “Stop this! You’ve no idea what you’re doing!”
This gave her pause, despite the source. It was, after all, what she’d been thinking herself.
But even if she’d wanted to prevent Hartgrave from completing the task for which they’d risked so much, it was too late. The spell he aimed at the server engulfed it and the cabinet in white fire.
As abruptly as that, the cellar was thrown into near-silence. The soft motion-detector signal continued above, but the wailing alarm had cut off.
They’d succeeded.
She wished she felt happier about it.
Hartgrave put both hands back to defense, but he looked a moment longer at the carnage, a grim twist of satisfaction on his face. She glanced at it again and shivered at the sight of the melted remains, shimmering like a mirage through the barrier he’d erected to protect them from the heat.
“Take my arm,” he croaked. “Be calm.”
She did the former, but the latter had never seemed more impossible. She squeezed her eyes shut to block out everything—the fire, Kincaid, the face of the man she’d thought she knew.
