“Which way do we go?” Demon asked.
“Midas,” Ildefanso called out. “Double-check our positioning.”
“You’re under the far end of the residence. There should be an entrance on the opposite side of the warehouse. You’re actually not far enough underground yet.”
“Perhaps there’s another door on the opposite wall,” Daleyza suggested. “One that will take us lower.”
“We’ll start there.”
The three of them crossed the warehouse at a low run through the aisles, past the tables of product being packaged. On the far wall, glass windows looked into the lab area, where the product was processed. There was nowhere for a door to go further underground.
Daleyza, hands on hips, blew out a frustrated sigh. “There’s nothing here.”
Demon looked behind him. “Well, we’ve established one key point. We’ve got a processing area”—he pointed to each area—“a packaging area, and a shipment area.” He crossed to one of the tables and picked up a kilo-sized brick. He turned the top of it toward Ildefanso to show him the stamped logo. A red horse. “And we’ve also confirmed this is shipping to the Colonel Cartel. We have our connection.”
“Let’s just hope, in a perverse way, we’re right about everything else,” Ildefanso said.
He threw the brick back on the table. “We’re right. We’re almost never wrong. So there’s no door here. For some reason, the facility here doesn’t connect to the area beneath the church. Fine. It’s not optimal, but we find a way upstairs, we get to the church.”
“Other than that garage door, I don’t see any other entrances and exits, do you?” Daleyza asked.
“No,” Midas confirmed. “I was too busy looping cameras, and believe it or not, none of the views show any doors or windows, which is really odd. There had to be fifty people inside this room when that alarm went off, and they didn’t just vanish into thin air. They had to go somewhere. Based on what I could see, they all appeared to go north.”
The threesome headed to the north end of the warehouse, where they found a long alcove set off from the main room by a set of six archways. The alcove had no entrance or exit other than back into the warehouse. All that was in the space was a decorative wall, fashioned like a barn, with wooden slats running top to bottom, held together by a top and bottom slat. Every twenty feet, another set of two slats crossed diagonally from the four corners, so the wall looked like a series of barn doors. Hanging on the decorative wall were black-and-white photos of the mission over the last hundred years.
“This is bizarre,” Demon mused. “What’s the point of a four-foot gap between these arches and the wall?”
Steel was looking at the ceiling’s corners. “No cameras. That’s even more bizarre.”
Daleyza looked back and forth between the two features, slowly walking to the eastern wall. She got down as far as another X feature when she stopped. “Over here!” she called to them.
Both men walked up behind her and looked where she was focused.
“I almost missed it,” she said apologetically.
Together, they surveyed the slats, even running their hands up and down them, looking for whatever she saw.
Finally, Demon found it. A red glow came from between two of the slats.
He handed his rifle to Daleyza. Turning to Steel, he instructed, “There’s an elevator behind this wall. Run your hands along the bottom and look for a break in the seams. Probably near the tops and bottoms of the X’s.”
One man worked on one side, the other took the opposite side. There was a loud clicking sound, like a bolt being shot from its casing. “Found it!” Steel yelled. “Help me. I’ll pull. You push.”
Together, the two men put pressure in opposite directions, allowing the fake wooden door to slide open, revealing two massive elevators that would hold twenty to thirty people each.
“That explains why there are no cameras in here and the space after the arches. They didn’t want anyone to know this elevator was here.”
“That seems strange. Why would it matter?”
Demon and Steel shared a look.
“The cameras are for internal security only,” Demon explained.
“The cameras in the warehouse portion are to make sure no one is stealing the product. Besides that, people getting into the space would be an issue, not out.”
“Which means that wherever these elevators come out, there are going to be stationed guards,” Ildefanso surmised. “It’s time for plan C, Midas! We need security out of our way.”
“Gotcha covered. Keep on the line for good tidings.”
