Alistair looked at him.
"Did Ablation assign you to Voss?" he asked in return.
The stairwell was very quiet.
Then, from below: a gunshot. Sharp and close. The acoustic impact of a weapon fired inside an enclosed building, the sound carrying through the walls and floors with the unmistakable clarity of a thing that had changed the situation.
Both of them moved at once. For a fraction of a second, neither of them moved.
• • •
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Then training overwhelmed hesitation and they descended simultaneously, their footsteps loud now — urgency overriding the previous need for silence — as screaming reached them from below.
The ballroom had fractured. Tav registered this the moment they pushed through the ground floor stairwell door: the organized geometry of the event had dissolved into the panicked geometry of a crowd trying to exit simultaneously, evening dress and overturned champagne glasses and the normal
sound of people who had not expected violence trying to respond to it. Security personnel were shouting conflicting instructions. Someone near the entrance was injured — blood was visible on the marble floor — and the orchestral music that had been audible from the stairwell had been replaced by the particular acoustic chaos of confusion.
Tav scanned the room automatically.
Two security personnel on the east side, both moving toward the entrance wound. One civilian down near the base of the stage — shoulder, not fatal. Ballroom windows intact on the south and east.
Potential entry points from the north corridor still unclear.
Alistair was doing the same scan beside him.
"Voss," Tav said.
"Not visible." Alistair's voice had the focused flatness of professional mode. "Last position was centerleft, near the tall windows."
"Blood trail." Tav saw it. "Moving west."
The blood wasn't pooling — someone wounded and mobile, moving under their own power.
A shoulder wound, or a grazing hit. Not immediately incapacitating.
"He's heading for the service corridors," Alistair said.
"You know the layout."
"I scouted it last week." He was already moving. "South service corridor runs behind the kitchen to a maintenance exit that connects to the underground carpark."
Tav followed him.
They moved through the crowd efficiently — not against it, with it, using the flow of panicked people to mask their direction — and then through the service door and into the different acoustic world of the back corridors: quieter, industrial, the event visible only as noise through the walls.
A second shot cracked from somewhere deeper in the corridor system.
Closer.
Both of them accelerated.
Tav's mind was running two analyses simultaneously. The first: the immediate tactical situation — the unknown shooter, the wounded target, the exit route and who might control it. The second: the larger
picture, the question they'd been hovering at the edge of in the stairwell when the shooting had interrupted.
If neither of them had been assigned to Voss as a primary target— If Voss was operational cover— Then who had shot him? And why tonight?
