Page 26 of One Last Stand
Maybe she wore that truth in her expression because Ziggy leaned back, her tone softening. “Okay, I get it. Tomas is a friend. Fine. Find out what is really going on . . . and then we’ll see.”
Yeah, right. She knew exactly what Ziggy meant bywe’ll see.
“I’m going to get the bio card. Send me the pin.”
“Remember your training. Once a Swan, always a Swan.”
That’s what she’d been trying to forget. “I’ll be in touch.”
She disconnected the feed, then got up and headed over to a safe built into the cement bunker. Pulling out her notebook, she keyed in the twenty-one-digit number, then pressed her thumb to the display.
The door unlatched.
Inside, along with a stack of other manila envelopes, sat a letter-sized envelope with a bio card along with a piece of paper inside. The twenty-two-word-long seed code. Just in case she forgot it. Her backup, should her memory fail her.
She left the code in the envelope but grabbed the bio card and shoved it into the leg pocket on her cargo pants. Then she rooted through the envelopes, found her ID packet, and took that also.
Because if she was going to disappear, she’d need to destroy all that was Laney Steele.
Then she closed the safe and locked it.
The monitors to the house had clicked on, and she peered at them, searching for movement. The driveway remained empty, the garage door closed, the backyard barren, and no lights flickered on in the house.
So far, so good.
She shut off the computers, then opened the metal door and headed back down the pitch-black hallway, her light bouncing through the space.
She reached the other doorway. A latch on the other side fused to the metal door, rust bleeding down around that. She hadn’t noticed that before. She put her hand on it, tried to tug it open, but the door wouldn’t budge.
She pulled on the handle again, harder?—
It screamed as it popped off, the door shuddering, and she stumbled back with the force of it, nearly fell.What?—
She returned to the door, shining her light over it.
The rivets at the top of the handle bled red, weakened by rain or whatever moisture had wicked in. Not surprising—this was Alaska—but now what?
She’d have to sneak out through the house. Preferably before anyone returned home. She ran down the tunnel toward the other door, keyed in the code, and thankfully, it opened, no problem.
Back inside the safe room, she found the door to enter the house. No rust. She punched in the code, same as the office door, and the lock disengaged.
She wrenched the door open.
Metal stairs leading up, no light. She shone her phone on them and climbed up. At the top, at the end of a small landing, stood another door, this one unsecured. Maybe she should close the door at the bottom, but frankly, she didn’t want to be stuck in the middle in case this door didn’t want to budge.
She pulled the door open without a fight.
Inside, another door, this one covered in insulated foam, and she guessed it led to the sauna.
Moose never even suspected.
She pushed it open.
The sauna room sat adjacent to a space that held a hot tub. And beyond that, through windows, the basement rec room, with the pool table and massive flatscreen.
All dark.
She let out a breath, then pushed through the sauna, closing the metal door. She’d leave the office door open, but with the sauna door closed, who would know?