Beauty in the Broken

My fingers clench on the doorframe. “What the fuck are you doing here?”

“I’m Maze’s best man, and you know it.”

“I can’t trust your feelings not to get in the way.”

“It won’t. Get in. Time’s not on our side.”

I ignore the fact that he’s just given me an order, because he’s right. We only have two hours before Dalton’s deadline. I needed Maze’s men to hold off an attack until I arrived. I don’t trust anyone but myself with Lina’s safety.

Sliding into the back, I check the tracker on my phone, the small, vulnerable dot that represents Lina. Dalton isn’t moving her around. She’s still in the same place as twelve hours ago.

The driver has barely taken off before Russell hands me an iPad with a kaleidoscope of drone images. Dalton is keeping her in one of the top floors of the Hillbrow Tower. The tower has been closed for security reasons since 1981. It can’t be too difficult to break into a dilapidated and deserted tower. No one goes there, anymore. Not even the police. It’s a dangerous neighborhood. The floor used to be a revolving restaurant called Heinrich’s. At two hundred meters high, there’s no other building on the former Heinrich’s level. No place from where to launch a sniper attack. There’s only one way up and one way down. It’s a good place to hide a captive. Too damn good.

“Are you meeting his demands?” Russell asks in a solemn voice.

I give him a cold look. “Of course, I fucking am.”

He narrows his eyes to slits. “Just checking.”

“I emailed the contract my lawyer drafted.” A whole team worked on it through the night. “I’m waiting to hear back from Dalton. He’s probably reading it as we speak.”

“The minute you sign it, there’s a good chance she’ll end up dead anyway. We can’t trust Dalton to meet his end of the bargain.”

My stomach lurches, and my heart beats harder. “That’s why we have to get her out before. How many men has your drone picked up?”

“Infrared shows three people. We couldn’t get a visual on their faces. They’ll spot our drone if it hovers in front of the windows. Those damn windows run three hundred and sixty degrees around.”

I wipe a hand over my face, the strain of two sleepless nights catching up with me. “We have to assume two of the people are Dalton and Lina. The third is probably the guy who took her. Did Brink get a visual?”

“He only saw a man dragging her to a van.”

Cold fury rages through me at the mental image. I should’ve sent more guards with Lina, a mistake I won’t make again. I never expected anyone to strike after the example I made of Anne and Zane. After the failed kidnapping, I thought Dalton was on the run, knowing what I’d do to him when I find him. I never expected him to pull such a move.

Russell taps on an old photograph of Heinrich’s in its former glorious days. “There’s a fire exit on the east side of the room and the main one facing the escalators, which are out of order. We could take the stairs, but there’s no way of breaching it from the doorway without being spotted. Plus, Dalton isn’t stupid. I’m one hundred percent certain he has the stairs booby-trapped. We need an element of surprise. I say we go in air-borne and snipe Dalton and his crony.”

“No.”

At my harsh tone, Russell looks at me quickly.

“I need Dalton alive.”

His face contorts with the emotions he’d sworn wouldn’t get in the way. “He took Lina.”

“He’ll pay when I’m good and ready.”

“What the hell is wrong with you, Hart? Do you want her to die?”

I slam a fist on the seat between us. “I’m not going to let her die.”

“Then explain why you won’t snipe that bastard. It’s the best damn solution.”

Exhaling deeply, I stare at the blue almost-winter sky through the window. “Lina has a child. Dalton is the only one who knows where he is.”

“Holy Mother of God.”

“Yeah.”

“What do you suggest?”

I lift the iPad again, enlarging one of the drone photos. “There’s a panoramic terrace at the top. Below used to be a smaller restaurant.”

“The Grill.”

“How’s the tower structure inside?”

“Hard to say. The last time anyone’s been up there was when Carte Blanche broadcast from the old Heinrich’s in 2013. No safety checks have been filed with the municipality since 1980.”

I search for behind the scenes images of the broadcast even as he speaks. “No engineering reports?”

“Zilch.”

A few photos of the Carte Blanche studio setup prove helpful. They give a view of certain spots inside. The interior structure looks sturdy with a few places where the ceiling boards are peeling. I flick to the blueprints. Ventilation tubes run around the ceiling, but they’re too small to fit a human. A trapdoor between the floors of The Grill and Heinrich’s catches my attention. The blueprint shows stairs. In the earliest days, the floors must’ve been connected. I flip to the photos of the restaurants in the days when they were still in operation. No stairs. The interior was redone.