"Which way now?"
"Go right," said Rocco. "If there's anyone in the vault, and there shouldn't be at this time of night, you'll have to take measures."
Measures? She almost asked.
While she wasn't a black belt holder, Elodie could hold her own in a fight, even if she came out all battered and bruised. But, not against a gun, though.
She had a feeling these people shot first and asked questions later.
Elodie moved carefully, squeezing past junk: rusted filing cabinets and rotting wooden furniture, inexplicably dumped decades ago in this remote place beneath the city.
She came to another heavy door, which led into a wider access tunnel where caged bulbs provided dim light above the dirty concrete floor. A ventilation shaft disappeared into one side of the curved wall.
"The computer where the information can be accessed is air-gapped," said Lux. "Which means it's disconnected from the internet, and any third-party hardware that could compromise it."
Unbidden, the night her parents died came rushing into her mind. The police cars flashing red and blue lights, staining their porch like stained ink across paper. The empty words of condolences, and how they couldn't recover the bodies because it'd washed away.
They'd only found the car and their personal effects. Then, the topic of their debts surfaced and they'd lost everything: the house, the money in their accounts...everything.
She felt a low rumble in her cold bones, and shook her head to rid herself of the memory.
Metal pipes affixed to the side of the tunnel began to sing, as they did whenever a train passed on the other side of the wall. Puddles of water on the ground trembled around Elodie's frozen feet.
The roar increased in pitch; for a few moments it was deafening as the carriages cascaded past, and then disappeared into the distance.
She headed up an incline along one final unlit tunnel – and came to a dead end. The usual waist-high bundle of cables continued across the far wall and then back the way she had come.
"I've come the wrong way," she said, getting angry at herself for being too lost in her own head.
"Except you haven't." That was Asami.
When Elodie pointed the torch at the dead end, she saw the faint rectangular shape of a door.
The gathered wires that snaked horizontally across the door weren't connected to the bundles on the walls on either side, they just looked like they were; the cables were fake.
Even if some unhappy traveller hopelessly lost in the maze of underground tunnels had somehow accidentally arrived at this spot, and even if they had access to better light, they'd never in a million years notice the door unless they knew exactly what to look for. Elodie took out Hana's forged pass from the pocket of her jeans.
"Here goes nothing."
"There's a panel to your left," Lux told Elodie, who pressed the pass against a smooth patch of dull metal embedded in the wall. There was a series of soft clicks, and then the door opened a couple of inches.
"Sooner or later, questions are going to be asked about why someone's walking around in the dead vault in the early hours," said Rocco. "So be quick."
"You may have realized already, but I'm not very good with computers," said Elodie, stepping inside.
"But we are, and we'll guide you every step of the way," said Asami. "Let's get to work."
YOU ARE READING
THE ESCORT
Romance*** Explicit +18 Mafia romance*** Elodie Evans has been an escort for over five years. It's a nerve-wracking job, but she needed the money to pay for her brother's hospital bills as well as her own bills. A waitress by day, an escort by night, life...
