Chapter 28 : DISMANTLING FRANK — PART 2
The mercenary in the hallway was not a Bertinelli thug.
Bertinelli thugs carried themselves with the sloppy confidence of men who'd been winning fights since high school through size and willingness rather than technique. They left blind spots. They telegraphed. They assumed the person in front of them was intimidated, because in the Glades, most people were.
The mercenary in the hallway carried himself like a wound spring — weight centered, hands positioned at the belt line in a ready posture that said I've been paid to hurt anyone who comes through that door and I take my work seriously. Tactical pants, composite-toe boots, a sidearm holstered at the thigh. Military bearing. Professional eyes that swept the corridor in two-second intervals, the kind of systematic awareness that came from institutional training and not from growing up in Frank Bertinelli's orbit.
Helena's briefing at the safehouse that morning had covered the ARGUS concern and the mercenary upgrade simultaneously, which was the kind of operational multitasking that defined our working relationship. She'd absorbed the ARGUS identification with the grim pragmatism of a woman who'd been surveilled by law enforcement her entire life — add it to the list was her effective response, followed by a demand for counter-surveillance protocols that I'd spent the afternoon designing.
The mercenary situation was more immediate. Frank had replaced his family guards with a private security firm after the planted decimal from Strike One triggered his paranoia. The firm was called Aegis Protective Services — Helena had gotten the name from a contact inside her father's administration, someone whose loyalty to Frank was conditional on continued employment rather than blood.
Aegis meant professionals. Professionals meant the plan needed adjusting.
The original approach for Strike Two was identical to Strike One: Helena takes guards, Charles picks locks, extract records, get out. The target was Frank's construction subsidiary office on the edge of the industrial district — the Cascade Development Group records that connected the Bertinelli laundering network to the seismic equipment purchases. The Undertaking's financial artery, flowing through a second-floor office guarded by men whose résumés included combat deployments and executive protection contracts.
Helena went in through the roof. Same approach, same efficiency — fire escape to rooftop, maintenance access, descending through the building's ventilation infrastructure with the practiced ease of someone who'd been infiltrating her father's buildings since she was old enough to pick a lock. The exterior guard — posted at the loading dock, watching the parking lot — went down to a chokehold delivered from shadow. Helena's technique was cleaner than any CQC I'd seen outside the Death Echo of Oliver's eleven-second takedown. Clean, controlled, quiet.
I went through the delivery entrance. Stealth Trained guided the feet — toe-heel, sound suppressed, the body moving through darkness with a spatial awareness that Basic had hinted at and Trained delivered in full resolution. The first-floor corridor was clear. The stairwell was clear. The second-floor hallway was—
Not clear.
PER 11 caught the mercenary before the mercenary caught me, but the margin was less than a second. He was standing at the hallway's midpoint, fifteen feet from the office door, positioned where the corridor's sight lines converged — a professional placement that covered both approaches and the stairwell simultaneously.
I pressed flat against the wall. The mercenary's head turned. Not toward me — a routine sweep, left to right, the two-second interval I'd been counting since I cleared the stairs. One-Mississippi. Two-Mississippi. The head turned away.
I moved. Three steps, silent, closing the distance from fifteen feet to ten. Then seven. Then five.
The floor creaked.
Not loud — a faint groan of old wood under shifting weight, the kind of sound that a civilian would dismiss and a professional would investigate. The mercenary's head snapped back. His hand went to the sidearm. PER 11 registered the draw speed — fast, practiced, the holster positioned for exactly this scenario.
CQC Trained made the decision before my conscious mind caught up. Close distance. Inside the draw. If he got the gun out, I was dead; inside arm's reach, the gun was a liability and his training would shift to hand-to-hand.
I covered five feet in two strides. The mercenary's gun cleared the holster. I slammed my forearm into his wrist — a deflection, not a strike — and the gun discharged into the wall with a bark that split the corridor's silence like a hammer through glass.
The mercenary didn't panic. His free hand drove into my jaw — a straight right, compact, the kind of punch that came from a boxing base refined by military CQC. My head snapped sideways. Stars. My left ribs — the ones that had cracked under the Red Dogs' bat and never quite settled back to full strength — absorbed a knee that folded me sideways and sent white fire cascading through my torso.
I swung back. The right hook caught the mercenary's cheek but the power was wrong — the rib pain disrupted the hip rotation and the strike landed with half the force it should have carried. He absorbed it. Returned a body shot that compressed my diaphragm and emptied my lungs.
Then Helena was there.
She came from behind the mercenary — through the office door she'd already breached from the rooftop entrance — and the chokehold was a replay of every takedown I'd watched her execute. Arm around the throat, controlled pressure, the mercenary's resistance lasting six seconds before the blood supply to his brain decided the fight was over.
He dropped. Helena lowered him. I stood in the hallway with a split lip and ribs that screamed and lungs that refused to fully expand.
"You're bleeding."
"I'm fine."
Helena's expression said she'd heard that particular lie enough times to have stopped cataloguing it. She zip-tied the mercenary's wrists and turned to the office.
The door was open — she'd picked it from the inside, entering through the ventilation, which made the lock I'd planned to spend three minutes on irrelevant. The office was standard corporate — desk, filing cabinets, a server rack in the corner, and a floor safe identical in design to the ones at the shipping office and the laundromat.
The safe opened on the second try. Helena's combination — Frank's universal four-digit — worked on the first three digits but the fourth had been changed. The mercenary upgrade came with a security review, apparently. I worked the lock manually, picks in the mechanism, feeling for the pin that didn't match the old combination.
[LOCKPICKING: TRAINING HOURS LOGGED. BASIC → APPROACHING TRAINED.]
Seven minutes. The safe cracked. The rib pain made crouching agony, but the contents were worth every second of it.
Construction contracts. Cascade Development Group. Subcontractor agreements for excavation work beneath a Merlyn Global property in the south Glades — a property listed as a "transportation infrastructure improvement site." The excavation plans showed a chamber seventy feet below street level, reinforced walls, power infrastructure, ventilation. The dimensions matched nothing in Starling City's subway development database.
The seismic equipment invoices from the QC data matched the delivery address on the contracts. The same address. The same chamber.
I photographed every page. My hands trembled — not from the rib pain but from the weight of what I was holding. The address of the machine Malcolm Merlyn intended to use to destroy the Glades. Physical, documentable, GPS-verifiable proof of where the device was being built.
"Charles."
Helena's voice from the doorway. Urgent but controlled.
"Two minutes."
"One minute. The gunshot woke someone up. There's a light on in the building across the street."
I photographed the last three pages, closed the safe, and set the server rack's remote wipe sequence — a script I'd prepared on a USB drive, loaded with a timer that would erase the digital records sixty seconds after we left. The hard copies would remain in the safe, but the digital trail would be gone.
Helena pulled me through the office door and down the stairwell. The rib protested on every step. The lip dripped blood onto my collar. We cleared the building through a side exit and reached the Audi in under ninety seconds.
She drove. I pressed a hand against my ribs and breathed in the careful, measured way of someone managing pain through technique rather than endurance.
Helena glanced sideways. Said nothing for three blocks. Then pulled a first-aid kit from the center console and set it on my lap.
"The lip. Clean it."
I opened the kit. Antiseptic wipes, butterfly bandages, gauze. The kind of thorough medical preparation that said Helena had been patching people up — including herself — for longer than she'd been planning her father's destruction.
I cleaned the lip. Applied the butterfly closure. The kit had enough supplies for a field surgical station, which raised questions about Helena's past that I filed for later.
She watched me work in the rearview mirror. The car was warm and the motion was smooth and neither of us said anything about the fact that she'd reached across the console to steady my hand when the antiseptic made me flinch.
[HEROIC ACT: DISRUPTION OF UNDERTAKING FUNDING INFRASTRUCTURE. +15 CP. TOTAL: 90 CP.]
The notification arrived while Helena was parallel-parking at the safehouse. I processed it in the background — ninety CP, the largest reserve I'd accumulated, a number that represented months of missions and deaths and incremental progress toward a threshold that still felt impossibly distant.
The construction site photo sat on my phone like a loaded weapon. One earthquake device. One address. One piece of the puzzle that could save the Glades.
The second device — the show had established two — was still missing. But one was enough to start.
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