Enemy Agents by Shaun Tennant Read Free Book Online

exploded.

 
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
    5
    The breeze blowing through the air vent was cold. It wasn’t strong enough to carry the dust to the filters, so the vents were covered in a thick layer of dry filth. Jessica Swift was covered in it. The dirt stuck to her clothes, to the sweat on her bare skin, and collected at the end of her ponytail whenever she turned a corner. She crawled along a route she had memorized from the blueprints before she entered the building. Tonight was a dress rehearsal. She needed to know that she could get in and out of the vents where she needed to. She scouted possible B- and C-exits in case her original escape was blocked somehow. Wherever it wouldn’t be noticed, she replaced vent cover screws with wing screws that she could pull off quickly and without tools. She studied the views from each vent and where it would lead.
    This was mostly an office building. It belonged to a major bank, and only the first two floors were open to the public. The rest of the building was just offices, desks, computers, and cubicles. She was disappointed by that. Given the reputation of Swiss banks, she had hoped to find a secret hidden room, or at least soundproof offices. Where did they do all the scheming with South American despots?
    WBS was the fourth-largest bank in Switzerland, headquartered in Zurich. This building was decades old, and the exterior matched its neighbours to create a charming street view. A 2000s renovation had modernized the inside; knocked down some walls and opened it up a bit, but the bones were still very boring to crawl around in. The building was square, and from the third floor up, every floor was virtually identical except for the occasional oversized executive office. They had installed some new vents, bigger than they would have been originally (which she was grateful for since she had a few inches to spare between her slim shoulders and the sides of the vent) but they hadn’t upgraded the ventilation enough to keep the air moving, hence the dirt.
    Jessica had never been to Zurich before, and she had hoped the assignment would be in something more interesting than this. The assignments she got from Jupiter, her handler, always gave her the basics—an address, a target, a timeline—but never a sense of what the place was actually like. A centuries-old castle would be fun to sneak into, or some postmodern twisting absurdity of steel and glass might be interesting. Instead she was in an ordinary six-storey building that was probably identical to half the other buildings on the street, trapped in the dusty air vent. It was exactly like her training, and she had trained in a filthy abandoned warehouse.
    Her target was on the ground floor, but she was currently on the third. She wanted to make sure that if she needed to, she could get out this way after she had robbed the bank.
    It was after hours, but not very late. She had entered through the front door just before the bank closed at five, made her way into a vent without a single person or camera noticing, and began her work. It was past six when she crawled past an office and felt the air duct sag under her weight.
    It creaked, loudly, the steel twisting away from the ceiling just a little.
    She wasn’t near a vent cover, so she couldn’t see where she was exactly, but since she had just passed an office, she assumed that she was currently sitting above a hallway. And underneath her, someone said, “Was war das für ein Lärm?”
    ‘What was that noise?’
    There was someone in the hallway. She tentatively shifted backward, pushing with hands as she walked her knees back. The pressure of her hands made the vent groan again, louder.
    The person spoke again. “Die decke. ” The ceiling.
    Suddenly, there was a dull sound of movement, and she knew someone was moving the ceiling tiles. She crawled backward faster, and just as she moved away someone poked at the vent. The steel panel where she had just been