Chapter 48 - Countdown (2/2)

20 minutes later, Halia put down the last bullet and started labelling the piles that she had made.

Max quickly walked over to double check. He then looked at the other two men and nodded his head. Halia was quick and accurate.

Within 10 minutes, she finished labeling everything and smiled at the three men.

”I'm going to go to the bathroom while you guys double check everything. Is that OK?” she asked casually.

Rowan brushed his hand through his greasy hair and pointed to a door behind them, ”The bathroom's over there.” He then kneeled down with the other two men and started looking through the piles of bullets on the floor.

Halia looked at the three men and started walking towards the bathroom, but they were so focused on the bullets that they did not notice her straying off course and heading for the stairs instead.

Halia carefully walked up the stairs. The top three stairs were out of sight, so as soon as she got up there, she breathed a sigh of relief.

Jackson had closed the wall that opened up to the VVIP room when he left, but Halia remembered the 10-digit code he had typed in, so she quickly typed it into a pinpad on the side of the wall. If there was one thing she was good at, it was memory.

Of course, Halia did not wait for the wall to fully open. As soon as it started sliding up a little, she immediately ducked under and ran out as fast as she could. The sounds from the karaoke bar quickly drifted into the underground shooting range and Jackson's three men soon realized the wall had been opened. Max and Rowan quickly ran up the stairs while Kevin checked the bathroom.

”She's gone!” he yelled up the stairs.

Max and Rowan ran out of the VVIP room just as they heard Kevin's cry. They had to quickly get Halia back.

”The Boss is going to kill us,” Rowan said.

”You take the back exit, I'll take the front,” Max instructed.

Rowan immediately nodded and ran towards the back of the bar while Max ran towards the front. However, Halia was too fast (she was, after all, a young and fit police officer), so both men lost her.

Halia kept running until she knew she was completely in the clear. She then picked up her phone and called Sean.

Sean had been sitting in a van outside the karaoke bar and saw Halia run out, but he didn't know what had happened.

”Are you safe?” he immediately asked.

”Yes, I'm fine. We're at the wrong location. Jackson's meeting is somewhere else. I've attached my hairpin to him. Can you track it?” Halia said with urgency.

Earlier, when she hugged Jackson, she had managed to clip her hairpin to the back of his pants. Luckily, the pin was small and no one noticed it was gone from her hair.

”I'll give you the coordinates right away. You go there first and check what's going on. We will be following behind on standby,” Sean said. ”It's about 30 minutes away, in the mountains...”

Halia immediately flagged down a taxi and headed towards the mountains.