Where on Earth, Spies Ch. 13

"Mne nuzhen vodonepronitsaemyĭ sloĭ." Carmen grumbled, quietly slipping through the surface of the water to the nearest rope. She climbed up to the first porthole if the largely underwater "boat" (it was rather like an iceberg, the "boat" was hardly worth note compared to the rest of the structure) and prayed nobody was on the upper floors. She turned out to be lucky: able to unseal the window and crawl through. Some days she didn't realize how bulky her coat was until she had to climb through a suspiciously small space (For being the illustrious Carmen SanDiego the Second, it had to be the coat, and not too many expensive French coffees).

The upper floors were nearly deserted, with just a few passing guards in fake sailor's outfits. They had to at least pretend there weren't government dealings, after all. Especially multi-government dealings in faux wars and secret agendas.

The files Carmen needed were thirty floors under sea-level. She slipped to the elevator and used a chewing-gum-sized piece of C4 to pry out open. Fun fact: Chewing C4 will mix it to explode properly, and may make it easy to conceal, though this narrator advises strongly against it, especially to smokers, people with metal filings, or  people with an appreciation of their own jaw bone.

Carmen looked down the elevator shaft and found that the elevator was nowhere in sight, so it was either above or below. Either way, it would be dangerous. But not the most dangerous thing she'd done that day.

She jumped into the elevator shaft and grabbed onto he wires, slowly lowering herself down. She wanted to talk to Alik, ask him to sing a little more or something to keep her occupied, but any sound would echo. Someone could walk past the open elevator shaft doors at any time, and she'd be a sitting duck in there.

"Ein Spion ist im Gebäude! Alle Mann auf ihre Position!"

Well damn.

She looked up at the older man above her, looking through the pried-open elevator door. How could she have missed him? The man was old, with a beard of half-greyed rusty hair. Worse, he was holding a gun.

"Aren't we on the same side?" Carmen was mostly asking herself, out of incredulity. She could've sworn the Germans and the Russians were working together in VILE. When did she get left behind? Either way, this was no time to stop and think. She let go of the elevator cables and could have sworn she felt the ricochet of the bullet brush past as she fell.

It felt like she was falling for several minutes, even though she knew it could have only been seconds. She could hear alarms being raised all over the building, and she didn't even have Alik to comfort her over the headset now. No time to panic or to plan, however. She stopped herself just under the correct floor and climbed up, realizing suddenly that she heard a trundling up above. The elevator was coming down, not at any great speed, but wide enough and heavy enough that Carmen was left with three options: open the door and get out, keep falling, or die.

Carmen much preferred the first option, but she was out of C4. So she allowed the elevator to descend just enough to grab onto the bottom of it, removed a screwdriver from her high-heeled boots (for she was far more utilitarian than she cared to admit) and began dissassembling in a hurry, prying a steel bar from the bottom of the elevator. She jumped off again and landed on something like the 42nd floor (where, presumably, the answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe, and everything was being held in a safe guarded by sentient singing dolphins or something of that nature).

She knocked on the door from there, preparing the bar for a swing. Fun fact: Carmen never took baseball. She -did-, on the other hand, take bartitsu.
When the elevator doors opened to a rather surly-looking spy, said spy was greeted at high speed by an iron alloy of some description (and shortly thereafter woke up in a medical bay with a severe headache and skull fractures) as Carmen made her way down the hall. She swapped clothes with the spy (well, that's not true. She took his jacket and pants, leaving the rest of him unharmed) And made her way upstairs.

Carmen eventually managed to find the kitchen, where she stole a mason jar and some molasses so old it may as well have been tar. It wasn't spectacular, but it would have to do. A little farther up the stairs, and she slipped into the records room while everyone was out looking for a woman wearing a black Bodysuit in the elevator shaft. No doubt somebody had found the body she left behind by then. She just needed to find the papers and somehow get back out to the chronoskimmer, somehow.

She looked through the files until she came to Martin's, which she promptly,  indiscriminately, and unceremoniously stuffed into the mason jar. She glanced over to see Waldo's file, and was tempted to investigate, but she had things to do. She broke the container of nearly-solid molasses and sealed the mason jar, hoping it would outlast the water long enough to get back to her ship. If it didn't, her plans were screwed.

Carmen tried to slip back out of the records room, but soon found her wrist caught up by a very familiar hand.