O'Toole, alone inside the abandoned office in the cellars, sends out tendrils of telekinetic power in the area around the guards at the T-intersection in the main tunnel for what seems like an infinity. He doesn't find any handy metal objects to use for an impersonation of Terry the Minotard, though, and the guards are getting increasingly impatient when he doesn't answer their demands to produce Cherry Bell.
Townsend asked the guards what guarantees they could give for good treatment about half a minute ago, but hasn't said anything else loud enough for the guards to hear. O'Toole can hear him whispering encouragment, though, presumably to Burr, who is moaning curses as his wound is inexpertly tourniqued. All the guards seem to be promising in return for turning over Cherry Bell is not to kill them immediately.
Guard
Vaughn: "If you send her out unhurt, the Warden won't make us kill you. We'll put you in cells, maybe, but you'll be alive."
Guard
Arden: "If you make us come in there, you won't like the results."
O'Toole: "Wait, wait! Just take it easy for a minute."
Guard Arden: "We aren't interested in waiting. Give. Us. The.
Girl."
O'Toole: "Lookit, I'm coming out alone. If I'm safe, she'll come out next."
Agent O'Toole takes his captured M9 pistol and sticks it in his belt at the small of his back, adjusting his shirt and suit jacket to hide the outline. Then he takes his flashlight and widens the beam as much as he can, holding it in his left hand as he puts both hands up and walks out of the room. Outside, he can see four or five flashlight beams shining at him from both corners of the T-intersection in front of him, with indistinct shapes of men holding guns at the end of the beams. O'Toole sneaks a quick glance to the side, making out the entrance to a side tunnel about forty feet backward and to his right. He takes a few sideways steps in the corridor, until the guards shout at him to stop and drop his flashlight.
O'Toole: "Cool it. Don't shoot, man."
Guard Arden: "Hands on your head."
Guard Vaughn: "Drop to your knees."
Pretending to be confused as to which he should do first, O'Toole concentrates for a few seconds as he drops his flashlight and then raises his hands slowly to put them on his head. He's looking for a flashbang on hanging on the web gear of the guard closest to him, a guy who hasn't spoken yet, but has stopped a few feet forward from the T-intersection and is holding his rifle steadily aimed at O'Toole's center mass. Once O'Toole can feel the flashbang with his telekinetic tendrils, he pulls the pin with a pickpocket's smooth touch and makes sure to hold on to the pin to avoid warning the guards with a tell-tale tingle if it hits the floor. Then he waits, squeezing his eyes shut and covering his ears with his hands.
Guard Arden: "On your knees, now!"
Guard Vaughn: "Don't make me shoot you, boy."
Guard3: "Do it!"
O'Toole: "I'm surrendering, I'm surrendering!"
In the tunnel, the flashbang explosion is an all-encompassing force. It's not a noise, it's the cessation of all sound embodied as a physical blast. Even with his hands over his ears and his eyes closed, O'Toole is blinded and deafened. He's less than fifteen feet away from the overwhelming wave of force. The guards are closer,
much closer in the case of three of them.
O'Toole lets himself drop to the ground, raising a PK shield between himself and the guards. O'Toole can feel rounds hitting the shield as he dives, probably fired reflexively and at random. He turns his dive into a roll and comes up further from the guards, on the right side of the tunnel, running for the side tunnel opening.
After the initial, probably accidental, burst, only one guard seems to have the presence of mind to fire his weapon in the direction of O'Toole, perhaps because he was partially shielded by the wall he was sheltering behind, but is clearly firing blind. O'Toole is frantically trying to blink afterimages from his retinas so he'll see something, anything, but keeps running blind even when that doesn't work. He dives for the tunnel opening as ricochets throw stone fragments around him.
Once O'Toole has scrambled to his feet again in the side tunnel, at least two more rifles and one pistol have begun firing down the main corridor that O'Toole came from, though O'Toole is hardly in a state to estimate this. All
he hears is ringing in his ears and all he sees are afterimages of blinking white spots in the darkness. The guards are almost certainly unaware where he is at the moment, but O'Toole is not interested in waiting for them to recover enough to start following him. He runs straight ahead into the completely dark tunnel, which he realises might be a bad idea as he trips over something.
The fall is painful, but not dangerous, and O'Toole runs his hands over what tripped him to figure out what it is. At first he thinks it's a sack of something heavy, maybe supplies, but then he realises that it's someone's leg and the outer surface is trousers. Shocked, he runs his hand upwards, looking to touch the rest of the body. As his hand touches something sticky and a sharp hard surface sticking out of it, O'Toole realises that there is no rest of the body. Just a severed leg.
Cursing under his breath, he scrambles to his feet again and manages to touch a wall with an extended hand. Using his sense of touch to navigate, O'Toole goes deeper into the darkness of the side tunnel. There is a foul odour in the air, but the air does not appear to be poisonous.
Once O'Toole thinks his eyes are a little less useless, he feels around in his pocket for a phone. He rejects his trusty old personal Nokia 3110 and keeps looking until he finds the Blackberry Torch he uses at work. Deftly working the phone without vision, O'Toole tuns on the light function. Holding his phone like a flashlight in his left hand, O'Toole then draws his pistol and moves on ahead with his light hand supporting his gun hand, the knuckles of which he drags lightly over the wall on his right side to back up his still limited vision.
O'Toole still doesn't hear a thing, so he doesn't know where the guards are, but he expects that they secured the office where he took cover and the other room with Burr, Townsend and Berrocal before coming after him. After all, they had no way to know Bell wasn't in there without searching the rooms. O'Toole figures he has some time to get futher away and presses on, taking care not to trip over anything, however. Before he has covered more than a hundred feet, he almost walks into a door which closes off the side tunnel.
Leaning against it, O'Toole sends telekinetic tendrils of energy to the other side of the door and feels around. It seems to be a fairly small room with lots of debris around. In one corner, there is something fairly soft, which O'Toole eventually determines to be a mattress. There's warmth emanating from the mattress, as O'Toole can find when he flutters his mental fingers around it, avoiding further touches for the time being. Slowly exploring the air above the mattress, O'Toole confirms his suspicions. Someone is breathing rhythmically on the mattress, asleep to all appearances. The breath is fairly weak and on the fast side for a sleeping human, suggesting a small person or a sick one.