With their lives flashing before their eyes, no one immediately realized that the two miniguns were firing blanks. But, amid the chaos created, the blast door finished its slow rise. As it passed, Bodhi grasped the edge and pulled, shooting himself forward across the tunnel’s ceiling.
By the time the agents began realizing they hadn’t been sawed in half by the guns, Bodhi had passed overhead, dropped a series of flash grenades into their numbers, and flipped off the ceiling to land behind the last man at the back.
He began moving amongst them in the chaos. The men he ducked and dodged between were all wearing gear that looked—well a lot like his own—and none realized quick enough that an enemy was working his way through them from the rear.
By the time Perth and Tam ran out of blanks, only two of the agents were still on their feet. One wobbled to his knees, a hand going to his neck where he’d felt a small prick a moment before he got so very sleepy. He fought a losing battle to hold onto consciousness before falling flat onto the tunnel floor. By then, the last agent standing was spun around, finding Bodhi’s grip far greater than his size suggested.
As Perth and Tamsworth stood, they knocked over the small piles of spent shells that had formed around them while they fired. Another expended tranq cartridge dropped from Bodhi’s wrist.
He did a double check, looking around to be sure all the agents on the floor were out. “Drawbridge down and operation sleepy town complete . . . you’re welcome.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
SURROUNDING HER, THE situation in the command center was increasingly volatile. Everything was disordered noise around her, but for a moment, as her guards escorted Jonathan in, Olivia didn’t hear it.
Ears plugged, blindfolded, his shackles so cumbersome he was forced to walk in tiny uncomfortable steps—Harrison and her three guards had to guide him shambling to a seat where his wrist cuffs could be chained to a metal table.
He was helpless. She could order a bullet put in his brain any second and he wouldn’t even be able to hear the gun being cocked. Yet . . .
Olivia couldn’t shake a growing certainty that tonight she was going to lose to this man. Command wouldn’t forgive the failure if The Mark escaped—too much time and too many resources had been burned to acquire him. Her career would come to an end.
She had to pry her eyes away from Jonathan, and as she did the cacophony of sound in the command center returned to her awareness. All around her were reports of failed communications, power outages, triggered facility alarms.
She took a long breath.
Olivia had found that maintaining control in overwhelming circumstances was a matter of compartmentalization. Treat each problem like a bomb. Use the tools you must to diffuse or dispose of the threat, prioritize the bombs in the order they’re most likely to explode.
Whatever you do—don’t over complicate it.
Under normal circumstances, this saw her through, but tonight was different. She was starting to see the mistakes she’d made, since the moment she’d spoken to this man in the interrogation room, that had led to this moment. She’d never questioned her instincts before, but now she wondered if every order she gave was just another domino falling.
He had said he’d escape with the alien. She’d taken the threat seriously, prepared for a local assault on the hangar. The whole time, she’d underestimated his ambition. Hadn’t seen the bigger picture. Never considered that he wasn’t simply planning to take the alien—but every person of interest The Cell had under surveillance.
She’d given the order to bring all the subjects into custody. But by the time they’d realized what was happening she had already been certain it was too late to matter. The real rescue operation had begun hours before a single one of his allies set foot inside her facility. She saw now that they had synchronized their attack so that it began while they were distracted, still reacting to the chaos of learning all the subjects were rapidly disappearing.
Somehow, Jonathan Tibbs had coordinated a nationwide operation from inside the most secure prison she had to put him in. He’d done it under constant surveillance—and her only lead as to how any of it was done was an invisible worm on a video feed.
The reports inside the facility were coming at her like machine gun fire.
“The phone lines are down. Can’t get a line out.”
“Internet’s down. Can’t ping the server.”
“The radios are jammed. All I hear is . . .”
The entire room went quiet when the sound was played at full volume. Everyone recognized the brand of the distortion. Every single agent had been hearing that noise from surveillance since their first day with The Cell.
That moment of quiet only ended when another analyst reported another equipment failure, another avenue cut off—a more foreboding picture of their future painted. Olivia kept her expression cement, not letting her charges see through the mask as they delivered each gut punch.
As the implications stacked up, she grew warier of even turning her gaze to the helpless man in the chair. Even with the blindfold on she feared she’d find him staring back at her.
“Olivia,” Rivers said. “You alright?”
She realized she had been staring off into space. Rivers had leaned in close to discreetly snap her out of it. She wanted to slap herself right there, but instead she pressed her fear down and forced herself to take stock.
They were cut off from all the other branches of The Cell. By the time she found a way to reestablish contact, every subject throughout the US might be in the wind. Nothing she could do about that, so she was done thinking about it.
She was cut off from the surface. The surrounding base might not even know anything was happening in the hangar, let alone underneath it. Maybe help was coming but she couldn’t count on it.
She couldn’t communicate with her people throughout the facility. That meant the only agents under her command were the ones standing in the same room with her.
That was when the lights went out. The moment was short lived, the red emergency lights kicking on after the briefest moment in darkness. But in the seconds that followed, alarms throughout the entire facility began to blare.
“We’ve got activity in the hangar!”
Olivia whirled on the security monitors just in time to see the attack beginning.
This deep underground, they couldn’t feel the explosions, but she could see that two opposite walls of the hangar had burst inward with small, localized explosives. Her people on the surface, mostly analysts, were rapidly thrown into disarray. She was relieved to see that the surface level response team was quick to move in on the situation—geared and ready—expecting an attack. With the communications down, they had to take initiative on their own. They poured out of the hallway like a well-oiled machine and spread out to take protective positions around the analysts.
After a moment of uncertainty, as they watched the still smoking walls of the hangar for some sign of an assault, a single man, covered head to toe in black, dropped from the ceiling.
In the next few moments, Olivia stared with growing disbelief at the screen.
As she checked the various angles on the hangar, the sheer choreography playing out in front of her was ridiculous. The man landed in a group of over thirty well-armed agents and twenty analysts—and he was making them all look like goons from a Jackie Chan movie.
She watched him as he swept the legs out from under a man and injected something from beneath his wrist. She watched him hurdle over cubicles and pallets of unpacked supplies with gun fire trailing him. She saw him as he tilted his head at the last possible instant to dodge a pistol bullet, before disarming the man, whipping him about and tossing him over his shoulder. He shoulder-rolled over the floor, into close quarters combat with two of her men and slapped both of their guns away—and his foot only left the ground once.
This wasn’t real. This was Hollywood cinematography.
Her eyes narrowed as she watched men being whit
tled down on the surface until she started to wonder if the ridiculousness was the point. As the thought occurred to her, she realized there was no way for her to know. She couldn’t contact anyone in that room with eyes on what was happening. She couldn’t contact anyone in the damn facility.
She realized—the only equipment that hadn’t failed was the cameras.
Soon, she was sifting through footage of all four wings. Looking through empty hallways and conference rooms, laboratories where the researchers were all dropping their work in response to facility-wide alarms. Armories where her underground security teams were pouring out heavily armed.
As she scanned over them, suspicion suddenly became reality. She saw herself, walking down a hallway with thirty armed guards trailing behind her. Meanwhile, in the feed showing the very command room she was standing in, there was an almost empty room.
Almost, because one person remained. Jonathan still sat at the very table he did now. Except, the Jonathan in the video wasn’t cuffed or blindfolded. He . . . he appeared to be playing solitaire. Then he looked at the camera and waved.
Her security cameras had just become worse than useless—they were actively feeding her people misinformation . . . and she couldn’t even tell anyone outside this room to turn off their screens.
Jonathan’s allies—Jonathan—now had more control over the facility than she did. She forced herself to look at him. The real him, still sitting in that room. Behind the blindfold and ear plugs he acted as though he were blissfully unaware of the chaos.
She couldn’t even confirm that the ninja dispatching agents in the hangar was real. If he was, then one of the top strategic advantages of this location was useless. This hangar was inside a military base. It was surrounded by miles of secured fencing, check points, and controlled air space. No one strolled inside unseen and no human aircraft got close without being detected. If the ninja were real, he’d appeared inside the hangar itself. Like The Mark—he could teleport.
So, what was immediately obvious—whoever was attacking them was doing so with the assistance of alien technology. Olivia was either dealing with another alien—or The Mark had already given his human allies access to his technology. Either way, the people coming for Jonathan controlled the very thing she was meant to acquire and, thus far, this attack seemed to be going exactly as Jonathan promised her.
Was she losing control or just now realizing she’d never had it?
She still had the trigger. Why? Why had Jonathan promised he wouldn’t stop her from using it?
Beneath her, the floor began to rumble. The voices in the room went quiet as they stared down at their feet. The lights and electronics all flickered erratically, a low growl like an explosion from a nearby corridor seemed to roll past. Then, the rumble didn’t build, but became a sudden violent jolt.
Anyone who hadn’t grabbed hold of something was thrown to the floor. Olivia, now on the ground, found she was holding her breath—surprised to be alive. She’d imagined a wall of fire bursting through the command center door, or the cement ceiling collapsing to bury her under six stories of dirt.
They weren’t new visions.
They were the very things she knew would follow if she hit the trigger in her pocket. She’d thought the charges had been set off. Triggered somehow by the people attacking them.
Cement dust still raining down on her from the ceiling. The lights stopped flickering. She breathed.
“What just got hit?”
“Armory,” Rivers replied. “The feed just went to static.”
She’d spent too much time letting fear play games with her thoughts. Letting things happen—she had to act.
“Ignore the monitors,” Olivia said as she got to her feet. “Turn them off. Don’t trust anything you haven’t seen with your own eyes.”
She took in the faces watching her and tried to pick the three she thought most expendable. “You, you, and you. Each of you are heading to the other wings, tell whoever is in charge that the monitors are compromised. They’re using them against us. We are going to have to clear this facility the old-fashioned way. Now go!”
As the three analysts blinked in disbelief, the most obnoxious of wolf whistles sounded out from the adjacent room. Every head turned to look at Jonathan as he yelled, “This sure is getting exciting!”
“Go,” Olivia repeated to the analysts, before turning to Jonathan. Her cement gaze contained a world of rage. Beneath that blindfold he had the look of a child getting on his first roller coaster at the fair.
“Sorry,” he yelled. “Am I too loud, I can’t hear myself!”
His behavior was affecting her already worried agents. This attack, it had begun in near perfect sync, not just with the disappearance of subjects throughout the US, but with Harrison bringing him here from the containment shell. The alarms had begun to blare within seconds of his restraints being locked to that table.
“Rivers, Harrison, Rolland,” Olivia said, already heading toward the room. “The rest of you, anything comes through the door you don’t recognize, take it down.”
As she stepped into the room with Jonathan, she looked at Harrison. “Take them out, I want to talk to him.”
With a nod to Rolland, she pulled her firearm as Harrison took the plugs from Jonathan’s ears.
“How many—”
“Six or more,” Jonathan said, answering before she could even finish the question.
“. . . or more?” Olivia asked.
“It’s like I told you. They’ll be prepared to deal with whatever comes at them. Might mean they need more or less.”
“How many more could be out—”
“I really doubt there are more than ten.”
“The feeds from the hangar—”
“The Ninja’s real,” Jonathan said. “Everything else . . . meh.”
Rivers came to stand beside her. “If that is true, these men aren’t walking in here.”
“No, manifesting inside,” Olivia said.
“Doesn’t make sense,” Rivers said. “Why come at us like this if they can just appear anywhere?”
He nodded at Jonathan. “He isn’t in the shell, so why not just beam him out?”
“How about it, Tibbs?” Olivia asked.
“I think they’re all good questions,” Jonathan said.
Olivia gave Harrison a look. The look passed to Rolland. She didn’t waste a second considering. Her hand grabbed the back of his head and slammed it down on the metal table.
“Ouch,” Jonathan said, with the same level of distress as someone who’d just stubbed their toe.
Olivia leaned down, staring at the blindfold. “Why aren’t they retrieving you?”
“Maybe . . . we’re too deep underground? No . . . that’s ridiculous. Maybe they can’t tell when I’m outside the giant Easter egg? Hmmm, no, wait, that doesn’t make any sense either. I mean, if these are my people, they’d expect you to put me right back in there the moment you realize that folks are teleporting in and out of your top-secret facility.”
Olivia skipped Harrison this time and looked directly at Rolland.
Jonathan’s head slammed down on the table again. As she sat him up, Jonathan groaned—a cut having opened over his left eye.
“Okay, I’m a little dizzy . . . don’t worry though, I’m still happy to help you guys think this through.”
Rolland cocked her firearm and placed the steel barrel against the back of his head.
“Okay. Wait, wait, wait, okay,” Jonathan said. “I’m thinking about it all wrong. Maybe they want me right here? Maybe they need me here . . . or maybe . . . I told them this was where I needed to be.”
The barrel didn’t bother him, and he seemed to revel in how easy it was to waste their time. It was unsettling, because every time she gave him the chance to speak, she felt less sure of anything. Even when what he said sounded credible, she had to second guess it—suspect every word a trap.
“What happened to your word. You promised everything yo
u told me would be true,” Olivia said.
He leaned forward, his head still a bit wobbly from its last collision with the table. “Why do you think I keep saying maybe?”
Her eyes narrowed. But just as she was considering broken fingers, he sighed. Beneath the blindfold he looked at her as though she were ruining the fun.
“Fine, I’m still here, because there is a bigger picture. I’m still here, because we’re all going on a journey together, and you guys need a guide. But, mostly . . .” His fingers moved, pointing to a clock over the door as though he’d known it was there without having to see it as he said. “Because I needed to stall you a bit longer. See, now we’re past the point of you hurting anyone.”
Her glance went back and forth between him and the clock. Olivia tilted her head, stood up straight and turned to Rivers. “Get Leah, get his friends. We’ll see how clever he thinks he is when the gun is pointed at their heads.”
Rivers nodded, moving to carry out the order. Olivia grabbed his shoulder, leaned in close to whisper. “Keep them restrained.”
“Of course,” he said.
“Including Leah. Don’t trust her,” Olivia said.
Rivers nodded, then signaled for two of Harrison’s guards to follow him.
“We’ll fall back to the lower chamber if this position is compromised,” Olivia said.
Rivers nodded, and then was gone.
“I told you to think long and hard about our relationship before you hurt my friends,” Jonathan said. His expression had lost its smugness, he’d exchanged it for an honest one.
“Stand him up,” Olivia barked.
Rolland moved to free his cuffs and, as he stood, blood ran down from the cut over his eye.
“Mr. Tibbs, in my opinion our relationship is rapidly nearing its conclusion,” Olivia said. “You would do well to realize that your friends’ fates depend on you now.”
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