“I’m sorry, Lisa,” Savannah said, “but who hired you?”
“Mr. Masters,” Lisa said. “He hired the entire on-site team.”
Fuck me sideways.
The building was full of Devlin’s minions, though why and what they were doing remained a mystery. Which was, of course, why we were there to breach the servers.
“Can we call this now?” I asked.
“Hold your position, Hayes,” Kat said.
My fingers itched like I was jonesing for something, and I was. Devlin’s head on a pike.
“I’ve set up a scan on the day’s street cam footage,” Lang said. “Hayes, if we detect potential hostiles, be on standby for us to call the extraction plan.”
“Roger that.” I’d memorized five different rescue plans that Lang and Bloom had developed, and I was ready for any one of them.
“Taking control of the elevator,” Pasco was saying, which meant Savannah and Wheeler were in it, on their way to the second floor. “And our friend Lisa is trying to make calls out from the landline and her cell phone. We’re blocking her and recording the numbers.”
Hopefully, the pot of shit at the end of that rainbow would be Devlin.
A minute later, Wheeler checked in. “We’re in the server room. I’m patching into the closed system.”
After another minute, Pasco confirmed success. “We’re receiving data. I’m showing four minutes, thirty-eight seconds to copy the relevant information.”
We were ninety-eight seconds ahead of our estimated mission time. Since we were trying for speed and not precision calibration between different ops elements, that was good news.
“Boss, permission to seize a couple of machines to create a false trail,” Wheeler said.
Smart. Potential hostiles in the building, which probably included Lisa, were likely to report Savannah’s visit to Devlin. He would want to know what she was doing there. Stealing hardware would make it look like those couple of pieces of equipment, and the data they contained, was all that she’d taken. It was a smokescreen to hide the fact that we were leaving with a download of all the secret data contained in that room.
Kat gave her permission, and then I heard the sound of Wheeler grunting, probably pulling out equipment and wires.
“What are you doing?” Savannah asked.
“We’ll explain later,” Wheeler told her. Good idea to keep her calm. Maybe he really was almost as good as he thought he was. “Can you put these servers in my backpack? If we make it look like we tried to physically remove servers, they’ll only be worried about whatever is on those two we’re takingwith us. They won’t realize we actually walked away with all their data.”
“I have an update on our unexpected employees,” Lang said in our ears. “Matching street cam images to facial recognition, I have the list of names. No criminal records, no permits to carry firearms, no former military or security specialists.”
Just run-of-the-mill lackeys. That was more good news because in case I had to breach the building for a rescue, I preferred not to have guys like me shooting at us.
“Hayes,” Bloom said, “trouble coming your way. The receptionist tried the elevator, then the fire door to the staircase, which Pasco has blocked. She’s probably trying to get to the person she attempted to call. Now she’s heading for the back door of the building.”
“I’m holding position out of sight,” I said. “And wondering what the hell she thinks she can do from out here.”
I found out seconds later when she burst through the back door and shouted up at the third-story windows. When that didn’t work, she hunted around on the ground, picked up a couple of sticks, and made a sad attempt to throw them. I couldn’t fault her logic, but her understanding of physics left a lot to be desired. Who was up there that she was so desperate to contact?
“Log team, did you run the heat signatures against Devlin’s known biometrics? Any chance he’s on the third floor?”
“You think this is my first day on the job, Hayes?” Lang snarled. “Yes, we ran them. No, he’s not there.”
“Roger that,” I muttered. But I couldn’t shake the feeling he was nearby.
Lisa was now digging through bushes, looking for something else to throw. I glanced at the buildings to either side. Given the number of issues we’d already had with this operation,I didn’t like the odds of someone in one of those offices spotting her and coming to help, cell phone in hand.
“Boss, we could have a spectacle on our hands in a minute,” I said.
“Permission to restrain her, Hayes.”
