Page 19

“Welcome to the shitshow,” Boone said by way of greeting to Thomas.

“I’d love to say I’m happy to be here, but I left my husband and son playing on a beach in Capri, so the sooner we get this shit handled, the sooner I can get back to my double-life as a privileged zero point one percenter.”

“You didn’t have to make the trip,” Boone said. “We’ve got things under control. We’re chasing down a lead. We just have to lay a trap and catch them in the act.”

“I couldn’t help but notice the two CID agents frantically searching for your…boyfriend? I thought you agreed you would keep him under lock and key?” Thomas countered.

Boone sighed, pulling the bottle of Tums from his desk, opening it, then upending it into his mouth.

“You know there’s an actual dosage for those, right?” Thomas asked, his tone sounding faintly amused.

“Why do people keep saying that to me?” Boone muttered.

Thomas snorted. “Well, you are taller than a skyscraper. I suppose a little extra can’t hurt.”

Boone chewed the six tablets aggressively, liking the way they felt when they broke apart on his tongue. Something wasn’t sitting right with him, but he couldn’t figure out what. He’d texted Payton, and he’d said he was fine. Maybe he should have called, but with Thomas there, it hadn’t seemed prudent at that moment. He was already regretting it.

“Excuse me for a second,” Boone said when he couldn’t take it anymore.

He found West’s number. He answered on the second ring. “Can you do me a favor and go monitor Payton and Remi in the security office? I don’t know what they’re doing, but I would feel better if they were—” He cut himself off, frowning as Payton’s number appeared. “Oh, wait. He’s calling me. Just get over there when you can.”

He switched over to Payton’s call. “Hey, is everything—” There was a sound like static over the microphone. “Payton?”

“What’s going on?” Thomas asked.

“I’m not sure,” Boone said quietly, hitting the speaker button just as a female voice said, “I should hope so. That’s why I shot him in the chest.”

“Who is that?” Thomas asked, shifting closer in his chair. “Is that Suri?”

Boone nodded absently. Thomas picked up his own phone. As soon as someone answered, he said, “Get to the security room. Now. We have a situation. Do nothing until I say. Get Park in here now.”

He hung up without waiting for an answer.

“I’m lost,” they heard Payton say. “Why are you doing this?”

“That’s a very long story.” There was a sound like glass being crushed. “But I suppose we’ll have time.”

“What are you doing?” Payton asked, following her movements. “Has that been there the whole time? You’re barricading the door?”

Boone’s heart rate skyrocketed. Payton sounded almost bored as he narrated the events playing out, clearly for their benefit.

“You don’t have to point the gun at us. You’re ten feet away. If one of us charges you, you’ll have plenty of time to respond.”

“You psychopaths are so practical,” Suri said with a chuckle.

“She clearly doesn’t know we’re listening,” Boone said, stating the obvious. He felt like his teeth were sweating, his breaths coming faster.

“Did you suspect Suri?” Thomas asked quietly, even though Boone had already muted their side of the call so they didn’t give away their advantage.

“Couldn’t you at least put Pike’s body out in the hallway or something? That bloody rattling and gasping for air is just…grating.”

“You’re awfully delicate for a known serial killer,” she said, sounding slightly closer than she was before.

“I just don’t understand your end game,” Payton murmured.

Boone didn’t either. His office door flung open, and Park and Gift entered. Boone waved them inside.

“What’s happening?” Gift asked, staring down at Boone’s phone where it sat face up on the wooden surface.

“You’ve already ruined my endgame,” Suri said, irritation bleeding into her words. “Remi was supposed to join us, but it appears we were a little too lax with our recruitment tactics,” she said in a sing-song tone. “Oh, well. No time like the present to get things back on track. Remi, be a dear and get me into that room, will you?”

“W-What?” Remi stammered.

“Is that…Suri?” Gift asked, looking at Park with wide eyes.

“I need access to that room. You’re going to get it for me. If not, you’re of no use to me.” There was a sound like someone’s shoes scuffling. “You’re already of no use to me,” she said, far too close to Payton for Boone’s liking.

“You gonna kill me, too?” Payton asked, like he was ordering a cup of coffee. “That’s a lot of mess to clean up.”

“Wouldn’t be the first time.”

“If you kill him, you might as well just kill me, too,” Remi said.

“You Peregrines are shockingly loyal. It’s kind of adorable. Completely useless in our line of work, but adorable nonetheless.”

“You need to listen to me,” Remi said. “Even if I wanted to help you, I can’t. This is West’s system. Why not just…recruit him?”

“Correction: it was West’s system. Kendrick modified it too much for someone of West’s limited training to crack. But not you, beta . Your MIT transcripts showed some of your pet projects while there. They would love you at DARPA. I can make that happen for you.”

“Are you trying to bribe me right now?” Remi asked. “With…employment?”

Suri made a noncommittal noise. “I’m just saying there’s room for negotiation. If you can get me into that room quickly, you can access whatever you like. There’s enough secrets on those servers to make the next four generations of your family disgustingly wealthy.”

“And you want to share that with me?” Remi asked, his tone very much implying he didn’t believe her.

“I couldn't care less what you do. I just need to pop in and make a few tweaks. Once I do, I’ll let you go and I’ll disappear.”

Yeah, right.

Payton snorted at her words. It unknotted something in Boone’s chest. Payton would never fall for any of Suri’s lies. Neither of them would. But Suri had to know that. She wasn’t planning on letting either of them walk out alive.

“What does she want?” Thomas murmured, looking from Boone to Park, then back again.

“I have no idea,” Boone said. “As far as I knew, nobody knew or cared about the servers in that room except Kendrick himself.”

As if reading Boone’s mind, Payton asked. “What is it you need? How much are they paying you to betray your country? Are you selling secrets to foreign governments like Kendrick?”

Suri gave a delighted laugh. “You idiot. I am foreign governments.”

“You’re a double agent,” Remi said, voice dripping with disgust. “Did Kendrick know?”

“Of course, he did. Say what you want about the man, he was meticulous. He brought me in to use me as a liaison between the sellers and himself, ensuring that, if caught, I’d be the one to go down for it.”

Boone frowned. Was she attempting to make them feel sorry for her? She really was crazy.

“Imagine wanting sympathy for betraying your country,” Park muttered, lip curled.

“I’m sorry if I sound a bit confused,” Payton asked, “but are you planning on picking up where Kendrick left off? Were those emails just…subterfuge so you could start selling government secrets to the highest bidder?”

Suri sucked her teeth. “Hardly. Those emails were to prove to you brats that actions have consequences. That propaganda and false flag operations can have catastrophic outcomes. I tried to show you just using real life drone footage, but you didn’t even care. You just sat there, making snide comments, as if you were playing a video game.”

“We need eyes in there,” Boone said. “Now.”

“The only person who can do that is West,” Park recalled.

Park stepped away from the desk, then made a phone call, his calm voice the antithesis of Suri, who seemed to grow increasingly agitated by the second. What was so important to her she would do all this to get into that room? She hadn’t answered Payton’s question about whether she planned to take over for Kendrick.

“To be fair, half of us are psychopaths. You’re never going to get us to have empathy because we just don’t have that ability. You can’t make us feel sorry for you or anyone else. We’re just not wired that way.”

There was a terrible moment of silence where things felt like they stretched on forever, then she said, “I suppose you’re right. That is why your Air Force targets gamers for their recruitment. It’s much easier to slaughter babies and kindergartners when they’re not real people, just a game.”

Just a game? Had she fallen for some other country’s propaganda? Was that what this was about? Or had she always been some kind of sleeper agent just lying in wait? How had Boone never noticed before?

“I assure you, painting a target on my back didn’t teach anyone anything,” Payton said. “Though, I suppose targeting Remi was a good start. People like him like they do Gift. They mistake his quiet for weakness and want to protect him.”

Once more, Suri made a noise in the affirmative. “Targeting Remi was two-fold. One: as you said, he’s someone who everybody appears to like. I thought the handlers would immediately rush to his defense. Two: I hoped he’d heed the warning to keep his nose out of our business. But neither of those things happened. So, now, I have to resort to outright violence.”

West arrived with a single knock, sweeping inside and promptly kicking Boone out of his seat. “Sorry, this is the only computer outside of the security office with the access I need for this.”

Boone grunted something that he hoped sounded like acquiescence as he watched West’s hands fly across the screen. “Can you access the security cameras?”

“That won’t help us. But I can do…this,” he said, then hit a button.

Boone swallowed a gasp as a sliver of Payton’s head appeared before him. He leaned over West, not even the slightest bit sorry for encroaching on his personal space. “Why not pick a better camera angle?”

West glowered at him. “Of the three webcams, the one in the center is the only one with the camera deployed. If I tried the other two, it would just be black screens. We’ll be lucky if she doesn’t notice the tiny green light. At least we know Suri’s position within the room now.

“But why target Payton?” Remi asked from the right side of the website, out of frame.

“That one’s easy,” Payton said. “She was just trying to frame me with the added bonus of causing chaos in the school so she could get you here, in this room. Which worked. I’ll give you that.”

She scoffed. “You’re always so glib. It’s easy when you’ve never suffered a consequence in your life. You’re all spoiled brats. But you’ll learn soon,” she said. “You’ll learn that your government will lie to your face, have you unwittingly massacring innocent people, and if you fuck up, they’ll leave you to die in a burning building.”

They watched as Suri grabbed the hem of her skirt and yanked it upwards, revealing severe burn scars all along her leg. It occurred to Boone then that he’d never seen Suri in anything but pants and long skirts. How long ago had that happened? Why hadn’t he heard about that?

“Have you ever almost been burned alive?” she asked Payton and Remi casually. “I laid there for what felt like hours, even though it was probably only seconds. Have you ever smelled burning human flesh? I’d never been so grateful to be a vegetarian in my life. The smell still makes me sick.”

“You betrayed your country because they left you behind during an operation?” Remi asked.

Suri’s gaze darted to his, her face contorting in rage. “My country betrayed me. They told us that the house they were taking out was full of insurgents, terrorists. It wasn’t. It was a shelter. The people inside were humanitarian workers.” She began to pace the small space like a caged panther. “That’s when I realized they’d been lying to our face for decades, maybe since the beginning. I laid there listening to people dying around me, and I decided if I got out of there, I would burn it all down.”

“And you think you’ll do it with what’s on those servers?” Payton asked.

“I won’t lie. The people I work for want what’s on those servers, but my priority is getting in there and erasing the files Kendrick has on me. Anything else is just a bonus. We all knew going in that the success rate was low…at least without Remi.”

Remi huffed out an exasperated breath. “It can’t be done. Even if I could get you past the code, there’s no way to get you past the ocular scanner, unless you have one of Kendrick’s eyeballs in your pocket.”

“You have an hour to figure out how to get me into that room. Then I start shooting off body parts.”

“You’re not listening ,” Remi snapped. “West designed this system to be so complex that, no matter what happened, no matter how good at stealing a person was, there would always be one more hoop to jump through…unless you had the keys.”

“We tried to find the keys, but they’re nowhere. We tried hacking into the security system from the outside, but nothing worked,” she said. “One system shouldn’t be this hard to crack.” She looked at Remi, jaw jutting forward. “I know you can do it.”

Remi snorted. “I appreciate the vote of confidence and all, but you’re crazy.”

“Can we reboot the system Jurassic Park style?” Payton asked. “Like would that temporarily knock the system offline and open the doors to the server room?”

There was a rather judgmental silence that followed before Remi said, “This is a military base. Of course not.”

“You’re not leaving here until I get what I came for,” Suri said. “So, figure it out, beta .”

Remi’s hand came into view as he waved it around. “I don’t know how to?—”

Suri marched forward, shoving the gun barrel against Payton’s head. “Figure it out, or I will blow the back of his skull off. Are we clear?” She glanced to the side, then did a double-take, leaning in until it was just her eye in the frame. “Well, that was idiotic.”

Boone gasped at the sound of a gunshot just before the screen went black.

“Fuck!” he shouted, clenching his hands into fists as he fought the urge to punch a hole in the wall. “I’m going down there. I’ll beat the door down if I have to. I don’t fucking care. Get CID. Get the fucking SEAL team. We’re getting them out of there now. She’s going to kill them when she realizes she can’t get whatever it is she wants.”

“Easy,” Park said, placing a hand on his shoulder.

Boone jerked away from his touch. “Don’t even attempt to tell me to calm down right now. When this was Gift in this position, you were ready to go scorched earth on Kendrick.”

“Boone,” Thomas said, not shouting, but his tone was sharp enough to snap his head up. “You’re no good to him in this state. We need a plan, and we need it fast. We know that what she’s asking for can’t be done.”

The door burst open, and Drake stormed in. “What the fuck is going on in the security office? Why are Archer and Mac refusing to let me in? Why are there fucking gunshots? Where’s Remi? What the fuck is happening?”

“You need to calm down, or the only thing about to happen is you getting detained,” Boone said. Somehow, Drake’s fury calmed Boone’s nerves, allowing him to push past the fear to the rational part of his brain. He took a deep breath and let it out. “Suri has Payton and Remi held hostage. Pike’s been shot. She wants Remi to get her into the server room. We all know he can’t do it. The system is designed to be impenetrable. We are trying to come up with a plan to extract them…alive.”

Drake’s nostrils flared, his chest rising and falling rapidly. “I knew I shouldn’t have left him alone. He never listens to me. Fuck. How do we fix this?”

Thomas stepped forward. “We know they can’t hack the system. Soon, Suri will know that, too. Once that sinks in she will have to deal with the fact that she’s trapped, and she will attempt to use one of them as a hostage. So, let’s go through this step by step and think about what we know.”

“We know she barricaded the door and broke the scanner,” Boone muttered. “We just don’t know with what information.”

“We can blow the door off the hinges,” Thomas said like it was nothing, like he carried C-4 in his briefcase instead of paperwork. “What else?”

“We know she has a gun,” Gift said, teary-eyed. “And that it’s pointed at Payton’s head.”

Boone did his best to ignore the way Drake’s shoulders sagged a bit in relief that the gun wasn’t on Remi. He probably would have felt the same way. Not that he’d admit that out loud.

Park rubbed Gift’s back comfortingly, but he seemed distracted. Deep in thought.

“Is there anything they can use to defend themselves?” Boone asked, looking at West expectantly. “A butter knife? A fire extinguisher? Anything?”

West shook his head, but then stopped, his eyes going wide. “Actually, maybe there is.” He glanced at Park. “I need your big brain here. If someone were to trigger the fire alarm for the server room, and that room filled with FM-200, how fast would we have to get them out before they were in danger?”

Park frowned, eyes rolling up and to the right, like he was trying to recall a complex math problem. Maybe he was. “FM-200 is heptafluoropropane. It works by displacing oxygen and starving the fire. It’s considered safe, unless it’s deployed in confined spaces…like the security office.”

“Would it kill them?” Thomas asked. “Or would they just have a really bad day?”

Park shook his head. “Without an active fire, there would be no risk of compounding problems, such as burns or smoke inhalation. They’d have dizziness, lightheadedness, possibly a headache. But they’d live…except maybe for Pike.”

They all looked at Boone’s phone. It had been eerily silent for what felt like hours. “We don’t even know if he’s still alive. We have to focus on the other two first,” he said, words raw.

“I agree. It’s our best bet,” Thomas agreed, looking at Boone.

Before Boone could answer, Park added, “We would still need to breach the room in two minutes or less. They’ll likely already be unconscious, but once they’re out of the room, recovery shouldn’t take more than ten to fifteen minutes at most. ”

Boone started nodding. “Okay, so we trigger the fire alarm, deploy the FM-200, have our guys blow the door, shock and awe it off the hinges, and drag everyone out with no additional casualties.” He looked around at the others in the room. “Why does that sound too easy?”

“Because it is,” West said. “We have a big problem. The first is that the alarm has to be tripped from the security office, as there is no active fire.”

“Goddammit!” Boone shouted, slamming his fist on the desk beside West. “Then why even bring it up?”

The moment the words left his mouth, he winced, then looked at his phone, remembering it was muted.

Suri’s voice sounded through the speaker, far too close to Payton for Boone’s liking. “Clock’s ticking, beta . I’m sure you prefer your friend with no holes in him. And your instructor isn’t looking so good.”

Boone forced his attention back to the conversation at hand.

“We were spit-balling ideas. You asked about a fire extinguisher. That’s the first thing that came to mind,” West said, immediately defensive.

Drake stopped his pacing to glare at West. “How about you be helpful?—”

“Shut up,” Gift said, cutting Drake off. “You can talk to them, right? We can talk to them.”

“What? How?” Thomas asked.

“We have that internal messaging app? The one we only use to ask our teachers a question. We can still use it to talk to each other, we just don’t because we can text, which is way easier,” Gift explained, looking at Park for confirmation. “Can’t you send Remi a message and tell him to trigger the fire alarm?”

“Not Remi,” West said. When they all looked at him, he continued, “Suri might have put a gun to Payton’s head, but her eyes will be on Remi. Payton can’t give her what she wants.”

“But if you send a message and she sees it, we’re fucked,” Drake countered. “She’ll start shooting. Maybe she’ll kill Payton, or maybe she’ll start blowing holes in Remi. That’s a huge risk.”

“Not to mention if she sees him typing, we’re screwed,” Park added.

“What if I send it?” Gift asked. “Then it won’t look so strange. I could make it look like I’m reaching out about something totally normal. Well, as normal as we get around here. Nobody knows that I know what’s happening in there. Last time Suri saw me, I was sitting in class with the others at the assembly.”

“I doubt Payton signed into his messaging app when he sat down. He wouldn’t bother. The computer was already up and running.”

“What computer is it?” Drake asked.

“The one on the right,” West said. “Terminal three. Where Remi sat yesterday as well.”

“Then message Remi. He always forgets to sign out,” Drake said.

“Uh, guys, not to be a total downer again, but won’t Suri notice if Payton uses the computer to trigger the fire alarm?” Park asked, expression growing grim. “No matter how locked in she is on Remi, there’s no way she’s gonna let Payton play around on the computer.”

“What if he doesn’t have to push a button at all?” Thomas asked.

“What do you mean?”

“You said Boone has an administrative computer,” Thomas said. “Whenever my IT people need to fix something for me, they remote access my system. What’s stopping you from remote accessing the system and triggering it from out here?”

“It’s gonna flash a big red box on the screen that warns I’m remotely accessing the system. It’s kinda hard to miss. There is no guarantee she won’t notice it, and Payton will have to acknowledge it by pressing a button.”

“How long will it take you to trigger the fire alarm?”

“Once he hits the button to give me access?” West said. “Thirty seconds, maybe less. I run those drills every ninety days. I could do it in my sleep. There will be a warning before it deploys. I cannot stop that. There’s no override. That will be the most dangerous part. The thirty-second delay.”

“Shit.”

“It will probably startle her,” Thomas said. “Payton will try to take advantage.”

Boone was shaking his head. “It’s too dangerous.”

“You remember your boy toy is about to be an actual black ops agent, right?” Drake snapped. “You act like he’s not a cold-blooded killer with a literal body count ten deep at least.”

Boone knew he was right. He did. But it was Payton. His Payton. His little monster. Nobody knew him like Boone. Nobody understood Boone like Payton. He’d tried so hard to resist him, but now the thought that he could lose him…again, less than forty-eight hours after a previous attempt on his life… He hadn’t even had time to love him.

“He’s going to be fine,” Thomas said. “I know you’re panicking, but he’s more than capable of handling a woman with a gun for thirty seconds. Then he’ll be back in your arms.”

Boone gave a stilted nod, then leaned against his desk to scrub his hands over his face. “Yeah, make the calls.”

Thomas called Archer. “I need that door off its hinges, stat. That means explosives and a battering ram. Once you have what you need, call me back. Don’t dilly-dally.”

Boone didn’t realize Archer was on speaker until he scoffed. “I don’t dilly-dally. I may stroll, meander, and occasionally even lollygag, but never dilly-dally.”

“Archer,” Thomas said, the warning in his tone clear.

“Yeah, yeah. People have no sense of humor around here. Give me ten,” Archer muttered.

The minutes dripped by like molasses, Boone’s anxiety ratcheting up with each passing second. He ignored the judgment on the other’s faces as he chewed through the rest of his Tums.

Finally, the call came in. This time, it was Mac. “We’re ready to breach.”

“Hold for my order,” Thomas said.

“Roger that,” Mac answered.

Everyone gathered around West as he sat at Boone’s desk. He hit a few buttons and then glanced around. “Are we sure about this?”

“Do it,” Boone muttered.

West hit the button. Payton shifted in his seat, the sound like a creaky boat as his clothing rubbed against the speaker.

“I’m in,” West cried.

“Stand by,” Thomas told Mac. “Once you breach, you need all four of them out in under two minutes.”

“We didn’t come alone,” Mac said, sounding like he was talking to him from a paper tube. “We’re masked and ready. We’ve got this.”

“Done!” West cried.

A sharp foghorn-like alarm came through the speaker.

“What the fuck is that?”

Warning. A fire suppression system has been activated. Please evacuate the area immediately. Discharge will occur in thirty seconds.

“What did you do?” Suri shouted.

“Nothing!” Remi cried. “I didn’t do it.”

Repeat: Fire suppression system active. Discharge imminent. Evacuate now.

There was a sharp cry, then the sound of something crashing to the floor.

“Fifteen seconds to deployment,” West said, shouting to be heard over the booming voice of the evacuation message. “Ten… Five…”

There was a sound like a hissing snake, and then the coughing started. What seemed like an hour later, but was, in actuality, only ten seconds or less, three solid thumps sounded through the speaker, along with what sounded like a chair falling over.

Then…silence.

Boone’s insides twisted like balloon animals as Thomas barked, “Now! Breach now! Two minutes.”

The explosion had them all wincing away from the phone’s speaker, and then three beeps sounded. Payton’s phone had disconnected.

Boone was running towards the door before he even registered his feet moving.