Authors: Ben Sussman
Slight weakness in his left knee where a stray oar clipped him two years ago
.
To the guard’s left was an empty office chair, slightly spinning. That told Matt that Tim’s partner had recently vacated the seat, most likely for a quick bathroom break since he knew that they were supposed to be on duty together at all times. Tim’s eyes lit up with recognition as Matt entered. Ashley entered behind him as the front door swung shut.
“Mr. Weatherly,” Tim smiled. “Nice to see you. Anything I can help you with?”
Matt kept moving forward, taking the floor in large strides. He kept his face open and friendly. “Hi, Tim. I was wondering-”
By the end of his sentence, he was at the desk. Before the guard could react, Matt leapt on to its surface, kicking the desk phone away from Tim’s reach. Bewilderment spread across the young man’s face as he stood up, fumbling for his fastened gun holster. Matt hopped down and crouched, swinging his leg around and connecting with the back of Tim’s left knee. The guard cried out in pain, instinctively grabbing his injured leg. Matt sprang up, planting himself behind Tim and wrapping his forearm around the guard’s neck.
“I’m sorry,” he whispered as Tim struggled. After several seconds, the security guard’s eyes drooped and Matt felt his body slacken. As Tim’s head slumped, Matt’s view was cleared to see Ashley standing in open-mouth shock in front of the desk.
“My God, you killed him,” she sputtered.
Matt shook his head. “Sleeper hold. He’s alive. Although the headache he’ll have tomorrow will make him wish he wasn’t.”
“That’s awful. Should we leave him some money or something?”
“I’m not sure what the protocol is for tipping on this, Ashley.”
Matt’s eyes ticked to a door at the far end of the hallway. Exiting through it was a burly man in his forties wearing a uniform that matched Tim’s, glancing down to make sure his pants were completely zipped. When he looked up, his eyes took in the lobby, trying to make sense of the scene before him. He quickly reached for his gun but Matt was already unsnapping the holster on Tim’s belt as the young man’s body fell to the floor, whipping up the gun to level it at the guard’s chest while thumbing the safety off.
“Put your hands up,” Matt ordered. The guard hesitated. “Now! Before you make me use this!”
The guard glared at him, then slowly put his hands in the air.
“Ashley,” Matt said, surprising her. “Get his gun and the zip cuffs on the back of his belt.”
“Me?” she asked in stunned disbelief.
“Yes, you. My hands are a little full at the moment.”
She hesitated, steeling herself before finally taking the steps across the lobby. The guard’s eyes tracked her movement. She spotted the gun in its holster, the leather top unsnapped. Her palms were suddenly slick with nervous sweat. Wiping them on her skirt, she gingerly withdrew the gun using her fingers. It was heavier than she thought it would be and she wondered briefly how Matt was able to hold his with such ease. Trying to move it into the palm of her other hand, it slipped out of her grip and banged on to the floor.
“I’m sorry,” she said to Matt.
“It’s fine,” he replied through gritted teeth. “Kick it over to me.”
“I’ll just pick it up-” She knelt down just as Matt cried out.
“No!” Matt shouted.
Too late. Before she could react, the guard had grabbed the back of her collar and snatched her back up to standing. The blade of a knife grabbed from an ankle holster was pressed against her neck.
“Drop the gun, Mr. Weatherly,” the guard growled.
“Larry, I know this is hard for you to understand. And I know you wouldn’t want to harm Ms. Kane-”
“Stop talking and drop your gun,” Larry interrupted. “I don’t give a damn why you’re here but you’re not leaving. Now,” he pressed the blade further in, causing Ashley to emit a hushed scream, “put it down.”
Matt weighed his options but none presented themselves. At last, he lowered the gun and let it tumble from his fingers.
Ashley felt the knife slip away from her neck as the guard slightly loosened his hold on her. She knew it was her only chance. Balling her left hand into a fist, she swung it out in front of her to gain momentum, then back behind with all her strength. Larry cried out as the blow struck him between the legs, causing him to double over. As he did, Ashley’s other hand was there to crack an uppercut across his jaw. He stumbled backwards, crashing into the wall.
Matt materialized next to her, the gun back in his possession. He snatched the plastic zip cuffs off of Larry’s belt and trussed his hands.
“Where did you learn that?” he asked Ashley, clearly impressed.
“I had a couple of fight scenes in
Encino Girl
. Never thought they would work in real life.”
A glance at his watch caused Matt to wince. “We’ve only got about five minutes.”
Ashley grabbed Larry’s gun from the floor. “Then we’d better get going,” she said.
Entering the elevator, Matt moved towards a small keypad embedded below the glowing buttons for the floors. He punched in a seven digit code from memory as the doors closed and the car glided upwards.
“Keep that out,” he nodded at Ashley’s gun.
“I don’t know how to use it.”
“Pretend that you do. Just like the stage fighting.” A smile crept up on him.
“What?” she asked, noticing the grin.
“I never knew you used to be an actress.”
“Funny time to start sharing our war stories, Matt. Literally, in your case.”
Without warning, John’s voice appeared in Matt’s ear. “Time is being wasted. Step it up.”
“Doing the best I can,” Matt hissed, earning a look from Ashley.
“Do better. The police are on their way,” John said.
The breath left Matt’s lungs. Any amount of time he believed was on their side had just vanished.
He watched as the floor lights pinged in ascending order, nearly to the top. “As I recall, the guard up here doesn’t have a monitor that watches the lobby,” Matt told Ashley. “We’ve probably got about thirty seconds before he realizes that he hasn’t gotten the usual check in from lobby security. We need to make them count.”
Ashley nodded in agreement as a loud buzz indicated that they had reached their destination. The doors slid apart to reveal a polished cement floor stretching outwards, bisected by a floor-to-ceiling cage fence. In front of it stood a man in a security uniform punching the keys of a black computer. He glanced up, taking in Ashley and Matt. Immediately, he reached for the gun at his side.
“Don’t!” Matt cried out, but the warning came too late. Bullets spat in his direction. He pushed Ashley to the side of the elevator car, using the slim alcove as shelter.
“Put your guns down and come out now or I’ll continue to fire!” the guard yelled. A few seconds passed before more bullets slammed into the back of the elevator.
“Who is this guy?” Ashley wondered aloud.
“Must be new, I don’t know him. But he takes his job seriously. He’s pinning us in with his fire until the police get here.” An idea blossomed. “John,” Matt said, tipping his chin towards the button microphone.
“Yes?”
“Did you see with my button camera what kind of gun this guy has?”
“Yes. It was a Beretta 92.”
Matt’s mind latched on to old memories. “That means there’s ten, maybe fifteen, rounds in his clip, right?”
“Correct.”
And he must have already used five,
Matt estimated in his head. He planted his feet, then raised his gun. Swinging it outwards, he fired four wide shots in rapid succession which pinged off the cage’s grill. A breath later, a barrage of gunfire came back in his direction. He placed himself in front of Ashley, pushing her further back into the wall.
“What are you doing?” she whispered.
“Just wait,” was his answer.
Suddenly, the bullets stopped, replaced by a hollow clicking sound. Matt was expecting it and he burst out of the elevator, gun blazing. From his experience, it was more difficult to
not
hit a target when you were trying to avoid casualties, just as he was now. The guard looked up in shock, fumbling to reload his clip as Matt strode towards him.
“Throw your gun away,” Matt said, pausing his fire and thrusting the barrel against the man’s forehead.
The guard complied, dropping his sidearm to the floor where Matt kicked it out of reach.
“You did good,” Matt said, earning a perplexed look from the guard. “Give me your zip cuffs.” The guard handed them over and Matt quickly bound his hands. Ashley exited the elevator to join him.
Matt stepped to the keypad at the side of the cage door and punched in his entry code. The door swung open and he sprinted to the blinking stack of servers in the middle of the room. Finding his thumbpad, he pressed it and the small cage swung open. With no time to waste, Matt raised his gun and fired three point-blank shots into the server’s core. Sparks flew as its green light turned dark.
He ran three cages over and repeated the process, knocking out the other server. “We’re good,” he said aloud so John could hear. He waited for a response but received none. Knowing he had no time to spare, he quickly made his way back to Ashley.
“Just in time,” she informed him.
“Let’s go,” he said, brushing by her.
Before his foot could take another step, a voice boomed out from the building’s PA system. “Matt Weatherly, this is Detective David Larson with the LAPD. We have the building surrounded. Drop your weapons and come out.”
N
early two miles beneath the craggy surface of a snow-capped Colorado mountain, Emma Hosobuchi was losing patience.
“I’m sorry, Ms. Hosobuchi, but you’re going to have to step a bit higher,” a tinny voice said from a speaker somewhere nearby.
Emma held in the exasperated sigh she was eager to let go of. She knew that it was part of her job to remain completely unflappable, even in mundane situations such as having her retina scanned. She perched herself on the front tip of her shoes, inching her eye up closer to the opaque lens implanted into the wall.
A thin flash of bright red light pierced her vision, then disappeared. A whir and a metallic thunk followed, with the voice now giving a dull ‘thank you, ma’am’ through the speaker.
To her left, a steel door Emma knew to be over six inches thick swung outward on silent hinges. She stepped through it, shrugging off any traces of the annoyance she had felt.
The morning commute was always arduous. It began roughly an hour before Emma passed through this door, at her tidy house in Manitou Springs. Her route was one continuous road that began at the foot of a high hill, morphed into a piece of the local highway, then branched off in a straight asphalt line towards the Rockies. A soaring electrified fence topped with coiled wire greeted her arrival, along with a rotating crew of guards.
Upon being granted entry with her top secret clearance, she followed a narrow gravel footpath to another guarded entrance, this one being a low-slung steel building pressed up against the granite base of the mountain. Most people in town knew of the government offices housed here that dealt with routine issues regarding administration of the surrounding military bases.
Few knew what lay beneath them.
When Emma boarded the unmarked elevator in the rear of the building each morning, it whisked her down 1.8 miles beneath the ground. This was the home of the National Intelligence Agency, a rather bland sounding name that hid secrets as deep and dark as the elevator shaft that Emma descended daily. Among the two hundred and sixty-seven agencies formed after September 11
th
, the NIA, as it was commonly referred to, was formed as a new kind of agency. Instead of being populated by the usual jaded collection of Grade 14 career government employees with top secret clearance, the group’s mandate was to find the best and the brightest that America’s schools had to offer. The goal was to draft the superstars that were routinely plucked by prestigious investment banks and law firms, convincing them that a career for their country was far more enticing.
On paper, the recruitment process was laid out in simple straightforward steps that led to guaranteed success. In reality, however, it was a disaster. Most ambitious young people were lured by cash and perks that the NIA could not compete with.
After several years, little had come of the drafting efforts. The only true success was Emma herself.
She began her life in the town of Newton, a short train ride from the heart of Boston. The burg had served as the refuge for her grandmother many years before Emma’s birth, a petite Japanese woman who had endured the humiliating horrors of a California internment camp during World War II. She vowed never to return to the state that had placed her behind barbed wire for nothing more than the shape of her eyes. The elder Hosobuchi moved to the opposite end of the country, far from the Pacific Ocean she had played in as a child.
As a teenager, Emma excelled in high school. Her combination of prowess on the running track and multiple advanced placement classes secured her scholarships to every college she applied to. When Harvard’s thick envelope arrived, she was overjoyed. Bursting into her grandmother’s room, she swelled with pride as she read the acceptance letter out loud to the gray-haired woman.
“So proud,” her grandmother beamed. “I am so proud of you, Emma.”
Her intention was to go to medical school but it was a freshman elective class that brought Emma’s career path into focus. Computer science presented her a world unlike any she had ever known before. Math skills became art in HTML coding and her big-picture thinking allowed her to imagine entire new IT infrastructures where others only saw obstacles. Whether it was mere coincidence or some divine fate that she was also being reared in an age of ceaseless invention and innovation, it all served to help Emma realize her calling.
It was during her senior year that she learned others had realized it, too.
The recruitment began, simply enough, at a standard career fair. Harvard’s square bustled with students circling the various booths for Goldman Sachs and Manatt Phelps. Although she knew many of the companies would covet her skills, Emma drifted to a sparsely populated booth at the far end of the quad, mostly because of the attractive man that was staffing it.