Chapter Text
The room was dark and smoky. Fourteen thugs sat in a circle around a large table covered with small piles of cards. Their rough features and stocky builds were occasionally illuminated by the flashing lights of the massive wall of data storage machines right next to them and the blue glow of security screens. Not enough light to strain anyone’s eyes this late at night, but enough to see the cards in front of them.
It was certainly enough light to see that one of the men should have stayed when he decided to hit instead, tapping his finger impatiently on the table. The dealer shrugged.
“If you insist,” she said, and flipped over his card.
The jack and four that were already on the table in front of him were now accompanied by an eight. Bust.
“Fucking hell,” he cursed. “I had fifty pounds on this one.”
“Awwh, too bad, you could’ve got it mate,” said his buddy next to him. “But, I should be thanking you. Now it’s my game.”
“Are you so sure about that?” said the woman on his left, looking over at his two and six.
“Hey, I could get lucky,” he said. He tapped his finger on the table. “Come on, gimme a face card.”
The dealer passed him a card. Four.
“Whatever, at least I didn’t bust like Craig here,”
“You’d better watch yourself-”
BEEP! BEEP! BEEP!
A shrill alarm cut through the conversation. It was met with many groans and rolled eyes.
“Room five,” said the woman who was dealing. “Craig. You’ve busted. You’re up.”
“But there’s nobody on the camera,” said Craig, pointing up at the empty blue screen.
“That was our heat sensing alarm. Just go check it out,” said the dealer. Craig sighed as he reluctantly rose from the table.
“Just not my night, is it?” he muttered to himself as he walked down the winding hallways that led to more computer rooms filled with illegally gathered data.
He got to the room and opened the door.
Nothing but a bunch of flashing computer lights and slight whirring of the fans.
“You’re in a load of trouble, whoever you are,” he called menacingly as he walked into the room, shining his flashlight and searching every corner. Not a single movement. It was like a ghost had set off the alarm.
At least that meant he could go back to the game and possibly win his 50 pounds back. He clicked his radio.
“Nobody here. Must have been a malfunction,” he said.
“That’s impossible, those are our best alarms. They only go off when there’s a human body close to the computers, I would check again-”
Another alarm blared. Cursing came over the radio.
“That’d be room three,” she said. “Craig, stay in room five. We’ve got an intruder.”
Craig heard a snippet of her ordering his buddy down to room three and then it cut off. And then he was standing in silence.
This room was much darker than the one he had come from. The computer lights hit the messy tangles of wires that surrounded them and cast uneven shadows in between the dim, shifting lights.
There were no sounds other than the fans and occasional beeping. Craig could hear himself breathing. He could hear his own heart beating. He was far away from the rest of the shifty security detail, down here in this obscure room.
Anyone could be in here with him.
They were guarding information about the most dangerous man on Earth. It could be a highly trained and dangerous agent from the world’s most powerful spy network for all he knew!
He tried to reassure himself by saying no, that couldn’t be possible, nobody even knew they had this information on John Lark. It was gathered right before he went missing on his mission to the Siachen Glacier.
The mission was never accomplished, and Lark was presumed dead. But of course, the rest of the undercover apostles had hoped differently. Including the lower level of devoted thugs who gathered as much secure information as they could and hid it in their most unfindable facility.
At least, they hoped it was unfindable.
BEEP! BEEP! BEEP!
Another alarm blared. The radio crackled.
“ROOM SEVEN!”
Footsteps echoed closer and then got further away.
Craig’s heart pounded. He couldn’t tell whether they were footsteps of the rest of his team or someone else.
He pulled out his gun with shaking hands and held it in front of him.
Another alarm blared.
Footsteps.
More alarms.
“Bloody hell, they’ve set off every alarm in the place!” Craig gasped. He grabbed his radio.
“What’s going on?”
No answer. Then suddenly the radio cracked and whined as someone shouted through it.
“MICHAELS IS DOWN, I REPEAT, MICHAELS IS DOWN!”
Someone was killed?
This was more than what Craig had signed up for. Indecision plagued his feet as he rocked back and forth, backing against the wall in front of the server room doorway and holding his gun out in front of him. Should he abandon his post and try to get to safety? Or should he hold his ground? There were more footsteps. His heart was in his throat.
“WHO’S THERE?” He called in his most rough voice possible. No answer. His throat went dry.
The radio crackled again.
“WE’VE LOST JOHANSSON!”
His heart was beating out of his chest. He hadn’t heard any gunshots. Whoever was doing this was incredibly quiet, and incredibly precise.
Which was why he didn’t hear the catlike drop as someone fell from the ceiling of the computer room and onto the floor. He didn’t hear them approaching him behind the doorway. He didn’t even have time to scream, only gasp, as a thin but incredibly strong hand clamped over his mouth. He struggled for a half second before a knife leapt towards his face and his throat was cut.
Craig collapsed on the ground in a puddle of his own blood.
The figure responsible slowly cleaned her knife before re-holstering it to her thigh. She silently leaped back up onto the ceiling, engaging her gloves and sticking up there perfectly out of range of the security cameras.
She crawled back across the hallway and towards the stairs, activating a few more alarms on her way up. Then she finally made it to the main control room. Jumping down onto the floor, she flipped a lock of dark blond hair out of her eyes that had somehow managed to escape her neat braid.
The blackjack table stood empty in the middle of the room, cards scattered everywhere, players scattered as well, to catch the culprit who was picking them off one by one.
The agent unstrapped a black laptop from her back and set it on the table, hooking it up to the control center of the machine.
“Come on,” she muttered to herself. She looked up and checked the security cameras. The guards were running around, still discovering the bodies she had left scattered through the building. There would only be so much time before the security detail would be back. She scrolled through files and searched through piles of data before she finally found the massive file she needed.
Lark, John.
She transferred it onto her machine. They would notice it was gone, but that was better than them having it in the first place.
There was motion in the security cameras. She counted the rooms. The guards she had left alive were making their way towards the room she was in.
The file finished transferring.
She quickly hacked into another computer and took care of something else.
She disconnected her laptop and slammed it shut, shoved it back onto its holster, and jumped gracefully onto the ceiling again.
She crawled towards the staircase and made her way towards the roof.
Mission accomplished.