We were being invaded.
Chapter 28
I took the elevator even though I shouldn’t have, stopping at the first floor and shouting at the security detail to lock down the building. I saw the shutters begin to clink into place even as the doors closed again and I descended to the basement. We had built directly on top of the old Headquarters and the previous dormitory because for all their faults, the space was already excavated. A little too excavated, after the explosions, but that was easier to fix than digging a new hole in the ground in winter, so we just let the construction guys clear the mess and start building. There was an additional advantage to this, though, one that I didn’t readily advertise.
I hit the armory first, throwing on a Kevlar assault vest, the kind used by our security teams when they needed to clear a difficult target. I hadn’t had to deploy the security teams yet, which was just as well. They might have to come into play in a few minutes, but I didn’t care for that idea much. I grabbed a walkie talkie off the rack and set it to the emergency channel. “Get the FBI’s Hostage Rescue Team on the line, get them out here.”
“Understood,” I heard a clipped, familiar voice on the other end of the radio. “I’ve already contacted them.”
“Li?” I asked. “I sent my mother along with Karthik and Reed to Portland to get on that manhunt for Hildegarde. I need you to see if you can locate any of our other metas. I need Scott and Breandan.” I cursed. “But they’re probably in the dorms.”
“I’ll see what I can find,” Li said.
“Sienna,” Ariadne’s voice broke in. “What are you going to do?”
“Ever seen the movie Die Hard?” I asked, snugging a submachine gun strap tight across my shoulders.
“Oh, dear God,” Ariadne said.
“It’s all right,” I said. “As soon as the FBI HRT gets here, let them know the situation and have them start setting up. I didn’t see the shutters deployed a minute ago, but if the Century force has gained access to security, it’s more than probable that they’ll be locking the building down to repel our efforts to retake it.” I burst out the door of the armory and kept talking as I ran down the hallway of HQ toward the far side of the building.
“At which point you’ll be locked inside with them,” Ariadne said.
“I run this place,” I said, “good luck locking me in anywhere. I can override any door I want opened. No, if they trigger the shutters—and they should, to keep us from dusting them with snipers—then they’ll be the ones locked in. Security will be the only place they’ll be able to raise and lower the shutters.”
“But that keeps our people trapped,” Ariadne said, “and we have an awful lot of young metas over there.”
“No argument here,” I said as I hit the edge of the building and reached a locked room. I ran a card key over the door and it beeped, sliding open to admit me. “Hopefully they’re not dug in, because I need to deal with the Century force on my own.”
There was a pause before Ariadne spoke again. “You’re not a one-woman army, Sienna.”
“Oh, yes, I am.” I took a breath as I entered the tunnel that led from HQ to the dormitory’s basement. The overhead fluorescent lights clicked on in a long sequential pattern that left me staring at a dank, acrid-smelling hallway. The tunnel was left over from the original Directorate, designed to be used when periods of snowfall made transiting from building to building uncomfortable. I hadn’t used them since shortly after I came to the Directorate because they tended to lock them down in the summertime, but they had survived the destruction of the Directorate with only a nasty, smoky smell to show for it. I ran down the hall, feet pounding against the concrete as I headed straight for my target. “Coordinate a response, Ariadne. Keep them contained, because if they’re with Century—and I can’t imagine they’re not—then their objective is to wipe us all out, so we’re effectively already dead. Make sure they don’t survive the attempt.”
Ariadne’s reply came back eight octaves higher than usual, coated in frustration. “That’s insane—”
“Do it,” I said. “That’s the position of the head of Ops, okay? Do not negotiate, do not bargain, kill them all as soon as you can, because I guarantee you that they’ll be trying to do that to our people.”
“Why not just blow up the building then, and save ourselves the trouble?” Ariadne asked with measured sarcasm.
“Why, that’s a lovely idea,” I said. “I might just have to do that.”