Project Maigo(73)

“Here,” Alessi said, stopping by a keycard reader. She swiped her card, and the unit flashed a green light. The door unlocked with a loud click that felt more like a gunshot in the dark hallway.

Collins followed Alessi into a large storage room and eased the door shut behind her. Unlike the rest of the building thus far, the storage room was bland. White walls. Rows upon rows of shelves. But Collins hardly noticed the lack of décor. It was the shelves’ contents that held her transfixed. “Holy hell.”

The shelves were lined with hundreds of human-sized neural implants. Alessi moved past them and opened up a large, hard case the size of a kid’s toy chest. Inside was a Kaiju-sized neural implant, complete with its rocket body, packed in form-fitting foam. Collins opened the next case, revealing a second device. She moved down the line, opening cases. There were twenty in all. She stopped after seven. “Why do they need so many?”

Alessi looked stunned. “I...I have no idea. I thought—we thought—they had only a few working prototypes.”

“This looks more like mass production,” Collins said. “More than what you’d need for a few redundancies.”

“There isn’t time to figure out why they need so many,” Alessi said, picking up one of the large cases. She struggled with it, holding on to the handle with two hands, but she managed to hobble toward the door. “If someone is paying attention, they’ll see that the door was opened.”

Crap, Collins thought, and asked, “Will they know it was you?”

“Yeah,” Alessi said, not hiding her disappointment. “They will.”

She’s throwing away her high paying, cushy job, Collins realized. Risking prosecution, too.

Collins picked up a second over-sized implant and headed for the door. It had to weigh forty pounds. They wouldn’t be going anywhere quickly. She put the case back down carefully, took out her phone and speed-dialed Woodstock.

He answered with a casual, “Ayuh?”

“Going to need a speedy exit,” Collins said.

“On my way.”

The line went dead. Collins pocketed the phone, picked up the case and hurried to the door. They moved down the long hall as quickly and quietly as they could. Ten feet from the exit, a voice stopped them in their tracks. “Don’t fucking move!”

The duo stopped in place.

“Put down the cases!”

Collins glanced over her shoulder. One security guard was fifteen feet back. Two more approached, but were still at the far end of the hall. All held non-lethal tasers, though they had guns on their belts.

“Don’t fucking look at me!” the guard shouted. She could hear the nervousness in his voice. They’d probably never had a break-in before. She stole one last glance before facing forward again, confirming that the guards all wore bulletproof vests. If the guard was a little less panicked he might have seen that she wore a similar vest, and that his taser, aimed at her chest, would have no effect on it.

“Listen,” Collins said, turning around casually, “I don’t think you—”

The guard pulled his trigger. Two metal prongs trailing thin cables shot out and attached to Collins’s chest, the tick, tick, tick, of electricity having nowhere to go. Collins drew her pistol and fired once, hitting the guard’s chest on his right side, well away from his heart. The vest stopped the bullet, but the high caliber round knocked him off his feet.

“Go!” Collins shouted, picking up her case with one hand and aiming with the other.

Further down the hall, the other guards dropped their tasers and drew their side arms, but neither got a chance to fire. Collins squeezed off three rounds, aiming for the ceiling above their heads. The cacophonous sound sent both men diving for cover. Collins was out the door before the men looked back up.

Outside, the chop of approaching helicopter rotors mixed with the squeal of tires from the building’s front. Security and Woodstock would arrive at the same time. As bullets pinged off the metal door’s interior, Collins put down her case, took hold of the magnetic disk and dragged the deadbolt back in place.

The rotor chop grew suddenly louder as Betty emerged over the fence, angling down for a hasting landing. Alessi, holding her case at her side, with both hands, was already halfway there. When Betty touched down, Woodstock flung open his door, leapt out and opened the rear door for Alessi, who slid her case inside and climbed in after it.

Not waiting for Collins, Woodstock got back inside the chopper and the rotors began spinning faster, the skids lifting off the ground.

Collins was thirty feet from the waiting chopper when a black SUV tore around the side of the building and barreled toward her. She took aim and fired her last two rounds. The first shot sparked off the pavement, but the second found its mark, punching through the vehicle’s front left tire. The SUV’s driver crushed the brakes and all four doors flung open.