He was seeing green, where they were merely seeing gray.
A gloved hand tilted his sunglasses down a bit as brown eyes scanned the horizon for any sign of difference, any hint of interference.
As far as his more-than-mortal sight could tell, there was nothing.
He took one last glance at the list he had been given and relayed the ingredients necessary to his operator before he set the shard of paper on fire and let the ashes blow into the wind. There was no reason to risk anyone else getting their hands on this information.
Perhaps it was an odd scene. A strange looking man dressed all in black from dress shoe to trench coat burning a small slip of paper with a silver Zippo lighter on the streets at rush hour in front of the Kalt Chemical Complex.in Kedemoth.
For a brief moment, a smile, or rather, a smirk passed his lips.
He took a step forward and mentally reviewed the notes on the list.
91% RDX. Stored in Kalt Chemical’s Kedemoth Division in Room 38. Labeled “Cyclotrimethylenetrinitramine Formula Five-S.”He didn’t have the faintest idea where “Room 38” was, but he was fairly certain that if it housed things like this special composition of RDX, it wouldn’t be easy to reach.
Nevertheless, he entered the building amid the efflux of Kalt employees who had served their nine to five sentence for the day. Some of them joked, some of them sighed, some of them looked beaten. Still others looked like they had covalent and molecular bonds still on the mind as they exited. But regardless of the demeanor of the employees he remained dispassionate and emotionless towards them as he entered the building.
It was no more than a few paces towards the elevators before he was carded by a security guard.
“Hello, uh, sir. May I please see some identification?”
He felt around his pockets in an attempt to appear as if he had genuinely lost his identification.
“I’m sorry, I don’t seem to have my identification with me. Could you possibly cross-reference me with the database?”
Goddammit, Wanzer this hack better have worked.“Certainly, sir. What’s your name and field?” the guard asked as he marched over to a security cubicle, taking a seat behind a computer screen. He beckoned him towards it as well.
“Michael Crawford, Military R&D,” he responded without a pause.
The guard’s fingers tapped harshly against the keyboard of the security station computer, though the resonating sound of each tap seemed to pound within his head as if imbued with the same pressure he felt coursing through his veins.
“Hmm…” the guard paused for a moment. The man glanced gruffly at him and pushed up his sunglasses as he felt for the knife in his pocket.
“Right, here we are, Mr. Crawford. Let me just print out a temporary security badge for you. Working late today, eh?”
“Yeah, well, you know what they say about military deadlines. If you don’t meet them, you end up dead.”
“Wouldn’t want to be in your shoes, Mr. Crawford!” the guard chuckled and picked up the piece of paper he had just printed out and laminated it quickly before he pinned it to the man’s chest.
“There you go, sir! Have a good day.”
“Thanks,” he said roughly, as he took his hand off of the knife and brushed past the guard to the elevators.
---
Room 38… Room 38… Where the hell is Room 38?He didn’t really have any idea where to start looking, but the Military R&D area to which his fake identity belonged didn’t seem like a bad place to begin. After all, RDX was an explosive compound often used in military weaponry. Undoubtedly Kalt would have less trouble attempting to hide the substance in a Military R&D lab.
He reached floor seventeen and adjusted his tie as the elevator doors opened. Apparently he wasn’t the only one in the Military R&D facility “working late.”
The floor was littered with security checkpoints, armed guards, and metal detectors. None of which did him any good.
He slowly exited the elevator as a crowd of about five workers entered the small silver box. He stopped one of the workers who looked particularly cheery before he could enter the elevator.
“Hey, sorry to bother you, but I’ve just been reassigned. Could you tell me where Room 38 is?”
The man looked at him a bit confused, “Room 38? Oh, jeez, I really don’t need to be messing around with any of you guys. Well, I guess you’re still new, though. It’s at the far end of the East checkpoint. Just, uh, make sure you’ve got your clearances all filed. And once you’ve gone in, well… Don’t talk to me again. Forget my face.”
“Thanks…” he said.
The worker went on his way and the man found a nearby wall and leaned up against it, removing his cell phone from a pocket and dialing zero before lifting it to his ear.
“Operator.”
“Wanzer, I need a distraction here. Security’s a little too tight for me to get into Room 38 unnoticed without one.”
“What do you want, cap?”
“Pull the detonation trigger on bomb five on the 26th floor and on bomb three in Civic parked outside. That should be sufficient cause for evacuation.”
“Five seconds.”
“Thanks.”
He hung up the phone and ducked into a bathroom to await the explosions.
The first was a roar of fire and an immense quaking of the ground. Bomb number five had gone off.
“Oh dear god! What’s happening?” came a shout from outside the restroom.
“Team four, this is team seven, we have reports of a large explosive device being set off on the top floor of the building, evacuate the facility NOW!”
“Run! RUN! Oh, dammit, I just knew this would happen some day…”
It was not long before the slamming of hurried legs and feet was gone from floor seventeen and the stinging silence took their place… For as long as another five seconds took, when the car bomb outside went off.
But there were no screams to be heard for that particular explosion. No terror, as the crowd had already disappeared. But now he had to act fast. There was no doubt that agents would be about in a moment’s notice.
He removed the Glock 20-C pistol from his jacket and pulled back the slide, placing his right forefinger on the trigger as he removed a knife from another pocket and clutched it firmly in his left hand. He kicked open the stall door, and then the bathroom door, flying through with his gun aimed towards any threat that might present itself. None did.
He lunged around the metal detector set up at the vacant east security checkpoint and dashed down the hall. At best he had twenty minutes to find Formula 5-S – that was if all of the bluepills within the complex had been adequately evacuated before any of them could be turned into agents. He had less time if any had remained within the building, and even less if any of the security agents remained.
As he sprinted down the hall he removed his cell phone and dialed zero once again.
“Operator.”
“Wanzer, blow bombs one and four.”
“Done and… done.”
He hung up the phone and skidded to a halt as he reached the end of the hall. There was a simple gold placard adorning the otherwise white door which read “Room 38 – Specialized High-Level Research and Development for Military Operations No Unauthorized Entries Permitted.” There was a card reader and optical scanner next to the door.
“Dammit…” he mumbled to himself as he backed up against the wall opposite the door and charged at a speed so breakneck, it slowed everything else around him. His coat blasted back as if hit by fierce winds generated solely by his motion, his ponytail whipped about in a similar fashion. He jumped into the air and hit the door with a supernatural force channeled through his foot.
It seemed to do nothing but make a rather large, leg-shaped dent in the door.
“Cute,” he huffed as he turned towards the optical interface and snapped it open. He removed his sunglasses and stared at the inner circuitry of the machine in a mixture of despair and wonder before he opened his phone once more.
He didn’t even let him say “Operator.”
“I need a program for how to bypass or crack a retinal scanning device. Model number is AF93B by Metacortex. Chipset seems specially encrypted.”
“Coming right up…”
His head twitched for a moment as a flood of information entered and was integrated into his memory. Suddenly, entry into Room 38 didn’t seem so difficult. He moved his left hand so as to position the knife directly along a circuit in the scanner and swept up carefully. The circuit was cut as desired. He moved to another and repeated the process, and then, to another where he simply dug the knife into it so as to create a new gap in the chip. Finally, he very cautiously used the knife to surgically connect two of the circuits.
He swept his newly made identification card at the reader and placed his eye before the scanner. Both signals lit up green and the white door with the rather large dent in it opened for him.
Not much time left - this had better be somewhere obvious.The room was filled with not only cabinets and drawer, but with contraptions which had no readily apparent function, despite their obviously flawless exteriors. Yet he wasted no time in tearing the room to pieces.
He ripped drawers from their shelves and rifled through their contents, he threw every experiment he could find out of his way, he smashed glass tanks looking for the RDX. But he couldn’t seem to find it.
Finally, time had run out.
Slow, steady footsteps echoed through the quiet hall, approaching Room 38 as he frantically overturned everything he had been looking through and what had yet been untouched. Two loud, resounding thuds came from the only entrance into Room 38, and then the door, now dented beyond conventional repair, flew from its frame to the wall.
A spectacularly bland-featured man walked through the door and straightened his black tie before announcing his intentions.
“Mr. Slayboughn, you are under arrest for the bombing of Kalt Chemcial’s Kedemoth Division and associated attacks on Downtown structures as well as for the murders of key counter-terrorist personnel as well as espionage and treason.”
“Can’t you see I’m busy, Agent… Ah, who cares what they call you? You’re all the same!” he picked up the nearest weighty metal project and tossed it at the agent, who dodged it with uncanny speed.
“Resistance will not be tolerated, Mr. Slayboughn,” the agent remarked as he removed the black desert eagle from his suit pocket and fired several rounds at him.
The man ducked behind the long laboratory table he had been searching, which seemed to have caught the first three rounds in the seven round clip.
“You cannot escape us, Mr. Slayboughn. Terrorists will be detained and/or terminated.”
“Go to hell!” he yelled as he dove from the cover of one table to another, lifting further inventions off the ground and hurling them towards the agent as he removed the glock from his coat once again and emptied his first clip into the air where the government agent should have been.
“It does not have to end like this, Mr. Slayboughn. Surrender and join our ranks. We could use a man of your experience, with you knowledge… You could be fundamental to a restoration of peace,” the agent said, simultaneously firing the rest of his .50 caliber bullets at the man hiding behind the table, which again served as adequate cover, though it received quite a bit of cosmetic damage.
“Peace is dead. And you killed it,” he growled, lunging onto the table and sliding across it, emptying the remaining nine bullets in his Glock at the agent who had just ejected his magazine.
In his slide, he hit something which stopped him – a very large metal case with a very distinctive marking on it – a code character, with the term “Cyclotrimethylenetrinitramine Formula Five-S” written underneath it in blocky characters with a molecular diagram drawn nearby.
It had to be now didn’t it?He grabbed the oversized container with one hand at each end, leaving both arms outstretched, grabbing onto the handles. He dropped the container to the ground and backed up a few meters as gunshots started to ring out from the agent’s firearm.
“Escape is impossible.”
Time slowed as he charged towards the container and the agent’s .50 caliber bullets whirred by his shoulders and head. One. Two. Three. Four. He was certain to fire at least three more. But his shoulder finally connected with the container and smashed forward against it, pushing it rapidly across the tile floor with his body, up against the wall that held the only exit from the room.
Two more shots were fired, and two more shots were evaded just narrowly. He grabbed the container by the sides once again and dove out the door which had been conveniently kicked in by the agent. The final bullet in the agent’s chamber was fired, and it both entered and exited his lower stomach.
He recoiled in pain but managed to pull himself to his feet as the man in the suit readied another magazine and stepped out into the hall.
He dashed a few meters and turned towards a window. It was a long way down. But there was no other way out.
He dropped the case for but a second and dialed his operator once more.
“Bomb one.” he said before dropping the phone into his coat pocket and grabbing the case. Time slowed once more and the three bullets flying towards him came to a near halt as he kicked off against the ground and lunged through the window pane, but not before one of the bullets dug directly into his kneecap. He screamed in pain all the way down, and not even the explosion that leveled floor seventeen could overshadow his cry.
He used the case as an item to cushion his fall as best he could, though he could easily tell that many key bones had been broken in the fall. However, he held on to the case and pushed it with his one good leg to the nearest ringing phone booth, where he accepted the collect call and disappeared along with the case of Formula 5-S.
One down, three to go.
