Breaking In Was the Easy Part
Shadows kept what shadows veiled.
The security guard’s shoes clapped against shiny, marbled floors. He stopped by one of the tall windows, overlooking the glittering skyline of Rome by night.
He stared outwards. Sniffed. Scratched his butt.
Hiding in the shadows nearby, where this oblivious guard ran risk of glimpsing her from the corner of his eyes, Chloe Grant held her breath. Frozen, still, like a statue, she waited in the dark.
The guard remained oblivious. He continued staring out into the night. He stood there for so long that Grant’s lungs began to ache from holding her breath, and a frustration, welling deep down, started budding into anger.
She had already broken into the building without him noticing. Now, he just needed to get the hell out of her way. Preferably before she needed to gasp for air, or the anger bloomed into fiery rage.
In the drop of a hat, she could have switched his lights off, just like that. The silenced pistol in her toolkit had a bullet with this guy’s name on it. She wasn’t one to snuff out some rent-a-cop if she could avoid it, but he was taking his sweet time.
The temptation to go for the gun rose while the burning in her lungs blossomed alongside her frustration.
Finally, the guard walked on. Disappeared around the next corner of the corridor, descending deeper into the bowels of IntelliTech.
Every shuddering breath hurt as Grant’s lungs flooded with desperately needed oxygen. All her frustration waned as fast as any pain subsided. After all, this guard knew nothing. Probably lived his days and nights, working security here, oblivious to the true nature of IntelliTech.
It was just one of many shell companies used by Celava worldwide. They fronted this IT provider, but all of Spencer’s intelligence pointed to IntelliTech serving as a data hub for the multinational energy corporation.
And this one, single, useless guard—well, he was just doing his job. Not well enough to have noticed the woman who infiltrated the building that night, but doing his job nevertheless.
He’d probably get fired if Grant’s invasion was eventually noticed, but that was very low on her list of concerns.
Once the guard had moved far enough out of earshot, she whispered into her headset.
“Hammy’s gone. What’s it look like out there?”
“Coast is clear,” responded Ruiz via their radio, with a soft crackle of static. “Pretty sure it’s just the one guy on-site.”
“Keep your eyes peeled. I prefer ‘definitely’ over ‘pretty sure’.”
Grant snuck out of the alcove, slipping past one of the ornate alabaster sculptures of Roman deities. She weaved her way past the other divinities, heading in the opposite direction from the security guard who had missed her intrusion.
Much to her relief, most of the building’s rooms and hallways featured clear labels. Big, black print emblazoned on brushed gunmetal plates. She followed their lead, drawing her spiraling path ever closer to the building’s server room.
Minutes ticked as she moved with the quietude of a cat. She kept her eyes peeled for security cameras, shimmying underneath any when their cold, glassy lenses looked the other way.
Ruiz asked via radio, “And you, uh, you don’t think anything’s… off? These guys got a lot of valuable data to keep private here, and security’s a little bit on the sad-sack side, don’tcha think?”
Grant paused, ducking behind a towering potted plant to wait.
To listen.
The guard was long gone, on the opposite side of the building, and unlikely to hear her.
Ruiz wasn’t wrong in his observation. She had thought the same thing.
“Yes and no. I’m guessing there’s some extra bells and whistles we haven’t noticed yet. Some less-than-obvious stuff. All the windows are bullet-proof, and some of these doors are magnetically locked with steel reinforcements. A lot of the premises are labeled, but then there’s some big mystery doors. My guess is, they have something else underneath this building—something that ain’t just plain little ol’ IT, if you catch my drift.”
A long pause.
It felt strange how this liminal space was swallowing all her whispers.
Silence filled the vacuous hallways of IntelliTech.
“You think they’re holding some specimens down there,” Ruiz said.
Grant snuck on. Set her jaw. Through clenched teeth, she replied.
“Almost a one hundred percent chance.”
Another long bout of silence followed from Ruiz. He broke it with a short and ominous remark.
“Switchin’ to point-fifty.”
She paused again, just outside a sealed door, labeled—
SERVER ROOM.
“Jesus. You gonna ready some AA missiles to go with that?”
Grant guided a stolen keycard through a reader next to the door. A red light on the device turned green and the gadget emitted a soft beep, with a loud click-CLANK to follow, as the magnetic seal on the door released, and the door slid open with a soft whoosh.
“Ain’t takin’ no chances tonight. If they got a specimen down there as a watchdog, you just line it up, and I’ll take it down.”
Grant slipped into the server room, where the hum of hundreds of fans filled the air. The whole room vibrated, and the array of server racks, all encased in metal and glass, looked like something straight out of a science fiction flick.
The door automatically slid shut behind her.
She needed access—soon—because all her movements in the building, such as opening these mag-locked doors, were likely being recorded in some sub-system. And registering it to the guy whose card she had stolen.
It had to be a matter of time.
Now locked inside a room where she was permitted to make more noise, she ripped open the zipper on her backpack. Locating the nearest server, she whipped out the device Singh had provided them with for the mission, hooked it up to the system, and booted up the sleek black laptop.
Instead of an operating system’s stock screen to greet her, a sinister-looking and slow-moving loading bar progressed on-display, while the device brute-forced its digital tendrils into IntelliTech’s—or rather, into Celava’s—data hub.
Minutes flew by to the steady whispering hum of computer fans in the room, while Singh’s hacking device worked its magic, and Grant awaited its completion with bated breath.
“How’s it goin’ in there?” crackled Ruiz’s voice via headset, now with heavier static interference. “Security guard’s out on a smoke break. Coast is still clear. If anybody knows what’s up, they ain’t showin’ jack for it.”
Grant shot a glance at the screen.
It had changed already, which she had missed because it looked almost the same: the progress bar now indicated how far the device had gotten in vacuuming up all the data it could access from this data hub.
She didn’t want to envision how expensive the unseeming sleek laptop and its hardware must have been. Then again, Malachi Spencer was footing the bill, and Future Proof’s pockets seemed to run as deep as the Mariana Trench.
“Almost done,” she replied.
79%.
She wished she could scour the data gathered here while she waited.
Grant wondered if Spencer’s suspicion would prove to have been right.
Whether or not Celava was truly funneling personnel and natural resources through the Anomalies, all with a singular and terrifying purpose: to build a colony in the distant past, in some era before the dinosaurs went extinct.
In the here and now, however, Grant only glimpsed a black screen with a white progress bar. Racking up all the data.
93% complete.
Just before her patience could wear thin, a monitor on the wall winked on, flashing brightly with electronic life.
The monitor flickered, yet refused to display any image, staying a darker shade of gray—revealing it had turned on, without casting much light. Speakers behind the device emitted a soft ringtone, like a call or message had just come in.
Then a booming voice spoke to her.
“I am the Operator, and you are very naughty,” spoke a mysterious man’s voice from the monitor’s speakers—with a playfulness to his tone, and a strong British accent. “Cease what you’re doing now, or I’ll be forced to release the hounds. And, fair warning, I do not mean electronic countermeasures.”
She played it smart. Offered no response. Nothing she could be recognized by. Like the ski mask concealing her face, a voice could lead to identification. For now, she preferred to maintain her image as the nondescript cat burglar.
96% complete.
“Not talkative today, hm? You know, the hounds usually make intruders far more chatty. Or, well, screamy. I suspect it will be the latter with you. Don’t say I didn’t warn you!”
He sounded young and mischievous. How much of the threat was empty?
A smirk crept across Grant’s face.
Was this guy for real?
“Hah. Have it your way then. Your screams of terror will probably make for a great feature on our next instructional video. I do love authenticity. Nice never having known ya, I suppose. Ta.”
The monitor deactivated again. The gray glow vanished as its electronic life disappeared.
And nothing else happened.
Asked Ruiz on the radio, “What the hell was that?”
In case anything was being recorded in the server room, Grant stayed quiet. She looked around for bugs, microphones, cameras, anything.
She found nothing.
99%.
A man’s scream reached her, muffled through the mag-locked door into the security room.
Her only way out.
The scream endured, shifting through varying stages of surprise, agony, and horror. It didn’t end as abruptly as it started, instead petering out with indecipherable pleading in Italian, and cutting off after a bout of gurgling noises.
The security guard?
100%.
Keeping her eyes locked on the door, Grant yanked Singh’s device away from the server rack, careless of the cable she blindly ripped out of its socket in the process. She stuffed the sleek laptop into her small backpack and neared the door again.
THUMP.
Something had hit the door, leaving Grant frozen, while her heartbeat raced at a pace of a thousand miles a minute, felt all the way up into her neck, and accompanied by the rushing of blood in her ears.
There was something out there.
Silence. The shuddering breath she dared to take could not have eclipsed any sounds out there, but she felt a presence. The vicinity of something dangerous.
Of something deadly.
There were no other ways out of the server room. The only other door led to a dead end, where Grant frantically looked through, only to find a bunch of clutter in form of cardboard boxes, spare cables, a sink fastened to the wall, and other useless junk.
“Talk to me, Goose,” said Ruiz. “Can’t see anything out here. Guard went back inside, and you’re in a blind spot for me.”
She waited at the mag-locked door. Couldn’t sense any presence there now.
The deadly silence remained.
She swiped the keycard down the mag-lock reader. The device only emitted an obnoxious beep and its red light blinked.
“Uh-uh-uh,” said the Operator from the TV speakers with a mocking, singing tone to it. “I locked down everything. Consider it me doing you a favor, magpie. A sweeper team is on its way to arrest you. They’ll return the hound to its cage before you’re ripped to shreds, and you’ll get to have a nice, lovely chat with a security detail, and then some corrupt police officials, I wager. One day, you might even get a chance to look back at all of this and have a good laugh—that is, from behind prison bars, of course.”
The Operator chuckled with sadistic glee.
Grant’s anger almost gave air to a single swearword, and instead exploded into a strike of her knuckles against the metal door.
The Operator was making perfect sense. Having worked in counter-intelligence herself, she would have run the same kind of ship. Issued the same kind of intimidation and taunts as he was.
She knew better than to succumb to fear, or spiral into inaction, and knew exactly what to try next.
The Operator had responded to her attempt at opening the door with the keycard—he clearly had no eyes on the server room, only on whatever any device was ever telling him. Beyond a shadow of a doubt, he could remotely open and close any mag-locks throughout the building.
She was boxed in now. And she wasn’t going to wait for some sweeper team to capture her.
Thus, Grant acted quickly. Whipped out the tiny toolkit she had brought along for analog intrusion.
She had already been detected, and something was out there—according to the Operator, ready to slash her to ribbons upon contact—so subtlety had just flown out the window. And the poor security guard guy, well, he had probably lost more than his job just now.
Her foldable crowbar snapped into full length after she retrieved it from her kit, and she used it to jimmy open the mag-lock reader.
“You need to get the hell outta there,” said Ruiz, nervous tremors swinging fiercer with every word. “There’s an Apex fuckin’ Predator in those halls. It’s trailing blood all over the place, and I think it’s lookin’ for you. That security guard is toast, and I got no eyes on the AP. It’s too fast, moved into some room. I think it loops around to where you are. Repositioning.”
Metal sheets bent and splintered until she stopped prying at the reader with the crowbar, and ripped off the metal casing. Dexterous, Kevlar-gloved fingers started eviscerating the card reader, splaying out its thin wiring, and trying to make sense of its design.
Closed system. Not anything she could simply override.
Fuck.
The swearword echoed in her brain.
She backtracked into the backroom and pursued plan B.
Her boot crashed down on the ceramic sink with a heavy kick. Upon first impact, a long crack appeared on the wall behind it.
The whole place’s design for doors and locks and computerization was modern—but being situated in the center of Rome, the building must have featured some parts that had never been modernized by its newest owners.
Another kick shattered the sink and water started trickling from a bent pipe.
She grunted and gritted her teeth as she kicked and punched at the wall until she could jam the crowbar right into the growing fissure she was creating, busting her way through the wall.
Her tiny flashlight clicked. She shone its light into the fissure.
Luckily, none of it was solid concrete. Just a bunch of old bricks behind thin plaster and white paint.
“Do you know how to play chess, magpie?” asked the Operator from the adjacent room. “If you’re smart enough—and I truly hope you are—then I’m sure you can play it in the theater of the mind. Or draw on the floor for all I care. I’m sure it’ll buff out, even if you use a permanent marker.”
He didn’t know what she was up to. No eyes on the backroom. No electronics to spy on.
Lucky.
She gritted her teeth again and pulled at the drain pipe in the wall with all her might. The metal squealed, then finally bent before snapping away where it broke. Grant grunted again and yanked a portion of drain pipe from the wall, then used it as a blunt instrument to break through the wall entirely.
She struck and struck away, widening the hole, and hammering the gap. When it found purchase and dug deeper into the fissure, she used it like a cruder crowbar to widen the hole.
The Operator rambled on in his musing, mocking tone. “I’ll even give you the luxury of making the opening move. White pawn on F-7 moves to F-5. You know… a little IT joke on the side?”
There was no way she was going engage.
“Come on, it’s funny!”
Grant continued hammering and striking away, tearing away chunks of red brick and artificial rubble till her black gloves had turned a chalky white, and until the hole had grown wide enough. A different light poured in through a hole on the other side of the fissure.
The ski mask and black attire was soaking up her sweat. She must have lost minutes already. If there was a sweeper team on its way—and she suspected the Operator had been telling the truth—she didn’t have a lot of time left.
Ruiz hadn’t spoken in those minutes. She hoped he had kept his cool, and stayed on position of the eagle’s perch a few buildings away.
She needed the sharpshooter to shoot sharp if it came down to it.
Breathing heavily, she only perceived a deceptive silence from the adjacent room.
Every further attempt at tearing open the wall came easier than the last, with all its integrity having been demolished by her incessant and systematic destruction. Whole bricks clunked down and the rest crumbled, and the drain pipe clanked and clattered when she chucked it aside to climb through the hole, clambering into an open office space.
The Operator was still talking, babbling about Chess moves and other inane tomfoolery, but her own panting, and the noises of fighting her way out of the backroom into the office drowned it all out.
Pressed up against the wall next to the office’s door, she waited again, hoping to hear something—anything—that might reveal the presence of the “hound” the Operator had warned her about.
But… nothing. Not a sound.
This was going to end badly.
She had seen those monstrosities in action before. Silent, agile, fast, and built to kill grown humans in the blink of an eye. Evolved beyond natural evolution, and as Burch had later theorized—maybe designed by genetic engineering.
The Apex Predator was lurking. Hiding. In position to ambush her.
Seconds passed, melting into what felt like an infinity. Time—a luxury—she didn’t have.
Time.
Grant considered retrieving her silenced pistol from her pack, but decided against it. Nine millimeter rounds weren’t going to do much against such a beast.
She opened the office door and crept outside.
Sprays of blood had painted the walls with gruesome splatters. The body of the security guard wasn’t even nearby. Crimson marked where the creature had dragged it along the marbled floors, around the next corner.
Grant scanned every nook and cranny, keeping in mind every single thing that Mischchenko had taught her about predatory wildlife.
Watch for the shadows. Watch for vectors along which an animal can leap. And if it can fly, or climb—such as these Apex Predators could—always look up.
And just as she looked up, following the cue of those teachings, she almost regretted it. Her heart skipped a beat. The gangly, mottled-gray body of the Apex Predator hid just beneath the high ceiling, perched atop one of those statues of a Roman deity.
“Oh no,” said the Operator, pressing out the second word with vicious sarcasm, and his voice now coming from unseen speakers in the hallway. “Quite the pickle you’re in, aren’t you? Wish you would have stayed and played some Chess now, eh?”
Bloodstained claws clicked against the sculpture’s shoulders. A guttural growl from its closed, toothy maw sent shivers down Grant’s spine. It hissed.
The Apex Predator stared at her through its spider-like array of eyes. The brain implant exposed on the top of its skull glowed with a singular red light.
A spiderweb of cracks appeared on the nearby window, and the Predator’s head whipped around, as it snarled at where the glass cracked.
“Run! Now!” shouted Ruiz via headset.
He had shot the window, and the glass withstood his .50 caliber.
Grant needed not be told twice. She dove into the next alcove behind a statue, and the Predator flew past her. Then she zigzagged the opposite way, towards where the Apex Predator had leapt from in its deadly lunge at her.
The creature screeched—turning into an alien and ear-piercing howl—as its claws scraped against marble, and it skidded along the smooth, blood-splattered floor.
Running for her life, she dove around the next corner, and the Apex Predator followed. She leapt over the dead security guard’s mangled corpse, just in time to hurtle through the next door on her way back out, and slam it shut behind her.
The Predator would have caught her, had it not slammed into that same door with the momentum of a speeding truck, and broken the door’s surrounding frame in the process—everything bent upon impact, metal deformed.
Another blood-curdling shriek pierced the night as the Predator pried its way through the door, tearing through the feeble obstruction in its pursuit of the fleshy human in the Kevlar catsuit.
Grant fled through the building, retracing her steps with little thought, and panic driving her running stride.
Glimpses over her shoulder only accelerated her footsteps and supercharged her terror, as the ferocious mutant quickly closed the distance once it had clawed its way through the door, only to crash into the next one she slammed shut in between them.
“Fuck,” Ruiz shouted. “Move!”
Her boots clanked up the metal stairwell as she fled upstairs to the rooftop from which she had gained entry into the building.
And finally, making her heart sink, Grant’s mad dash ended at the mag-locked door she had opened with the stolen keycard.
The red light on the card reader glowed a menacing red, mirroring the red glow on the Apex Predator’s brain implant.
She was trapped.
“Oh, Magpie,” spoke the Operator. “See, I could open that door for you, and set you free… but then I’d also set our little doggy free, free to roam the city of Rome, and feast upon—well, I’m not actually sure how many people it would rip apart in its rampage before we put it down—”
Metal squealed as the Predator pried the door to the stairwell open. The creature peered up to her and shrieked.
With feral fury.
“I’m sure you’re regretting your life choices now, aren’t you. Well, you can’t blame—”
“Get away from the door,” growled Ruiz on the headset radio.
“No!” shouted Grant. “We can’t let this thing out!”
The Predator stormed up the stairs with leaping bounds, skipping entire floors as it flew up the center of the spiraling stairwell.
“Oh, how very noble of you. I tip my hat, missy!”
“Down!” yelled Ruiz.
He was going to do it, one way or another—
She ducked.
The door exploded. Then it exploded again. Two of Ruiz’s rifle shots had blown football-sized holes through it. Funny how the glass withstood more punishment.
Before any dust could settle, the Predator flew over the stairwell railing and its claws cut deep. Grant’s own blood sprayed, shedding DNA that could be traced—the least of her worries now, as the blood drained from her head, and she lost all feeling in her left arm. An arm and hand that refused to obey when—
She ripped the broken door open, and fled onto the rooftop, into the sea of night, where glittering lights sparkled on Rome’s city skyline. The streets bustled with life—life that was threatened to be ended by the creature right behind her—
Grant fumbled and retrieved the pistol from her pack, just in time for the growling creature to follow onto the rooftop where she had emerged. Its brain implant glowed red like a malevolent, cyclopean eye.
It prowled towards her while the pistol slid perfectly into her grip, and she aimed at the Predator’s head with practiced precision.
It had smelled blood, and it was poised to leap again.
To kill.
The pain in her arm screamed as it hung lifelessly from her side, while she stayed silent and aimed with her right.
She aimed.
To kill.
To pull the trigger, as it leapt.
The bullets she released didn’t stop it. Couldn’t stop it. Probably even hit.
The next thing she knew, the smoking, silenced gun was on the rooftop next to her, and she was holding her side, where claws had left a deep wound, and all the warmth escaped her, pumping wet and slick and deathly.
The Predator crumpled to the ground, and echoes of Ruiz’s dampened shots were so loud that she could still hear them, several rooftops away.
Like the .50 had blown holes through the door, it had turned entire chunks of the Predator into a fine red mist. Killed the damned thing dead outright before it could kill her.
Well, almost.
Almost.
Grant slumped from her knees onto the ground, splayed out and with all strength escaping her like the blood.
Ruiz was talking to her all the while. The Operator, less audible from out there, also continued babbling.
Darkness enshrouded her field of vision until shadow swallowed all. And blinking never dispelled it fully. The starry night blended with the darkness of death.
Breaking in was the easy part. Always was, wasn’t it?
Getting out, unnoticed, unscathed—that was the hard part.
Everything hurt.
Guess this is what dying is like.
Losing consciousness, losing time, she didn’t know how long she took to fade away, in and out, until a silhouette rushed to her rescue, towering over her, and joining the darkness in blotting out the glittering night’s sky.
Not the silhouette of Ruiz, that is, but many figures. Men in black jumpsuits, armored, and armed to the teeth with firearms and batons. They sported ski masks like her own, with eyes covered by night-vision goggles.
A whole strike force of hired guns crowded around her.
They lifted her up. Not a damned thing she could have done about it.
They carried her away. Over the crumpled carcass of the Apex Predator.
All the pain went away, flared up, went away again.
Away.
They carried her away, into a blinding bright light.
