12: Intruders

Quiet feet, more than one person, crept across the tiled floor near the suite’s entrance. Jon could not see the intruders from his position: the bathroom door faced west, toward the balcony; the entrance was across the lounge and down a short hallway, facing east.

He struggled to lift his head. Why could he not move? This paralysis was not caused by alcohol. He focussed on an index finger, trying to raise it, but it was as though his hands were wrapped in invisible bandages. He thought about the anatomy of his arm, the tendon connecting to the finger, the extensor connecting to the tendon. He changed his focus to his bicep, trying to make his arm twitch.

The intruders had gone into the bedroom. That made sense: whatever their ultimate objective, they would want to neutralize the suite’s occupant. They said nothing to each other, which meant they were probably professionals who had trained together. Jon heard the rustle and thump of blankets being thrown off the bed.

Focussing on the larger muscles of his limbs and torso, Jon found that he was able to make broad, uncoordinated movements. He began squirming backwards into the bathroom, out of the lounge. Perhaps they would not check every room of the suite? Perhaps if he got himself out of sight, they would assume he was not there and leave?

Jon heard a switch click. The intruders had turned on the bedroom light. They were going to check the suite thoroughly.

Jon continued squirming backwards as they checked the bedroom closet, then the second bedroom, turning on lights as they went. Jon was in the bathroom now. If he could get himself into the tub, or behind the door, maybe he would not be seen… 

Without any sound or motion, the floor around Jon was suddenly covered in a coarse white powder: plaster. Looking up, he saw that the plaster on the ceiling was degraded and crumbled, as if it had suffered heavy water damage. Looking forward, he saw footprints in the powder: the marks that he might have made if the plaster had fallen from the ceiling hours earlier. Clumsy, dragging prints led from the balcony into the lounge, then from the lounge toward the bathroom: a visible trail leading directly to him. In the bathroom’s doorway was the amorphous smear that he might have made with his squirming. Even in his bewilderment, Jon was impressed by this skillful magic.

The intruders came straight toward him now, still slow and cautious. They switched on a lamp in the lounge, and their shadows loomed.

One of the shadows made a tossing motion. A flat device thudded in the dust just in front of the bathroom door. It was like a folding hand mirror, square, but with the reflective surface on the outside, facing up at the ceiling. With the click of a latch and a whir of gears, the device unfolded, tilting the mirror downward, facing into the bathroom. Jon saw himself in it. Then the device began to flicker, changing position without moving. With each change, it rotated slightly, and the mirror tiled at a different angle, so that Jon saw different views of the lounge reflected in it. After a dozen changes, the flickering stopped, and Jon saw two faces in the mirror, a man and a woman. They stared at him for a dozen heartbeats, then looked at each other and nodded.

Jon groaned and tried feebly to sit up as the man came into the bathroom. His hair was cropped short, like a boxer’s. He wore a close-fitting tunic and trousers, dark gray, with the slight iridescence of woven silicon and carbon fibers. Two swords were sheathed at his back, and he held a dagger in his hand. With the dagger, he pricked Jon’s arm, drawing blood. Jon dragged the arm back with a slow, clumsy motion.

Satisfied that Jon was helpless, the swordsman withdrew a pair and handcuffs from a pouch on his belt. With surprising carefulness, he cuffed Jon’s hands behind his back, then gripped Jon under the armpits and pulled him out of the bathroom. Jon’s hair dragged in the white dust.

The woman was standing at the lounge table, holding the half-empty whisky bottle in a gloved hand. “This is why the paralytic didn’t work,” she said. She was dressed in an odd garment, like a black kimono, but truncated, showing black leather boots. It had a hood, which was up, shadowing her face. Instead of an obi, a corset with thick laces fit tight against her ribs. She must be the magician, Jon guessed: the corset would keep small dams pressed against the skin of her torso, feeding her kao without obstructing her mobility.

“He drank enough of this that he might have puked,” the magician continued, “so he only got a half dose.”

“What if he’d actually puked?” the swordsman asked.

“Hard to say. Are you worried you couldn’t have handled him?”

This was apparently a joke. They both chuckled.

The swordsman dragged Jon into the lounge and positioned him between the couch and the table, a place where Jon’s body could be stretched full length. The swordsman patted Jon’s back, checking him for hidden weapons, then rolled him over and checked the front.

When the swordsman was done frisking Jon, the magician handed him a large bag. Jon did not see where she had gotten it. The swordsman unfolded it once, twice… and Jon realized what it was: a body bag, for his body. They were going to put him in the bag.

Fear gripped Jon. He did not fear death, or pain, or loss, or any of the things that mortal men feared. But he feared this: if he were imprisoned, trapped, held in such a way that he could not escape and could not fall back…

Decades ago in his own memory, Jon had realized what his ultimate fate must be. Eventually — maybe not for ten thousand years, but eventually — he would set a net proximate to inevitable death. He might do this accidentally, or ignorantly, or it might be an act of nihilistic despair. But it would happen. And when it did, he would be trapped forever, in endless, monotonous repetitions of death. To be trapped in eternal dying: this was his fate, however long it took him to get there, whatever happened between now and then. 

He must not be trapped. Not by these people, not by anything. He must not be put into the bag.

His mind raced, but there was nothing he could do. He was bound, outnumbered, and there were no weapons at hand. Even if he were armed, he could barely move. Could he scream for help? He tried, but produced only a moan. There was nothing–

The big cuboid dam that he had used as a ward detector: it was still on the table, with the ink-blotted paper still on top. Had the intruders seen it? Was it still there? He had stacked his biographies next to it, further shielding it from view. Perhaps they had not seen it. They must not have seen it.

His feet were bare. If he could manage to get a foot up onto the table, he could touch the dam, and then… What? He might clear the paralytic out of his blood, but he would still be unarmed and handcuffed. He might snap the handcuffs, but still be unarmed and paralyzed. There was a slight chance that he could cause one of the assailants to have a stroke…

There was no single spell that could save him. If he had time, if he could drain the whole dam experimenting, then maybe he could find a way to escape. But there was no–

Drain the whole dam. Cuboid dams charged quickly, and this dam had been active for at least thirty hours. It would be at capacity, full of enough kao to… Jon called on all of his physical training, thinking of which muscles he would need to move, tensing them in advance. At the same time he readied his mind, forming his intentions.

The swordsman had come around to Jon’s head. He lifted it by the hair and began pulling the bag over it.

Now, or not at all: with an inarticulate scream, Jon kicked his foot up unto the table, scattering books. He felt the dam slap cold against his foot, and he immediately channeled kao from it. He might have drunk more. He might have drunk the whole bottle, and puked his whole stomach out onto the lounge floor. Suddenly his face and clothes were covered in reeking vomit. And he had control of his limbs; clumsy, addled by alcohol, but what he needed was force, not precision.

The sliding door of the balcony was still open. Jon kicked the dam, sending it hurtling toward the door and the balcony beyond. He could not affect the dam’s flight once he had stopped touching it, but he could affect his muscles while he was. Just before his foot broke contact, he channeled kao through an intention toward his own body, and his kick became perfect, his muscles flexing in the exact sequence he had planned. The dam arced through the air, struck the top of the balcony railing, bounced, then fell down on the outward side, down, down toward the street.

“Oh no…” the magician murmured as it disappeared from sight.

Two seconds later, five stories down, the dam entered the influence of the prohibition ward at the restaurant entrance.

Jon was suddenly in a different room, near the ceiling of that room. He fell and landed crushingly on a floor that was now stone. He heard his scapula break, and then the room was filled with deafening sound. The floor shifted under him. The lights went out. Air pressure increased, and he knew the ceiling was collapsing, but before it could crush him, the floor lurched downward, and outward, and the wall crumbled away, and then he was falling through open air, looking at Argintarbo’s bright skyline upside down, with bricks and furniture and screaming people falling around him. His head hit the street.

7 Pluvo 712, 5:58 a.m. (II)

Jon gripped the bedsheets as his body thrashed, hands and feet reflexively seeking anything to hold onto, to push against. The sheets tore. Jon lay there for a moment, breathing heavily, then stood and began pacing through the suite, back and forth and back again.

He had almost forgotten what terror felt like. He had been captured before — many times — and it was always unsettling, but this… He felt certain that if the intruders had put him in that bag, he would never have gotten free. They would have given him no opportunity to escape, no opportunity to fall back. He would have been in their power… until they were done with him…

Who were they? They were clearly trained professionals, competent and well-funded, but their actions made no sense. They had not acted like police, or security, or assassins, or thieves. They might have been Palace Guards, but they had not worn uniforms or insignia. And if the Emperor wanted him, why not arrest him openly, or simply summon him to the Palace? They might have been from Vivdauro — Jon already knew that Vivdauro employed elite agents — but if Vivdauro wanted him, why had they not attacked him while he was inside their building?

He paced for half an hour, and came to no conclusions. But now instead of exciting him, the mystery made him anxious. Anxiety became anger; he had been enjoying himself: how dare these people ruin his good time?

There was a very straightforward way to find out who they were. Now that he knew they were coming, and how they would attack, he could lie in wait and ambush them. They would be easy to defeat with the advantage of surprise reversed. He would try to take one of them alive, but even corpses could reveal identities, and killing them would be fun.

* * *

Jon had breakfast at a restaurant down the street from the Albrook. The magician would likely introduce the paralytic in his evening meal, but out of caution he would not eat anything that she might anticipate him eating.

Breakfast finished, he walked to a boutique. His near-abduction had given him an idea for getting into Vivdauro that was more sophisticated than just shooting out a window. He might not be able to avoid triggering the alarm, but he could make it difficult to determine who in the building was triggering it. A short while later he emerged from the boutique with a paper-wrapped parcel. He walked south, toward the sound of automobiles: he would want a taxi for the rest of the morning’s shopping.

* * *

Jon waited in the cafe. At noon it filled with dull-clad Vivdauro employees. This time Jon did not pretend to read a book. He stared out the window, watching for the bald man to come in after the others. Jon spotted him coming, grabbed a briefcase from the floor, and intercepted him just outside the cafe door.

“Excuse me, sir,” Jon said, blocking the man from entering. “Could I have a word with you?”

“Who are you?”

“My name is Johannes de Alder. You may have heard of me?”

“No.”

“Ah. Well, let’s speak anyway.”

“I don’t want to talk to you.”

“But you’re going to talk to me,” Jon said. He moved forward and shoved the muzzle of a pistol up under the man’s ribs. “Start walking down the street. Now.”

The man backed up, looking fearfully at Jon’s gun. He looked into the window of the cafe, but no one was looking out. Jon held the gun low, close to his body, where it was mostly concealed by the wide sleeve of his robe: even if someone did glance out, they would see nothing alarming.

“What do you want?” the man asked.

“What do you want?” Jon retorted. “Do you want to start walking, or do you want to start shitting out a hole in your belly?”

The man began walking west.

“You look stiff,” Jon said. “Relax. I won’t kill you if you cooperate, and I’m not going to make you do anything complicated. Do you live alone?”

“Yes.”

“Good. Let’s go to your place. What’s your name?”

“Pavel de Trinquist.”

“Alright, Pavel, I’m gonna walk next to you like we’re friends. If anyone tries to talk to you, just wave and keep moving.”

Pavel guided Jon to an apartment building about half a mile away. They passed few people. None of them acknowledged Pavel. The building was plain and rectangular, three stories tall. Although the architectural style was Bosfus, there were telltales that it was much newer: lack of weathering on the bricks, and mortar that was cracked despite still being bright white.

Jon disabled the prohibition ward above the entrance almost reflexively. They passed under it and then down a carpeted hallway and into Pavel’s apartment, on the first floor.

“Sit down,” Jon said.

“Where?”

“I don’t care.”

Pavel sat on a couch. He shrunk into its cushions like a snail retreating into its shell.

“Do you have any guns in here?” Jon asked.

“No. Why would I need a gun?”

Jon sneered. He brandished his gun dramatically, sweeping the barrel across Pavel’s body.

“What about a dam?” Jon asked.

“A dam? No! How could I have a dam?”

“Do you use magic at work?”

“No.”

“Does anyone? How many dams are inside Vivdauro headquarters?”

“I don’t think there are any.”

“Tell me about the security system. How does the building know when someone is in there without a key?”

“I don’t know how it works.”

“How does it know which key belongs to which person?”

“I don’t know.”

Jon was surprised. Vivdauro’s security system was a technological marvel, and Vivdauro’s business was designing technological marvels. He would have expected an employee to have at least a gross understanding of it.

“What do you do at Vivdauro?” Jon asked. “What’s your job?”

“I’m an engineer. I calculate stress tolerances on materials.”

“How many other employees have that job?”

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t know? You don’t know how many people work in your division, your department?”

“No. I mean, there’re four of us on my team, but the work is distributed. I don’t know how many teams are doing stress tolerance calculations.”

“How many people work at Vivdauro altogether?”

“I don’t know.”

Jon blinked, bemused. How could this man know nothing about his own workplace?

“How long have you been at Vivdauro?”

“Eight years.”

“Have you been a materials engineer the whole time?”

“Yes.”

“How did you get the job?”

“They recruited me out of university. I graduated in 706 from–”

“Are all of the employees recruited from universities?”

“Everyone I know was.”

“How much does Vivdauro pay you?”

“Fifty thousand. I think everyone on the team makes that. But I don’t know. We aren’t supposed to talk about it.”

“Fifty thousand? Did they offer you that much to start?”

“Yes.”

“So Vivdauro doesn’t really have an application process. They just pick who they want, and offer too much money to turn down. But if you’re all making fifty thousand, then why do you dress like widows and live in little apartments?”

“Rent is expensive.” Pavel shrugged.

“Why not live further from the headquarters? Rent must be cheaper further south.”

Pavel shrugged. “Everyone lives close to headquarters. It’s just…”

“It’s just something everyone does. Corporate culture. And corporate culture is also local culture, because everyone around here works for the corporation… This doesn’t seem unusual to you? You’re all wealthy and educated, but you live like factory workers. This might as well be a corporate dorm.“

Pavel had been hunched over, murmuring answers, but now he sat up straight and looked Jon in the eye. Indignation creased his brow. “We are not like factory workers!” he declared. “We can go wherever we want when we’re not on the clock, and we get a day off every week. I go to the theater on my day off, or the casino, and sometimes I spend the night downtown. Factory workers can’t do that!” He turned and pointed at a machine in the corner of the room. “I have a magnetic tape player. It cost five thousand gil!”

“What do you do with that?”

“Play tapes!”

“Do you know how it works?”

“I… No…”

Jon reached into a pocket and withdrew the photo of Beatrace.

“Have you ever seen this woman?”

“No.”

Jon felt his watch. One thirty.

“Alright, Pavel,” Jon said. “It’s time we head back to Vivdauro. You’re going to help me get inside.”

“You can’t get inside! You don’t have an employee key!”

“Give me yours.”

“You can’t use mine. It won’t work for you.”

Jon sprang forward and used the barrel of his gun to punch Pavel in the solar plexus. Pavel doubled over, gasping, and Jon easily snatched the key from around his neck with his free hand.

Jon left Pavel writhing on the couch and walked to the apartment’s front door, where he had set his briefcase when they arrived. He opened the briefcase and withdrew a bundle of gray clothing. He walked back to Pavel and began undressing, untying his sash and shrugging off his yellow robe.

“You are going to put on my clothes, Pavel,” Jon said. “And I will put on these. Then we are going to walk back to Vivdauro together. Simple. Understand?”

Ten minutes later, the two of them left Pavel’s building. Pavel was shorter and fatter than Jon, and his bright robes fit poorly. Jon’s gray trousers and uwagi were tailored. He looked almost debonair.

Jon paused under the prohibition ward mounted to the entrance door frame. He studied it for a moment, one thumb hooked casually into his sash. Pavel knew that Jon had a dam there: he had seen it when Jon changed his clothes. Jon had not threatened Pavel with the dam, but he had seemed more cowed by it than by Jon’s gun, or his punch. Ubiquitous prohibition wards were supposed to make carrying dams impossible, and most people believed this to be true. And if they did not fear the wards, they feared the Emperor’s law.

Jon crouched, then jumped up and grabbed the ward with both hands. It supported his weight for a moment, then came off the wall in a shower of rotted wood.

Pavel’s eyes grew round. Jon recalled that there was a severe punishment for removing or vandalizing wards in public places. Death, probably. He could not recall.

The pyramidal ward was about 8 inches high, just small enough to fit in Jon’s briefcase, where the clothes had been. He put it in.

They walked back to Vivdauro headquarters. The lunch hour was long over, and the streets were nearly empty. Instead of going up the concrete path to the bank of doors, Jon pulled Pavel off onto the grass, heading toward the building’s west side.

“What’s in this part?” Jon asked, pointing at a random spot on the building’s homogeneous exterior.

“I don’t know.”

“Of course you don’t.”

Jon stopped next to one of the dark windows. He opened his briefcase and pulled out two objects: a small cylinder with a screw top, and a bomb. The bomb consisted of a bundle of dynamite sticks capped with a detonator, from which emerged a length of thin cord.

“They use these demolishing old buildings in the slums,” Jon said as he stuck the bomb to the window with a bit of putty. He gripped the end of the cord and moved away, following the curve of the building, pulling Pavel along with him. In a moment, the bomb was no longer in view, and in another moment the cord had pulled taught.

“Boom!” Jon shouted. He covered an ear with one hand and jerked the cord with the other. The bomb exploded, a shockwave lurching the air. The ear Jon had not covered rang painfully. Pavel, who had covered neither ear, staggered, dazed.

Jon grabbed Pavel by the collar and pulled him, stumbling, back to the point of the explosion. The bomb had removed the window completely, but done little damage to the metal frame around it. Jon stepped through the empty frame, into the building. As he did so, the intruder alarm began ringing.

The room he entered seemed to be a meeting room, and the explosion seemed to have ended a meeting. Four people lay on the floor amidst overturned chairs and scattered papers. One man was obviously dead, a huge shard of glass embedded in his neck. Two more men squirmed on the floor, cradling their heads. Near the room’s entrance, a woman lay still, blood trickling from under her hair.

There was a long table in the room’s center. Jon jumped up on it to avoid treading on bodies. He tried the door. It opened.

Jon returned to where Pavel was standing near the empty window frame, looking in shock at the dead man. Jon unscrewed the top of the cylinder he had taken from the briefcase. “Acid!” he said, and splashed the contents in Pavel’s face.

Pavel’s face began to melt, blistering and sizzling as the acid burned into it. He screamed and fell to the ground, clawing at his eyes.

Jon tossed the empty cylinder aside and walked out the door, deeper into the building. With any luck, no one would recognize Pavel — disfigured, and wearing Jon’s clothes — and everyone would assume that the alarm was ringing because of him. Until Pavel was removed, Jon — bearing a key and dressed as a Vivdauro employee — would be free to move around the building.

Jon found himself in a long hallway that curved out of sight in both directions. The monotony of the building’s exterior corresponded weirdly with its interior. The walls were a dull coppery metal that scattered the light just enough to make their surfaces seem indistinct, so that it was hard to judge how far away they were. A row of lights ran down the center of the ceiling, casting harsh shadows, so that every object looked as if it were about to fall into a void. The floor was covered with dust-colored carpet. The air smelled of disinfectant. Jon had an unsettling notion that he had not entered the building, but that it had somehow inverted itself around him, and he was inside the outside.

Jon had expected his intrusion to induce swarming activity. He had expected the hallway to be filled with employees running to exits, or running to investigate the blast and the screams. Managers or security men should be shouting instructions. But he was the only person in the hallway, and the only sound was the irritating ding of the alarm.

He began walking down the hall. The door he had come out of was labeled “010416.” He passed 010417 and 010418. But the next door was 270341, which was followed by 010309. He looked down the hall one way, then the other. The views were identical, and he felt unsure which way he was facing. He turned in a full circle, uncertain what to do next, and bewildered at being uncertain. Why was the building made this way? Where were the employees? Why was no one trying to stop him?

“Hey!” a voice called. Jon looked back and saw a man’s head poking out of the door labeled 010418. “Do you know what that boom was?” the man asked.

“No!” Jon answered, feigning fear. “It sounded like a bomb!”

“That’s what we thought! Is something going on out there?”

“No. I mean, not now. Uh… If it was a bomb, shouldn’t we evacuate? Go to a safe place? Safe zone?”

“Safe zone?” the man said. He seemed both suspicious and confused, as if Jon had just said something nonsensical that revealed him as untrustworthy. The man frowned, then pulled his head back into room 010418 and closed the door.

Jon set off down the hall at a brisk pace, heading clockwise around its curve. The numbered doors continued without variation on the left. Lavatory doors appeared with lesser frequency on the right. Was the entire building like this? How far had he walked? There were other floors; maybe the higher floors were less confounding?

At last, after he had gone what felt like halfway around the building, he saw six men coming down the hall toward him. They were carrying rifles and wearing armor. They must be security responding to the alarm, but they seemed in no hurry, and they did not call out to Jon, or increase their pace when they saw him.

As Jon watched, they stopped at one of the numbered doors. Three of them went in while the other three waited in the hall. A minute or two later, the ones who had gone in came back out. The group moved to the next door and did the same thing. They were sweeping the entire building to find the trespasser. That made sense, in itself, but why would they start at one end of the hall and work down instead of going directly to the obvious point of intrusion? And why were they not trying to detain Jon, whose behavior was obviously suspicious?

Jon was confident that he could defeat the guards, but fighting them seemed like something to do at the end of his infiltration, which he felt had just started. Instead of continuing toward them, he turned around and walked the other way until they were out of sight. Then he picked a door at random and tried the knob. It was unlocked.

The room he entered (as far as he could tell considering the damage he had done to that room) was identical to the one he had bombed. At the far end, opposite the door, was a narrow window looking out onto bare ground. Six chairs were set around a long wooden table that occupied the center of the room. Three men and one woman sat in the chairs. The walls to either side were covered in cabinets. The table was covered in books and papers.

“Who are you?” one of the men demanded as Jon closed the door. He was fat, and he spoke with a high, nasal voice. “This isn’t your workstation!”

Jon had planned to continue posing as an employee, but he was feeling frustrated, and the man’s accusatory tone annoyed him. Impulsively, he drew his gun and pointed it at the man. The man gasped and recoiled, his chair wobbling on two legs.

“I’m going to ask questions, and I’m going to kill you if you don’t give me good answers,” Jon said. “Did you all hear a big boom a few minutes ago?”

All four employees nodded.

“And this alarm.” Jon pointed to the drop ceiling, from which the shrill chime emanated. “Was it already ringing in here before I came in?”

They nodded.

“Does it ring throughout the whole building?

Yes.

“So you heard a big boom, and an alarm started ringing, and you’re all just sitting here? Why isn’t everyone evacuating? Why didn’t anyone go see what the boom was?”

“Procedure!” said the fat man. “If the trespass alarm is active, all employees are to remain at their workstations and wait for an ID check.”

“We thought it was a drill!” the woman squeaked.

“That’s ridiculous!” Jon scoffed. “If someone breaks into the building, procedure is for everyone to sit and do nothing? You didn’t even lock the door! I could stroll down the hall and kill everyone in this place one room at a time!”

The employees shrank into their chairs, whimpering. Their fear disgusted Jon. He rubbed his temples, suppressing the urge to vent his frustration through violence.

“What do you do here?” Jon asked, pointing at the papers on the table. “What are your jobs?”

“We’re chemists,” a man answered.

Jon glanced around the room to make sure he had not somehow missed seeing a workbench with chemistry equipment. There was none.

“Where’s your lab?” Jon asked. “Is it on a different floor?”

“We don’t have a lab. It’s all theoretical.”

“We use these books of tables,” the woman said. She pushed a thick volume toward Jon.

“But who made the tables?” Jon asked. “Where’s the data from? There must be a lab somewhere?”

The employees glanced at each other anxiously. None of them knew.

Jon considered shooting one of them — maybe the man who had not spoken — just to fulfill his promise of punishment for poor answers. But at that moment he heard footsteps outside the door. He quickly sat down in one of the two empty chairs, stuffing his gun into the back of his sash. The door opened, and three guards came in.

The guards seemed surprised to see five people in the room instead of four, but the leader only said “ID check!” Jon marked him as the leader because his equipment was different from that of the other two. All of them wore black plate carriers over blue tunics. The other two carried auto-loading rifles, but the leader had a pistol holstered on a belt, from which several pairs of handcuffs also hung. In his hands he carried a yellow box, made of either metal or lacquered wood. It reminded Jon of a prohibition ward, although it was larger and the wrong shape. On its top were several metal switches and a linear gauge. The gauge’s needle rested in the center. A metal disk was embedded horizontally into the front of the box, so that its edge faced out at the room. The device had two handles, attached to the side opposite the disk.

The leader held the device out to the employee nearest the door, the fat man. The man held his employee key in his left hand, then put his palms on either side of the disk, so that both the disk and the key were squeezed between them. The needle on the device moved to the right with an audible click. The guard nodded, and the fat man released the disk.

The guards had noticed the tension in the room. No one had said anything, but the four employees were all pointing at Jon with their eyes and grimacing. The leader skipped the others and brought the device to Jon. He held it out, frowning. Behind him, the other guards fidgeted with their rifles.

Jon took his stolen key and pressed it against the metal disk in the same way the fat man had. The needle on the device clicked left.

“Yup, it’s me!” Jon exclaimed. “I’m the intruder! I’m armed and dangerous!” He stood up, still gripping the disk. “What’re you gonna do about it? What’s procedure now?”

“I arrest you,” the leader said. His words seemed to motivate him, as though he had given himself an order. With one hand he pulled the device out of Jon’s grip and set it down on the table. With the other hand he reached for a pair of handcuffs.

“Arrest me and take me where?” Jon asked. “Do you have jail cells in this place? Do you take me to the city police?”

“We take you downstairs, to the Operations Center.”

“And what happens to me there?”

“Uh…”

“You don’t know. Of course you don’t know. Fine, then, take me to the Operations Center. I’ll come quietly as long you don’t cuff me.”

“I have to cuff you. It’s procedure.”

“Try it, and I’ll kill you. Your choice.”

One of the other guards raised his rifle and pointed it at Jon. The leader was between them, blocking the shot. Idiot, Jon thought. He should circle around to get an angle. The third guard leaned out the door to alert those still in the hall.

“You’ll kill all six of us?” the leader scoffed. “Who do you think you are?” He plucked a pair of cuffs from his belt and made a lunge for Jon’s wrist.

Jon grabbed the leader’s arm and jerked him forward. With his other hand he snatched the man’s pistol out of its holster. Jon pressed the barrel of the pistol up under the leader’s chin and fired. The top of his head burst open, spraying bits of skull and brain across the room.

Jon dropped the gun and grabbed the new corpse by the collar. He held it up as a shield, blood pouring over his hand and arm, while he reached for his dam with the other hand. He touched the dam, then let the corpse fall. The guard who had already trained his rifle on Jon pulled the trigger, but he was shocked to find that there was no round chambered. By the time he realized why the rifle was not firing and pulled the charging handle, Jon had drawn and aimed his own pistol. He shot the man in the forehead.

The guard who had leaned out into the hall turned back and tried to raise his rifle, but it was too long to maneuver in the doorway. It caught on the doorframe, and before he was able to aim it, Jon shot him twice in his armor, stunning him. Two more shots took him first in the throat and then between the eyes.

Jon crouched behind the table. He hoped that the remaining guards would simply rush into the room. If they did, he could easily shoot them in the doorway. They did not. If they were intelligent, they would back off down the hall: its curve would allow them to set up a crossfire on the door without hitting each other. They had shown themselves to be incompetent, but their tactical advantage now was overwhelming.

Jon’s ears rang. Six gunshots in the enclosed space had deafened him. As the ringing faded, he began to hear screaming. The four employees were huddled in a corner of the room, away from the blood that pooled around Jon’s feet. The woman was shrieking hysterically, eyes closed, hands pressed over her ears.

“Get up!” Jon commanded, barely able to hear his own words. He grabbed one of the guards’ fallen rifles, then strode across the room, leaving bloody footprints, and seized the woman by her hair. The men cringed and did nothing. Jon forced the woman to the door and shoved her out into the hallway. He hoped that the guards, expecting the intruder to be a man, would be confused and hesitate. He could take advantage of their distraction, or perhaps use the woman as a shield.

As soon as she emerged into the hall, a dozen bullets hit her, coming from both directions. Immediately, Jon sprinted out the door, dodging around her crumpling body, and pivoted right.

There were two guards in front of him. They seemed startled — probably wondering who they had just killed — and they took a moment to comprehend that there was now an enemy charging at them. They raised their weapons and fired, but Jon dived forward, under their shots. He lay prone and pulled the rifle’s trigger as fast as he could, not bothering to use the sights. He fired twenty times in five seconds, pelting the guards and the walls around them. They recoiled from the onslaught, and their shots went wild.

Jon abandoned the empty rifle and leapt up, drawing his own pistol again. Both guards had been hit, but neither was dead. Jon walked toward them quickly but deliberately, taking careful aim. Whenever one of them moved, he fired. By the time he reached them, they were both dead.

Jon shoved a full magazine into his pistol and wheeled around. The final guard, if he had been intelligent, would have shot Jon in the back while he was fighting the other two. He had not shot Jon in the back, and he was nowhere to be seen. Perhaps he had run away. Perhaps that had been the intelligent action.

What Jon did see was many of the workstation doors cracked open. A score of fearful eyes peeked out at him.

Jon stood and thought for a moment, pondering what to do next. His infiltration of the building was clearly over: all sense of normalcy had been shattered, and he, covered in blood, would not be able to blend in with any crowd. He considered entering another room and interrogating its occupants, but he doubted that this would be more fruitful than the interogrations he had already performed. He considered waiting for more security to come: the fight had excited him, and he felt the lust for victory.

But he already had a fight scheduled for that evening. If he wanted to keep that appointment, he needed to avoid being killed here, or else he would have to wait another day to find out who attacked him at the Albrook. He did not want to wait.

“Everyone get out!” Jon screamed. “Everyone get out of the building now!” The doors that had been cracked opened further and faces peered out. “Hurry!” Jon shouted. “Get out while it’s safe!”

One man stepped out into the hallway. “Go!” Jon commanded. The man ran, and others saw him run, and in a moment every door had opened, and dozens of men and women were fleeing in terror down the curving hallway.

Jon went against the flow, back to the room where he had killed the three guards. The male employees had fled. Jon retrieved his suitcase, and was about to walk back out when he noticed the ID device still sitting on the table. He tried to put it in his suitcase, thinking he might take it apart later and see what was inside. But his suitcase was too small to contain both it and the disabled prohibition ward.

He dropped the device, then walked out the door, stepping over bodies, and made his way back to room 010416. Pavel was still there, lying face down on the floor. Jon walked past him, not bothering to check if he was alive, and left the building the way he had entered.