The Collective Protocol (21 page)

“Show me the message,” Agent Quintana ordered.

“Sure thing, man,” Greg replied. He dug through his pockets and produced his cell phone. After a few taps on the screen and a moment of scrolling, he handed it over for Juan to see.

He took the phone and Reagan could tell that what he feared was written on the screen. Juan handed the device back to Greg and turned to confer with Dave and Janice. The three of them talked for a moment and there were a few gestures, but they ultimately decided to stay and help with the mission under the direction of the CIA. It was, after all, the greatest threat that the U.S. had ever faced and they had an opportunity to potentially save the nation that they were sworn to protect.

TWENTY-SIX

Reagan checked her phone, it was 6 p.m. and time to go. Greg wanted to infiltrate the building on one of the vacant floors somewhere above the 10th floor, but the inability of the five original team members to use either the hang gliding gear or the suction cups to climb up the glass-faced building had forced him to fall back to his third method of entering the building.

There was a greater chance of their discovery this way, both at the staging area and during the insertion. The new plan was to go into the construction site across 3rd Street, tranquilize anyone there and shoot a cable from the roof across the road and insert on the 6th floor. It was the only way to get Reagan inside the building without going through the lobby or taking a helicopter to the roof; both of which would alert the Canadians that they were being attacked.

At the café, Reagan had gone into the restroom and overheard Dave and Juan in the men’s restroom discussing the complications that their new partners brought to the mission. She didn’t know for certain, but she was fairly confident that the CIA guys were under orders to kill or capture everyone in the facility.

“It’s go time,” Greg said to everyone in the van when they’d reassembled. They’d ditched his fairly conspicuous Jeep and everyone had piled into the van for transportation to the construction site.

The agents from the different organizations double-checked weapons and Greg even made the call to let Jimmie have a tranquilizer pistol; they’d need all the help they could get to neutralize the construction site and he said that it technically wasn’t a weapon, with exaggerated finger quotation marks.

He’d also made the decision to not allow Jimmie to go on the mission. It was too risky. Whatever had happened to virtually every police officer in the States was likely to affect him sooner or later, so he was a major liability inside. Greg did give him the responsibility of keeping their transportation safe, which ultimately gave Jimmie responsibility for everyone on the team.

Jimmie drove the van down the street and stopped on the opposite side of the construction site to keep the building between them and the Collective Protocol’s headquarters. It was just after rush hour, so while there were still plenty of people around, the downtown area wasn’t as crowded as it would have been only an hour before.

The shortened winter daylight hours had already encased the worksite in darkness and the construction workers made up for the loss of daylight with floodlights connected to gas-powered generators. The generators made everything noisy as hell, but it would help to disguise any outcries or other signals for help.

The seven men and two women climbed out of the van while Jimmie stayed behind the wheel. They were dressed in the same type of clothing as the workers in an effort to further hinder accidental discovery. They each wore jeans, thick work jackets, reflective vests and hardhats. From a distance, and with the added darkness, they should be able to fool just about anyone.

Greg walked up to the construction fence and unlatched the lock to allow the gate to swing wide enough for the van’s passage. Jimmie pulled through and they secured the gate loosely to keep everything looking normal from the street. “Alright, we’re headed to the roof. We need to sanitize the worksite and round everyone up in one location. We can’t afford to let even one of these guys get away.”

Everyone gave an affirmative answer of some type so Greg sent them to begin sweeping the site. The entire job site that they needed to clear was huge. The building was going to occupy an entire city block once it was completed next summer. They had to be careful and ensure
every
worker was bagged.

Reagan stayed with Jimmie while the others fanned out, hunting for the workers. She glanced over at him as he ran a hand along the tranquilizer pistol that he had been given to ensure no one made it past their net and away from the job site. They hadn’t been able to talk much today with all the planning and preparations for the mission. They were finally alone.

“You doin’ okay?” she asked. She knew that it must be difficult for him.

“Yeah, I’m fine. I just… I just wonder what the hell I’m doing here,” he answered.

“What do you mean? We’re here to stop Paige.”

“No,
you’re
here to stop Paige. I’m just sitting in the van outside.”

Reagan tucked a stray lock of purple behind her ear and smiled at him. “The getaway driver is the most important part of any bank robbery.”

He grinned for a moment and then his face darkened back into a scowl. “We traveled halfway across the country, snuck into Canada and now I’m just going to sit in the van? It just sucks, y’know?”

She placed a hand on his thigh and said, “I don’t want anything to happen to you, it’s probably going to be pretty bad in there.”

He snorted and looked out the window.
Dammit!
she thought,
that wasn’t how it was supposed to come out.
“What I mean is that Paige is… She’s an unknown entity in this. We may get in there just to have her take over the minds of everyone on the team. I’m confident that she can’t harm me, but everyone else is vulnerable to an attack that they have no way of defending against.”

“She may not be able to hurt you, but everyone else can,” he retorted. “What if even one of our teammates turns a weapon towards you? You’re not impervious to bullets, are you?”

“Uh… I don’t think so.”

“Then today isn’t the time to find out. You need me there watching your back.”

“Why, so Paige can do the same thing to you? No, thank you. I need you out here ready to drive me away from danger when this is over.”

He mulled it over for a moment and said, “Okay, Reagan. I’ll keep the van ready to go. The first sign of trouble and I’m pulling you out.”

“Deal,” she said as she leaned over and kissed him lightly on the cheek.

“Hold on,” he replied. “Is that… Yeah, be right back.”

He opened the driver’s door and quickly moved forward to the front fender. She watched him take up a shooter’s stance and then followed the direction that the tranquilizer pistol was facing. A limping construction worker ran towards them. She squinted her eyes and saw a dart sticking out of the leg that he drug behind him; it must have not fully knocked him out.

A small
pfft
noise made her look back at Jimmie, who stood motionless by the front of the van. The smoke curling towards the sky from the end of the pistol’s barrel indicated that he’d taken a shot. Reagan looked back to where she’d last seen the worker, but he wasn’t there anymore.

The van rocked slightly as Jimmie sat back in the driver’s seat and closed the door. “Wow, these are powerful darts. I hit that guy in the gut and he went down almost instantly.”

“Why didn’t the first one put him down?” she asked. If there was a chance that these darts contained different doses of the drug, then she didn’t want to risk these guys not sleeping for the six-to-eight hours that they were supposed to.

“It was far away, but it looked like they got him in the big rubber boot that the concrete workers wear. The dart probably didn’t penetrate far enough into his skin to do more than numb his leg.”

She thought back to the image of the man dragging his leg. Maybe the dart that she saw was low enough to have been in the boot, but she still didn’t like the idea of these people waking up and calling the police… or Mounties, whatever they were called here.

“That confirms it for me,” she said. “I need someone back here that I can trust to make sure none of those workers wake up early and call the cops.”

He nodded at her reaffirmed decision and replied, “Alright. I’ll stay back here and keep our options open.”

“I know you will.” Reagan resisted the urge to kiss him again and watched through the windshield for any more potential escapees.

*****

It didn’t take long before the others quietly returned. There were a total of twenty-six workers on site and they’d dragged them all, including the one that Jimmie shot, to the first floor. It took an extra twenty minutes away from their timeline, but it would be easier for Jimmie to keep an eye on everyone in one location.

“Scott and Joe, you guys grab the pneumatic rifle and cable,” Greg ordered. “Everyone else, let’s go to the roof.”

Reagan turned and waved over her shoulder at Jimmie as he stood beside the van. He waved back and then started walking to the area where they put the tranquilized workers.

They climbed the concrete stairwell to the top of the seven-story building. It would be a daunting task for Reagan to slide across the cable to the other building, suspended by a little belt that high off the ground. She hated flying, but she had a fear of heights as well and the tiny coil of cable rope that Scott carried didn’t reassure her at all.

Joe brought up the rear of the group as he carried a strange looking rifle that must have weighed a ton. He set the weapon down heavily at the spot where Greg wanted to shoot from. Ryan set up a tripod and used some type of gooey substance on the legs to secure them to the roof. He sprayed something and the glob turned hard, bonding the rifle’s legs to the roof.

“It’s Cyanoacrylate instant glue,” the agent answered her questioning stare. “This stuff will hold over a thousand pounds. There’s a vial of the glue and a vial of the activator in the head of the cabling. They’ll both break when it hits the building next door and the cable will be secure for us to cross.”

“Wow, that’s like James Bond-type stuff!” she replied.

“Nah, he’s got nothing on the toys that we have nowadays,” Ryan smiled up at her. “We’re good to go, Greg.”

Thom pulled out a contraption than looked like binoculars inside a cereal box-sized case. As he peered through the lenses he adjusted a few knobs on the side and said, “No one is on the 5th, 6th or 7th floors. Most of the workers are on the 3rd floor—that’s the cafeteria, so they must be eating dinner now. Looks like three bodies, including Paige, are riding the elevator down from one of the higher floors. One person still on 12th floor, alone,” he paused for a full minute. “Elevator riders have exited and gone into the basement.”

“Dammit, that changes things,” Greg responded. “Alright, Paige has gone to the basement, we follow the target. We’ll have to work our way down from the point of entry to her, through all the guards.” He tapped Joe on the shoulder, “Do it.”

Joe positioned himself behind the pneumatic rifle and carefully took aim at the building across the way. The weapon gave of a hiss of air as he squeezed the trigger and sent the cable towards their target two hundred feet away.

Paige watched in awe as the thin cable uncoiled faster than her eyes could follow. It fed through the side of the rifle and exited out the barrel towards the other building. The wire was so thin that she could only see it for about ten feet before it blended into the background and became lost in the scene below.

“Hit,” Thom stated simply as he continued to look through his strange device.

Joe tapped a lever on the rifle and the cable stopped feeding through the weapon. He wrapped the wire around a geared wheel and manually cranked backwards on the handle. Paige saw the slack pull out of the line until it stretched across the way at a slight downward angle. Joe grunted as he cranked hard, one more time, to remove every last bit of slack from the line and Scott inserted several metal pins into the side of the gear, locking it in place.

“We’re as tight as we can get, Greg,” Joe grunted to his commander.

“Ryan, get us inside.”

The agent snapped his belt onto the cable with two heavy snap links and swung out over the edge. Reagan watched in terror as he pulled himself hand-over-hand towards the far building. She expected the thin cable to snap and send him plummeting to his death in the traffic underneath them.

To her surprise he made it all the way across and splayed against the glass like a spider. She couldn’t tell what he was doing, but she saw the next pane of glass over from where he held on fall gently inside the building. He disappeared inside and reappeared thirty seconds later.

“
Clear
,” Ryan’s voice over the in-ear transmitter that she’d been given startled her. “
Beginning the cable switch, give me some slack
.”

Joe and Scott worked in tandem to loosen the gear and Scott fed the cable through his gloved hands into the weapon as slack appeared in the line. Reagan looked back across to where Ryan had somehow separated the cable from the window and stretched it inside the opening that he’d created.

When he returned to the window and waved, Joe once again cranked on the gear to remove the slack. It was obvious that the agents had rehearsed this type of entry until it became mechanical to them. The way they moved and worked together as a team was amazing to watch and Reagan knew that most people would never get to see anything like it in their entire lives.

“Set,” Joe stated and picked himself up off the ground.

“Go,” Greg ordered as Scott hooked himself up and slid across.

“Juan and Janice, you’re next,” Greg said when Scott confirmed that he was across. “Help the guys over there establish security and then I’ll send Reagan over.”

Reagan knew that the FBI agents weren’t experts at this sort of stuff either and she took comfort in the fact that they both found the courage to snap themselves in and slide across the wire. Finally, it was her turn.