part0109

I t would definitely be a long night. Savage hadn't had much sleep on the plane, and he had spent most of the day either preparing or studying the information for the mission. He'd had coffee and a fifteen-minute nap to take the edge off before the mission started, and it had been go, go, go from that point forward.

Somewhat morosely, he reminded himself that he really needed to stop doing this to himself. It would go badly for him eventually and considering the life he currently lived, he would be lucky to be able to learn from that mistake. The chances were, though, that Pegasus would ultimately find some way to cut all ties from him and they would find some other poor schmuck to do their dirty work for them.

Maybe Jessica, Anja, and Anderson would lament his loss. Monroe would probably miss him too, although he doubted that the rest of the Heavy Metal team really knew enough about him to care that he was gone.

His own family thought he was long gone. When he thought about it, the state of mind was a somewhat depressing one to be in. He needed to simply stick to the mission and focus on keeping himself alive and undetected. That should be all that he did in the lab.

There would be enough time to think about how fucked up his life was when he was out of this with the mission accomplished and his bosses happy.

Unfortunately, he caught a little flack when he checked in with Guy at the end of his first two hours. The man didn't like how quickly Lawrence Palmer, as he was known by these people. had gone through his first few checkpoints. He was supposed to make them last the hour and so ensure that the people who ran the lab knew there were people all around the building at all times of the night.

It was a lie, of course, but an effective one that was easily sold to the folks who didn't know much about how security was run. The team didn’t want a newbie to make it look like they hadn’t been pulling their weight or lacked enthusiasm for their work.

"You need to take your time," Guy said. "Which is why, if you go through the paces a little quicker than usual, take a break on the roof. It's why the guy who has that part of the patrol usually takes a smoking break."

"I don't smoke," Savage said. "Who the hell smokes these days anyway?"

"Or...vape. I don't know, play games on your phone," the man snapped, clearly not in the mood to be talked back to by the new hire. "My point is that you need to take your time is. We're selling a product here as much as running security."

"Well, with security in the name..." he started to say.

"Look, we're obviously not the best that ICU Sec has to offer. We're the guys they send to punch numbers and make them look good at the end of a quarter in front of shareholders with a smile on their faces. The guys who are the real professionals will make far more than we do, have guns, and actually do something important. You can bet your ass they won't work the graveyard shift like we do. Do what I tell you and stop asking stupid questions."

Fortunately, he remembered that he wasn't there to attract attention—and what he did right now was attracting attention. While he could think of all kinds of snarky responses, he needed to move on. He had a job to do, and it sure as fuck wasn't being a security guard.

He bit his tongue and headed to the third floor, following the map he had committed to memory and made sure to stick to the plan they had insisted he follow. That schedule gave him minutes between checkpoints, give or take, which meant he would have a small window between the fifth and sixth point that would place him directly in front of Dr. Gains' office.

If he hadn’t already had the key, it would have been a complex lock to pick and there would also be no help from Anja. There didn't appear to be any electronic connections to the door she could manipulate from her side. It was a double-edged sword—which worked in his favor—since it meant there would be no alarms connected to the door, which would enable him to enter without being seen due to a security blind spot in the area.

That definitely wasn't a coincidence. Someone with Gains' history of harassment lawsuits—which had been a subject of curious study for part of the afternoon—would want to show people into his office at odd hours, given that he had a wife at home who had no idea of his legal problems.

They assumed, anyway. There wasn't much Anja could find about the woman herself aside from a couple of social media accounts that were filled with pictures of her cats. But still, it was a good assumption. No self-respecting woman would stay indefinitely with a husband who had a history of getting handsy with receptionists.

Savage hoped, anyway, but reminded him that human beings were strange creatures.

Thankfully, none of that mattered much at the moment. He wouldn't need to force his way into the office since he was given the keys to all the doors on his floor, and after a couple of attempts with incorrect keys, he finally managed to enter. He was careful and quiet and shut the door behind him before he slipped behind the desk. A personal laptop had been left on the surface and a couple of work computers and a tablet also provided possibilities.

Savage didn't have time for all of them. Thankfully, he didn't really need to do that much. He turned them all on but only plugged the dongle Anja had delivered to him into one of the work computers and turned all the screens on when the dongle glowed red.

"I'm connected," Anja said.

"See what you can get," he said. "I need to keep moving through the building."

"Will do," she replied quickly. "Good luck on keeping your new job, Savage."

"Once they realize I'm here as a spy, I'll get the boot anyway." He left the room hurriedly and left the hacker to do what she did best while he continued with his rounds.

"Okay, I'm in the system now," she said. "There are numerous firewalls here. It looks like their first line of spending when it came to security was to pour everything into their electronic security."

"Will it be a problem?" he asked and maintained his measured pace along the hallway.

"It would have been about three or four years ago," she said. "Given that I wrote and sold most of this code myself, I know my way around it. It merely takes a little while. I guess that means I should have some pride in my work."

"Well, yeah, but it's nice to know that my work remains effective even after three or four layers of inferior work has been added into it," she said. "Okay, I'm into the system, so if you want to do one more round of the checks, I can remote activate them from that point forward and let you get back to your day—or night—job."

"That sounds like a plan," Savage said as he reached his next checkpoint.

Over the next few minutes, he made sure not to rush his way through before he returned to the office. As much as he wanted to continue his career as a security officer in order to maintain his cover and avoid detection, there was a job he needed to do in there, and it wouldn’t be done by punching checkpoints every five minutes. He turned toward the office as Anja took over control of the devices that would monitor his progress.

"What's the situation on the data?" he asked as he closed the office door behind him. "Did you get everything you need?"

"I think so," the hacker confirmed. "I have images of all of the devices we need to retrieve, but there are other things I think you should take a look at really quickly."

He circled the desk, sat, and woke one of the screens up as she called up some of the images she wanted to share with him. Most of these were of the devices they were looking for and had been made to seem like they were collected by people who were actually meant to be there to cover them against any fruit of the poisonous tree legal defense. Her task was to manage that side of things.

Savage was thankful that he wasn't actually a part of the legal team who had to actually put all this work together. His role was really as close to legal work as he would ever get while working for Pegasus and there was a reason for that. He was there for the dirty work. That was what he was good at. If they wanted him to go legal, they needed to pay him far more than he received right now.

Going legal would definitely be much more expensive to his mind.

"Wait, wait—come back to that one there," Savage said and leaned forward to focus on one of the images on his screen.

"That's an...electronic microscope?" Anja said tentatively but didn’t sound too confident about it. In fairness, it didn't sound right.

"An electron microscope," Jessica corrected her. "It's not one of ours, though. Anja thought that it had a Pegasus logo and sent it to me, but it's definitely not one of ours. It looks like it's top-of-the-line, though."

"No, that's not what I mean." He narrowed his eyes for better focus. "What's with that glass wall in there?"

"Uh…it looks like it's something they use to contain live test subjects," Jessica said. "But that's much bigger than what they usually have for those things. It actually looks like it's a cage for a chimp or something similar, which is interesting since this lab isn't authorized for any live testing."

"Is this vital to the mission?" Anja interjected. "Because if we're wasting time out there to satisfy personal curiosity, I think that shit can wait, don't you?"

"Call up the footage on that room," he insisted in a tone that demanded compliance.

He had only seen a tiny little portion of the room from the picture, but it was enough to tell him there was no chimp inside there. Since when did chimps need a toilet and sink?

The hacker did as she was told with a huff of annoyance and called up the camera feeds that monitored the room. Sure enough, it was definitely a cage, six feet by eight feet and maybe seven feet tall, all made of clear glass.

A small bathroom occupied one corner of the room, and the other held a narrow little cot where he could see what looked like a young woman wrapped in a white blanket.

"What the fuck?" Jessica asked when she saw the same thing he did.

"Is this what I think it is?" he asked.

"If you think that this is human testing then...yes. Yes, it is," Anja said after she pulled up a couple of files connected to the room.

It took her a few seconds, which Savage supposed spoke to the sheer amount of encryption that went into what they attempted to hide here as well as to the skill of the woman who worked on a keyboard from the other side of the damn planet.

"Her name is Jenna Castle," she said finally and displayed the files up for both Savage and Jessica to see. "It looks like she suffered from childhood leukemia—of the terminal kind—and her parents signed her up for some revolutionary and experimental new treatment coming from the Zoo, both the stuff coming out of it and some attempts to replicate it too."

He nodded. "Well, that doesn't sound too bad. I have the feeling that it's about to get worse, though."

"You should trust that instinct." The hacker did not sound happy about what she was reading. "Well, as it turns out, the treatment cured her leukemia...more or less."

"What do you mean?" he demanded. The medical work was called up on the screen next, and he wasn't too proud to say he was one hundred percent out of his depth.

"Well, it would probably take us all night to explain," Jessica said. "Basically, the cancerous cells were altered while inside the body, pushed out and expunged, and returned different but still functional. The people running the treatment shrugged, said that altered is merely cured with another name, and called it a win."

"Were there any side effects?" Savage asked.

"You'd better believe there were," Anja said. "Which is how they justified keeping our gal in the treatment for longer than she was allowed to be by the contract her parents signed for her. They tried to get her back from the company involved, but both parents died in an iffy car crash before they could file the case with the local authorities. They then changed the company name and moved Jenna to another state once they realized she had no other legal guardians."

"Fuck me," Savage said. "It looks like they really want Jenna on the roster."

"It sounds like they had someone they could keep running tests on indefinitely and decided they had no intention to give her up," Jessica said angrily. "Despicable assholes."

"They've changed their company name about three times a year since they brought Jenna in, and they've moved her regularly," the hacker continued. "She’s always kept in that cage, though, which sounds like a very specific kind of hell to me. Currently, she's recovering between experimental treatments."

"Huh." Jessica grunted. "What are these files signed off on? It looks like they're delivered to someone off-site. As in made into physical copies and sent via parcel service to someone outside the country."

"To one Edwina Smith," Anja said.

Savage raised an eyebrow. The name was too similar to Edward Smith—the moniker had been used by numerous men who had been employed by Carlson as a means to obscure his involvement in various unethical and downright criminal activities. Aside from that, a few had been part of a team that tried to eliminate him and Anderson. According to the one he’d questioned, they’d all gone by the name Edward Smith.

"Do you know who that is?" Jessica asked.

From Anja’s silence, he gathered that she had reached the same conclusion he had but didn’t want to discuss what could also as easily be a simple coincidence.

"Nope," he said quickly to ensure that they weren’t diverted down a rabbit hole that might require far more time and attention than they had right now. "Fuck this shit. We can't leave this kid here at the mercy of these assholes. We need to get her out. Well, I need to get her out of here."

"Agreed," Anja said. "Although I guess I should warn you that it won’t be as easy as getting into this office."

"I guess I should cover my ass and tell you that while she might agree with the sentiment on a personal level, Courtney would absolutely not approve of this change to the mission from a business perspective," Jessica pointed out. "With that said...good luck, Savage."