Chapter 5 - The Locked Room
The sudden darkness inside the bunker was absolute, broken only by the sickly amber hum of the monitor.
"Hey!" Hayes shouted, leaping out of her chair and slamming her fists against the thick steel of the door. "Open this up! This is a federal compliance officer—"
"Save your breath," I said, stepping past her to inspect the locking mechanism.
The padlock was a heavy-duty military-grade brass lock, the kind that required a master key held only by the battalion commander's office—or by someone who had just stolen the master keys from Colonel Lindley's desk while everyone was distracted by the server crash.
"Who else knew we were coming down here?" I demanded, turning on Hayes.
She pressed her back against the cold concrete wall, her professional composure finally cracking. "No one. I wiped the digital trail from the admin office before I came out. Only... only..."
"Only who, Hayes?"
"Only the commanding officer's terminal," she whispered, her eyes wide in the dark. "Lindley's terminal has a passive mirror drive. Everything typed on my laptop gets automatically backed up to his office server in real time."
The puzzle pieces clicked together with the force of a physical blow. Colonel Lindley hadn't been shocked when he saw the lioness tattoo on my back. He hadn't been surprised when Hayes brought up the Vanguard file. He had orchestrated the whole thing—luring me onto the base, letting Colt provoke me, and driving us both down to a dead-end bunker where we could be neatly contained without a single shot being fired.
A sharp, metallic pop echoed from the ventilation shaft above our heads.
A small, cylindrical canister clattered across the concrete floor near our feet, bouncing twice before coming to a rest against the wooden crate. A thin, pale wisp of white smoke began to hiss out of its sides, smelling faintly of bitter almonds and burnt sugar.
"Tear gas," Hayes choked out, dropping to her knees and coughing violently. "No... it's not gas. It's a chemical neutralizer. They're wiping the biometric sensors."
"They're not wiping the sensors," I said, grabbing Hayes by the collar of her blazer and hauling her toward the back corner of the bunker where an old emergency exhaust pipe led upward. "They're sealing the room."
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As the white smoke thickened, obscuring the amber glow of the monitor, the heavy rumble of heavy machinery echoed from outside. The sound of tracks biting into the gravel.
A tank, or an armored recovery vehicle, was being driven directly over the top of the bunker entrance, dropping tons of concrete rubble and earth across the steel doors, burying us alive with our secrets.
