Chapter 16 - THE LOBBY SHOWDOWN
The grand marble lobby of the Hart Office Building was completely deserted.
The morning public rush hour had been diverted three blocks away by a fabricated hazardous materials alert, leaving the cavernous, echoing hall bathed in golden sunlight streaming through the massive arched windows.
Except it wasn't completely empty.
lined the perimeter of the mezzanine walkway above us, their black tactical helmets gleaming under the chandeliers. At the center of the main marble staircase stood three men in dark suits with federal law enforcement windbreakers, their hands resting on their sidearms.
And standing directly behind them, flanked by two armed state troopers, was Marshal Vance—his hands free of zip-ties, his face etched with a grim, complicated expression.
"Hold your fire!" Vance bellowed, stepping forward onto the grand staircase and raising a hand to signal the perimeter snipers on the mezzanine.
I stepped out of the elevator, keeping my left hand firmly locked around the collar of Arthur Sterling’s suit jacket, using the Deputy Director as a human shield while my carbine swept the upper balconies.
"Vance! What is this?" I called out, my eyes narrowing as I calculated the crossfire angles.
"It's over, Nathan," Vance shouted back, his voice echoing off the vaulted marble ceiling. "The Attorney General's office just issued a nationwide emergency directive. They’re designating the entire incident as a rogue military extraction. The cavalry didn't come to save us—they came to sanitize the scene."
Sterling seized the moment, twisting violently in my grip and snapping an elbow back toward my ribs.
I countered instantly, sweeping his legs out from under him and driving him hard face-first into the marble floor, pressing my knee into the small of his back while slamming the butt of my carbine down to pin him.
"Stay down!" I barked.
"Shoot him! Open fire!" Sterling screamed into the marble floor, his voice echoing frantically through the lobby.
None of the federal agents on the stairs moved. They stood frozen, their eyes darting between Sterling pinned on the floor and Vance standing at the center of the landing.
"Don't do it, agents!" Vance roared, unholstering his own weapon and pointing it directly at the lead federal supervisor on the stairs. "Look at the data stream currently broadcasting to every secure server in the Department of Justice right now! Read the encryption signature!"
The lead supervisor blinked, looking down at his tactical wrist tablet, which had suddenly begun vibrating violently with incoming data alerts. His face turned the color of ash.
"Sir..." the supervisor stammered, looking up at Sterling pinned beneath my knee. "The firewall... it's being bypassed from an external secure node. The entire Project Janus archive... it just replicated to the Supreme Court's public filing portal."
Sterling stopped struggling. He went completely limp against the cold marble, his breath catching in his throat.
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"You didn't just leak it to the news, did you?" Sterling whispered into the floor, his voice hollow and defeated.
"No," I said, leaning down close to his ear as I clicked a heavy pair of steel tactical cuffs around his wrists with a sharp, definitive click. "I replicated it directly to every active federal judge in the country. The cat's out of the bag, Director. Welcome to the audit."
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