Chapter 15 - The Trap Springs
"We've got company on the ground floor!" Sarah warned over the radio. "They're pushing up the stairs!"
Claire pulled her sidearm, taking position behind the reinforced doorframe of the server office. "James! How much longer?"
"Eighty-five percent!" James yelled, his fingers flying across a portable terminal as he fought through security firewalls. "Ten seconds!"
Down below, gunfire erupted as the contractors swept the catwalks. Bullets punched through the glass office walls, showering the room in glittering shards. Claire returned fire with disciplined, deliberate double-taps, forcing the advancing guards to duck behind steel structural pillars on the lower level.
"Data download complete!" James shouted, ripping the drive from the server stack. "Let's move!"
"Catwalk exit is cut off!" Claire called out, assessing the tactical situation in half a second. She grabbed a heavy steel fire extinguisher off the wall, pulled the pin, and threw it down onto the lower floor near a stack of pressurized paint canisters.
"Cover your eyes!" she yelled.
Claire fired two precise rounds into the extinguisher. A blinding explosion of white chemical foam and deafening noise filled the warehouse floor, completely disorienting the guards below.
"Go! Go! Go!"
Claire and James vaulted over the catwalk railing, dropping ten feet onto the top of a wooden shipping container, then sliding down to the concrete floor. They sprinted through the blinding cloud of foam, bursting out through the emergency rear exit just as the siren of an arriving private security patrol began to wail in the distance.
They threw themselves into the back of the waiting SUV. Sarah slammed her foot on the accelerator, tires shrieking on the wet asphalt as they tore away into the rain.
Inside the bouncing vehicle, Claire caught her breath, wiping a smudge of grease from her forehead. She looked at James, who held up the black USB extraction drive with a triumphant grin.
"Did we get it?" she asked.
James plugged the drive into his ruggedized laptop. The screen flashed green as thousands of lines of code decrypted.
"We got everything," James said, his eyes scanning the logs. "The IP routing, the internal encryption keys, and the private communication logs between this server and a personal terminal."
He stopped, his face turning cold.
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"What is it?" Claire asked.
James turned the screen toward her. "The terminal receiving the stolen hardware schedules isn't just Victoria Vance's estate. The files were being forwarded to a secondary recipient inside the Pentagon."
