ONSET: My Enemy's Enemy

by Glynn Stewart

  “I don’t plan on going in shooting, but the risk is there,” he admitted. “It’s worse if there are actually thralls or vampires in the building—they’ll likely fight.”

  She snorted.

  “You’re not selling me on this, White,” she pointed out.

  “Not my job, Your Honor,” David said flatly. “My job is to give you the information to make the call. If you don’t see evidence for probable cause, that’s your call to make.”

  “What rock did they dig you out from under?” Nabahe replied with a soft chuckle. “Most Omicron cops are a little too enamored of shadows and conspiracies. Still good cops, but procedure is…not their strong point.”

  “I was a police Lieutenant a year ago,” he told her. “Working with the DA was half of my job, at least.”

  “And we haven’t taught you bad habits yet,” she said. “Tell me, Commander White, if you weren’t under a time limit, with political disaster looming if you can’t find a culprit, would you have still brought this forward as justification for probable cause?”

  David was quiet for a moment, thinking. He’d sat there while Charles had gone through the process of identifying Talon Security, and he had been left with very few questions. He’d like more evidence—what cop wouldn’t?—but supposition or not, it all held together to him.

  “Yes.” He paused. “But like I said, Your Honor, it’s your call.”

  “It is,” Nabahe confirmed. “And I’d already made it, but I wanted to get a feel for the man who’d brought it to me.”

  “And?”

  “And I’m reasonably sure you’re no cowboy cop who’ll turn a search warrant into an unjustified-force lawsuit,” she said calmly. “I’m accepting your case for probable cause, Commander. You’ll get your warrant.

  The judge waved at the window with its almost-dark sky.

  “Given what we suspect is inside that building, though, I would strongly suggest you wait for sunrise to execute it.”

  Night was most definitely falling over Seattle. Even the fog earlier would have allowed vampires to move around, though they’d have been uncomfortable at best. With the sky turned fully dark, his people could easily run into a fully functional supernatural defense.

  “You’re probably right, Your Honor,” David admitted, sighing softly.

  Two days of seven. He hoped that Talon Security did have answers, because he was starting to feel very short on time.

  Chapter 16

  They waited until late enough in the morning that all of Talon Security’s people would be on site, then David sent Narita’s company off through Seattle’s downtown in a fleet of borrowed black SUVs.

  There was no attempt at subtlety—they were barely two blocks from the OSPI building before they turned on the sirens. The vehicles spread out, splitting into rolling formations of black vehicles that cut through the downtown traffic like knives, swinging across traffic to form blockades across the streets surrounding Talon Security’s building.

  The mercenary company leased six floors of a forty-two-story building right in the center of Seattle’s downtown. There was no way to do this quietly, so there was no point in not doing it loudly if it could help at all.

  David watched Narita’s troops swarm out with practiced efficiency, quickly ushering the vehicles trapped inside the perimeter on their way even as the heavy Super Stallion helicopters delivered Narita’s weapons platoons to the surrounding rooftops.

  Pell swept the Pendragon in to a landing in front of the building, the last few passers-by scattering away from the wind from its rotors.

  “Hellet, you’re with me,” David ordered. “Stone, Pell—take the Pendragon up to the roof, secure the helipad. We’ll move up and secure from below. Meet you in the c-suites!”

  “Yes, sir!”

  “And remember—this is a search-and-interrogate op. We need these people alive,” he reminded them. “Not to even mention that we don’t know for sure that they were involved. Kid gloves, people. Got it?”

  He held Stone’s gaze in particular. He knew the man was perfectly capable of discretion, but he also carried a machine gun as his weapon of choice. There were a lot of problems you could solve by shooting them with an M60, but finding out if Talon Security had been behind the Conclave attack wouldn’t be one of them.

  “I got it,” Stone replied.

  “Good.”

  David jumped down from the helicopter, waving Pell back into the air as Narita approached. The AP Captain was waving his troops around the building to secure the secondary exits as his main assault team formed up.

  The main lobby was glass-fronted, and the ONSET Commander could see the shocked and horrified people in the main-floor coffee shop watching the martial preparations.

  “Roads are blocked half a block out in every direction,” Narita reported. “I have fireteams securing the other exits. We’re ready to move when you are.”

  David nodded, glancing over at Hellet. Between him and the Mage, they could probably deal with anything Talon did on their own—but given that Talon only rented a seventh of the building, there were more than enough civilians around to make anything openly supernatural problematic.

  “Let’s go, Captain.”

  #

  Credit where credit was due: the receptionist was a spectacularly brave young man.

  David walked into the main lobby with Narita looking scarred and intimidating on his left and Hellet looking stern and impassive on his right—and with a twelve-man squad of armed soldiers directly behind them.

  The young black man with the close-cropped curly hair and cheap suit still carefully intercepted him barely inside the door with a carefully plastered smile.

  “Can I help you, sirs, ma’am?”

  “We have a warrant and are locking down the building,” David said calmly. “If you can have any building staff report to the lobby immediately and direct some of Captain Narita’s men toward the building control center, that would help us.”

  He swallowed.

  “I’m…not sure I have the authority to do that, sir… Who are you?”

  “David White, FBI,” the ONSET Commander lied smoothly, flashing a badge that stated he belonged to “Division O” of the FBI. “We’re working with Homeland Security to follow up on the attack earlier this week.

  “Like I said, we have a warrant,” David continued, producing the short, safe-for-the-public, version of that document. “This building is now under lockdown. Captain Narita’s people will process everyone and engage in an orderly evacuation of anyone we will not be detaining.”

  The young man swallowed. His gaze flickered over toward the coffee shop, where another squad of APs had just moved in through the outside door and the sergeant was starting to give calm orders to the patrons.

  “I’ll call the building staff,” he said slowly. “I don’t have an access pass for security; you’ll have to talk to Mr. Lowe.”

  “That’s fine, son,” David told him. “You’re not in trouble; we’re only locking down the building as a precaution.”

  Waiting for the young man to head back to his radio, he gestured Narita to him.

  “Sweep this floor,” he ordered. “Set up processing outside. Anyone who isn’t a Talon employee, we want out of here by noon. Anyone who is a Talon employee, detain and interview.”

  “I know the drill,” Narita replied, gesturing another squad into the building. “What about upstairs?”

  “Send a squad to the third floor ASAP,” David ordered. “Otherwise, move up floor by floor as you secure. Keep this lot”—he gestured at the squad behind them—“with us for the moment. Once I’ve spoken to this Lowe, we’ll move up to Talon’s lowest floor and secure the elevators and stairs.”

  “It’s a big building,” the AP Captain warned. “We’ll need more than a squad to secure even Talon’s offices.”

  “I know,” David agreed. “We’ll secure the lower access, and Pell and Stone will lock down the helipad.”

  “Wha
t is the meaning of this, Bryan?” a voice bellowed, and David turned to find a florid-faced man bearing down on the young receptionist, several other men in janitorial uniforms following hesitantly.

  “Ah, you would be Mr. Lowe, I presume?” David asked, intercepting the man before he reached the youth.

  “I am James Lowe, the manager of this building, yes,” he snapped. “What is going on? Who are you?” he asked, finally registering David’s suit, Narita’s uniform, and all the guns.

  “David White, FBI,” David flashed the badge again. “We’re locking the building as a precaution; we have a warrant to detain all Talon Security employees and search their premises and files. I will require access to building security and master keycards to the premises.” He presented the short warrant again.

  Lowe managed to flush even redder, a color that was probably unhealthy on such a big man, while ignoring the document.

  “I can’t give you that,” he snapped. “That would be a violation of the security clauses of our leases.”

  “Mr. Lowe, unless your employer is incompetent, your leases have a force majeure clause for a reason,” David said calmly. “You will provide my men access to security and master keycards, or I will arrest you for obstruction and have your staff arrange the same. Am I clear?”

  Lowe swallowed. Before he could say anything further, however, the main freight elevator suddenly announced its arrival with a loud chime.

  The incongruity dragged everyone’s attention—a reaction proven justified a moment later when eight men in gray-and-black uniforms boiled out of the elevator in perfect formation to clear each other’s lines of sight and fire, handguns out and sweeping around the floor.

  It took them slightly less than a second to register the now-several squads’ worth of fully armed and armored soldiers swinging into action in response. By the time the Talon Security men—or so David presumed them to be—had finished deploying from the elevator, they were facing down the barrels of over twenty assault rifles, including David’s own.

  One of them coughed gently, slowly lowering his handgun.

  “Mr. Lowe hit a panic button,” he said slowly.

  “FBI,” David informed him. “Are you Talon Security?”

  “Yes.”

  “Surrender your weapons,” the ONSET man continued. “You’re being temporarily detained while we carry out a search-and-interrogation warrant on your company. There is no need for violence, but we have full sanction here.”

  “The soldiers were a hint,” the Talon man said with a pained smile. “Put ’em down, boys. This is above our pay grade.”

  “Sergeant Bull,” Narita snapped, gesturing one of his squad commanders forward. The Talon troopers readily surrendered their weapons and submitted to handcuffs.

  Eight down. David wasn’t entirely sure how many to go, and he turned back to Lowe.

  “Mr. Lowe,” he said calmly. “Keycards. Security access. Now.”

  #

  With the overrides and master keys, David’s teams had full control of the elevators. Narita’s sweep was moving up the stairs, slowly evacuating people from each floor one by one as they moved upward. Once they reported the third floor—with Talon’s servers and main computer storage—secure, David finally took his own team into the elevators.

  All of the elevators. The building had an efficient set of four of them, and the two ONSET agents, AP Captain and twelve AP soldiers easily filled all four, especially since the soldiers were in armor and all of them were carrying assault rifles.

  He emerged from the elevators to hear the girl at reception complaining.

  “All of the servers seem to have gone down—and I can’t reach anyone downstairs to let me know what’s going on!” she was saying loudly to the man leaning across the desk, somewhat inappropriately into her personal space.

  “That would be our fault,” David said calmly. “FBI. Keep your hands where we can see them.”

  The girl quite literally squeaked, her hands flying into the air in shock. The somewhat older man who’d been more concerned with her cleavage than her complaint had good reflexes too—the wrong reflexes. He went for his gun.

  David reached him first, probably moving faster than he could justify other than in the cause of avoiding violence. An iron grip slammed onto the man’s wrist and his other hand crushed him into the reception desk.

  He twisted the Talon Security man’s arm around behind his back and roughly cuffed him even as the merc gasped for breath.

  “None of that,” he said sharply, passing the prisoner off to one of Narita’s troopers. “We don’t want trouble, miss,” he told the girl. “The building is under lockdown; we have a warrant to search the premises and interrogate all Talon employees on site.

  “So long as you cooperate, you will not be harmed.”

  She kept her hands in the air, gulping hard as she nodded her understanding.

  Hand gestures sent Narita’s men to secure the stairs, and David stepped closer to the poor receptionist.

  “Other than the men you sent downstairs, is there anyone here who is going to be armed?” he asked gently.

  “There’s a reaction force on the forty-second floor,” she whispered. “Supposed to respond to any crisis, not that they’ve ever been needed here! Thirty guys, armor, guns…” She shivered. “Not…nice guys.”

  “We know the type,” David agreed grimly, tapping his earpiece.

  “Stone, Pell, is the helipad locked down?” he demanded.

  “Locked and secure,” Pell reported. “I’m flying overwatch and no one seems to want to argue with miniguns and rocket pods, for some reason.”

  “Good. Apparently, there’s a platoon-strength reaction force on the top floor. I’m going to attempt to neutralize them diplomatically, but watch your back.”

  “Got it.”

  Smiling grimly, he turned back to the young woman again.

  “Where is the regional director’s office?” he asked gently.

  Chapter 17

  Talon had added two additional sets of stairs in the middle of their offices, decorative things in granite and steel that allowed ready access to each floor in sequence. Despite their decorative nature, David noted that they were easily wide enough for a fireteam to move down in a row abreast.

  The designers had put more than passing thought into enabling the defense of the office, and the last thing the US government strike force could afford was for the mercenaries to start resisting.

  Leaving Narita and two of the squad’s fireteams to secure the exits and make sure none of the Talon employees left, David took Hellet and the third fireteam and started up those broad granite stairs, watching for trouble as they went.

  They found it on the third of Talon’s five floors. David’s prescience flashed a warning and he jerked the entire procession to a halt—only for bullets to crash loudly through the space where he would have been standing a moment later.

  “Federal agents!” David shouted up the stairs. “Lay down your weapons!”

  The response was more gunfire, which his prescience allowed him to neatly sidestep. There were two, maybe three shooters, all with automatic weapons. They didn’t have much cover—but they had more than the stairs were allowing David’s people.

  One of the AP troopers produced a metal cylinder the Commander recognized as a flashbang, looking to David while holding it up questioningly.

  “Alive,” David reminded the troopers as he nodded his permission. Another blast of gunfire echoed down the stairs, the shooters trying to keep the invaders pinned down more than anything else—and the flashbang went flying back in the opposite direction.

  Knowing what came next, David intentionally suppressed his enhanced senses. At this distance, a flashbang could be dangerous to ordinary humans, let alone someone with his Empowered hearing and sight.

  He still heard the device go off, and charged up the stairs with the Anti-Paranormal troopers in his wake. One of the shooters fired wildly, bullets ricocheting
around the stairwell until David reached him and yanked the rifle out of his hands with brute force.

  From the sound of it, he had broken several of the man’s fingers, but he didn’t stop there. Sweeping the stolen assault rifle around, he hooked the man’s feet out from underneath him and then slammed the wooden stock into his head with carefully estimated force.

  David’s target went down like a limp sack of bones, and the AP troopers swarmed the other two men, disarmed them and tied them up.

  “One more floor to the c-suites,” David said quietly. “Tie them and leave them; we need to get everyone to stand down.”

  #

  The executive section—the “c-suites”—of the Talon Security offices was on the fourth floor, encased in a separate glass enclosure with another set of keycard security locks. Everyone had heard the gunfire and the flashbang, so the staff David and his team passed were hiding behind their desks, peeking out to see just what was going on.

  Security shutters had closed over the glass enclosure, sealing the executives away behind a flimsy but secure-looking defense. Even without being obviously supernatural, David could get through the shutters in under a minute—but it would be a messy process.

  Instead, he rapped sharply on the glass.

  “Federal agents,” he announced. “We have a warrant. Open the security shutters or we will blast our way through.

  “You have thirty seconds to comply.”

  He gestured to the AP troops to start setting the charges, but the shutters slid up and the door buzzed open before they’d laid more than a single block of C-4.

  “With me,” David ordered, striding through the door into the executive offices, glancing around at the terrified-looking assistants staring at him and the soldiers.

  “Who’s in charge here?” he demanded.