She scrolled through the internal surveillance she had access to, knowing that those were hardwired differently, so one couldn’t simply turn off the system unless they knew the location of each camera individually. It was a little failsafe she’d built into the system long before she started working for the youngest Hennigan. Speaking of the Hennigans, Ms. Wilson checked the video feeds from Deborah’s and Sarah’s offices. Sarah was the Chairwoman of The Foundation. She was also Phillipa’s grandmother. Deborah was Phillipa’s mother and next in line to chair The Foundation. No one knew she’d installed these cameras. They were a device of her own design and were never found during the daily security sweeps. She pulled up the images and found both women secure in their offices—Deborah pacing, Sarah was simply reading a book. Admittedly, the older Hennigan had seen more over the years than anyone in The Foundation could imagine. She’d propped up royalty and torn down nations. She looked more like an editor for a New York fashion magazine than one of the world’s most powerful and deadly women.
“Glad I don’t have to worry about those two.” She pulled up the other internal feed. Ms. Wilson was shocked by the carnage she found around The Complex. Ms. Wilson had worried that the place had become too relaxed in their assumption of invulnerability. “I should have seen this coming.” There was pounding at her door, followed by bullets ricocheting off the steel back into the hall. There was a yelp as someone was hit by one of their own stray bullets.
She pulled up the feed to the hall. A man in dirty cowboy boots lay in a pool of blood as another man tried to help him.One down, Ms. Wilson thought.Now, how to get rid of the other?She steepled her hands under her chin as she spun in her office chair to face the large, empty television monitor that took up the back wall of her office.
She took stock of the facts. Their backup diesel could run The Complex for approximately one hundred and twenty hours. After that, their security systems would stop working. She had four days to topple the coup.
She had an old computer in the corner that hadn’t been plugged into an electrical socket in years. She pulled the plastic cover off the computer and plugged it in. On a shelf nearby, she drew the box of floppy disks she had held on to. She flipped through the box, finding the one she needed. She took a deep breath and pressed the power button, filling the area with the whirring sound of the internal metal mechanisms.I forgot how loud these things were. She waited for it to boot up before typing in the command line to run the old computer-aided design program from the early nineteen-eighties. The whizzing and buzzing noises from the disk drive filled her with a feeling of nostalgia. “Ahh, the good old days.” She waited for the program to boot. When it did, she loaded in the Mesa Juamenes Complex’s original blueprints. A lot had changed since these were drawn and input into the system, but there were secrets only she had access to.
She spent the next few hours drinking coffee from her coffee pot, snacking on meal replacement bars and searching for the blueprints. “There,” she said when she finally found what she sought. “Well, I’m going to have to get a little creative. And I hope Phillipa doesn’t mind getting a new carpet in her office.” She searched their offices and labs for the tools she’d need before creating a hole in Phillipa’s office. A little acid, some creative chiseling and Ms. Wilson had made a hole that would lead her between the floors. She would have to be careful, but it would lead her to a ventilation duct in a maintenance closet. She’d drawn a map on spare paper and was ready to shimmy her way through the systems. Her short stature was ideal for the first time in a long time.
* * * *
After crawling on her stomach through the crawl space, she had made it into the ductwork, armed only with a penlight and a screwdriver. The mapped-out path had taken her almost forty-five minutes. The room below her was pitch black. She listened above, waiting to hear any movement below her. When she was finally satisfied, she showed her light around the room. It was small but empty of any humans. She unscrewed the grate in the ductwork before quietly dropping to the ground in the room. She spent several minutes taking stock of what she had to work with there. To her delight, she found a box cutter and several cleaning supplies. There was even protective gear. She smiled to herself, realizing the fun concoctions she could create with these. She found two chemicals she’d hoped to find, oxalic acid and trichloroisocyanuric acid. “These shouldn’t even be stored in the same closet,” she muttered. “I’ll have to put an end to that once this is over.”
She set about preparing herself, and within minutes, she opened the door to the closet and peeked her head out. The hall was empty. She heard clopping noises on the marble tiles. She closed the door just enough to watch a group of three guys in those blasted cowboy boots walking through the halls. They’d taken off their masks. They looked like a bunch of good old boys out playing army. None of them held themselves like they had real military training. When the walking subsided, she slid out. She placed the chemicals in a mop bucket and prayed the wheels wouldn’t squeak.
Ms. Wilson headed into the hallway and went to the T-intersection connected with the armory. She knew they couldn’t get in without someone in senior leadership, so the room would be locked up tight. Two guards were standing in the hall.This should be easy. She mixed the chemicals, waited for them to turn into a gas, and kicked the mop bucket down the hall.
“What the—?” before he started coughing.
She waited just a second before dashing madly toward the men. The protective gear helped her see while the other men rubbed at their stinging eyes. She held her breath as she slid under one man, severing his femoral artery with the box cutter. As he crumpled to the ground, she used him as a steppingstone to launch herself at the second man, driving the screwdriver through his eye and into his brain. She spun around and finished the first one, slicing through his trachea just below the larynx to stop him from screaming. All-in-all, the entire ordeal took less than thirty seconds. The first man attempted to grab her, but she knew he only had two minutes left to live. She kicked his hand away, walked up to the keypad, entered her code and let the device scan her iris. There was a whirring sound as the locks on the door disengaged. She opened the door and slipped inside.
The lights flickered to life. She found three women braced for battle at the other end of the room.
“What are you three doing in here?” Ms. Wilson asked in her authoritative voice. She recognized the recruits. She’d started their training a month ago.
“We were checking out weapons for training when the lockdown happened, Ms. Wilson,” a petite blonde woman said. Ms. Wilson tried to remember.A senator’s wife?
“What’s going on out there?” asked a bulky brunette. Ms. Wilson remembered this one, a former Marine.
The third was an ordinary housewife that no one thought would last as long as she had. Ms. Wilson smiled at the memory.
She turned to the housewife. “I’m glad to see you are still with us. I’ve been rooting for you. You remind me so much of myself. When I went through training, no one believed I would last to the end, either.” The woman nodded once. “Well, let’s get out there and do some damage, shall we?”
She had the three women arm themselves, and they spent the next twenty minutes discussing specific military tactics. “Remember… You are now the insurgency. Use all the insurgency tactics you’ve learned. Donotplay military. The only rules of engagement are don’t die and don’t kill one of our own, unless necessary. At the same time, don’t trust anyone roaming the halls. Someone let these people in. Until we know who it was, assume everyone you run into is an assailant.”
“You’re out roaming the halls?” the Marine asked.
“Yes, but I’m one of the good guys,” Ms. Wilson said flippantly. “If I’d wanted you dead, you’d be dead.”
She looked the three women over. They weren’t exactly ready for this, but they were about to be tried by fire. It would have to do for now.
“You three do some damage.”
“What are you going to do?” the housewife asked.
“I need to call in the cavalry.”
With that, they slipped open the door. Immediately, gunfire erupted. Two women took an isosceles stance while the third dropped to her knee and set up counterfire. The gunmen at the end of the hall dropped in seconds.Like shooting fish in a barrel.Ms. Wilson slipped the other direction. She now needed to get to the backup generator room—one of only two places in the entire building that contained satellite phones. She wasn’t relishing crawling around in the ducts again but headed back to the janitor’s closet. She was almost here when a man stepped around the corner. Ms. Wilson put a bullet between his eyes before he could register her. Unfortunately, someone came running in her direction. Instead of waiting, she slipped into the janitor’s closet, barricaded the door and slipped back into the ductwork. She finished securing the grate when a man kicked the door in. He looked around the room.
“Fucking decoy!” the younger guy said before pulling a walkie-talkie from his belt and speaking into the device, “Henderson is down.”
“For fuck’s sake!” a woman’s voice came back. Ms. Wilson recognized the voice but couldn’t place it. “Find this person and put them down. It shouldn’t be that complicated.”
“Sure thing, Mrs. Jackson.”
“How many times do I have to tell you not to use real names? What have they been training you at redneck gun camp?” The woman on the walkie-talkie let out a stream of obscenities that would make a hardened sailor blush.
