The Busy-Bees helped me map out the safest route, and so we set off. Ghost went first, and I relied on his nose and his instincts every bit as much as my electronic doodads. We moved silently along the dimly lit halls, pausing now and then to allow foot patrols to make a turn down a corridor before we entered that passage. Everything was so quiet. We were near the staff lounge, and I couldn’t hear the explosions and dramatic music of superheroes and villains beating the snot out of one another. Nice. Made me want to send a box of chocolates to whomever designed the acoustics. Maybe give him a foot massage.

One confusing thing was that the cells were so scattered that it was tough to follow the numbering system. Nor were there arrows on the walls or those colored lines you see in some factories to guide you to key points. Likely that was to make it even more difficult to find any specific person. That would have been frustrating if I didn’t have a tactical version of the world’s most sophisticated computer on my arm.

It took me under five minutes to locate cell 13. It was snugged way back into a corner, with the adjoining rooms proving to be dry storage for office supplies on one side and the electrical room on the other. And that was lucky, too, because the machines in the electrical room generated a constant audible hum, further masking incidental sound. Luck seemed to be on my side.

Ghost and I peered around a corner, saw the foot patrol making a left at the far T junction, and then we hurried to the cell. Some jokester on the staff had used a Sharpie to draw a big red heart on a sheet of printer paper and had taped that to the door. For the great lover, Casanova. Cute.

I knelt outside his room and spent a couple of minutes sending new protocols to my swarms. The Busy-Bees fanned out and landed high on walls near the corners, positioned to watch for foot patrols coming my way. By resting on the walls, they conserved their batteries. As for the Killer Bees, I sent two to each intersection. If things got freaky, the Busy-Bees could paint approaching guards with tiny lasers, and the Killer Bees would zero in on each specific guard and send them into slumber land. I didn’t want to have to do that, but the way my luck’s been running, I figured I’d have to. Once I was outside again, any bees I could not retrieve would be sent a detonation code that would activate minuscule thermite charges. There’d be nothing left for a forensic analysis and no way to trace it back to me or RTI. No way for Bug to track me, either.