He pinged back in seconds. What a nightmare! I’m about fifteen minutes from home. What’s that password for the phonics website?

I texted back the code for the lift emergency authorisation code number and code word. We didn’t rely on fingerprint recognition for entry. We had found if people really wanted to get in somewhere that needed it they’d just cut off fingers. For the same reason we didn’t use iris recognition. Or facial recognition. While the entry code followed by ‘open-sesame’ would activate the lift and take you to our lower level of offices. Entering the code and ‘sesameseeds’ would mean the lift would take you down to a level below the main offices where a wall of alerted, heavily armed Rats would be waiting. If we were compromised and forced to give up the entry code, we had the chance of giving one that would save everyone inside. We were dead anyway but a final act of rebellion, a massive fuck you from the grave to our murderers, was a nice consolation.

Whatever the Ghosts were here for it had to do with the Dictaphone. The Ghosts at the fashion show last night had failed to secure it. Tenebris must have realised that Platform Eight had it and were prepared to risk an all-out invasion to get whatever intel we had stolen off it. Why was it so important to them? I’d scanned a copy of Robin’s translation of the meeting notes and had seen nothing of interest.

Yet Tenebris making a strike to get it just showed how valuable the audio files must be.

And made me all the more determined to keep them safe.

*

I opened the chamber of the Ghost’s gun. A full six rounds. I clicked it back. I heard the sound of desk drawers slamming from down the corridor as his companions searched the offices. How many were there?

The Dictaphone recordings were saved on a hard drive, which was right now in our office inside Robin’s desk drawer. I’d seen him putting it there just before he left. As we were on lockdown nothing was getting saved onto the server in case the Snake could access it. All the information we had to do with the ongoing mission was saved to our individual laptops and to hard drives or USB sticks. The Ghosts wouldn’t know what we’d saved the audio onto so would have no idea what they were looking for. They would take everything just to be safe. If they left with all our hardware we were fucked. Not just the Dictaphone intel but all our intel would be gone.

I needed to stop them.

With just six bullets.