Page 90 of Peaceful Chaos

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The insideof the manor is trashed. It looks like we narrowly missed Damien. He appears to have torn through the place gathering anything and everything that could serve a price.

Lucien moves purposefully through the house. Starting in Damien's office he notes the safe is empty. "He probably had up to ten thousand dollars stored in there. He'll have more in a few other hiding places. Some safe houses he's got set up. He'll also have false identification and weapons."

"We'll be ready when we find him," Javier reassures him.

"We're not trying to arrest him anymore," Lucien insists.

Javier shakes his head. "No, the time for that has passed. I think it's time Damien has a very tragic accident."

"And you're okay with that? You aren't going to insist we follow the law and let justice take it's course?" I press.

He turns to look at me. Sin looks so much like him my breath catches, but I force the sadness away. I can't let emotions overcome me right now. Losing my shit won't get Sin out of jail.

"I used to be in the FBI, so I know the training Grant is relying on. I also know the tragedies that have been caused by over zealous agents who refuse to try alternate paths. Everything that happens from here forward is because Grant Holbrook didn't leave us another route. I'm a soldier now, and I know that in war not everything is so easy to label as right and wrong."

"Good," I say. "Getting Sin back is the only thing that matters to me."

"Well then," Lucien speaks up. "Let's go find my hiding place."

He leads us down to a lower level. The basement where Sin was tortured is on the other side of the house. There are two subterranean spaces here, and the one Lucien leads us to is being used as a server room.

"Damien doesn't trust cloud servers. He's got an entire room here to keep his blackmail."

He goes to one of the tall server stacks and pulls out a drawer. There's a small screen and keyboard attached. "The data is stored on this stack and encrypted. Damien's data security is only as good as I designed it, and that's to say I installed several backdoors so I could access the information I needed and escape someday. Sin isn't the only one who was putting together an escape plan."

His fingers fly over the keyboard, and when he finds the files he needs, he pulls a small hard drive out of his pocket and begins to download the information.

"What are you downloading?" I ask, curiosity winning out on my need to let him work in peace.

He smirks back at me. "A loaded gun in the shape of ones and zeroes."

Once the files are downloaded he takes a small laptop out of his bag. "This is an air-gapped laptop," he mutters to himself as he boots it up and opens one of the files.

"How long is this going to take?" I ask him.

"Just a few minutes. I am not leaving here without making sure it's downloaded," he says without looking up.

"The rest of the house is clear?" I ask Javier.

He gives me a suspicious look. "What are you up to?"

I smirk at him. "Complete chaos."

He doesn't question me further. Instead he grabs his radio where it's clipped to his shoulder and barks an order. "Alpha team meet at the stairs near my location."

"Be fast, whatever you're doing," he demands.

I salute him, and he rolls his eyes. I don't wait for him to change his mind, and I jog up the stairs.

"Do you have gasoline in any of the vehicles to spare?" I ask the soldiers waiting for me at the top of the stairs.

One of them shakes his head. "But I found some containers in the shed around the side."

"Get them and meet me back here," I order. He doesn't question me, just runs out and returns a couple minutes later with two five gallon containers of gas.

There are four members in his unit. I leave one of the red jugs with the soldier who fetched them and take the other. "You two go upstairs and cover as much as you can with that container. We're going to get to work down here."

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