salute [h.s]

chapter 34 - femme fatales & anomalous allies

If Piper had thought the activity outside of the Royal Courts of Justice had been chaotic, it was nothing compared to the hoards of police that surrounded the London Stock Exchange. The streets were blocked off way back from the building and every other building in the vicinity had been evacuated which meant there were huge crowds milling about on the open side of the police barricades. Niall and Piper had to plow their way through them to get up to the police line.

They were still wearing the bulletproof Kevlar vests that they'd taken from the Firearms Unit so they weren't spared more than a passing glance as they crossed the barricades and moved through the streets clogged with police cars and ambulances toward the LSE building.

Piper was lost in her thoughts as they walked, trying to piece together this puzzle. She had the edges done, the corners all in the right places but there were pieces in the middle that she just couldn't figure out, holes in the image that she couldn't manage to fill. There were so many double agents tossed up in this mess that they could make their own team — the antithesis to One Direction. They were after the wealth of the city. They were after her brother. And she suspected that for whatever reason, they were also after her.

She jumped when Niall's hand curled around her elbow, pulling her in the opposite direction she'd been intending to go. It wasn't until she looked around that she realized she'd been about to go the wrong way. "Sorry," she said as she jogged to keep up with Niall. "I was stuck in my head a bit."

"Trying to figure it all out?"

"I just have this really bad feeling." It was deep in her gut and it was instinctual. Her instincts were rarely if ever wrong — Harry had said it was the reason he'd had so much faith in her so early on. "Something's going to go wrong," she told Niall warily. "I can feel it."

Niall's brow knit together as he looked at all the activity around them. He shook his head, as if he'd been thinking something but he wanted to rid himself of it as quickly as he could. "Let's just stay focused," he suggested as he pointed out a nondescript van sitting up just up the street, about 100 metres to the entrance of the LSE. Piper wasn't sure why they were headed that way until the back door opened and Zayn stuck his head out, waving them forward.

The van turned out to be a mobile command centre of sorts, one wall lined with monitors that were displaying any number of things — security camera footage, file after file of identification information, blueprints of the building — and the other stacked with weapons. Louis was sitting in front of one of the monitors, his fingers flying over his keyboard which translated into line after line of code on the screen.

"What's he doing?" Piper asked as they stepped up to the van.

"Writing base code for a program, I think."

"Trying to keep these fuckers out of the LSE systems," Louis corrected over his shoulder. "I'm doing as much as I can from here but I'm going to need a physical entry point before long." He abandoned his work and stood, ducking his head in the small space. "I'm going to go in and see what I can do. But let's get you both up to speed first."

"Is there any new information from what you told me on the phone earlier?" Piper asked.

"The hostiles, whoever the hell they are, have already breached the LSE's system and they're trying to work their way around the code for the Delta Protocol which means they haven't gotten it yet. There's still a chance we can catch Andrew and stop him from giving it up."

"Do we know where he is?"

"He's not on the trading floor, that's for sure. We've got eyes on the whole room because of the cameras and he's nowhere in sight. He hasn't come out of the building though so he's somewhere in between. It's just a matter of finding him first."