Inside the apartment, Cole dropped the mask and met Letty and the others. Letty and her two teammates were surprised at first by the face beneath—until Cole explained the disguise and why Owen had sent them. That settled it.
"Five million dollars each has been transferred to your accounts," Cole said, nodding to Dade. Dade and Kate ran it through; moments later all three phones chimed.
Klaus slung an arm around Cole's shoulders. "Brother, you line up work like this again, you call me first. How much did you pull this time?"
"Not much. A few hundred million," Cole said, almost bored.
"How much?" The three of them blinked. They'd made plenty over the years, but never hundreds of millions in one bite. It sounded like armed robbery on God Mode.
"What's a few hundred million? Barely enough to get started." Cole smirked, then thought of the R&D fund he owed Jason Tate and deflated. Weapons research could swallow a billion without blinking.
"What's next? I've already lined up the weapons; I can take delivery whenever," Klaus said. He'd had the easiest ride—just armorer and logistics—then sat on his hands.
"Next, I go into the lab with Jason," Cole said. "I'm not sure whether Ross will change his timetable, so the smartest play is to wait for them inside. To be safe, I need you three to do something for me."
Dade pulled dossiers onto the screens at Cole's request: Tool at the tattoo shop; Christmas's girlfriend; Caesar's daughter; Toll Road's family. Cole didn't dig on Yin Yang's people—but the list was enough. These were his pressure points if Ross pushed for a fight; fair fights were for fools.
"Dade, can you crack the lab side and give me ten clean minutes?" Cole asked.
"Yes. I'll run point with Kate from campus, sync to your clock," Dade said.
"Good. Then here's the plan…"
⸻⸻
Inside IMF headquarters, Theodore Brassel walked Belford into the building and went straight to his office to run "Cole Shaw." Minutes later he found what he needed. Seeing Margaret Shaw listed as mother, his hard face twitched with surprise. Most would miss the name, but he'd worked alongside Margaret years ago; he also knew who her other children were. The family was… exceptional—MI6, special operations, mercenary capability—leaders, the lot of them. For IMF purposes, that wasn't a problem; the Shaws didn't sit under Langley's leash, and any blowback would hit the service world, not his. Still, he flagged Cole Shaw for priority monitoring.
⸻⸻
The next night, at Hilland College, Dade and Kate prepped to take over the campus LAN and divert the lab's monitoring. On the other side of campus, Jason Tate moved into position. Soldiers guarded the lab doors. To reach them you followed a long corridor and took the corner; once you were past the gate, you were effectively safe. The interior was researchers-only—sensitive experiments, top-secret data. The military stayed out; supervision interfered with progress, and nobody wanted a mole posted at the door.
On the exterior wall above the lab, Cole climbed with gecko gloves, the only clean way to bypass the guards below. With the monitors under his team's control, ten minutes would be enough.
He reached the roofline, listened to the net, checked his watch.
"Okay," Dade's voice came into his ear. "Lab monitoring is under our control. You've got ten minutes before someone notices."
Cole dropped to the fifteenth floor and headed down for thirteen. At the stairwell window, he peered through the crack into the corridor. Three soldiers stood watch with rifles up.
"Jason, I need you to draw their eyes for thirty seconds," Cole murmured.
Jason walked into the corridor on cue. Cole set the projection screen, waiting for the guard's attention to shift, then slid into the hall and deployed the screen. In a breath the panel bloomed to full size. Cole tuned the lenses and locked the camera on the three soldiers.
Using Jason as the distraction, Cole moved forward in the screen's blind zone and reached the corner. He tapped the sound simulator—drip, drip. The guards glanced away, hunting for a leak. In that sliver of time, Jason rounded the corner and Cole kept the projection tracking the guards' sightline.
"Verification successful," the scanner chimed.
As the iris scan cleared, Cole yanked the screen, slipped through with Jason, and the lab door sealed behind them.
Everything landed inside the window.