Chapter 84: Neutralizing the Threat
"The access code," Sarah said. "Tell me what it is."
She was holding a switchblade at Farook's eye level. He was zip-tied to a chair, both legs bleeding from where she'd already used it twice. His expression was the specific flatness of someone who had decided on a course and intended to hold it.
"The code's been destroyed," Farook said. "Nobody stops it now."
Sarah put the blade into his thigh again without preamble.
Farook's jaw clenched. His face went dark with the effort of not making a sound. He managed it, which told Simon something about the man's threshold.
"The target," Sarah said. "Where is the satellite aimed?"
"It doesn't matter who fires first," Farook said, through measured breaths. "Nobody remembers. Nobody cares. The ones who die — they're already forgotten."
"What's the target?"
He laughed — a compressed, ugly sound. "Does it change anything?"
Sarah hit him in the face.
"Watch him," she said to Simon.
"Understood."
She moved to the primary console and began pulling up the command interface — setting up the input screen so the moment Chuck came through with the code, she could enter it in seconds.
Simon moved to the second terrorist, who was still unconscious on the floor near the door. He searched him methodically — took the submachine gun, the spare magazines, and a secondary handgun from an ankle holster. He set it all by the exit.
Then he went to the hostages.
There were eight of them — facility workers, zip-tied to chairs along the back wall. He cut the restraints on each one.
"There's a break room at the end of the corridor," he said. "Go there and stay. Backup is twenty-five minutes out. Someone will come for you."
They went.
Simon looked at Farook, who was bleeding steadily from both thighs. Not arterial — Sarah's placement had been deliberate — but enough that leaving it unaddressed was its own kind of interrogation tool.
Simon crossed to the first aid kit mounted on the wall, took it down, and opened it.
He found triangular bandages and improvised a pair of compression wraps around both wounds — enough to slow the bleeding, not enough to make it comfortable.
Farook watched him do it. "I'm not thanking you."
"I'm not looking for thanks," Simon said. "I just don't want you bleeding out before anyone gets useful information from you."
"Your country kills people in theirs," Farook said. His voice was steady despite everything. "Children. Families. In their homes. You know this."
"I know," Simon said.
"And you defend it."
"I don't defend it," Simon said. "I don't have the power to stop it. Those are different things." He looked at Farook directly. "What I can do is stop you from killing people who had nothing to do with any of that. My people. People I know. That's the scope of what I can actually affect, so that's where I operate."
Farook looked at him for a long moment. Something moved through his expression — not softening, not agreement, but the specific quality of someone who has heard something that doesn't fit their working model and is deciding what to do with it.
He said nothing.
Sarah's phone rang.
"Chuck," she said. "Do you have it?"
A pause.
"Chuck. The code. Skip everything else, I need the code."
She was at the console before he finished reading it. Her fingers moved through the input sequence — deliberate, no hesitation, the precision of someone who understood the cost of a typo in this context.
The status display shifted.
Red to yellow.
Yellow to green.
"Satellite weapons systems offline," Sarah said. "All functions deactivated." She exhaled once, controlled. "Good work, Chuck."
Simon looked at the display. Then at Farook.
"It's over," Simon said.
Farook pulled against the zip ties — a single, futile motion — and then went still. "No," he said. Then again, quieter: "No."
He looked at the ceiling.
Simon checked his watch. The support team would arrive in under twenty minutes.
"I need to go," he said to Sarah.
She understood immediately. His presence at the scene when the NSA cleanup team arrived was a complication neither of them needed — his profile was supposed to stay clean, and a weapons satellite incident with civilian witnesses wasn't a scene he could explain his way out of.
"Go," she said. "I've got it from here."
Simon picked up the submachine guns he'd taken from the two terrorists — both of them, along with the spare magazines — and headed for the door.
"Simon," Sarah said.
He turned.
She looked at the weapons in his hands. Her expression was the one she used when she was choosing not to say something officially.
"An independent unit needs to supply itself," Simon said. "Weapons are expensive."
"I didn't see anything," Sarah said.
"Thank you."
He loaded the guns into the Mustang's trunk beside the ones he'd taken from the corridor, drove back toward the freeway, and let the city expand around him as he moved.
DING.
He pulled up the system notification at the first red light.
[ Chuck — significant Chuck series character — operation completed. Skill acquired: Iron Will — Basic (Passive). ]
He turned this over mentally.
Iron Will. The description was what the name implied — an elevated threshold for pain, the ability to maintain functional consciousness under physical duress, some resistance to chemical agents that affected mental clarity. Sedatives, truth serums, that category. Not immunity — resistance. The difference between going under immediately and having a few seconds or minutes of awareness before the dosage won.
It was, Simon thought, the kind of skill you hoped never to need and were glad to have.
He filed it and drove home.
He put the submachine guns under the bed, which brought the total of illegal military-grade hardware in his bedroom to a number that would end his life as he knew it if anyone with a warrant ever opened the door.
He sat at his desk and thought about this practically.
The problem wasn't new — it had been building since the armored truck job, since the storage closet full of cash, since the C4 and the detonators and the MK14 in the gun safe he'd installed in the closet. The volume had just reached the point where the risk was no longer abstract.
A search connected to Dom's case was the most likely trigger. The LAPD had the Toretto crew on their radar, and anyone connected to that crew was a potential avenue. Simon had been careful, but careful had limits.
He needed a proper operational base. Not a storage unit — a legitimate front, something that provided legal cover for movement, finances, equipment, and occasional foreign travel.
The obvious answer was a company.
A business entity with commercial premises gave him somewhere to operate from, a reason to hold equipment, a paper trail for cash flow that didn't trace back to armored trucks and black market arms dealers, and a cover story that worked in multiple contexts.
He opened his laptop and started looking at commercial real estate listings in the Burbank and Glendale area — something small, something that wouldn't attract attention, something with enough square footage to be functional and enough anonymity to be safe.
He had the money. He had the need. What he needed now was the right address.
He started making notes.
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