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"Red Queen's defenses are in place. She's making it difficult."

The medic looked cranky. Kaplan ignored her, and kept his virtuoso thing going.

At the sound of cloth rustling, Alice turned again, this time to look at Spence. He had decided to take advantage of this little bit of downtime to rummage through his pockets.

He found a gum wrapper, an ID card with his picture on it, and some loose change.

Everything else went back in his pocket, but he kept out a quarter. Alice was proud of the fact that she not only recognized the kind of coin, but that it was worth twenty-five cents and was one of the new state ones.

Then he started twirling the quarter in his fingers, flipping the coin with one knuckle over the adjacent finger, then repeating it across his hand and back again.

Alice was impressed.

Based on the look on his face, so was Spence.

He smiled. "Didn't know I had it in me."

Then the big door opened up. Alice looked over to see a self-satisfied look on Kaplan's face.

One nodded. "Let's pack it up."

Warner and Drew pulled a huge metal cylinder out of the trunk and put it in a duffel bag.

Alice looked at One, then turned to Kaplan. "He's a cool customer."

"Kept us all alive a long time."

Given their apparent line of work, this was no small thing.

One moved to the door, rifle at the ready.

Alice started to move behind him, which prompted him to stop and stare at her. "You stay here."

He spoke with finality. A retort of, "No I won't, either," died on her lips. Instead, she nodded and backed off, going to stand next to Kaplan at the computers.

One continued into the glass-lined corridor slowly. His rifle was out, he was bent over slightly, and looked ready to take on anything.

Halfway down, a series of lights behind the glass walls came on. Alice had to avert her eyes from the sudden brightness, which reflected off the ceiling and the other parts of the glass.

One shot Kaplan an irritated look, and the latter checked his monitors.

Then Kaplan spoke into the walkie-talkie on his left shoulder. "The lights are automated—nothing to worry about."

One nodded, and continued down the corridor.

As Alice watched, One made his way to a door that looked like—something.

A bank vault. That was it. It was certainly thick enough.

Reaching into one of the dozens of pouches on his all-black outfit, One pulled out some kind of transmitter. At least Alice assumed that was what it was, based in part on the small plastic antenna that he pulled out before affixing it to the big vault door.

Then he spoke into his own walkie-talkie—the abbreviation PRC popped into her head all of a sudden—and she heard his words over the like devices on everyone else's shoulder:

"Transmitter in position."

"Roger. Running the bypass." Kaplan's fingers started flying across three keyboards. The left-most workstation had a stream of code flying by. The monitor in the middle blinked with the words locking system override, and the one on the right was running a passcode search, running all the mathematical possibilities for the five-digit code that would allow them to gain ingress.

Alice found herself engrossed by the right-most screen, watching the numbers change rapidly until set-ding on one each:

XX1XX

XX1X7

X2 1X7

1 2 1X7

12 17 7

"Checkmate." Kaplan smiled.

As he spoke, the vault door opened. One looked inside, rifle pointing right inside, but there didn't appear to be anything there.

"Move up," he said with a come-here gesture.

From this distance, Alice couldn't make anything out, but she doubted that One would call up the rest of the team if there was any serious problem.

Warner and Drew picked up the duffel, and headed in, the medic right behind them.

Alice indicated the bag with her head and asked Kaplan, "What is that?"

"That's what's going to shut the Queen down. It delivers a massive electrical charge, scrambles the mainframe, and forces it to reboot."

Alice nodded. Simple, straightforward, yet productive. She admired the simplicity.

Then the vault door closed