Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

They have to go in clean because everyone is being searched at the door. Knives, guns, even comms are right out. For some suspected ecoterrorists that Jack already called “hippy dippy commune types”, the hosts of tonight’s party own a pretty big, modern mansion. A lot of trees were chopped down to build the place, and a lot of dirt covered with cement.

Mac’s been hoping they’ll get to keep their cell phones, but as soon as he steps inside the door with Cage on his arm, they’re funneled through a second queue. Jack’s behind them, still outside the doors at the metal detectors.

The end of the funnel is manned by several young women who look like they got kicked out of the Oscars for showing too much skin. They’re all wearing tight gowns and large strings of jewels and enough makeup that they’d probably be unrecognizable without it. Beyond them, a man with the build of a professional wrestler waits to sweep them for electronics, completing the carrot-and-stick team.

A busty woman in a tight sunflower-yellow dress whose hair has been dyed lavender to match her lipstick-–or the other way around—holds out a small steel lockbox to Mac and Cage. “Y’all can put your cell phones and other electronic devices in the safe. Watches too, if they’re more’n just watches.” She glances down at Mac’s wrist as he holds out his phone, giving an approving glance to his plain old mechanical watch. Cage is wearing a crystal bracelet and simply gets a vapid smile. “That all y’all got?”

“That’s everything,” Mac tells her, taking Cage’s arm again. They really don’t have anything else, so they pass the final guard without difficulty and are allowed into the wide hallway beyond.

“That’s going to make it tough,” Cage murmurs.

All they’ve got left for equipment is what’s in Cage’s tiny silver purse: bobby pins, a couple hair bands, a small hair brush, credit cards, a nail file, a few band-aids, and some make-up. It’s not nothing, but it’s not a lot, either, and now they don’t have any direct way of contacting Riley, who’s a quarter-mile down the road in the van.

They only make it to the first turn before they encounter another checkpoint manned by three more models, again dressed in vibrant colors with colorful hair.

These guys are really serious about their security. Or whatever this is. They slow behind several other party guests. Mac lets Cage watch what’s going on ahead while he casually appraises the area. There’s a camera tucked away in the corner above the next door, recording the faces of every guest who comes down the hallway. That’s nothing unexpected. Hopefully it means that Riley is also seeing their progress.

“Flowers,” Cage says softly.

Mac glances at her. “Hm?”

She tugs him forward. It’s their turn at the security stand. And indeed, it’s flowers: corsages and boutonnieres in an array of different colors. Their hosts certainly seem serious about the “garden” theme that was printed on the invitation that Phoenix intercepted.

The security employee is a young woman wearing red sequins and little else. She holds up a corsage made from marigolds and bright red zinnias to Cage, while one of the others offers Mac a boutonniere that appears to be chives and lavender.

“Let me put that on you, darling,” Cage says, giving the model who’s edging up to Mac a cool look as she reaches for the boutonniere.

Mac stands still while she pins it to the flap of his jacket, and then takes the corsage and pins it to the strap of her silver gown.

Cage tugs him softly right, and Mac starts down the marble hallway.

The party starts at the end of the hall, where they pass into a tall room paneled in dark wood. There’s a bar to one side. The decoration scheme is full-on flowers, but they aren’t the only attendees who missed the memo. There are a lot of dark jackets and dresses, a lot of metallics, the occasional red or blue, much like any other upscale party they’ve crashed. It’s easy to spot the party staff, who stand out in their vibrant colors.

Mac orders drinks while Cage turns around, as if she’s admiring the room while she scopes it out. They accept two glasses of wine from a passing server and continue through the next door. There’s supposed to be an art gallery here somewhere, and a party.

They come to the party first, which is a large, open room with tall windows and a few chairs here and there. They’re supposed to mingle to avoid suspicion, but it’s crowded enough that they can just move to the side and watch without looking out of place.

“How are we going to do this without equipment?” Cage asks softly as they reach an empty stretch of wall. “We could scrap the op. But we won't, will we?”

“No.” Mac sips from his wine glass, examining the bookcase they’ve landed near. Unsurprisingly, it’s filled with thick tomes about nature. Their host is known for spending her millions on environmental crusades, some that have genuinely done a lot of good for the world, and which Mac admires. But some, especially recently, seem more based on conspiracy thinking than reality. Phoenix is here because analysts linked her to a bioweapon which some conspiracists think should be shot into the atmosphere to prevent the government from creating chemtrails. “We’ll improvise.”

“Figured.” Cage turns to scan the room. She looks completely relaxed, like she’s been to a hundred parties just like this one before. “Jack’s in.”

“The crowd isn’t thick enough to cover us yet.” The door they need to get through is off the hallway on the opposite side of the room. They probably aren't supposed to go through it, so they need everyone busy before they try.

Accepting hors devours from a tray that comes by, Mac and Cage continue to avoid mingling as they circulate around the room. The crowd was already a good size when they arrived, guests continue to arrive while they loiter around the room, avoiding conversation and eye contact.

It’s a good twenty-five minutes before Mac signals Jack to head out. Cage goes next, leaving Mac pretending to sip wine alone as he counts to two hundred. Moving without haste, he wanders to the side of the room to discard his glass, then changes course to the back corner, where he slips out the door after his team.

#

The first door they need to get through is protected by a fingerprint scanner, but no problem. They lifted the hostess’s prints a week ago. Mac spent two days after that in the lab with Bozer, turning the swirling ovals into textured prints on the silk from which Cage’s clutch purse is sewn. Jack stands casually at the door nearest the party, eating hors devours from a cream-colored porcelain cocktail plate, while Cage dusts power makeup onto one of the tiny fingerprint swirls on the purse. She hands it over to Mac, who positions the dusted print it over the fingerprint scanner and rolls it carefully across the plate.

The LED on the lock turns green. He shares a grin with Cage and reaches for the handle. They’re leaving the land of plausibly being “lost” in the mansion, but that doesn’t stop Cage from brushing off the fingerprint and tucking the clutch under her arm. Jack deserts his post to squeeze through the door and snicks closed behind them.

They turn a corner and all stop to gape. There’s a section of hallway sectioned off by two sets of glass doors about four feet ahead of them, separating them from a hallway that runs at least thirty feet to another set of glass doors.

Riley had pulled a copy of remodeling blueprints as part of her research into the building’s tech setup. They’d found two pipes connecting the hallway to other parts of the building. Mac’s been expecting to find that the hallway was secured somehow–lasers, maybe, or Argon gas.

He isn’t expecting the security measure to be bees.

And it isn’t just a few bees. The stretch of hallway beyond the glass doors looked like something out of the type of late-night horror movie he and Jack stumble onto at 3am when they can’t sleep: slightly ridiculous and simultaneously bone-chilling. There are several thousand bees at a minimum, maybe tens of thousands of them. It’s hard to tell given the amount of movement in the hallway. Enough that the faint buzzing of their wings is audible through the glass doors.

Mac can’t see the pipes in the walls, but they make sense as transport tubes for bees, allowing them to move from the hallway to the outside to collect nectar.

He’d been right about the weird design being part of a security system. He’s just been very, very wrong about what type of system.

Chapter Text

“What about now?” Cage asks.

Mac drags his eyes away from the almost hypnotic swirl of bees in motion in the hallway. “Huh?”

Cage raises her brows at him. “Are we scrapping the op now?”

Personally, he wouldn’t mind. But if they’re right about what’s going on in his mansion—and the security measures certainly suggest that something’s going on—then they need to know what’s hidden down that hallway. Mac straightens his shoulders, turning resolutely back to examine the hallway. “No.”

“I’m with Cage on this one, homie.” Jack eyes the hallway with unease. “I’d face down a dozen guys with automatics for you, but that—” He gesticulates energetically toward the hallway with one hand. “No fuckin’ way. I say we let them keep their bioweapon if they want it that bad.”

Mac rolls his eyes. Sure, there are enough bees in the hallway that the other end seems hazy and sections of the wall appear to ripple. It’s a discomforting movement, even from the bee-free side of the doors. But bees aren’t as dangerous as most people think. “None of us are allergic to bees. It’s going to be fine.”

“You don’t have to be allergic to know better than to get near that many bees. What if they’re killer bees?”

“It’s unlikely at this latitude,” Mac says. “Anyway, there’s no other way into that room before the bioweapon is moved.”

“Surely you’re not proposing just walking through the hallway unprotected,” Cage says, cutting Jack off before he can protest again.

Mac shakes his head. He reaches for the plate Jack is still holding in one hand. “I’m going to need this,” he says, shaking the crumbs into the carpet before he looks at Cage. Her dress has a lot of hemline and a high waist. The outer layer is silver, but he got a glimpse of the underskirt lining when Bozer was altering it, so he knows the lining is made from creamy silk so fine that it’s translucent. “Also your purse and the lining from your dress. Can you rip it off for me? I need as much fabric as you can get.”

“I’m on it,” Cage agrees, handing over the silver purse again.

Mac crouches down and dumps the purse upside down on the floor. He separates four bobby pins and several band-aids from the pile of small items as the sound of fabric ripping comes from behind him. He twists and pulls on one of the bobby pins until it breaks in half, then uses the sharp point to cut a chunk of the fingerprint-patterned fabric off the end of Cage’s purse. He wraps it around his index finger so that the fingerprint pattern is at the end of his own finger and tapes it to himself using two bandaids.

Fabric sways in front of him. The tube of fabric Cage is dangling from one hand is about a yard high. He ties the ragged end that was ripped from Cage’s waistline in a tight knot. He balances Jack’s plate upside down on his head, then pulls the fabric over it so that the knot is on top of the plate. The hem falls below his belt. Working awkwardly, since his hands are on the inside of the fabric, he starts to tuck the hem into the waistband of his pants.

“You planning on marrying those bees?” Jack asks.

Cage gives him a sideways look. “It’s a bee suit, Jack.”

“I know that.” Jack crouches down and works on pulling Mac’s socks over the bottom ends of his pant legs. When he stands up, the fabric makes a haze between them, but not so much that Mac can’t see real concern in his eyes. “I still want it on record that I said this was a bad idea.”

Mac scoffs. “Well, you can gloat about it later.” He eyes a tube lying on the floor where he dumped it out of Cage’s purse, but there’s no way he can pick it up while his entire upper body is cocooned in silk. He pokes his fingers against the silk. “Hand me that, uh, tube of… whatever.”

“Mascara.” Jack holds it up. “Ultra Lash Builder, Waterproof, Blacker than Black,” he reads before he presses it into Mac’s fingers. “Be careful.”

“When am I not?” Mac smirks at Jack as he leans against the first door to push it open. He slips inside before Jack can compose a coherent response.

There’s only one door between him and the bees now. The humming noise of many wings is loud enough that sweat springs to his forehead.

He is not allergic to bees. The makeshift bee suit is going to work well, letting him see where he’s going while separating him from the bees. Bees won’t be interested in stinging him as long as he doesn’t alarm them. This is going to be fine. He’s going to be fine.

He squeezes his eyes shut and draws in a long breath, letting it out slowly and carefully not acknowledging the buzzing, the same way he’d try to ignore a drop if he was about to step out onto a height.

All he has to do is walk straight to the other end of the hall and get through the next door. He can do that.

He hooks the mascara tube under the door handle and pulls it open so he can slip though.

The buzzing is ten times louder in the hallway but there aren’t many bees on his end. They’re concentrated at the midpoint, where the pipes let out into the hallway. His heart is beating hard and his slow breaths become shaky as he takes slow steps forward. The deep humming noise feels like it’s worming its way deeper into his bones with every foot of progress.

Bees move around him, past him, over him, and a few land on the fabric from Cage’s skirt. One perches on the tip of the mascara tube he’s holding through the fabric. He pulls his other hand against his chest, letting his elbow push the fabric away from his body. He’s wearing a long-sleeved shirt and a good-quality wool suit jacket. Bees probably can’t sting through all that fabric.

It’s hard to judge the length of the hallway past all the movement. He’s taking slow small steps because he doesn't want to cause alarm, and so far the bees don’t seem concerned. Some land on him and a few depart, but as he moves closer to the center of the hallway, more are coming then going. Some of them crawl around the outside of the fabric, stopping as if to inspect, their furry little striped bellies inches from his face. The plate balanced on his head is just wide enough that the fabric doesn’t quite touch his face, but he’s never been so aware of how far his nose sticks out as when a bee crawls across the fabric right over it.

He’s a third of the way down the hall when he realizes bees are landing on his slacks, too, below the bee suit, where he’s protected only by lightweight wool. His sense of being vulnerable increases tenfold. He can’t really look down without knocking the plate off his head, and that will spell disaster, but he catches glimpses of his knees and ankles when he steps forward. There are a few bees on his shoes. There are bees crawling up and around his legs. He risks bumping them with each pass of one leg past the other. And worse: there’s a huddle of bees congregating on his chest, where the fabric rests against the chives-and-lavender boutonniere pinned to his jacket pocket.

He forgot all about the boutonniere.

Between one step and the next, Mac freezes. Sweat feels like ice on his skin. He wants out of this hallway. His breath comes in gasps. He wants to run, but the air in front of him is thick with more bees. His eyes cross trying to watch the bees that criss-cross the fabric in front of his face.

He knew a few would land on him, but this is too much. It’s too many bees.

There’s no action he can take to get them off of him. Nothing he can improvise. Any movement he makes is likely to upset them, and he really, really doesn’t want to be covered by upset bees.

Maybe if he stands here until the flowers wilt, the bees will get bored. Or maybe if he just stands here until spring comes, the bees will fly off to something more appealing. Do bees fly after dark? His mind is blank, his thoughts overwhelmed by the buzzing panic that crawls under his skin.

A thumping noise filters through the humming. It’s the noise of a fist on the heavy glass behind him. He can’t turn around but it’s Jack—it must be Jack—pounding on the glass. Jack’s probably contemplating doing something even stupider than walking into a swarm of bees with a sprig of lavender pinned to his chest.

If Jack comes in here without a bee suit and tries to get the bees off of Mac, he’s going to get stung. A lot.

Mac squeezes his eyes shut. The thumping is getting more insistent. The muffled shouting sounds almost like his name. If Cage wasn’t out there, Jack would probably already be in the hallway.

If he can function while hanging from an airplane or climbing a building, he can definitely face down some small insects while wearing a bee suit.

He takes a small, shuffling step forward, keeping his feet low so he doesn’t step on any of the bees. He’s entering the chaotic center of the hallway where bees are entering and exiting the pipes. There’s a boxy stack of man-made hives tucked into a cut-out alcove in the wall. When he passes it, he’ll be past the area of heaviest bee activity, not counting his chest, which is literally crawling with bees.

There’s no going back now. If he does that, Jack or Cage will have to do his job for him, or they’ll have to admit they can’t finish the mission.

Which they aren’t going to do. They always finish missions and he isn’t going back. He’s going forward, one foot after another.

He passes the center of the hallway and approaches the two-thirds mark. He can finally see himself reflected on the glass doors at the far end, and he looks like something out of a nightmare. There are so many bees around the boutonniere that they’re weighing the thin silk down enough that he can feel tiny feet tickling the tip of his nose where the fabric now touches it.

Mac gives a full-body shudder.

The bees react with alarm and Mac feels several hot pricks all at once, on his nose and his leg and his hip and on his wrist where he’s not protected by the sleeve of his jacket. On his fingers, where he’s been clutching the tube of mascara through the fabric.

He hisses and drops the mascara, pulling the throbbing fingers of his right hand against his chest. If he stays still and doesn’t try to shake or brush them off, maybe the others won’t notice.

It’s only a few, just a little painful. He takes a deep breath and tilts his head down so his nose isn’t touching the fabric anymore. He’s not allergic. This is just an annoyance, not a problem. And there’s nothing he can do about it until he gets out of this hallway.

He resumes his slow, cautious shuffle.

He’s almost there.

Almost.

The fabric sways slightly with each step, making the bass of bees bounce softly against him. With his head tilted down, the weight of the mass of bees is heavy enough to make the plate balanced on his head tip slightly forward. He can feel the fabric tugging where it’s tucked into the back of his pants.

If it comes loose—

He shudders again and shuffles forward. He’s never had a problem with bees, but then, he’s never been trapped inside a hallway with several thousand of them before.

He’s only a few feet from the door. Two more shuffles and he’s near enough that he could open it if he had a free hand.

But his hands are trapped under the fabric, and the mascara tube is somewhere behind him on the floor. All he has is a chest full of bees.

Which is also a problem, because he doesn’t want to take the thousand-or-so bees that have landed on him through the door.

He leans slightly forward, tipping his head back to keep the plate balanced on top of his head. He starts to reach up with his right hand but his fingers already feel hot and stiff, burning where he was stung a minute ago. He pulls it back against his side and scoothes his left hand up instead until he touches the boutonniere. He finds the head of the pin holding it and tugs it, a movement that makes his hand brush the fabric. It writhes against his hand, dozens of tiny feet tickling past, and then a hot sting and makes him

He can’t lean forward any farther without the plate sliding off, so he angles his elbows farther forward, lifting the fabric away. He pulls the pin loose and catches the boutonniere. He works it slowly down to his side. With his head tipped back, he can’t tell if the bees are following it. He pushes it against the end of the fabric until the fabric comes untucked, and flings it as far as he can with a flick of his fingers.

Then he waits to see if it will work.

Chapter Text

There are several dozen bees still crawling around the front of the fabric, as if investigating the ghost of the boutonniere. The door clicks shut behind him. Mac’s half-expecting something to happen to scare off the bees, but it’s just an empty room. He turns around to survey the room and feels a sting on the side of his knee. He sucks in a breath and plants his feet. There’s got to be some way to brush off the bees.

Aside from the glass door that separates the room from the hallway, there are three walls. The wall opposite the hallway has a door with a tall, slim window mounted in the top half. Mac can’t get close enough to get a good look at it without moving much more than he wants to.

Mac twists to look at the walls to each side. The wall to his left has several slits that have no obvious function. On his left, a panel with buttons mounted on the wall at about chest height. It’s just two unmarked buttons, but they’re the only buttons in the room.

He pushes the top one.

Two panels high in the wall above the buttons slide open and a mist squirts out, carrying the sharp scent of fresh mint. Peppermint. It’s soothing, like a freshness in the air. Three separate bursts of scent arrive one after the other before the panels slide closed again.

The bees don’t seem to like the smell as much as Mac. Their movements change and several alight. Some of them land on him again, but some of them move away from Mac, away from the source of the minty mist. A couple of them explore the slits on the opposite wall.

Hopeful, he pushes the button again and gets another three squirts of peppermint. The bees don’t seem to be fans of the damp mist, or the peppermint smell, or both. Several more bees departed through the slits in the wall. Mint had never smelled so good.

He keeps pushing the button until the smell of mint pervades the air and the last stragglers are crawling between the slats.

One more glance around, double-checking, and he dares pull the silk loose to free his left hand so he can drab the door handle. Pushing it open, he stumbles into the hall and then yanks the silk fabric of himself and lets it fall to the floor. The plate tangled up inside thunks heavily at his feet.

Mac sags against the wall, hand pulled tight to his chest as he looks around. The hallway is short, with one door at each end and a third off-center in the long wall. An actual, professional bee suit hangs on a hook right across from where he’s standing, its netted hat perched on a hook, rubber boots placed neatly on the floor. Like a spacesuit stationed at the airlock door, it has the look of an emergency escape plan.

If only there had been one on the other end of the hall, he’d be in less pain right now.

On his left hand, three welts are swelling pink across the knuckles and a few more on his fingers. There’s another two where his wrist meets the back of his hand. He can feel another couple on the front of his thighs, and that a couple more by his opposite knee, and he’s suddenly very grateful that Jack thought to pull his socks up over the open ends of his pant legs, or he might be worse off right now.

All in all, it’s only a few stings, and his left hand is entirely unscathed, and now he’s on the othr end of the bee trap. So it’s worth it. Some ice would do him good, but it will have to wait until they finish the mission and get out of here.

First things first: he needs backup. He needs to clear those bees out of the hall for Jack and Cage. Facing down a hive of bees–again–is not his idea of fun, but he pulls the door back open and takes a look. Nothing much has changed, except the peppermint scent is dissipating and the cluster bees who’d followed him to this end of the hall have, too.

He pushes the button that releases the peppermint smell again, flooding the room. It makes him feel slightly safer even though he’s already alone in a bee-free room. He hesitates, then tries the second button. His nose wrinkles as a puff of acrid smoke fills the room.

Everybody knows bees don’t like smoke. The smell is enough to stink up the room pretty good. It won’t spread to the hallway like this. He glances around and then checks his pockets–empty, but the way his finger rubs reminds him about the fabricated fingerprint he taped to his pointer finger with bandaids earlier. He peels the bandaids carefully off, grimacing because he has to move fingers on his right hand. The stings have turned into red welts, each surrounded by soft, swollen pink skin. There are enough stings that half his hand is beginning to look pink. He ought to try to get the stingers out, but he doesn’t have anything to scrape his skin with, and if he tries to use the sticky parts of the bandaid to pull them, the bandaids will lose their stick.

He secures one bandaid over each button, tight enough to activate the buttons continuously. As the stink of smoke and the crisp bite of peppermint fill the room, he uses the fingerprint to unlock the door to the hallway of bees and wedges the rolled-up ball of fabric that was his makeshift bee suit into the gap to prop it open.

He doesn’t stick around to see how the bees react. He pulls open the door to the hallway, hurries through, and slams it closed behind him.

All three doors in the hallway have fingerprint scanners. The blueprint showed two small rooms to the sides and a large room in front. He checks the side doors first, finding a closet with racks of random supplies on his left, and a closet with a couple more bee suits and the workings that produce the peppermint and smoke on the right. If he had more time, he’d want to take a closer look, but it’s not important enough right now.

The door in the middle of the hallway opens to a room about the size of his house filled in every direction with lab benches and lab equipment. There are some walls here and there, subdividing the space, but they’re all glass, like the war room back at Phoenix. The space is neatly organized but it’s clear someone’s been doing some serious work here, and there are several things that look like ongoing experiments.

The scene is a bit overpowered by the room’s long sides, which are entirely made of floor-to-ceiling glass and overlook two courtyard gardens of extraordinary beauty. They knew there were gardens, and that the gardens were colorful, but up close, they’re amazing. Rich with thick beds of different kinds of flowers and trees in a variety of species, they’re like secret showpieces.

A door closes somewhere and Mac’s attention snaps back to the lab. He’s not alone in here. Voices are coming from somewhere deeper in the large room; in the large space, they’re like background noise, but they’re coming closer.

He ducks down and crouches in the footwell of a nearby computer desk as two people pass by. They’re walking briskly, but not as if they’re looking for an intruder. They stop at another desk and lean over a computer together, talking animatedly while they look at something on the screen. He can’t see what’s on the monitor, and between the size of the room and the sound baffles on the ceiling, the voices don’t carry well enough to make out what they’re saying.

He scoots into a position where he can keep an eye on the two lab workers while he checks out the rest of the lab. There aren’t any surveillance cameras here, nothing that looks like a phone, so Riley probably doesn't have eyes in here and he doesn’t have a way to call her. Caution meant he didn’t even try to smuggle in a thumb drive full of Riley’s favorite password crackers and remote access scripts.

He shifts again. The position he’s in, knees pulled up under the desk, is pulling at the stings on his legs. He straightens his leg to relieve the pressure on his skin. He tugs up his pant leg to look at the stings near his knee and then wishes he didn’t. The welts are huge, pink, and swollen. He lifts his hand; the ones on his hand are bigger and more swollen. It’s enough that he can’t bend them tight anymore.

That’s going to be a problem.

The lab employees finish their conversation and head back to where they came from, down toward the other end and past some of the dividers. Mac scoots out from under the desk and grabs onto the desk’s surface with his un-stung hand to pull himself up to standing. He limps across the floor, trying not to bend his swollen knee. At least something’s gone his way: the lab techs left the computer they were using unlocked.

He moves the mouse to the left side so he can click around. He’s been in more than a few computers to spy on more than a few secret lab reports, and this one isn’t hard to navigate. There’s a molecular diagram alone in a window that he immediately recognizes as a variety of anthrax. Not exactly the ecoterrorism threat he’d have expected.

Frowning, he clicks through a few other open files. Yes, these guys are really into their anthrax. Maybe it doesn’t have anything to do with the rumors that drew Phoenix’s attention; it’s a pretty big lab, they could be doing a variety of experiments here. But he can’t rule it out.

He moves the windows aside and starts opening files on the desktop. There are about a dozen image files. He finds… bees, then more bees. Eight bees in, he finds a CAD file, half expecting it to be a diagram of a bee. But it’s some kind of mechanical device designed to spray. Maybe related to the peppermint sprayer. Interesting, but not what he’s after.

Maybe he’s on a wild goose chase. Where there’s network access, there’s always the likelihood that Riley can break in and extract files to send back to Phoenix analysts so they can snoop for him. He opens the command terminal and enters ssh, but all he gets back is no such file or directory, and he’s kind of a one-trick pony when it comes to hacking networks. If he can’t dump entire directories to the Phoenix servers, he’s stuck.

He blows out a frustrated breath and keeps clicking. There are 3 more CAD files, all different versions of the sprayer, but the last file is a PDF.

The PDF is the jackpot, if jackpots are a form of terrorism. Instructions for Preparing Your Bees, a title that might sound like some innocuous how-to for a beekeeper…. If said beekeeper was planning to use bees to spread a new strain of anthrax. The ten-page handout goes into some pretty specific detail about how to ensure a hive is dusted with enough anthrax to sprinkle it over a two-mile radius circle of land around the hive.

It doesn’t say why, but flipping back through the sprayers–referenced as the deployment mechanism in the ecoterrorism handbook in front of him–and the molecular diagrams, it’s clear that the lab is working for one purpose: to terrorize entire communities with untraceable outbreaks of deadly anthrax.

The garden party isn’t just a bunch of people mingling because they love the planet. They’re a bunch of people who are about to be given instructions and equipment to distribute to a few local beehives to turn their local honeybees into tiny, deadly vectors for widespread terrorism.