Shelter from the Sky
"Felicity?"
"Turn left at the next hallway and we want the third door on the right. Heat signature isn't showing anyone else on this floor."
Felicity looked up from her tablet to watch Oliver, dressed fully as the Arrow, stalk forward and check if the hallway she indicated was indeed empty.
"There is no one else here," Felicity said again, holding up and waving her tablet to make her point.
"You can't be too careful," Oliver grumbled and Felicity unsuccessfully tried to hide her snort of derision.
"Well Mr Safety-Conscious, we better hurry up before the next guard patrol finds that several locks have been disarmed."
She couldn't quite tell but she was sure that Oliver glared at her from under his hood.
This was one of the rare times that Felicity was out on a mission but didn't have to dress the part. They were on your average heist mission, breaking into an office building to find some documents that the police would need to convict a Mrs Geraldine Jay. Usually Felicity would just hack her way through the system but Mrs Jay was old school and kept paper records. In today's day and age it was a smart move, as long as the records were kept safe. If the police got them it would show proof of her smuggling ring as well as list the paying clients. Felicity was there because Mrs Jay used a security business as her front, and it was good advertising to have top security measures in place. Most doors had their own individual key pad locks, if not a card swipe and some form of finger scanning technology in the more private areas. Not to mention the army of security guards. She had tried to teach the boys how to hack into the different locks but the information they had varied the models and codes so much that in the end it was easier for Felicity to go in person than for Diggle and Oliver to learn twenty different ways to bypass the locks.
So Felicity got to help Oliver through the many locked doors while Diggle stayed in the car in case they needed backup and just generally keeping an eye on things.
Finally Felicity and Oliver reached the office of Mrs Jay and it took less than a minute for Felicity to rewire the door and bypass the fingerprint scanner. She could have done the old trick of reusing the print on the scanner, but unlike most other people, Mrs Jay knew to clean off her fingerprint after using it.
Oliver pushed in front of her and scanned the room for any threats before waving her in.
She walked in and squeaked in surprise before muffling her mouth with her hand.
"Felicity?" Diggle demanded over the comm. set while Oliver whirled around to face her, one hand going to his quiver.
"Sorry," she whispered. "There is a giant bear staring at me."
"What?" Diggle asked confused.
"There is a stuffed bear in the office," Oliver explained.
"It even does that thing where its eyes follow you around the room," Felicity added, bobbing her head to either side to prove it.
"Felicity," Oliver reminded her, "the files."
"Oh, right. On it."
Holding up her tablet she chose another program and started to scan the room while Oliver started to manually riffle through the filing cabinets.
"There are two places the scanner can't see," Felicity announced triumphantly. "My guess is that these hold the top secret stuff."
"Where?"
"We have a wall safe behind the bear," she eyed it warily, "and one in the middle of the desk, probably a hidden compartment."
Leaving her tablet on the desk she sat down behind it and started to figure out where the hidden compartment was. Oliver busied himself by moving the bear away from the wall to expose the barely visible opening in the wooden panel.
"Pay dirt," Felicity said excitedly as she opened the hatch that contained a small black book. Flicking though the pages she found a list of names and numbers that with a little decoding would be very damning evidence. Problem was it could take hours, even days, to crack if they didn't also find the key to the code. Tossing it to Oliver he started to look through it while she moved onto the safe.
"Can you even break into a safe?" Oliver questioned.
"Never doubt what information you can find on the internet," Felicity smirked and got to work.
Luckily for her it was a matter of wires and the right program fed into the lock mechanism rather than cogs and wheels. In short order she had the safe open.
"That was kind of too easy," Felicity admitted to Oliver as she opened the door and peered inside, "…oh, that's why."
Oliver had already grabbed her hand and yanked her out of the room before Felicity had registered that she had just been face to face with a live, ticking down bomb.
"Diggle," Oliver growled through the comms, pushing Felicity so that she was in front of him and leading them out, "the building is about to blow."
"Excuse me?"
"The safe was booby-trapped; we have just under a minute."
"It's a small but powerful bomb," Felicity added. "My guess is it will take out at least the top two storeys but we should be fine on the street, if we reach the street."
"Since when do you know about bombs?" Oliver demanded.
"Internet," Felicity puffed out.
They rounded a corner and Felicity nearly lost her footing but Oliver grabbed her arm again and pulled her upright without stopping.
"How close?" Diggle demanded.
"At the stairwell now."
They made it the ground floor when the explosion hit. Felicity let out an involuntary scream as the building shook but Oliver kept moving and shoved Felicity against the wall, his body pressing against hers.
The ceiling above them gave way and for what felt like forever there was a rain of plaster and debris. Felicity could only just hear Diggle shouting at them through her earpiece over the crash of the ceiling.
When silence came Felicity found that she had buried her head into Oliver's shoulder as he had protectively shielded her, one arm over her head the other around her waist.
"Felicity?"
"I'm okay. You?"
Oliver relaxed and carefully stepped back, mindful of the mess behind him. "We're okay, John. Just a little dusty."
"Thank God. Now get out of there before the police arrive."
Oliver helped Felicity climb over what was left of the ceiling and they quickly made their way out of the building and to where Diggle was waiting.
"Well?" he asked as they climbed into the backseat of the car.
"I didn't expect that," Oliver admitted.
"She did have a giant stuffed bear in her office," Felicity pointed out. "That should have been a clue that she was one of those eccentric types that leaves explosives in their safe, just in case."
Diggle pulled away from the curb as two police cruisers and a fire truck screeched around the corner. "Did we at least get the info?" he asked.
Oliver held up the little black book in triumph. A little decoding later and Mrs Jay was being visited by the police after an anonymous tip to Officer Lance.