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Major went to work the next day and put his best detectives on finding Enzo and his best diplomats on trying to figure out which Senator was supposed to be working with Enzo to lower airport security and allow zombies through. It was all he could do, and it galled him to have to sit and wait, to know that Liv's heart was broken, her spirit at as low an ebb as he'd ever seen it, and there was no way he could help. He hadn't felt this useless and lost since after the boat party, and that was saying something. He'd been through a lot of lows since then.
His phone pinged and he picked it up, expecting a report from one of his investigators. Instead, it was Liv, calling an emergency meeting back at the house.
Emergency or not, Major took a moment to change out of uniform before he left campus. It wasn't safe anymore to be roaming New Seattle in Fillmore Graves gear. If it had ever been, he thought, remembering Jordan.
Clive arrived at the house just as he did, and Peyton was already in there, seated on the couch. She shook her head at Major's questioning look. "They haven't told me anything."
"No point in going over it all twice." Ravi had that nervous but excited look he got whenever Liv had talked him into something stupid.
"What are you two crazy kids up to this time?" Major sank down on the couch next to Peyton.
Liv took a deep breath. "So you know how we got the tainted Utopium from my dad and sent it to the CDC?"
That had been part of the tale she'd told him through her sobs the night before. "Yeah?"
"Well … overnight the head of the project decided that instead of the good of humanity, he was going to be working for the good of his bank account. He … is holding on to the cure."
"They have the cure but are not sending it?" Peyton clarified. "The cure isn't coming?"
"It's sort of coming. We're going to Atlanta to break into the CDC and get it."
Major remembered when his then-fiancee didn't make pronouncements like that; when such a pronouncement wouldn't have seemed like everyday stuff. Dimly.
"Well," Ravi corrected, "we're breaking in to get the formula for tainted Utopium."
"Which is the only ingredient we're missing," Liv finished.
"The formula is on a thumb drive in a vault. In a high security satellite building called Zone 19. We were able to get some inside information from my friend Charli."
Liv added, "Then we kind of blackmailed a philandering janitor into giving us the full scoop."
Ravi bent down and picked up a packet of papers, handing it to Clive. "Here's what we know so far. Relax, Major," he said. He must have seen the stunned look on Major's face and the way he was just barely keeping himself from objecting, vociferously, to every part of his two favorite people in the world hurling themselves into danger so blithely. "It's much worse than you think."
As Clive looked over the papers and then handed them on to Major and Peyton, Ravi explained. "The formula is in a vault that only Dr. Saxon has access to. To even get into that room, you have to pass through a series of security checks. The first is a keycard which can't be copied, and if it's lost, the entire system will be reset. His photo comes up on a security cam. This only gets him into the outer room. Next, he has to pass more security cameras to get to the second of three checkpoints, where he has to pass a retinal scan. And this leads him to a vault that only Saxon can access. We have no way of knowing how he accesses it. We suspect it's by DNA, possibly from saliva, could be from blood. If any one of these systems is set off, it will activate a lockdown."
It all sounded like a poorly written spy movie … or a brilliantly written one, leading to a trap. Major held up a hand. "Quick question: Is any of that true, or are you just doing the Tom Cruise monologue from Mission: Impossible one for your own amusement?" He was really hoping it was the latter.
Ravi held his gaze, deliberately putting one foot up on the coffee table. "Both," he whispered dramatically.
Well, that was comforting.
"Are you guys actually thinking of going to do this?" Peyton asked.
"We're going to do this." Liv had that look, the one that always got her—and usually the rest of them—into trouble. "We just need some help planning it." She smiled. "That's where you guys come in. Clive, you must know something about security systems, right? And Major, you have special ops training."
"Not to mention cool military gadgets," Ravi pointed out.
Liv looked at Peyton. "You're here to poke holes in everyone's ideas, make sure we're not doing anything stupid."
"Oh, okay. Well, then, let me start by noting that you are talking about a major heist."
"Yeah, you'd need an Ocean's Eleven style team of highly skilled criminals to pull this job off," Clive agreed.
"Yeah, at least some kind of hacker genius," Major added. "And there's always the con man, the safe cracker ..."
Peyton picked up the litany. "The pickpocket, the computer guy …"
"You guys aren't highly skilled criminals," Clive told them. As if they didn't already know. Which, maybe they didn't, given this whole insane plan.
"No, we're not. We're zombies. We don't need Ocean's Eleven to do this job. We just need the right brains."
Liv did have a point. Major hated to concede it, but he knew as well as she did how thoroughly the right brains could alter and enhance your abilities, and give you whole new ones you'd never dreamed of.
None of the rest of them could argue with that point. They looked at each other in despair, but in the end, they had to agree. Which Major had known he would the moment he'd seen the look in Liv's eyes.
