They hiked on another five miles, Lily thinking, grumbling in her mind, "Close, he said, no big deal from here...." Finally, they arrived at a clearing. There was the standard military chain link fence topped with concertina wire, but this was of no consequence as Rock produced a small, albeit powerful pair of snips and created a door for them to step through. Unfortunately, they failed to notice the dog nearby. The dog, obviously of german shepherd descent, began barking loudly, despite Lily's best efforts to pacify it. She tried to befriend the dog, and held her hand, back side out, toward the dog and made a slow approach. Suddenly the dog stopped barking and did a backward and to the side somersault and lay still on the ground. She whipped around in time to see Rock reholster a small automatic pistol with a silencer on it. The silencer worked well. She hadn't even heard the shot. She looked back at the dog, it's tongue lolling out to the side, blood coming from both the wound in it's head and now from it's nose and mouth. Her eyes filled with tears, even though she knew it was necessary. She looked around quickly. The dog's sudden stop must have made the guard think it was a rabbit or something similar. Their complacency would be their undoing. In a trice they were at a service entrance. Very open ground. It was a large enclosure, perhaps sixty square feet of nothing but gravel. Small, pea sized gravel, but crunchy under foot nonetheless. It made Lily nervous. There was also a spot light. It gave her a grand view of the control panel, but she could hardly believe they didn't have it well guarded with several alarm systems as well as motion sensitive cameras. Her image caught on film here would not please her. As if reading her thoughts, Rock reached up to the obvious camera and attached a small object with clips to the wires leading into the unit. Ovbiously it was a looper. It would replay the previous shot over and over again, and hopefully, this was a delay camera that only recorded once every five minutes for a minute and they were viewing the empty enclosure, and not them breaking in. Lily was sweating bullets as she worked at the control panel, attaching clips and leads to distract the alarm into thinking they weren't a break, but a bypass. There was one nervous moment when the alarm started to sound, a single "wuuuuuuuuup....." before it dwindled back down. One of those large civil defense sirens. Still, no soldiers came to investigate. It made her more nervous that they didn't . It made her feel they were biding their time. She cracked the system and they found themselves in the bowels of the building. She knew why they called them "bowels". They were dark, twisty and vaguely stinky. They slunk along, down long convoluted hallways, and Lily hoped Rock was keeping track somehow, she was counting on it. He was best at that sort of visualisation that Lily was weak in. He was soon telling her which way to go, until they came to the stairs and the bank of elevators. Then they stopped and Rock uploaded a message to command . They waited in the dank silence until it beeped again. He quickly read the message, his face awash in the blue light of his communicator.

"We go up from here....thirty second floor, office number 28. That's the computer mainframe. Are you ready to roll?"

"As ready as I'll ever be. What can we expect from here? I know we don't blend, so I hope you have some secret shaft somewhere?" She asked this hopefully, half afraid of the answer he would give her. He smiled, but not a real smile, that wolfish grin, that didn't reach his eyes, except as a psychotic shimmer.

"No, my love, I'm afraid at this point, we need clothes and I only know one way to get them from here." Lily rolled her eyes and smacked his shoulder.

"Dammit! You know how I hate that! Why did I let you talk me into this?" But she followed him anyway, at a half crouch with her weapon ready until they came upon the few, the proud, the unfortunate. At least he took out most of them with his fists and left them breathing , albeit bleeding. Those were loose ends he would have preferred tying up with a few rounds, but he knew Lily's sensiblities were close to breaking already. He rubbed at a sore spot on his cheek but quickly jerked on the closest thing to a good fitting uniform he could, as did Lily. They quickly tied and gagged the unconcious soldiers. They kept their own clothes on underneath, as not to leave anything behind. This done, they returned to the elevator bank and quickly looked each other over for errors, straightened a button and a collar and were heading for the 28th floor. The elevator, like at most government buildings, crept at a snails pace. Lily began to worry about others getting on, but the car never stopped. Rock noticed her attention to the buttons and smiled her way.

"Relax. The elevator is on override. It wont stop til we get there." She relaxed a little, as evidenced by the return of her breathing. She looked over at him, standing there in military garb, his muscled body erect, getting into character. He felt her stare and looked at her and smiled a half grin,

"What?"

Lily smiled slowly and pushed herself off the rail she'd been leaning on.

"I was just thinking how cute you looked in uniform." and she leaned over and kissed the end of his nose. The elevator dinged and the car settled. Both Rock and Lily stood at attention for the opening of the doors.

The hall was empty. They breathed again and Rock led the way, striding out the door with Lily in tow as if they had important business and couldn't be concerned with anything else. A door opened at the end of the hall and made them hitch their step for just a second before they covered and resumed with their ruse. A wire basket on wheels was being pushed down the hall by a low level clerk. As she passed, she nodded her head toward them, a civilian, Lily noted. Anyone else would have stopped and saluted Rock for his obvious rank and her as well as she smiled at the captains bars now on her collar. They strode right through the door the clerk had come from and down a long dark corridor to the last room on the right, which proved to be locked.

Lily looked at Rock, the door, then down the hall. There was no one in sight. He inclinded his head toward the door and made a wait motion, then knocked lightly. Lily gritted her teeth in anticipation. No one came to answer the knock, meaning either no one was in the room, or they weren't answering it. Rock nodded to her again and toward the door, and she set to work with her picks and the door was unlocked in a matter of moments. She reached back and felt her pistol in her waistband, keeping her fingers on it as he pushed open the door. The room was sound insulated and you could tell the difference as you walked into the room and felt suddenly deaf. There was a large bank of computer screens along one wall, a large control panel of walnut, two empty chairs and miles of wall to wall shag carpeting. Glad to see my tax dollars at work, Lily thought. Lunch break? Where was everyone? This was too easy. Something was definately wrong.

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