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Jensen darts across the room, all nervous energy, adjusting his headset and whispering into it, as though there is any danger of being overheard. "Coug," he breathes, hunching over a desk and tapping a couple of keys. Three monitors illuminate his face and his gaze switches from one to the other, rapid and avid. "Can you hear me?"
"Yes," comes the answer after a moment. The headsets aren't great, but they'll have to do. Sometimes you just can't afford the good shit when you really need it.
"Okay, I'm set up in the building across the street," Jensen murmurs, toggling between screens on the central monitor. "I've got a feed from their computers so I can see what they're doing. Where are you?"
There's a pause. He can almost sense Cougar twitching in annoyance. He hates ops like this, particularly when Jensen is his contact. The endless barrage of questions annoys him, but Jensen can't seem to shut up. This shit always gets him all keyed up. "Cougar?" he mutters. "Where are you?"
"Third floor," Cougar answers, exasperated. Jensen switches to the third floor feed and nods, leg jittering against the floor.
"Okay, good," he mutters. "You're safe up until the sixth floor, but you're probably gonna want to go through the vents just to make sure..."
"Yep," Cougar acknowledges and Jensen watches him shoulder his gun and heft himself up into a ventilation shaft. Satisfied that his partner is taken care of, he switches to the sixth floor feed and watches the patrols to see if he can discern any sort of patterns. They're too clever for that, though, and after several minutes of wasted effort, Jensen retrains his attention on spying out their resources.
They've got the high ground and there's nothing he can do about that, but their weapons are comparable to Cougar's, and they'll be expecting a frontal assault. He can tell by the way they keep someone in sight of the elevators and someone in sight of the stairwell at all times. It might have annoyed him, but he's sure they don't anticipate someone coming in through the ducts, and Cougar can be sneaky like a ninja when he puts his mind to it. For the first time, Jensen starts to think this might work, and he starts to get excited.
"How's it going, buddy?" he says in a low voice, checking one of the other screens. According to Cougar's tracker, he's up to the fifth floor by now and Jensen knows he ought to just let it be but he chafes at being forced into a backup role. It's what he's good at, and Cougar is definitely going to need someone to hack him into this place but still. It would be sweet to climb through the ducts with a gun, too. Sometimes he thinks that the others forget he's got just as much combat training as they do.
"Fine," Cougar says, short and simple. Jensen stopped being offended by that ages ago, but it still makes him squirm. He unscrews the cap on a bottle of Mountain Dew and leans close to the central monitor. Almost there...
He switches the focus of his attention again, calling up schematics, reviewing security measures. There's a heavy security door on the sixth floor that requires a key card to get into. Jensen's willing to bet that one of the two guards is carrying it. No sense sending Cougar to fetch it from them; they'd only get swarmed and it's not worth it when he can just tell the door to open itself.
At least, he's pretty sure he can.
Biting his lip, he switches his focus to the third monitor. This is the one that's destined to give him a headache; lines of code stare him down, daring him to fuck with them. He cracks his knuckles, shakes himself out. "Okay," he murmurs to himself, standing briefly to shimmy out of his clothes and clap a cowboy hat onto his head. "Let's do this."
"No pants?" Cougar asks, and Jensen can hear the grin in his voice.
"No pants," he confirms happily. That's how you know shit's about to get real. "Okay, you're gonna want to get to the west wing of the sixth floor. It's pretty near the stairs, but don't come out of the vents, they've got guys on all the doors. There's a big security vault - that's where you're headed. Looks like the nearest vent is about fifty feet from the door. I haven't seen anyone patrolling back there, but be careful anyway."
"Gotcha," Cougar replies softly. Jensen barely hears him; he's already turned back to the lines of code, endlessly scrolling. They flash past him rapidly and his lips move as he searches for the part of the programming which tells the door when and how to lock. Seconds tick past. Cougar arrives at the proper air duct, signals said arrival by muttering, "Ready".
Text flashes past his eyes. They're gonna ache something awful tomorrow but for right now Jensen keeps them wide open, forces them to take in the information streaming past them. He's starting to worry that he missed the line, that he's not as quick as he used to be. He begins to curse softly, running through every single awful word or phrase that he knows in English and, when those are exhausted, switching to Spanish. Cougar chuckles over the headset, likely at his pronunciation, and Jensen ignores him.
"Problem?" Cougar hisses.
"No!" Jensen snaps. "I've almost got it." He's jittering again, both legs going at it as he searches. They've got a pretty limited window of time before someone realizes that something untoward is going on. He chews at his lips and growls wordlessly and finally, when he's sure he's going to have to stop and go back through everything again, wasting precious minutes they don't have, he sees it.
"YES!" he exclaims, holding his arms up and pushing back from the desk. If they weren't on such a tight schedule this would call for a victory dance. He settles instead for a self high-five and a swig of soda before getting started.
Once he's got the section he needs, it only takes a minute to rewrite the code. "Ready, Coug?" he murmurs, glancing at the sixth floor feed. Cougar slips out of the ventilation duct and, crouching close to the wall, scuttles down the hallway towards the locked door. "Okay...." Jensen licks his lips and crosses his fingers and hits 'execute'.
For a second, nothing happens and he nearly launches into a brand new abusive diatribe (this time in Korean; he makes it a point to learn to curse in the native language of everyone they've ever been sent to infiltrate) when the door hushes open. He crows in triumph, spins his chair in a circle. Cougar doesn't bother with stealth anymore, just standing up and strutting through the door. Jensen thumbs a switch, broadcasting his voice.
"Gotcha suckers!!"
On the center screen, the sixth floor feed spirals away and a series of scores pop up on the screen. At the top, big bold white type blares "WINNERS: TEAM FYEAPETUNIAS". From the other room comes a howl of profound rage. Jensen shoots up out of his chair, eyes wide, and looks across the monitors at Cougar, who has abandoned his game controller and scrambled up and over the back of the couch.
"Shit," he mutters.
"JENSEN!!" A door slams open down the hall. It's definitely Roque and he is definitely going to kill them. "The fuck did I tell you about cheating!?"
"We should go," Jensen says to Cougar. Cougar laughs, nods his head. Gestures.
"First," he suggests, "maybe some pants."