Caught between calling for backup and handling it alone, the miserable guard chose the only option that wouldn't brand him a coward for life: he dealt with it himself.
In the military, the worst thing you could be was a coward. Calling his colleagues in, running a sweep, and coming up empty would brand him as one for life. He steeled himself, turned on his heel, and headed for the utility room to check.
The moment his back was to the corridor, Ethan and Benji moved fast. They sprinted to the far end of the hallway and propped up a high-tech reflective panel—a near-perfect reproduction of the corridor, projected in real time from Benji's tablet.
The guard finished his search, found nothing, and crept back into the main corridor. He glanced instinctively toward the junction. Something felt off. But he couldn't see what—the reflection panel showed him a clean, empty hallway, and he looked right through it.
Drip.
Benji triggered the simulation again. The guard panicked.
"Who's there?! Come out!"
He racked a round and locked onto the utility room, convinced something was about to come through the door.
Ethan and Benji were sweating. Neither of them could figure out what was wrong with this man. One sound effect and he was in full combat mode? They gripped the reflection panel on opposite sides and eased forward, inch by inch. When they reached Archive Room Three, Ethan broke off and slipped inside.
Bella was still working through the document stacks when he entered. The arrival startled her for a moment—but the stealth suit covered her completely, and she kept her calm.
She went still and watched from behind the far bookcase.
Ethan Hunt was in a Russian general's uniform, decorations arranged with the fussy precision of a man who had dressed as many things over the years. He swept the room with the alert stillness of someone who had walked into too many traps. His instincts were telling him the room wasn't empty.
He kept it professional and searched for his target files without making a scene. Bella did the same and kept searching for hers.
The archive was enormous—bigger than most school libraries—one of fifteen in the Kremlin, this wing holding the less sensitive material. They worked at separate ends without incident.
She found Anton Vanko's folder quickly after that: weathered and creased, buried under factory schematics and railway survey maps, untouched for decades. She stopped worrying about noise and simply pulled the relevant pages out.
The sound caught Ethan immediately. He turned toward her section of the room just in time to watch a cascade of old blueprints explode outward into midair—document sleeves raining across the floor, a folded map drifting sideways on its own.
What...
He needed two seconds to put it together. There's someone here.
Bella had what she came for. She tucked the rolled documents into the front of her collar and moved fast along the wall.
Ethan watched a rolled blueprint floating in midair drift past him—less than ten meters away—and exit through the door. He stared after it for a long moment. Then he turned back to his files.
Outside, Bella spotted Benji with his reflection panel still in play.
With Eagle Vision, she could see the illusion for what it was—a flat panel with a projected image. She could see the edges from across the corridor. She pressed them more firmly in place, took two running steps, grabbed the ceiling, and crawled hand-over-hand past him overhead.
She came down the stairs, stepped onto the lobby carpet—and the warning detonated in her skull.
Danger. Danger. DANGER.
A middle-aged man slammed into her from a side corridor. She was stronger than he was by a wide margin, but she hadn't braced for it. She stumbled back a step.
He barely registered the collision. He was white-knuckled, clutching a metal briefcase and already running for a service passage.
"Halt!"
"Stop right there!"
A five-man security detail converged from deeper in the building. The man's behavior had been flagrant enough to trip every instinct they had.
Bella didn't follow. She stayed put and worked through what the warning was telling her.
It felt the same as the Hand's cache. That sick, bone-deep certainty that danger wasn't coming—it was already here.
She could leave. She had what she'd come for. But once you've felt this kind of warning, pretending you haven't is its own kind of choice.
She stood still and let the lobby flow around her. Two young women passed close by, planning which club to hit after their shift. A father stepped away from a desk to call his son—he promised he'd make it to the hockey game. An older man shuffled past on a slow, unsteady gait, cheerfully bickering with his wife on the phone.
If she left, those people would die.
There was also the matter of her promise to Natasha. She'd given her word—no one gets hurt. If she walked out and the building came down behind her, that promise was forfeit. More than the promise, actually—the crack it would put in what they had didn't bear thinking about.
She'd recognized Benji from a photo in Natasha's files. Ethan she hadn't identified through the disguise—her impression of him from Mission: Impossible was mostly that he was basically an American-style 007—all swagger, stunts, and fast cars. She hadn't retained the specifics of his Kremlin arc.
But she didn't need to understand the plot to understand the math. If the Kremlin exploded, it would be even worse than 9/11. If the wrong names were in the casualty list, World War Three might stop being a figure of speech.
She had every reason to stay. She couldn't find a single compelling reason to go.
Bella went down to the basement. She activated Eagle Vision and divination simultaneously. Fifteen seconds later, following the thread of the warning through the building's skeleton, she found the source: a disused room, one that hadn't seen regular use in years. The door opened onto a wall of explosives packed from floor to ceiling.
At the center—a timer, taped firmly to the detonator. Crystal oscillator circuit. Electrical ignition. The device was clean and functional and obviously military in origin. No tangled wires. No drama.
She looked at the timer.
Less than sixty seconds remained.
No time to reach Natasha. She reinforced herself with the Frost Armor—the Yata no Kagami could have helped too, but she hadn't brought it—and reached through the mark on her arm.
I should have brought the Koh-i-Noor and the Yata no Kagami.
She called the Flying Dutchman to her across the distance.
Science wasn't going to help her here. She didn't have the knowledge or the time. She needed something faster, and magic was all she had.
The ship was her answer.