"There's a security control panel here, but I've never seen this design before. Is this Cyrillic script?" John squinted as he leaned closer to the panel, trying to decipher the difficult Russian words.
"Don't!" Jack barely had time to stop him, watching helplessly as the guy pressed a button labeled "Emergency Lockdown."
A sudden sound of mechanical gears echoed through the room.
Everyone jumped in surprise. In the next moment, steel plates dropped over all the doors and windows, plunging the house into darkness.
Although it wasn't the flashy sci-fi transformation you'd see in movies, the effect was the same—they were temporarily trapped.
"Well done! You didn't know what the button did, so you pressed it just to see, right?" Tim mocked.
John immediately admitted his mistake with sincere regret, "I really, really regret it now."
Before he could finish his sentence, the TV on the wall automatically turned on, displaying a nine-panel surveillance grid covering various corners of the house, almost covering the entire block.
"Oh, wow, Russian gangsters are this organized now?" John feigned surprise, trying to lighten the awkward atmosphere.
"No, this is a spy safe house. I've seen something similar, though not in this country," said Tim, the well-traveled former Marine, with a dismissive snort.
Lucy suddenly gave him a hurt look, the kind that said, "You've been keeping secrets from me?" "What? When? Which country?" she asked.
"That's classified." Tim put on a stern face, playing up the "If you knew too much, I'd have to kill you" vibe.
The ridiculousness was contagious, and Jack couldn't bear to look. Even the once-cold and ruthless Tim had become like this. One could only imagine the state of Wilshire Police Station these days.
"The control panel is in Russian, and the missing woman spoke Russian, so we're probably in a Russian spy safe house in Los Angeles."
"And here you are, joking around as if you're not worried about a Gatling gun suddenly appearing from the ceiling to turn us into Swiss cheese, or gas spraying out to poison us all to death," Jack's words drained the color from John and Lucy's faces, though Tim remained unphased.
"You can read it? Then get us out of here."
"See that numeric keypad on the screen?" Seeing the three of them tilt their heads in unison with dumbfounded expressions, Jack sighed. These guys were impossible to deal with.
"To unlock the lockdown, you need to input a password. Do any of you know it?"
"Call 911, and while we're waiting for them to rescue us, how about a little escape room adventure?" Jack said as he pressed the button labeled "Escape Room."
With a rumble, a hidden door next to the TV opened, revealing a passageway behind it.
"I knew it. This space was too cramped; it shouldn't have been this small," John said excitedly as he drew his gun and was the first to enter the passage.
Jack shook his head, gesturing for the two LAPD officers, who had also drawn their guns, to go first. He then casually followed with his hands in his pockets.
The passage wasn't long, with a couple of turns leading to a staircase going down into a basement. The first room they entered was filled with guns and ammunition.
"Whoa, this arsenal is way better than the police department's." Jack remarked as he saw the neatly arranged AR automatic rifles on the racks, Uzi submachine guns hanging on the walls, and various bulletproof vests and helmets.
They continued to the innermost room, where a burnt smell assaulted their nostrils.
The room was divided in half by a one-way mirror. On the outside part, there was an interrogation chair welded to the floor.
"Interrogation room. It looks like the woman was held here before she escaped," Tim said as he continued further inside.
The burnt smell was coming from the half of the room behind the one-way mirror, where a metal barrel, still smoldering, was surrounded by shredded paper from a paper shredder, and more documents on the table hadn't been cleared yet.
A laptop with its back pried open and hard drive removed, then smashed, along with scattered file cabinet drawers, all pointed to a hasty departure.
"It looks like they knew the place was compromised the moment you responded, so they destroyed everything in a typical spy fashion," Tim said as he holstered his gun, addressing John.
"Was it an internal conflict? The woman who escaped was probably speaking Russian too," John mused.
"Who knows? Maybe she was trying to defect, or it could be something else. You can't tell the difference between Ukrainian and Russian, can you?" Jack shrugged.
"So what should we do now? Contact the FBI and DHS?" Lucy asked Tim.
"Yes, but once we contact them, we only have 15 minutes before those guys in black suits and sunglasses storm in and kick us out."
"So let's not waste time. Take pictures and gather evidence," Tim said, acting all tough, as if no one could steal the credit from him. That was until Jack cleared his throat lightly.
"Hey, you guys, just because I don't wear black suits and sunglasses doesn't mean you can ignore me, right?"
Facing three pairs of suddenly enlightened eyes, Jack started feeling uneasy. Oh no, these crazy street cops were desperate for credit; were they planning to "silence" him?
Sure enough, Tim made a throat-slitting gesture to John and Lucy, who immediately pounced on Jack, pinning him down and dragging him to the interrogation chair outside.
Of course, it was all just a joke between old friends. If it had been someone else, maybe it would have been different, but Jack had been involved the whole time. There was no way he would let the FBI kick the LAPD guys out.
Not to mention Hannah was there. Speaking of the close relationship between Wilshire Station and the FBI's Los Angeles office, it was probably one of a kind in the entire federal system.
Shortly after the firefighters pried open the steel plates and released everyone, several Suburbans pulled up in front of the house.
"They're here." Seeing Hannah get out of the first car, John, who was standing by the kitchen window, waved excitedly, and everyone walked out of the house together.
And then Jack unexpectedly saw a "familiar face" he didn't really know—a "long-lost" acquaintance, John Reese from the CIA.
This guy hadn't been sold out by the CIA and left wandering the streets yet? Looks like Jack didn't have to worry about that AI lurking behind the surveillance cameras for now. It seemed the "Person of Interest" plot wasn't kicking off just yet.
"When did the CIA start operating domestically?" Tim, with his poker face, didn't hesitate to question him.
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