xp_logs | Epiphany Frosts: Crisis

Thanks to the vodka, Angelo and Samie are late for the keynote speech. This turns out to be a very good thing, as a familiar face from the near-nuclear annihilation of San Francisco decides that today is a good day to make a point. Angelo and Samie make a near escape and call the mansion. Nathan, lucky man, is the one sitting coms watch in the middle of the night.

There was a sleepy giggle from beneath the pile of blankets. "Ow..." the pile said in Samie's voice, then added something foul-sounding in Kashmiri before going on in English. "Did we drink all the vodka? I think we drank all the vodka."

Angelo stirred, blinking and then closing his eyes again hurriedly against the light. "...I think we did too. What time is it?"

Samie emerged from the pile of blankets - or the top of her head did, rather. She got a look at the bedside clock and gasped. "Oh! It's after nine... we slept in."

That got a brief silence, then a scramble to get free of the sheets, despite his thumping head. "We're missin' the keynote speech... Nate's gonna kill me."

Samie scrambled out of bed herself, much more adroitly, and giggled at Angelo's struggles with the sheets. "That is what you get for being... how do you say it, a blanket pig?" She started looking around for her clothes.

"Didn't hear you complainin' at the time," he shot back. "An' I'm a California boy... where'd my jacket go?"

"Never mind your jacket, where are my pants?" Samie paused, then giggled and pounced on his jacket, which had fallen under one of the chairs. For someone with a hangover, she looked to be in far too good a mood. "Found it!"

"Thanks," he said, reaching over the bed to snag it from her, then returned the favour. "An' they're on the back of that chair over there."

"Oh good. I can't go to a keynote address without pants!" Giggling, she took the pants and vanished into the bathroom.

Angelo just laughed as she disappeared, then turned his attention to getting dressed as fast as possible.

--

The keynote speaker was a distinguished-looking man in his mid-fifties. A long-time activist who had managed to survive his period of youthful exuberance in an environment profoundly hostile to idealists, he now found himself facing an entirely new set of dangers in post-Soviet Russia. English was the lingua franca at this conference, not unexpectedly, and his was barely accented as he spoke passionately about the various challenges he and his colleagues had faced in investigating the treatment of mutants throughout the former Soviet Union.

It was a very good speech. The audience was rapt, hanging on his every word. The private security guards hired to keep an eye on the conference were not quite so fascinated. Still, all six of them inside the main conference hall were at least somewhat distracted, one eye on the speaker even as they went about their jobs.

It was unlikely that perfect attentiveness on their parts would have mattered.

One of the guards heard the noise from outside and down the hall, and raised his walkie-talkie to query one of his colleagues at the conference's registration desk in the lobby. When he got no answer, he frowned, turning towards the doors.

He was the first one to fall when they were flung open and a group of over a dozen black-clad intruders, most of them carrying guns, stormed into the conference hall. It wasn't a bullet that killed him, but an energy blast from one of the 'unarmed' intruders, who received a sharp look from one of his comrades and a barked rebuke in what wasn't Russian.

Another of the guards went for his gun, and got shot in the face for his trouble. The intruders fanned out through the conference hall with professional speed, covering the delegates from all directions. There was no further resistance. One or two of the delegates panicked, screaming, but were restrained by those sitting near them. The vast majority of the people in the room were highly intelligent, activists of various stripes and national origins. Many came from countries where activism was dangerous, where they'd had to develop strong survival instincts. Seeing the speed and viciousness with which the intruders had taken over the conference hall, none were willing to take the chance of fighting back.

There was more screaming outside, and the occasional burst of gunfire. After a few minutes, the doors opened again, more sedately this time, and three more black-clad men walked in. Two of them were carrying guns; the third, in the center, was not.

Illyas Saidullayev surveyed the terrified delegates, nodding when the man who'd led the rush into the hall trotted over to report. A few of the Russian delegates paled visibly as they realized that the intruders were speaking Chechen.

Saidullayev glanced at his watch, then back over his shoulder. He seemed satisfied, giving his people a brief, tight smile before he looked up, locking eyes with the keynote speaker.

The smile changed, becoming something altogether more frightening.

---

There was no sign that there was anything at all wrong until the elevator doors opened on the first floor. Then, Angelo and Samie heard screaming and sporadic gunfire. Two women, shrieking at the top of their lungs, ran past towards the lobby.

Angelo's first, instant, reaction to the gunfire was to step in front of Samie, blocking her way out of the elevator. The second was to get the hell back into it... but whatever was going on, if he was going to let anyone know, he needed to know as many details as he could get.

Samie's lovely blue eyes were wide, and she grabbed Angelo's arm, as if reassuring herself that he was right there. "What's happening?" she breathed.

"Nothin' good," was the grim answer. "Listen, I'm goin' to go try an' see a bit more. I want you to stay here, okay? An' if I'm not back in two minutes, you find somewhere to hide an' you stay there."

Her grip on his arm tightened. "I will not," Samie hissed at him, looking affronted. "Don't be a chauvinist."

"Samie," he said, exasperated. "It's about you bein' baseline human an' me havin' more trainin' for trouble than you do, not you bein' a woman. We don't have time for this, stay here."

She hissed something in Kashmiri at him. "I grew up in Srinagar, remember? I know what to do around gunfire."

He'd meant what he said about not having time, so after glowering at her for a moment longer, he just growled and gave up. "Fine. Come on, then."

They saw as they moved towards the lobby that people were running for the doors, obviously wanting to get out. There was no sign of the police anywhere, or, more disturbingly, any members of the hotel staff. People were still running freely for the doors, despite the odd burst of gunfire out of view down the halls. Strangely, however, the conference hall doors were closed.

Angelo gave the doors a look, not liking that at all. "Somethin' isn't right there. Why aren't people comin' out of the hall, same as everywhere else?"

"You said it was the keynote address," Samie said, her eyes still slightly too wide. "Wouldn't everyone from the conference have been in there?"

"They should've been," he agreed, frowning. "I'm just gonna... see if I can see anythin'." And without wasting time, he headed towards the conference room doors, keeping carefully to one side.

Samie followed him, just as quickly, and not saying a word. The need to know what was going on had a habit of overcoming natural caution.

Angelo wasn't happy with her following, but there wasn't really anything he had time to do about it, right now. He could keep her out of sight of the pane in the door, though, as he leaned against it and very carefully turned to look sideways through the window.

The scene he glimpsed was not reassuring. Black-clad men and a few women, herding the delegates together at gunpoint. And some of them were on the stage, holding their guns on the keynote speaker. He took in as much as he could in the second before he ducked back out of sight. Being seen now would be a Very Bad Thing.

Samie quite obviously didn't like the look on his face. "We should go," she breathed - or started to. There was more gunfire from outside the main lobby doors, and before Angelo could protest, she'd latched onto his arm again and dragged him back in the direction they'd come. "Not that way."

Given the obvious evidence of people with guns between them and the main way out, he wouldn't really have been protesting that hard. "...back upstairs," he decided quickly, turning to look for a staircase. "Quick, before they send somebody out."

"Right." She didn't say another word until they were well-around the corner. "This is when we wish that Nathan was here, yes?"

The laughter that came in answer to that went on just a second too long, before Angelo told himself firmly to stop it. "...yeah, we really do."

--

Nathan tilted his head, frowning at the line he'd just written in his notebook. "Knock it off with the alliteration, Dayspring," he muttered, crossing it out. "It's not cute..." The screens were all alight with various newsfeeds, to which he was paying a cursory amount of attention as he sat his coms watch. Nothing particularly interesting seemed to be going on in the world tonight.

That was, until the emergency phone rang. On the other end, in an empty meeting room in Moscow with the door firmly shut, Angelo was pacing. "Come on, pick up..."

Nathan paused, mid-word, and frowned at the light blinking on the emergency line. He reached out and flipped the switch to route the call through his headset. "Situation Room," he said, closing his notebook with his other hand. "This is Cable."

Angelo nearly slumped with relief, nodding to Samie without releasing the phone clamped to his ear. "Sancho. We've got a problem."

Nathan straightened instantly in his chair. "Details?" he asked tightly, and set a trace on the phone, then paged Ororo and Scott to come down to the Situation Room.

"Guys with guns in the main conference room, with hostages," was the concise answer. "I'm in a room on the ground floor, we got away from the patrol they sent out."

...son of a... I'm never letting him go to a conference alone again. Nathan pushed away the irrationally protective thought. "We?"

"Yeah, I'm with... uh, Samie, actually. We're both safe for now, an' we're gonna keep movin' when this call's done."

"... Samie? Samie Kander?" Nathan shook his head as soon as the words were out of his mouth. "Never mind." I'll hear that story later. "Don't try and get out - if they've taken hostages, they likely have exits blocked. You need to try and get back to your room -it's the safest place."

"We can do that," Angelo said tensely. "Should be able to dodge them, it's only a few floors up..." He paused. "But you're gonna come, right?"

"We've got to find out what's happening first," Nathan said, already reaching out to Charles telepathically. "But yeah. If I have to do what you did in San Diego and beg a favor from Illyana..." Focus. "Is there anything you can tell me about the terrorists? Did you hear any of them talking?"

"Yeah," he said, frowning, trying to remember every detail. "Not in Russian, not a language I speak... sounded like Arabic, but it wasn't. An' I think they said somethin' about... Ilyas?"

Nathan felt cold. Don't jump to conclusions. Don't. "Did it sound anything like this?" he asked after a moment, tightly, and promptly used a few of the Chechen phrases he knew. He had not much more than a traveler's grasp, but if it was an Arabic-sounding language being used by terrorists in Moscow, of all places...

"...yeah," came the hesitant answer. "Is that bad? I mean, worse?"

"Not entirely unsurprising," Nathan murmured, rubbing at his temples. "You said you heard something that sounded like 'Ilyas'. Did you see who was leading them?"

"Didn't get much of a look," Angelo said apologetically. "Just through the glass in the doors before we figured out what was goin' on, then we had to move so they wouldn't see us. But he's got... short hair, darkish. Dark eyes."

That could have described anyone. And yet... "All right," Nathan said, trying to keep the strain out of his voice and mostly succeeding. "You need to hang up now and get back to your room with Samie. I stuck a communicator in your suitcase, remember. I'll call you back on that in thirty minutes. We'll try and figure out what's going on from here -the only good thing about a situation like this is that if they've taken hostages, the rest of the world will hear about it shortly."

Angelo nodded, swallowing. "Half an hour. I'll be waitin'." He made that a promise.

"I know," Nathan said steadily. "Take the stairs, not the elevator. Don't be afraid to duck into another floor if you hear someone coming up or down towards you. Take your time - more important to get there safely than it is to get there quickly."

"I know." His voice was equally steady. "We'll be there, in half an hour."