Blood touched the corner of her mouth. She could feel it. The deputy at the front desk, a young woman named Sandra Tran, had both hands pressed flat to her desk, her face white as paper. Two officers on the far side of the bullpen were frozen mid-step. Pruitt stood with his fist still raised, breathing hard, adrenaline singing through his system.
"I told you to show ID first," he said to nobody in particular, constructing the story before anyone else could. Josephine straightened. She did it slowly. She did it carefully. She did not reach for the service weapon holstered at her hip, though she was qualified on three different platforms and could have ended the conversation in a different and permanent way.
She did not rush Pruitt. She did not raise her voice. She raised her left hand to her mouth and touched the blood at the corner of her lips. She looked at her fingers. Then she reached up with her right hand and pressed two fingers lightly against the underside of her collar, where a transmitter the size of a nickel was sewn into the lining of the jacket by a federal tech specialist six days prior.
"Lockdown authorization, Duvall." She said quietly. Her voice was steady, completely steady. "Execute." Pruitt heard her and laughed, a short disbelieving bark.
"Execute what? Lady, you're under arrest. You assaulted a—" The sound that cut him off was not gradual. It was a single massive mechanical clap that seemed to come from everywhere at once, resonating up through the floor and down through the ceiling and through every wall simultaneously. The heavy glass entrance doors at the front of the building slammed shut on pneumatic rams, and a steel crossbar dropped across them with a deep metallic thud.
Before anyone had processed that, the secondary side exits in the east corridor engaged. Two steel-reinforced fire doors that swung shut and sealed with electronic deadbolts that could not be disengaged from inside the building. The back delivery entrance, the roof access stairs, the parking garage connector, the holding cell corridor, all of it. Clank clank clank clank clank. The sequence took eight seconds from start to finish.
Eight seconds and the Harwick County Sheriff's Department was sealed tighter than a federal detention facility, because it had just been converted into one. Every screen in the building, every monitor, every dispatch terminal, every desktop computer, flickered once and then displayed the same image. The golden blue seal of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, crisp and enormous against a black background. Beneath it, in high-contrast red lettering, "Federal containment protocol active. Do not attempt to exit.
Remain in place." A synthetic voice came through the overhead PA system, calm, unhurried, completely devoid of emotion. "Federal building override in effect. This facility is under the jurisdiction of the United States Department of Justice. All personnel remain stationary.
A breach team will enter in 90 seconds. Resistance will be treated as obstruction of federal law enforcement." For three seconds, nobody in the Harwick County Sheriff's Department made a sound. Then everyone made a sound at once. Two deputies near the east corridor ran for the side doors, hit them at full speed, and bounced back like they'd run into a concrete wall.