Shoot the hostage.
Notes: Yeaaah, I know this story boiled down to "the group went kill-crazy for basically no reason," but sometimes in RPGs, people gots to die. This is just a story of a simple plan turned into a clusterfuck by a group going berserker. It happens.
People have asked why the group was concerned why the guards had seen their faces since (a) it never would have happened if they hadn't started a firefight in the first place, and (b) their faces were on camera anyway. I didn't mention the security camera footage. I SORT of did, but did a shitty job.
Part of the reason they'd started to barricade themselves was the cameras. I think the initial plan was for the physad to cover his face on the way out so the camera didn't catch him, but he slipped up when he triggered the alarm, freaked, and ran back to the group. The initial panic following the alarm led them to bunker down instead of running for it, perhaps fearing that the artifacts in question were amazingly valuable and they had to erase all evidence of their passing. They said that once the alarm was triggered, more than likely all the guards had seen the camera footage and had at least seen the physad's face. They all had to die, according to their logic.
Anyway, eventually they tasked the decker with trying to wipe out the security camera footage. The guards told them that it was archived on the local servers, but the decker had fucked up the system so badly that he couldn't even FIND the archive to access it. I think this was a major reason they decided to stall the police and wire the entire building to blow: they wanted to destroy the archived security footage and anyone who'd seen it.
The poor janitors were taken as hostages so that they couldn't help the cops get in the building, or help them access the computers.
