LOCKED DOWN: (A NICOLE GRANT THRILLER, BOOK 1)

by Ed Kovacs

  The headlights belonged to the Rolls, meaning Zhao was sitting in that helicopter rising into the night sky on its way to China. With him went eleven years of hard work, not to mention all of her dreams, her plans for retirement, her... everything. Rice noticed her reflection in the window just inches away. She looked old. It was a look that a thousand make-up touch-ups couldn't change. Everything had gone to hell. Zhao had left her, meaning others would come.

  To kill her.

  CHAPTER 34

  00:46

  Ron Hernandez and Major General Ma Ju slowed their gait in the main hallway of the gleaming computer complex at Sun Yat-sen University. Grant watched closely as one of the Chinese security officers peeled off from his escort of her and the others. She distinctly caught a whiff of piquant fermented fish sauce as the guard entered what appeared to be a break room. That left one escort remaining. The lone remaining guard motioned them forward and they made their way deeper into the brain of the seemingly deserted facility.

  “General Ma, where are you taking us?” asked Grant, feeling slightly paranoid.

  “To the room where my officers from the Fifty-seventh Research Institute are working.”

  “That's not our destination,” said Hernandez with an edge to his voice.

  “I have arrived with two foreigners in the middle of the night. It would raise suspicion to go anywhere except the room where my people are headquartered. And I only promised to get you into this building. I have done so, haven't I?”

  Nicole couldn't argue the point. And yet a feeling that this was all too easy began to dog her.

  Hernandez shot her a look and whispered, “You're about to meet the hackers who imaged your laptop and have been trying to break your encryption.”

  A wave of unease nipped at Grant like a persistent insect that wouldn't go away. The feeling of dread made her stomach queasy. It was some different kind of fear, unlike anything she'd felt today. At first she told herself there was nothing rational to it, but she quickly corrected herself. Considering the predicament, she had logical reasons to be scared out of her wits.

  They stopped at a heavy steel door. The guard entered a four digit code, the lock clicked open, and they entered a changing room that contained a row of tall metal lockers and benches. A steel shelving unit held boxes of disposable clean room garb—gowns, booties, hair coverings, and even beard coverings. Windows provided a view into a computer room ten meters square, where a dozen encapsulated, six-foot-tall electronics racks formed two short rows. Computer workstations that could accommodate eight people lined the far wall, but only four hackers were present. They all sat facing the windows. To enter the computer room, one had to pass through a small airlock lined with nozzles that blew compressed air—an air shower—since the computer room was a clean room environment.

  Of the four hackers present, three were men. It didn't take a theoretical physicist to determine that Ma's “lady friend,” was the short-haired, bespectacled young woman looking at them with a cute smile on her porcelain face. Grant met the woman's gaze and wondered if she were looking at her counterpart.

  Ma pressed up close to the glass as he stared into the computer room. The security guard slipped into the hallway, leaving them alone as he closed the door behind him. Grant and Hernandez huddled a few feet away so they could speak privately, without being heard.

  “Look,” said Nicole, quietly, indicating the large digital clock in the computer room. “That countdown clock is zeroed out. Maybe they broke my encryption.”

  “Maybe not,” whispered Hernandez. “You said they didn't get the Darknet files.”

  “No they didn't. We have them. So they didn't get much at all.”

  Grant stared at the faces of the Chinese computer team. They looked befuddled. Her peripheral vision then picked up the image of Ma's reflection in the window pane. She read his lips; he was silently mouthing in Mandarin, “Spies. Call police.”

  Grant's mouth dropped open in shock. She then forced a huge smile onto her face, quickly crossed to Ma and draped her arm around him like they were the best of friends. “Hernandez, smile, laugh, and slap the general on the back, right now!”

  He joined them and obeyed instantly, without question.

  “He was mouthing a message to them to call police, that we are spies,” she said laughing.

  Hernandez laughed even bigger and gently turned the general away from the window. He pointed at the hackers and gave them the thumbs up, laughing, as if they were in on the joke about being spies.

  “General,” said Hernandez with a huge smile on his face. “Since you have betrayed our trust, here's what's going to happen. Smile and motion for your girlfriend to join us. Then you will take us to Tianhe-2.”

  “I told you I do not control the access—”

  Hernandez jammed the gun into Ma's ribs, unseen by the hackers. “I swear on my brother's grave I will kill you, and your girlfriend, too. Smile húndàn.” Asshole.

  With Hernandez's huge arm around his shoulder, Ma smiled and waved at the hackers, who immediately relaxed. He gestured for Oi Lam to come out. She opened the inner airlock door, got a brief, but loud, air shower, then opened the outer airlock door and stepped into the anteroom. She beamed with the kind of inner happiness endemic to pregnant women.

  “We're old friends of General Ma,” said Grant, by way of explanation. “Please join us to see Tianhe-2.”

  ###

  One would think the world's fastest supercomputer would be booked solid, 24 hours a day, in the service of academia or industry. Exactly the opposite was true here in Guangzhou. As her group walked in the hallway escorted by the guard, Nicole knew why the place was largely empty. Supercomputers are specialized machines, not particularly adept at performing a wide variety of tasks. Slower and smaller machines might get a difficult job done cheaper and faster. To use Tianhe-2 efficiently, researchers could spend years rewriting software codes. Tianhe-2 quickly developed a reputation for software issues and so customers had stayed away.

  Tianhe-2, like all supercomputers, was hugely expensive to build and costly to use and maintain. The irony was that most supercomputers remain idle for long periods, especially those in China where there was a “supercomputer bubble.” China simply had more computing power than it required.

  But China was obsessed with “face” and bragging rights and besting the West, especially America, in anything it could. As something of a Chinese scholar, she understood the chip China carried on her shoulder at having been subjugated for centuries by western powers. A collective, long-held inferiority complex was finally being overcome in the 21st Century due to China's explosive growth, newfound wealth, industrial might, and growing military power. So having the fastest supercomputer was an on-going priority. Even if it couldn't attract many customers and had a limited scope of what it was good for. For Guangzhou, Tianhe-2 was the supercomputer equivalent to having a trophy wife.

  ###

  As Oi Lam readily explained to General Ma that Tianhe-2 was largely disused, he grew angry. Grant, Hernandez, Ma, and Oi Lam all changed into clean room garb in a changing room adjacent to the supercomputer's control room, while the guard had remained outside in the hallway.

  “Why was your team not allowed to use it?” asked Ma, as he tugged on a sheer white covering gown.

  “Tianhe-2 is very much connected to Guangzhou—financially and in every other way. And your compatriot Zhao Yiren is not held in high esteem by the local cadres because of what happened to Wang Hongwei two years ago,” she said simply, as she covered her head with a beanie-like cap. “So even though they could have given us full access, they gave us the small computer instead.”

  “Could you have used Tianhe-2 in your work here?” he asked fighting his anger.

  “Yes, we could have broken the encryption quickly.”

  Grant and Hernandez carefully listened to the exchange as they pulled disposable booties over their shoes. It felt weird listening to her enemies talk about breaking her
encryption, but a sense of poetic justice took hold. Perhaps Hernandez also felt it. Two years ago, they had personally witnessed, via a stealth spy drone, Zhao Yiren take down his main rival, Wang Hongwei, right here in Guangzhou. And because of what he did that night, Ma had subsequently been denied the use of a supercomputer that might have saved Zhao's candidacy. Hackers from the 57th could have used Tianhe-2 to break Grant's encryption and give Zhao and Ma and Tang and Rice the secret drone op files. But those same files would instead now destroy them. Her files. Nicole Grant's files. For she intended to fully restore them from their corrupted state, with the help of that same supercomputer.

  “Payback is a bitch,” interjected Hernandez.

  Oi Lam seemed confused by the remark, but then, she was confused by the mere presence of the two Caucasians.

  Suddenly, Ma sprinted across the changing room to the steel hallway door, catching Hernandez and Grant off guard. He threw open the door and called out, “Guard! These are American spies, kill them!” That was as far as he got. Hernandez grabbed him from behind and jerked so hard the general hurtled all the way across the changing room and crashed into the far wall.

  Oi Lam raced for the general. The startled guard appeared in the hallway and went for his gun. Hernandez stood in the open doorway, popping open all the snaps on his clean room gown to grab the Kimber from his fanny pack. The guard got off two shots and one of them tore into Hernandez's shoulder. He managed to fire the Kimber once. He only needed one shot from the booming .45, and the guard dropped to the hallway floor.

  Grant surprised herself by immediately drawing her pistol. She was covering Ma and Oi Lam, but spun when the door behind her flew open, the same door that led into the control room of Tianhe-2. Two technicians ran through the door into the changing room to see what was going on.

  The bewildered technicians saw the guard in the hallway lying on the floor, Ma on the floor with Oi Lam, and a bleeding Hernandez. And Grant's gun was hard to miss.

  “What are you doing here?” the younger techie demanded.

  As Oi Lam administered to Ma, Hernandez dragged the dead guard into the room with them. He closed the hallway door, but kept an eye out through a small window in the door for anyone approaching.

  “Grant, shoot anyone who moves.” Hernandez tore off the white gown, then painfully reached under his navy blue blazer and probed his shoulder area.

  “You've been shot!” she cried out. She started to take a step toward him.

  “Stay where you are and cover me. Please, for once, do what I ask,” he said softly, almost pleading with her.

  Nicole felt herself flush and remained in place, duly admonished. Her sense of trepidation upon entering the building was unfortunately being vindicated. A guard was dead, Hernandez was shot. It was her idea to come here and now this was the result. With shots being fired, how could they possibly hope to escape? Somehow she kept the weapon leveled at the technicians. She stole a glance as Hernandez ripped the gown and created a compress. She watched his jaw tighten as he placed the makeshift bandage over the wound under his jacket.

  “This will have to do,” he muttered.

  “Police are coming!” yelled the young techie, suddenly, startling Grant. “Give yourselves up!” He stepped toward Nicole, but she knew she couldn't shoot him. He was about to grab her gun, when Hernandez took a long stride forward and decked him with a right cross. The man staggered back into the wall and dropped to the floor unconscious.

  “I will kill the next one of you who makes a problem,” said Hernandez, making eye contact with each of the remaining Chinese. He turned to Nicole and gave a nod. “It's all yours, but make it fast.” He pocketed the guard's pistol and herded everyone into the control room of the Tianhe-2 supercomputer, the fastest in the entire world.

  “No problem,” she said, swallowing hard.

  CHAPTER 35

  01:00

  She was a black beauty, thought Nicole. She'd been in a clean room once at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, where a military satellite was being prepared for launch. She'd found it hard to stop looking at the satellite. The magnificent piece of technology had a mesmerizing effect that constantly drew her eyes to it.

  And now, as she stared through the windows from the control room into the room that housed the computing beast, she felt the same kind of visceral pull. The computer room itself was nothing special, with a raised tile floor, drop ceiling, and fluorescent lighting. But the sprawling computer reminded Nicole of the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey, where the astronaut couldn't stop looking at the black monolith. Instead of a single black monolith, however, here there were six of them.

  Tianhe-2 was made up of scores of sleek, matte black, six-feet-high computer cabinets housing racks of electronics. The unseen, interior racks stood back-to-back to form a row, so each row of cabinets was a “double-wide.” There were six rows of cabinets; two of the rows had gaps that allowed technicians to move from aisle to aisle without having to go all the way to the end of a row, creating something of a maze-like effect.

  The cabinets connected almost seamlessly, so one could argue that there were only six incredibly long sleek cabinets, connected overhead in a grid pattern by sturdy black cable trays holding hundreds of cables. The six rows of cabinets encapsulated 125 racks jammed with 16,000 nodes (each node having two processor chips and three co-processor chips) circuit boards, switches, ports, 1,375 TiB of memory, and the interconnected network, among other hardware. A water cooling system using Guangzhou city water kept everything cool, because the heat generated by this beast was enormous. At peak performance the system could draw something approaching 24 megawatts of power—24 million watts—enough to power a city of about 30,000.

  Unlike the complexity of the supercomputer, the control room was simple and straightforward. A built-in counter ran the length of the wall just below the large windows that looked into the computer room. Four PCs with oversized flat screen monitors were spread out along the counter. An air lock with inner and outer doors, exactly the same as the one Oi Lam had used earlier, lead into the computer room itself. Five inexpensive office chairs provided the seating, and Nicole sank into one of them in front of a PC on the long counter. She needed to focus on software and stop looking at the damn hardware.

  She found her velvet pouch and retrieved a USB flash drive. She was about to insert it into a USB port on the PC when she stopped herself and looked over at the remaining technician, the older guy. “I need your help to set up my interface. I want to run a simple search program. My software is ready to use.”

  The older technician met her gaze. “I will not help you.”

  Grant and Hernandez exchanged a look. “You can't figure out how to do it yourself?” he asked.

  “That might take a couple of hours.”

  “Take all the time you need. I'll send out for pizza.”

  His remark wasn't helpful, but could she blame him? Hernandez had gone to the mat for her, and right now stood dripping blood onto the control room floor. She'd told him she could do it, and he'd gotten her here. Was she going to deliver or not? She watched as he kept looking through the window in the door, looking into the changing room where two bodies lay on the floor.

  Nicole didn't believe in “feminine intuition,” but she instinctively keyed on the weak link in the room: Oi Lam. “You care for General Ma, I can see that,” said Nicole gently. “But if I don't run this program that will restore my corrupted files—it's nothing that will hurt China—my partner will kill him. You see, the general was complicit in the death of my friend's brother, an innocent man. So my friend will take revenge if he has to.”

  “His brother? Who was that?” rasped Ma, with a disbelieving tone.

  “Willie Taveras,” said Hernandez, coldly. “You people killed him in Washington D.C.”

  “But your name is Hernandez.”

  “The Agency changed my name years ago.”

  “Taveras was your brother?” Ma shook his head like a man who keep
s getting nothing but bad news.

  Nicole riveted her eyes on Oi Lam. The young Chinese lady seemed to be listening carefully, trying to take it all in. “Too many people have died already over this,” said Nicole. “American and Chinese. The general knows what I've said is true.”

  Oi Lam looked to him for confirmation, but Ma just stared at Grant. “What corrupted files are you talking about?” asked Ma.

  “The files of the secret drone operation over this very city, two years ago. Files that will destroy Zhao Yiren. Files that will save my life, and my friend's life.”

  Ma scowled and cast his gaze downward. “Files that will not only destroy Zhao, but me as well.”

  “You told us you wanted to flee China with Oi Lam,” Nicole gently reminded him. “You mentioned having blackmail material on the entire top cadre, so they'd have to let you live. You already have your blackmail material to keep you and your girlfriend alive, General. Now we want ours,” said Nicole, gesturing with the flash drive. “Mister Hernandez and I want to live, the same as you do.”

  Ma started to speak but held his tongue. She could see how torn the man was.

  “He planned to double-cross us all along. I ought to just put a bullet in him right now,” said Hernandez, leveling his gun.

  ###

  Oi Lam blanched. The last thing she could allow was for the American man to shoot General Ma, whom she now understood with certainty was her future meal ticket. No, more than a meal ticket, much more, since she knew Ma was worth hundreds of millions. She'd underestimated how important having a son would be to her lover. The American woman had just said, and Ma didn't dispute it, that he intended to flee China with her! She hadn't considered leaving China, but with that kind of money, so what?