by Theo Cage
Make the tough stuff automatic!
Soldiers don’t think about breaking down and reassembling their weapon. They can do it in their sleep. Soldiers don’t think about how to time a grenade toss. They don’t think about how to dig a foxhole. They've done it so many times, it’s automatic.
If it wasn’t, they wouldn’t survive long. In times of great stress, thinking can be a fatal occupation. Better to act. The military calls this discipline readiness.
Rice was considering this as he marched, with Ki, through the dried out remains of a corn field. Ki had no training. He was clearly not ready. He was therefore a massive liability. If fired on, he would panic. If confronted by the enemy, he would do the exact opposite of what was required for their joint survival.
They both had their pistols tucked into their waist bands. Rice hoped Ki would never be required to use his. He was as likely to shoot Rice as a Chinese soldier. Or himself.
“It’s an address,” said Ki. He was describing their target to Rice. “A twenty-two-story apartment block. Like dozens of others in the vicinity.”
“This location—is it a coordinate?” asked Rice.
“I start counting apartments when we reach the first one. Those are the instructions.”
“Do we have a suite number?”
“A floor. The eighth floor.”
“The whole floor. Does that mean it’s fully occupied?”
Ki stopped, touching Rice’s shoulder. “You think we need to clear an entire floor?” He looked worried.
“A suite would indicate the threat was confined to one apartment. An entire floor can mean many things.”
“Our information is limited,” said Ki, the obviousness of that statement causing Rice to smirk to himself in the dark.
“Option one. The company we have been investigating owns the whole floor. Potential is for dozens of occupants. Typical corporate types or engineers. They won’t try to put up a fight. Other than any security they have, which seems unnecessary considering the location, taking control of the operation shouldn’t represent a great risk.”
“You make it sound so easy.”
“The second option is a smaller group, somewhere on the floor, unfortunately our intel is not complete.”
“What happens if that’s the case?”
“Same situation. Maybe one or two guards. Limited resistance.”
“Who are these people?”
“This is a guess, but it’s probably a research center of some kind for a company called Lutu.”
“The cell phone company?”
“They do a lot more than just design cell phones. They are one of the world’s largest electronics companies.”
“Why are they hiding in a Ghost City?”
“Exactly.”
“Wow. I had no idea. Is there something fishy about Lutu?”
“We think so.”
“We?”
“My company. We do corporate and government security and investigation.”
“In China—”
“We’re global.”
“Am I going to have to shoot someone?”
“Ki, do not fire your weapon unless your life is threatened. Got that?” said Rice.
“Yes, sir.”
“Repeat it.”
“I will not fire my weapon—unless there is a threat to my life.”
“Visualize that. Repeat it to yourself.”
Ki continued through the dried-up corn stalks, mumbling to himself. He gave Rice a sheepish look a few times, but he didn’t turn around and run back to his car. Yet.
护士
T H E N U R S E
Manhattan
THE KID WHO BROKE INTO Alverez’s shiny Mustang EV was Rikki Bonnono, the grandson of Louis Bonnono, the infamous New York mobster. Rikki liked this gig; he got to drive a bitchin’ car out to New Jersey, with the owner quietly asleep in the passenger seat, where he would leave it on a residential street somewhere, pull up his hoodie, and get picked up by one of his grandfather’s drivers.
He looked over at the guy in the passenger seat, his face pressed up against the glass. The nurse had done her job like a real pro. He had never worked with her before, but he was impressed with how quickly and smoothly she did the deed. She slammed that hypo into Alverez’s jugular like she had done it a hundred times before. And maybe she had. Before the guy was even out, she had his wrist in her nitrile gloved hands and was slicing off the right thumb with a shiny scalpel. In seconds. Like she was filleting a fish.
Rikki smiled. There was something so cool about working with people who knew what they were doing. He watched her take the bloody thumb, open the cooler and withdraw a device about the size of a pack of cigarettes.
“Is that the thing that keeps the thumb ticking?” he asked her. She glanced up at him, then looked back at the device. He wasn’t upset that she didn’t answer. He’d heard about these gizmos. He’d even looked one up on the dark web. The one he found on some auction site went for three thousand dollars. You attach the thumb and it fed heated red dye into the cells to keep the appendage warm.
Apparently, the new security technology, the kind where the computer knows who you are by your thumb print, also checks the temperature and the flow of blood. To ensure that some thief wouldn’t just hack off the thumbs of the poor saps who managed the computer networks.
It was only about six months after the new security feature was introduced before ‘thumb preservers’ started showing up for sale on the Net.
When the retired nurse was finished, she glanced up quickly at the kid, nodded and reached for the door handle. That’s when Rikki completed today’s to-do list by shooting her between the eyes, painting the rear window of the Mustang a muddy red.
As he turned to leave, he couldn’t help but regret the mess they had made, all that gore splattered across the primo white leather interior.
. . .
THE THREE SEVERED THUMBS were in transit by 9:00 AM, via three different couriers supplied by the Bonnono family. You couldn’t ask for a more reliable service, thought Richard Yang. Always work with the best, pay the price, and the job will get done.
The thumbs were key to the attack in the New York exchanges. The baseline technology was corrupted by the fake chips Yang’s company had installed in servers and routers over the years, but the frontline security installed by American firms could only be breached by working around the top-level access controlled by senior people like Carston Alverez. They held the keys to the kingdom.
There were several layers of encryption that protected huge organizations like NASDAQ. At the highest level, where a supervisor would have control over all the lower levels, the only way to break into the system that oversees the day-to-day operations is with biological security. In NASDAQ’s case, that was the thumb print of the Chief Technology Officer. Once that door was pried open, the Three Sopranos would take over, change the locks, and then there wouldn’t be anything anyone could do to stop them. Then the fat lady could sing. That was an operatic reference that Toshi might appreciate.
Once the thumb prints became commonly used to protect data systems, terrorists and hacktivists learned they could remove a supervisor’s thumb and gain access. The security companies announced that these readers would be updated so that only living thumbs would be useful, hopefully protecting the lives (and digits) of people working in these roles. Within a short period of time, small manufacturers in China and the Russian states began to market a device that kept a separated thumb warm and alive for up to twenty-four hours. Ah, capitalism.
By 10:30 AM, New York time, individuals with current security access to the NYSE, NASDAQ, and the Federal Reserve had used the thumb devices to access the supervisory level on all three networks and had loaded a program into the terminals supplied by TTS.
At 10:42 AM, Richard Yang received notification from Zerzy that the hacker group was now in control of the exchanges and that the counterfeit Lutu chips were doing the job they were designed to do.
On his Lutu smartphone, Yang texted Zerzy. “Kill the pig.”
Less than thirty seconds later every server and PC and laptop at the New York Stock exchange dark. The other organizations followed suit within seconds.
Brokers sitting at their desks in the offices in downtown Manhattan let out a gasp of surprise. The entire floor had a backup system. Even in the city-wide blackout in 1988, the analysts and brokers had uninterrupted access to global markets. They had never seen anything like this before. Several stood up, waved at their compatriots in the surrounding cubicles, shrugged shoulders, gulped coffee. A few called computer services immediately. Several were in mid trade, wondering what would happen to their bid or transaction. They had clients on the line, wondering why their feeds were down, why they couldn’t access their accounts. Why they couldn’t spend more money.
Within two minutes, a Bloomberg reporter called. The word was out on the street. This was a major interruption. Historic.
Computer security services had no answer yet. They were working on it. Not to worry. But they were worried. Everyone with any kind of system access was locked out and systems that had powered down, now refused to come back online.
They would be calling in the hardware types next, having given up on software teams who couldn’t get onto the network. It would be like aliens had taken the stock market hostage.
Then, in a flash, everything was back up and running again. It took less than sixty seconds for Yang to get the call, this time from one of the employees at the NYSE they had bribed.
“Was the system supposed to come back up?” Richard Yang rarely swore. But this time he said under his breath, “What the fuck?”
He called Zerzy on his cell, a rare breach of protocol. “What’s going on?” he growled to her.
“It’s the whale,” she moaned. “The whale is back.”
END OF PART THREE
To continue with the adventures of Rice and his team, click here for the next book in the series.
ON THE BLACK: Ghost City (Part 4)
