by P. R. Adams
Good. I didn’t have time for the drama. Never have sex with someone on your team, I reminded myself. Emotions. Chaos.
I needed to change the conversation. “I’m confused why they sent some data traffic to Biloxi and other data traffic here.”
“Different functions.” Chan came across a little cold-shouldered.
“Isn’t that a bit expensive, having two data centers for separate functions?”
A shrug. “Rappaport? That guy you killed outside Denver? Standing up six data centers. Global. For a company that doesn’t even exist.”
“SunCorps?”
“Yeah.”
Even in a stagnant economy, that had to be a lot of money. And for what?
The passenger door on Huiyin’s car opened, and Ichi climbed out. She was a shadow, quiet and swift, barely shifting the car when she took the seat behind me. She crossed her arms over her chest. “Huiyin says it is safe but demands to go with me.”
Safe? The building looked like a fortress. Easily twice the size of the place we’d broken into outside Biloxi, and this place had better security. There was a helicopter pad on the roof. The frontage road that led up to the facility gate came off a small street, and that passed through a housing development with speed bumps. I’d counted six guards patrolling the outside of the facility. It was a safe bet there were twice as many inside.
Nothing about the place looked safe. The whole thing had me on edge. “I think we’re all going to have to go in.”
Chan stiffened.
I held up a hand. “Sorry. I mean me, Ichi, and Huiyin.”
That set Chan at ease a little. “I could. If I had to. Huiyin talked about explosives.”
“No. We need you out here. And we’re not using explosives.”
“Easy to get.”
“I said we’re not using explosives. They’re lazy and imprecise.” A little too sharp. The blast in the hospital was still fresh. “Sorry. I just…”
“It’s okay.” Chan’s lips twitched a bit. It wasn’t okay.
“Can you see anything? Grid activity, signals?”
“No. Quiet.”
In the rearview mirror, I caught movement: Danny jogging up the rutted dirt path we’d taken to get up to the slab. That meant his drones were airborne, gaining altitude, getting ready to transmit data. They were specialized stealth units, expensive, tough to pick up with typical imagery systems, the sort of systems Danny loved.
We were burning through our cash reserves and resources fast. For me it was all about survival. It had become the same for him the second we’d reconnected.
I pulled the left jacket sleeve back, checked the display sliver adhered to the skin of my arm: static. No data yet.
Danny set his backpack in the center of the rear seat and settled behind Chan. I smiled when Danny did a double-take at Ichi’s crossed arms, but he had the sense to not stare at her. Instead, he met my eyes in the rearview mirror. “Um, should have video in a minute. Why’re we all in here?”
Huiyin seemed to be wondering the same thing, based on the way her head was tilted as she looked at our car.
“Talking over the plan.” I waved at her. “Huiyin says it’s safe.”
Danny unzipped his backpack. “I can take up a position in the trees back there, where the slab begins. About two hundred yards down to that main building, I figure. Should be tough to spot me. Did you see? They have a different logo.”
“New Cytek logo,” Chan muttered.
“Oh. The new company. Real money.” Danny seemed to digest that.
Real money, better security.
“Aha!” Danny smiled. “Imagery from the drones. Sharing it now.”
My trusty data device popped up an invitation to share video; I accepted. The drones were high enough to catch as much of the water as the facility. Still, the video was crisp and the lag was minimal. I forwarded the video to the display sliver and forked the feed off to my eyes, then set up a two-rapid-blink-slow-blink hot switch. After testing that, I popped my door. “Ichi?”
We headed toward the steps that would take us down to the beach. A door slam told me Huiyin was following.
She reached us before we took the first step. “You are going, too?” She sounded disappointed.
“You saw what happened at the last place. This looks worse.” I grabbed the aluminum railing and descended at a dangerous pace.
They stayed with me.
At the bottom, the rotting fish became too much. I pulled one of the ski masks over my head. Ichi and Huiyin did the same. We were all dressed in dark clothes, Huiyin in the armored jacket and black pants, Ichi in her combination of black hoodie, leotard, and skintight black leggings. I would have preferred picking up thermal-neutral wraps, but the cost and delay were unacceptable. Every minute lost allowed Cytek to gain more advantages over us.
We moved along the base of the artificial hill that had been built up so many years before for a project that had never seen completion.
After a few minutes of searching, I turned to Huiyin. “This tunnel access?”
She jogged about twenty feet away, hugging the concrete wall, then dropped into a crouch where the wall jutted out. She brushed accumulated detritus away, revealing a level area that quickly sloped outward into the sand. After fiddling around with what I realized was a hatch, she raised it and waved us over, revealing a narrow concrete pipe leading down about thirty feet and intersecting a much larger concrete pipe. There were metal rungs the length of the vertical pipe.
I lowered myself in, descending as quietly as I could, stopping occasionally to listen, then dropping to the bottom. It was a concrete tunnel, probably eight feet in diameter. There was the faintest smell of seawater, but the floor was dry. My night-vision was going to be of limited use, so I switched my eyes to normal and pulled out a flashlight. It was clear in both directions as far as the beam would go.
Ichi came down next. “The pipe runs all the way beneath the data center?”
“To a generator building attached to the main one.” Or at least that was what Huiyin had gotten from her connections. “It’s rarely used.”
“And from there?”
Huiyin had stopped partway down the rungs to close the hatch. She called down, “We break in. They still have a loading dock. Chan clears us to the dock, we get through the door.”
Ichi looked down the length of the pipe again. “Why not have Chan hack their systems? I could go over the wall—”
I sighed. We didn’t have time to argue the approach. “Because we have no idea how ready they are for us. This place looks a lot tougher than the one in Biloxi. I want to keep Chan in reserve. They have to know we have a Gridhound. Not using that Gridhound immediately should give us a better chance when the big hacking comes. We’ve got the card reader and biometrics hack Abhishek put together for you. We’re going to be fine.”
“And the data center? We know where we want to go?”
Huiyin dropped the rest of the way to the floor and dusted her hands off. She wore her mirror shades over the ski mask. “We’ll find the room we want.”
She took the lead, her pace dangerously quick. The pipe was clear, and we were quiet, but a tripwire or an infrared beam would be tripped without caution. I bit my tongue, not wanting to get involved with whatever was going on between the two women. Huiyin was either leading us into a trap or she really was confident we could find what we were looking for.
When I thought we were close to the facility perimeter, I called out, “Hold up!”
Huiyin stopped, and I flipped to the drone video feeds. We had lag and chop going through sand and concrete, but the video finally came up. Everything seemed okay. Almost. Something about the patrol in the parking lot near the gate seemed…off.
I connected to Danny and Chan. “Did they increase the number of guards near the gate?”
“Um.” Danny hummed. “Say again?”
“Did they increase the number of guards near the gate?” This time, slower and louder.
“Uh. I count eight.”
There had been six. “Any odd activity? Vehicles moving? Traffic on the frontage road?”
“Nothing.”
Chan said, “Signals.” Agitation. “Grid traffic.”
That could mean anything, but I was sure it was bad. “What kind of signals?”
“Security. Lots. Sensor data. Radio traffic. They—”
Audio squealed, then voices called back and forth. Radio chatter. Security personnel.
A gruff voice said, “I want a team up there in fifteen minutes.” Agitated. Boston accent. “Boss says we check out everything suspicious; we check out everything suspicious.”
“Taking Patoski and Cox up with me.” A second voice. Younger sounding, calmer. “They’re bringing ATVs around.”
ATVs. Suspicious. “Danny, I think you’ve got three inbound on that dirt trail. ATVs. Sounds like fifteen minutes. We must have triggered something on our way up there. Or maybe down here.” I looked around, but I couldn’t see anything.
Chan yelped. “Sound. Picking up sound. From the pipe. They don’t understand it.”
A sensor somewhere, picking up our running? We had fifteen minutes before their team reached the top of the dirt path to the concrete slab where our vehicles were hidden. If we slowed to avoid giving away our presence in the pipe, it would be another five minutes just to reach the generator room. That didn’t leave much time.
“Chan, can you do something about that sensor that’s picking us up? Flood it, send false data, whatever.”
“They may—” Chan sighed. “Trying.”
I waved Huiyin ahead. She moved with more caution; Ichi was silence.
And then we were under the facility. I swore the mass of it pressed down, threatening to crush us. The pipe groaned, and everywhere my flashlight touched showed cracks.
It was getting to me. The Cytek people weren’t one step ahead of us; they were two, maybe three.
Huiyin stopped and signaled for us to do the same. Rungs led up. Ichi crept forward and waited at the bottom as the MSS agent climbed—slow, careful.
My gun was fully loaded. Sixteen bullets. Another magazine in a pocket on my right thigh, a third on my left. How many people worked in the complex? The parking lot could hold thirty or forty cars, easily. These were innocent people—techs, crypto experts, the security team. Working stiffs, like me. They weren’t the threat, and I didn’t want to have to kill innocent people if I didn’t have to.
Light—pale, white—flashed from above, and Huiyin scrambled the last few rungs. The hatch was open!
Ichi took the rungs faster, soundless.
I brought up the rear, slow as a snail. We were in a small room without a door. An old rug was twisted beside the hatch. It smelled like oil and diesel. Soiled rags, rusty washers, and stripped screws covered a small workbench. Belts hung from hooks on the wall above the bench. In the larger room, the generator was pressed into the corner to our right, close to the data center’s outer wall. Thick, black cabling ran from the side of the generator and through the wall.
Ichi grabbed Huiyin’s jacket and whispered, “Wait!”
Huiyin froze, and Ichi pointed to spots on the ceiling: sensors. Probably active. She pulled a small aerosol canister from a pocket and sprayed it into the room.
Infrared beams. Not sound or movement detectors. I flipped through other ranges to be sure; it was just IR.
Ichi pointed from the beams to us. Huiyin nodded; I did the same. They weren’t impossible to avoid, but we would have walked right into them without being alerted, and that would have spelled an end to the mission.
Ichi sprayed the beams again, then hurried around them, slightly contorting. We followed. Chan didn’t yelp, so we must have gotten through without detection.
Ichi unzipped her toolkit and went to work on the outer door. It would take us to the back end of the compound. The courtyard of the loading docks was thirty feet away. Chan would have to knock out four different cameras for us in that small space.
Ichi stuffed the electronic tool back into its kit. The door was clean.
She cracked it open and peeked outside, then gummed up the lock and pushed the door open more. A second later, she slid through the narrow opening. Huiyin easily fit through the gap, but I had to push it wider.
LED floodlights lit the back of the building almost like daylight. There was no relying on shadow. Either the cameras were compromised or the alarm would go up the second we ran into the opening.
Ichi nodded at us, then she was gone, sprinting like a gazelle.
Again, no alarms from Chan. Not even acknowledgement we were through clean.
That was worrying. Were we still connected? “Chan, are we clean?”
Silence.
“Chan?”
Nothing.
I checked the display sliver.
Static.
We’d lost contact with the others.
Chapter 19
Running through the lit courtyard outside the loading dock felt like trying to sneak up on someone in broad daylight. Without cover. The pure white of the LEDs drained the color from everything. The black material of our clothes turned gray, and our skin was washed out. Every grain of sand popped out against the dull concrete gray. Rather than a spring evening, it felt like a summer day. The rotting fish smell was gone, along with the dead seawater, as if the lights had burned the impurities from the air.
Our steps were loud scrapes in my ears, surely giving us away.
And then we were at the top of the ramp that led to the loading dock doors, looking down on the lower area. The concrete walkway formed a wide “L,” which would allow for deliveries to be unpacked and moved. The area was obviously under surveillance, so if Chan hadn’t shut the cameras off before…
Chan’s voice was suddenly in my ear. “Stefan?” Panicked.
I held a hand up to stop Ichi before she opened the door. “Where are you?”
“Edge of…” Chan’s breath caught. “Under. In the tunnel.”
“The tunn—” I took a step back toward the generator room. “What happened?”
“One of them almost…” Heavy breathing, crying. “Danny got him. Can I come?”
They must have had someone already on patrol or going ahead of the ATV team. “Yeah. Hurry.”
Sneakered footsteps echoed over the connection. “Coming.”
“That tunnel opens beneath a generator room. When you get there, stay. I’ll come get you.”
“Okay.” Then Chan shocked me by saying, “Thanks.”
I signaled for Ichi to go ahead. “Chan’s going to join us. Problems up on the hill. I guess that’s why we lost connection with them.”
Huiyin shook her head. “There won’t be enough time. They’ll know soon.”
Ichi’s hands were steady; there was no hesitation in her movement, no sign of second guessing. She seemed to be fully focused on the door. There was no way to know if she was panicking, not fully covered in her stealth gear. I had to believe in her.
I waved for Huiyin to go in. “We’ll be okay.” We had to be.
Ichi’s head came up, and the door buzzed. She slipped the card and the rest of her gear back into her tool pouch. After a glance to check with us, she popped the door open. It was actually darker inside.
Chan’s voice was there again. “At the rungs. Going up.”
I held up a hand. “Two minutes. Don’t wait for us.” Then I sprinted back to the generator room. Down the ramp. Across the white-lit courtyard. Stopping at the door. As it opened, I switched to infrared. It was easy moving between the beams, but I could see them, and I’d been through training before doing it in the field several times. Chan wouldn’t have it so easy.
Chan’s head popped around the corner of the doorway into the smaller room.
I hurried the last few steps. “Danny’s okay, right?”
Chan nodded. The hoodie was back up, covering the magenta waves I’d started to grow used to.
“Okay.” I curled my hand in a serpentine path between the beams. “You’re going to have to…”
Chan blinked, confused.
“I’m going to lead you through these beams. I’ll need to…you’ll need to be close to me. Really close.”
Chan shrunk a little bit. I had expected recoiling. “Okay.”
I stepped behind Chan, wrapped arms around narrow shoulders that must never have been used for any significant physical labor, pressed up against hips that Jacinto had—
“Sorry,” I whispered, then pushed forward.
Chan almost froze, and there was no missing the gasp that slipped out.
“Think of it like a video game, okay?” I pushed forward again, hating the uncomfortable closeness but thankful Chan had started wearing clean clothes and showering. The perfume coming up through the hoodie was actually pleasant. “Okay, this is the first beam. Lean—”
Chan fought my guidance.
“Lean, Chan. The beam’s angled from the ceiling to the floor. You don’t lean, it’s going to catch your shoulder. Okay?”
Chan leaned.
We worked through the second beam with a little more ease, then the third. By the fourth beam, Chan was working with me. I thought I caught a chuckle.
At the door, I listened, then pushed it open. We’d lost so much time. “Were you laughing?”
“A little. Sorry.”
“Nerves?”
Chan’s hoodie shook. “Just…like a video game, that’s all.”
A video game. “That’s good. Just remember that you don’t get to restart if you die in this, okay? You took these cameras down, right?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, we’re going to run through a wide-open area that’s lit like a nuclear blast is going off. You ready?”
Chan seemed to shiver.
Time was too precious to worry about panic or hurt feelings. I took Chan’s hand and ran. We couldn’t manage a sprint, not with Chan’s skinny legs getting tangled up, but I got us to the ramp before too long, then simply lifted Chan around the hips and shot up the ramp and through the door, which Ichi had left wedged open.
