by Mark Parragh
“That’s wrong, too. They must be rotating the nodes! Try…hang on.”
Crane heard more typing. He was intimately aware of passing time. At any moment the man he’d attacked could come to or be missed. Someone might come into the chamber, or he might trigger some hardware alarm. Crane’s instincts told him to get out, but he wasn’t leaving without the data tap.
Georges had him move down the row he was on, checking board numbers and looking for a pattern. Finally, he said, “Okay, got it.”
Georges sent Crane down two more aisles to another cabinet. “Same thing. Sixth drawer up.”
Crane pressed the button, and the rack slid out. He pushed aside the bundle of cable and there it was. An extra processor module with a heat sink glued on with thermal paste.
“Bingo,” said Georges. “Pull the heat sink and…”
Crane removed the heat sink, but Georges’ voice was fading in and out behind harsh static.
“Georges?”
“…getting this, Crane?”
“You’re fading.”
“Interference,” Georges said as the static rose. “Someone’s jam…”
Then Georges was gone.
Crane swore. They’d been discovered somehow. Before long, armed guards would storm the chamber.
There was a procedure for disconnecting the data tap, but Georges was supposed to walk him through it, and Crane had no more time to be delicate. He popped the clips holding the board in place and ripped the whole thing free. He positioned it carefully against the edge of the rack and pushed hard until he broke off the corner of the circuit board that held the data tap. He slipped it into a zippered pocket on his pants.
Outside, the lights came up. He noticed a red LED blinking on the frame of the revolving door. It was probably locked down now to trap him inside.
He ran through the rows of cabinets, pressing release buttons at random. Racks slid out into the aisles, making it harder to follow him. Finally, Crane stepped up onto one extended rack near the center of the cube, and pulled himself on top of the cabinet.
A trio of security guards appeared outside, armed with MP-5s. One moved to the revolving door, and the red light went out long enough for him to enter. The other two circled the supercomputer, then took up positions covering the doors leading out of the chamber.
The guard inside the cube moved slowly down the center aisle, sweeping each row with his weapon as he came. He spotted the disturbed processor racks and called that in. He turned down an aisle, checking racks, but didn’t close them. Finally, he turned down Crane’s aisle. Crane lay flat atop the cabinet, holding his breath, willing the guard to focus on the opened processor nodes instead of looking up. As the man stepped around the rack Crane had used to climb up, Crane pushed off the cabinet and dove onto him.
The impact drove the guard into the rack and knocked the breath out of him. The rack tore loose and they fell to the floor. Cooling water from a broken hose sprayed over them as they struggled.
Crane heard shouting as he slammed the guard’s right arm hard against a cabinet. His gun fell to the floor, and Crane knocked the man out.
There were more voices outside now. They’d be calling for the revolving door to be released. They could already cover the central aisle. In the other direction was a gauntlet of servers and the plexiglass wall of the cube. Crane’s way out was decided for him. He’d wanted to travel light, so he hadn’t prepared for too many contingencies, but he had the basics.
He hurriedly sifted through his pack and took out the compact Sig Sauer P938 pistol he preferred when he wasn’t planning to need a gun. From the few other odds and ends, he chose a smoke grenade and a clear plastic tube that held two foil pouches the size of Crane’s fist. He removed one and returned the tube to his pack.
The pistol went into a custom thigh holster built into his pants leg. The smoke grenade clipped to his belt. That left the foil pouch. Crane tore it open. Inside was a doughy, white mass the size of a tennis ball that started to hiss on contact with the air. Crane hurled it down the aisle, and it splattered against the plexiglass.
Crane picked up the guard’s MP-5, took a deep breath, and counted to three. The panel was already turning milky white, and Crane could hear faint cracking sounds. He leapt to his feet and sprinted down the aisle, firing the MP-5 into the plexiglass. He hit it hard and exploded through the panel in a shower of bright fragments. He cleared the gap and landed on the metal deck with a jarring impact.
One of the guards was already through the revolving door and inside the cube, but the other ran toward him. Crane emptied the rest of the clip at him, and he fell back around the corner. Crane tossed the smoke grenade after him.
He could hear alarms as he stood up and discarded the empty submachine gun. He didn’t know where to go. If they’d figured out how he got in, they could have sealed the access shaft.
“Georges?”
There was no response. Crane could taste the chemical tang of his smoke filling the chamber. Whatever he did, he needed to decide now.
Then he heard footsteps and whirled as a figure hurtled at him. He wore a jumpsuit and brandished some kind of long, metal tool. Not a guard, but a technician from somewhere.
Crane drew his pistol, but couldn’t bring it to bear before the rod smashed across his wrist and the tech slammed into him. His pistol clattered away across the deck, and their momentum carried them both over the edge.
They hit the cement floor below. The tech lay stunned, the tool on the floor beside him. Crane grabbed it and slammed him in the temple as he tried to rise. The tech went still.
Crane heard shouting above. His gun was out of reach, and he’d lost situational awareness. It was time to leave. Crane ducked beneath the deck and ran.
Chapter 4
They finally found Einar Persson at Harpa, the glass honeycomb concert hall perched on Reykjavik’s waterfront. He was enjoying a performance of the Iceland Symphony in the company of a very beautiful woman when they set a helicopter down directly in front of the main entrance.
For a moment, Einar indulged himself by pretending the clatter outside had nothing to do with him. He imagined some police emergency that he could gawk at from behind the crime scene tape like everyone else. But he knew better. Then two members of Datafall’s security team burst into the hall in tactical uniforms and boots, with unhappy ushers in tow.
Einar leant over to his date and whispered, “I’m terribly sorry for this. Really, I am. I’ll call you as soon as I’m able.”
Then, over her murmured protestations, he stood up and made his way to the end of the row. The orchestra soldiered on through Debussy’s La Mer, and annoyed patrons stared daggers at him as he walked up the aisle to meet the two worried looking men in their battle dress uniforms. Einar was a tall man in a tuxedo with a body builder’s physique and a blond buzz cut. He accepted the angry stares and whispered reproaches, but he didn’t acknowledge them.
“What’s happened?” he asked quietly as they walked out of the concert hall, but he knew what the answer would be. What it could only be.
“There’s been a brushfire level event, sir,” one of them answered.
Of course there had been. Nothing else would justify this kind of response. Critical company data had been compromised. One or more of Datafall’s metaphorical cats was out of its bag. Einar also knew which one it would be.
“Details.”
They filled him in as they strode quickly through the main lobby toward the doors. Building security was gathering now, and an older man in a suit followed along behind, protesting how inappropriate this all was. Einar ignored him and took in the facts as they were known. One man had penetrated the supercomputer facility and escaped. He was believed to have removed a foreign device from one of the processor nodes. He’d been in communication with someone outside the facility using a sophisticated spread spectrum system. Two men were injured and there had been minor damage to the supercomputer itself. All this had happened nearly two
hours earlier. The men were very apologetic. It had taken them that long to track Einar down.
Outside, his helicopter sat idling on the cobblestones in front of Harpa, its blinking lights reflecting off the building’s geometric planes. The blades were spinning and onlookers were keeping a safe distance. The police had arrived to deal with the unauthorized landing, and one of Einar’s men was arguing with them. There was a great deal of gesturing going on. Einar and his escorts cleared a path through the gathering crowd. They swept straight past the improvised police cordon and strode to the helicopter. Einar got the attention of the man keeping the police occupied and curtly gestured for him to get back aboard or be left behind.
His two escorts leapt into the open side door and extended their arms to help him up. Einar climbed in and stood in the doorway. The police had noticed something was happening now. The remaining operative on the ground broke off his argument. He leapt in and took a seat in the cockpit.
A quartet of police officers hurried toward them, waving them down. It wasn’t permitted to land a helicopter here, but having done so, it was apparently also not permitted for it to take off again. Einar had bigger things to worry about.
“Let’s move!” he called out. The helicopter lifted off and slid quickly away over Reykjavik into a sky that glowed dull orange in the long twilight.
“What’s been done?” he snapped, and his crew quickly filled him in. Standard brushfire protocols, of course. But those were designed by men who assumed an attack on their data would be a cyber attack by hackers, not an old school physical penetration of the building.
Einar had not made that assumption. He wasn’t entirely unprepared for this. It was unfortunate it happened on a night when he’d gone off the grid and forced his team to hunt him down. He could have done without giving his quarry a two-hour head start. Still, he had certain advantages, not the least of which was Iceland itself. Einar knew perfectly well who their enemies within the country were, and none would have had the motive or the ability to pull off something like this. That meant foreigners. Foreigners who would need to get their stolen data out of the country in some kind of physical volume. In many ways this was better than a hacking incident because, for all practical purposes, there’d been no breach at all if the attackers couldn’t get the data out of the country. And Iceland was a remote, isolated place that offered them very few ways to do that.
“Private aircraft arriving in the last week?” he asked.
“Five, sir,” one of his operatives read from a tablet. “Only one of which is still on the ground at Keflavik.” He read off a tail number.
“Why wasn’t I notified?”
“It was just logged as routine, sir,” the man said. “It’s not on the targets of interest list.”
“Well, perhaps we’d better add it, don’t you think?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Do we have a team heading for Keflavik?”
Another man spoke up. “Mr. Olvirsson dispatched a duty team, sir. They should arrive in…” He checked his watch. “Twenty minutes.”
“Olvirsson’s giving orders?”
“He assumed command in your absence, sir.”
Einar nodded. Good man. He’d had the guts to step up and take control, and he’d made at least one good call. He’d clawed back some of that two-hour head start.
The helicopter was flying fast over the outskirts of Reykjavik. They’d be at the site within minutes and Einar could take over. He toyed with the idea of ordering the pilot to divert to Keflavik. But no. Einar’s place in a crisis was at the command center. He was already going to have to explain a brushfire event to the company’s directors. They wouldn’t be pleased to learn that he’d been deliberately out of pocket for two hours as it developed. He could sweep that under the rug, but only if he was there onsite.
“Get me a channel to the Keflavik team,” he said. “I’ll direct them from base.”
Chapter 5
Crane ran with a steady, medium-fast pace, a pace he’d trained at for years and knew he could maintain for long distances. The light was just good enough to see by as he ran over the broken ground. The sun was a glowing wedge along the horizon behind him. He dodged a tussock of long, brown grass and kept on.
He was circling a tall hill that wasn’t big enough to have a name on the map, though Crane guessed the locals had a name for it. The Datafall complex was on the other side of that hill, stuck between it and the volcanic mountains to the north. On this side of the hill was a tiny hamlet, a clutch of half a dozen small homes clustered close together as if huddling for warmth once winter came. There was a gravel road leading out toward the main highway. And there was a tiny, ancient church with a sod roof where Crane had left his car.
Again, the situation wasn’t ideal. Probably no one but the residents of those half dozen homes and the postman had come down that little road in years. Crane very much doubted that they’d failed to notice a stranger parking his car behind the church and walking off around the hill. But you didn’t get to pick the mission parameters. Crane was hoping they’d taken him for a tourist roaming the countryside with a rental car and a day pack. There seemed to be enough of those drifting around Iceland in the summer.
Crane stopped for a moment, listened, and heard nothing. He scanned the slope ahead of him. There were few enough landmarks out here, but he’d stashed his backup bag in an erosion gully along the hillside, a bare scar in the green-brown slope. There was a rock nearby that could be seen from a ways off. He knew he could find the bag. The course was straightforward enough: back out the way he went in. Retrieve the bag, make it back to the car, then hightail it to Keflavik and the Gulfstream.
But there was a lot of distance to cover between him and the jet. A lot could happen between here and there. He set off again, angling up the hillside slightly.
He recovered the bag a few minutes later and checked his watch. Eighteen minutes since he’d left the complex. He wasn’t sure what Datafall’s response capabilities were or what kind of a cordon they could throw out in that time to stop him. It was another ten minutes to the car. Crane set off again, pushing his pace a little. He decided to see if he could make it eight minutes.
It was just under eight minutes later as Crane approached the clutch of buildings. He knew something was wrong before he knew exactly what. There were lights that hadn’t been there when he left. Crane could see the church steeple standing out in the twilight. His car was there, but so was another vehicle. His rented Nissan sat isolated in the pool of its headlights.
Crane crouched down to avoid silhouetting himself on the hillside. He moved forward and knelt beside a small cluster of three-leaved rush. There was no real cover here, but at least it would break up his outline. He took a pair of binoculars from the backup bag and swept the church.
“Damn it,” he muttered.
The other vehicle was a Toyota Hilux, dull gray with the Datafall logo on the doors. Two men in black uniforms stood nearby. They were armed. One of the doors of his Nissan was open. They’d been through the car. That wasn’t a problem. There was nothing inside that would tell them anything. But they’d found the car, and that was very bad.
Crane thought he might be able to take them if he could maintain surprise. But then what would he do? His choices would be to drive out in his own car, which they’d now be watching for, or in one of their own trucks. That seemed equally unlikely to pass without notice. For all he knew, the Hilux could have a GPS tracer. Either way, he’d have to take the Ring Road, which circled the country and was the only road back to Reykjavik. Then there was one highway out to Keflavik. They’d be able to intercept him almost anywhere they chose to, because there simply weren’t any choices he could make. His only chance was to do something unexpected.
Crane moved away, heading back around the hill and leaving the car to them. It was worse than just being able to predict his route, he realized. They’d know he was headed for Keflavik because that was the only international airport
and almost the only way out of the country. It wouldn’t take a genius to figure out there must be a plane waiting for him there. Georges and the Gulfstream would be a target. Once again it occurred to Crane that Iceland was a singularly bad place for this kind of job, one that gave every advantage to the opposition.
He made his way back around to the west side of the hill, out of sight of the team at the car. When he thought he’d found the point on the hill that was nearest the Ring Road, he sat down and took out the phone he’d been using for the last week, and called Georges.
“Where are you?” Georges said as he picked up. “What happened? Are you all right?”
“I’m fine. What’s going on there?”
“Nothing. We just lost you. I’ve been trying to get you back. They’re using some kind of predictive jammer. I could get a packet past it once in a while, but not enough signal integrity to—”
“Get airborne,” Crane interrupted. “They’ve made you.”
“What?”
“I have the device and I’m out, but they’ve got my car. I’m not going to be able to make it back there. You’ve probably got hostiles inbound. Tell the pilots to get airborne now. Wheels up as fast as they can do it.”
“But what about you?”
“I’ve got a backup plan,” said Crane. “I’ll get out on my own. You get out of the country immediately. This is the last call you’ll get from this phone, do you understand? If this phone calls you again, don’t answer.”
“We can’t just leave you here!”
“I’ll be all right. Go. Now.”
Then he hung up and powered down the phone. He pulled the SIM card, and buried it in a small depression he dug out of the mossy ground. Then he changed, quickly because it was chilly. He swapped out his black pants and sweater for a pair of hiking pants and a couple layers of light outdoor gear he’d picked up at Cintamani in Reykjavik. He packed everything into his bag, then stood up, hitched the bag up over his shoulder and set out on the long walk back out to the Ring Road.
