Interface: A Techno Thriller

by Tony Batton

There was the harsh sound of a cheap mobile phone ringing. Lentz scowled and pulled it from her pocket.

  "That's my phone!" Tom said.

  "Did you do that?"

  "Make it ring? No. Can I do that?"

  "Then who has the number?"

  "Only one person." Tom grabbed it from her and answered. "Kate?"

  There was a pause, then a man's voice. "She's here."

  Tom swallowed. "Marron."

  "Excellent. I hate having to explain myself. Is Ms Lentz with you?"

  "If you've hurt Kate I'll--"

  "Ms Turner is fine. Mostly. Although you'll be flattered to hear she really didn't want to give up your contact details. Now, listen closely--"

  Tom clenched his jaw. "How do I know you even have her?"

  "I'd send you a video link but this phone is pre-industrial revolution. How about you have a very quick word."

  There was a pause then a hoarse voice spoke, "Tom, just run. He won't hurt me"

  Marron's voice spoke again, "I will actually, but for now she's fine. Come to CERUS Tower and she'll stay that way."

  "So you can kill us both?"

  "I have no intention of killing you, Tom. I want to help you. But I have every intention of killing your friend if you don't comply."

  "I know what you did to me," Tom said. "Why would I ever trust you?"

  There was a pause. "I'm sure Lentz has explained what she thinks this is about, but what she doesn't know is that you are in grave danger. The item in your head has proven unstable and we need to help you before it's too late."

  "I suspect your definition of help and mine are somewhat different. I'll take my chances."

  "I hope for Kate's sake you rethink that position. You have twenty-four hours. Come alone. If I even smell Lentz..." The phone clicked off.

  Lentz looked at him. "We have to go. He's probably traced the call."

  "It doesn't matter."

  "Why?"

  "Because he doesn't need to come here. I'm going to him."

  Lentz put a hand on his shoulder. "Tom--"

  "I'm going to rescue Kate. I'm going to stop him."

  Lentz shook her head. "You're not thinking clearly. Kate made her own decision to get involved. In a few weeks, months, who knows what you'll be able to do. But now? What do you really think you can accomplish? "

  He returned her look, his eyes hard. "I'm going to break into one of the most modern secure buildings in the world, protected by an army of security guards, save my friend and, if the opportunity presents, exact retribution on the people who experimented on me. Any questions?"

  EIGHTY

  THE WHITE VAN GLIDED UP the approach road to CERUS Tower watched by fifty pairs of eyes and twice as many cameras. It slowed as it approached the security barrier. Inside the glass front doors of the main building, Alex and a team of eight security guards crouched, waiting. She tapped her radio earpiece as she peered through a set of high-powered binoculars. "It's the vehicle he told us to expect. I see one figure inside. Can't make out the face, but it's his height and build."

  Marron replied immediately. "Raise the barrier. Move Teams One and Two into position."

  "He can't really believe you're going to release the journalist."

  "I don't care what he believes."

  Alex signalled and a guard raised the barrier. Two other guards waved the van towards a parking space in the pedestrian area immediately in front of the Tower. The vehicle manoeuvred smoothly over to it, as four other guards converged. Alex nodded with a smile.

  There was a squeal of rubber and the van lurched from its path, accelerating towards the glass doors. Alex dived to her left, landing in a tight sideways roll, just as the vehicle exploded through the glass and skidded to a halt in the middle of the lobby. Alex looked around and saw that two guards had been knocked down and were not moving. Cursing, she unshouldered her weapon and crunched through broken glass to the front of the van, flanked by the six remaining guards.

  "What the hell happened?" shouted Marron's voice in her ear.

  "I don't know. He just went crazy." She signalled to the nearest guard. "Open it."

  "Is he injured?" asked Marron.

  The guard pulled the door open and leapt back. Seven weapons were instantly trained on the interior. A man sat at the controls. He was tied up and had clearly not been driving. He turned to her, eyes wide.

  It was not Tom.

  ◇ ◇ ◇

  In one of a network of sewer-access corridors not marked on any commercial map, Lentz looked at her laptop screen with a smile. "Time to move, before they work out it was simply a distraction. Though I expect it'll take them a while to realise how I was controlling the van."

  "I get the strangest feeling that's not the first time you've remote-controlled a full-size vehicle as if it's a model car. How did you even get a signal down here?"

  "I'm running through a relay. It also means Marron will start searching somewhere else if he manages to trace the signal."

  "Nice of one of our guests from the barn to stand in for me."

  "It was the least he could do." She closed the laptop and placed it in her bag. "Ready to break into theoretically the most secure office building in the world?"

  Tom puffed out his cheeks. "You suck at motivational speeches."

  "I said 'theoretically'. Marron's weakness is that he has an enormous building he is attempting to secure with no more than forty guards. He cannot possibly do that without the help of the technology, which he assumes is infallible. We just need to use that against him."

  ◇ ◇ ◇

  Marron burst from the lift into the chaotic lobby scene, the air thick with the tang of splintered metal and dust. Two dozen guards and technicians surrounded the van, pointing guns and scanners.

  "There's no sign of Faraday," Alex said, striding over, her boots crunching on fragments of black glass. "We thought about the 'Trojan horse' scenario. But the tech guys have run infrared all over it. There's no space large enough for him to hide."

  Marron cursed. "So who's the driver?"

  "This is the good part. He's one of our men. You sent him to Lentz's barn hideout."

  "He was working with Lentz?"

  "He wasn't really the driver. He was just tied up in the driver's seat." Alex pointed at a system of hydraulics that an engineer was pulling out from under the bonnet. "A remote control system, and cameras, all relayed via a mobile phone call. Whoever it was could be anywhere."

  "Lentz," spat Marron.

  "You have to admire the ingenuity. But why bother?" She gestured at the van. "What did this achieve?"

  "I don't know. Maybe she's trying to create a distraction. But they must be close. I'm going to activate a cell-phone jammer around the building. It should stop her using the same trick again."

  "Good." Alex stepped back and spoke a series of orders into her earpiece, then turned back to Marron. "All cameras are operational, all scanners are active. Guards are sweeping the vicinity. Faraday won't get within 400 metres of this building without our knowing it."

  ◇ ◇ ◇

  Approximately forty metres directly underneath where Alex stood, Tom and Lentz had reached a grimy steel panel the size of a small door. It was held in place by hefty bolts that looked as if they hadn't moved in years. Lentz tapped the door with a smile. "Forget programming 'backdoors': you can't beat a physical one."

  "How does Marron not know about this door?"

  "I've meddled with the CERUS Tower design for years. I hacked their architects' offices and made a few modifications to the plans after CERUS approved them. Mostly for my own amusement. I had no idea it would all actually come in handy."

  "Of course we still have to get it open."

  Lentz pulled a battery-powered socket driver from her backpack. "I brought my key."

  Tom stepped back as she got to work on the first bolt. "I went through all the building schematics on your laptop on the way here. A few areas are blank: on Level 88 it's about ten percent of th
e entire floor. What do you think that means?"

  She glanced across at him. "Just focus on locating Kate. But first, give me a hand with this," she said, as she removed the last bolt.

  Together they pried open the hatch. Tom peered through. "I can see a service lift. It says Level Minus 5"

  Lentz stowed the power tool then held up a phone-sized device and looked at the display. "We can go through the doorway, but stop immediately inside." They clambered carefully through. Lentz reached into her backpack and flipped open her laptop. Then she ran a cable into a socket in the wall.

  "Not going wireless?" asked Tom.

  "I need considerably more bandwidth. I'm activating my last back door."

  "You left something in the system? Surely it's not still there after all these years? Wouldn't it have been overwritten even if it wasn't discovered? The Tower wasn't even built then."

  Lentz's hands flew over the keyboard. "They moved the system from building to building. And my backdoor is hidden in millions of lines of code: on its own it looks like benign redundant instructions. And as for being overwritten, you're right: IT systems are normally replaced with next generation code within a few years, but although CERUS made upgrades, at its core it's still the same product." She paused. "Or at least I hope it is. The important thing is that modern protocols and attack techniques simply aren't relevant to this system."

  "So it's impenetrable?"

  "Unless you have the key." Her fingers rattled across the keys again. Her screen flashed red.

  "That doesn't look like a good colour," Tom said.

  Lentz sucked in her breath. "Maybe I spoke too soon. I think I only get one more chance before the alarm is triggered."

  "Maybe you just typed something wrong?"

  Lentz glared at him then typed again, more slowly and deliberately.

  ACCESS GRANTED appeared on her screen.

  EIGHTY-ONE

  MARRON SAT IN HIS COMMAND centre, sixteen large monitors in front of him cycling through various views, his fingers drumming on the control panel. Of their quarry there was no sign.

  "They're not here," said Alex from just behind him. "None of my teams have reported anything. He's either late or he's simply not coming."

  "Then why the van?" asked Marron sharply. "No, they're here, but for some reason we haven't spotted them."

  "Our guards are pros. How could he have got past them unseen? It's not like they could have flown in."

  "No... But what about the other end of the building?"

  Alex stared blankly. "Underground? There's no access that isn't covered by security. There would have been an alarm or at least a system error."

  "Actually, there is an access route from the river not shown on any plans. It's a special addition I worked into the plans. If they didn't use that, I wouldn't put it past Lentz to have dug her own tunnel."

  "That's impossible. She wouldn't have had time. And we'd have detected it being dug."

  "Not if it was done during construction."

  "Who would plan that far in advance?"

  "Lentz."

  "But there are cameras on the Minus Levels. Not as many as above ground, but surely something would have shown up."

  "Perhaps I've become too reliant on tech." Marron sighed. "Take a team and do a sweep."

  ◇ ◇ ◇

  The service lift rose smoothly, carrying the two people that Marron most wished to locate.

  Tom looked about warily. "Did you switch off the security systems?"

  Lentz shook her head. "Marron would have seen that immediately. Instead I looped the last thirty minutes of every system's analysis. So they'll appear to be receiving normal security data, but actually it's historic, not current."

  "Just the analysis or the live video-feed too?"

  "Both of course." She tapped her tablet. "We'll be on Level 45 in thirty seconds. The room will be ten metres to our right."

  "There is one rather obvious problem."

  "With the room?"

  "No, with your looping the video footage."

  ◇ ◇ ◇

  In the artificially lit underbelly of the Tower, Alex and her team of six guards had swept Levels Minus 1 through 4. Alex tapped her earpiece and spoke quickly. "One floor to go. Nothing so far."

  "Oh crap..." Marron muttered.

  Alex pushed open the fire door to the stairwell and began descending. "What's happened?"

  "I know why they haven't shown up on the system. It isn't showing current footage."

  "How do you know?" She reached the foot of the stairs and stepped into the corridor of Level Minus 5.

  "I'm looking at the lobby. There is no van in it."

  "Perhaps the guards moved it already?"

  "Did they also replace the glass doors?"

  Alex pulled a torch from her belt and walked forwards, shining it at a hole in the wall. "It looks like you were right: Lentz had her own tunnel after all."

  EIGHTY-TWO

  LEVEL 45 WAS A GENERAL administration and services floor, tucked between Level 44 catering and Level 46 Marketing. It was entirely unremarkable at first glance, but Tom and Lentz had identified one office on Level 45 as perfect for their plan. They walked into a small windowless room containing three computer terminals with high bandwidth connections to the building's network. A principal data-trunk for the Tower ran down one wall.

  "How long do we have?" Tom asked, quickly unpacking equipment from his backpack.

  "They may have already noticed the little matter of their wrecked lobby suddenly being fully restored," replied Lentz. "Let's just hope it takes them a while to get the system recalibrated." She ran a cable from her laptop and jacked it into the nearest terminal. The lights flickered and all three computer terminals beeped softly.

  "Was that you?" said Tom.

  Lentz looked at her screen. "I don't think so. I think it's a status alert."

  "Signifying what?"

  She tapped her keyboard then swore. "The security system has just been refreshed. It's good in that we can track the guards, but bad in that they can now track us too." She clicked on an icon and a cluster of red dots appeared on a number of small rectangles.

  "What are those?"

  "Live maps of active ID tags on a floor by floor basis." She pointed at the top left. "This one is Level Minus 5, where we entered. There are seven IDs moving towards the lift."

  "We should have replaced the plate so they wouldn't know how we got in."

  "It can only be reattached from the tunnel side. Anyway, right now I'm more concerned about them finding us."

  Tom looked at the featureless door to their room. "There's no lock if they do."

  "Just an electronic one, which I've already activated – with a little twist to confuse things. But it won't slow them much." She plugged a cable into a spare power point. There was an angry beep from her computer. "My backdoor might still work, but he's shut down the subnet that I used to gain access last time."

  "Maybe I can talk to the computer?" He reached into his own bag and removed the collar and a broad, flat cable, one end of which he clipped to the hub.

  "It's a complex system, not a simple mechanical appliance like that robot arm. I don't know what will happen. Perhaps it will feedback on you and render you unconscious." Lentz looked again at the screen. The dots from Level Minus 5 were now in the lift. "We've got three minutes, max."

  Tom slipped the collar around his neck. "Then we'd better hope I can come up with something."

  ◇ ◇ ◇

  Peter Marron watched his displays. A simple reset of the security networks had been enough to clear the looping of legacy data, and now he knew where his enemy was. He wasn't sure exactly how Lentz had managed it, but he was now running multiple scans across all systems. If she tried anything else, he would know immediately. It meant the system wasn't working at peak efficiency, but better that it was under his control.

  "We're in the lift, ascending," Alex said over the speakers.

  "Yes,
I can see," replied Marron. "They're still on Level 45."

  "What are they doing there?"

  Marron stared at the floor plan, showing two red dots in a simple office room. "I've got no camera coverage. I assume they're trying to access the system. I can't physically disconnect it from here, but I've activated further firewall layers."

  "I'm about a minute away."

  "They're not going anywhere."

  ◇ ◇ ◇

  At first, for Tom, there was just the darkness behind his eyelids, the faint hum of the building, the buzz of the network.

  And nothing more. Frustration welled within him. He couldn't let his failure in the barn repeat. This had to be different.

  In the barn he had tried too hard. He forced his breathing to slow, he tried to forget where he was. He counted backwards from a hundred. This had to work, or they were all done for...

  And something changed.

  It was still dark, but it wasn't nothing. It was a space with dimensions. He could feel his mind mapped out around him, intimate and familiar. Yet it was not enclosed, it was no longer just him. Ahead was another space: somewhere alien and unknown, but rich with information.

  This was the interface in action. It was the Tower system ahead of him; he was visualising it with the interface, and he was on the verge of making a connection. All he had to do was reach out. With a rush of excitement, he moved his perspective forward.

  And hit a wall.

  With a jerk, Tom opened his eyes and stared at the computer display. "Something's not right."

  Lentz walked up and placed a hand on his shoulder. "It was always a shot in the dark."

  "That's not what I mean. I think I've got it working, but something is stopping me. It's like a wall of glass. I can see the system in front of me, but I can't move to it. I can't make the connection."