by JC Ryan
On the last day of Peter and Kelly’s stay, a final walkthrough was conducted. All their equipment was checked and tested. Shortly after dark, the two of them left for Mount Ararat, where Owen and Alison were waiting for them. It was with sadness that they said goodbye to everyone and promised to be back as soon as circumstances would permit them. On the way back, they had a lot to talk about, including Peter’s idea of buying land somewhere close and setting up another safe house.
“That sounds like a great idea, Peter.” She smiled up at him.
It was show time
Peter and Kelly took a flight from Billings back to New York, where they had to wait for Owen to deliver the equipment they couldn't pass through airport security. Owen was scheduled for a final studio interview with Kelly three weeks later, for which he and Alison had to be in New York.
In the meantime, after arriving back in New York, Peter made sure that he strictly adhered to the conditions of his sentence. He was to stay in touch with Kelly and see to it that she got a bunch of flowers once a week. Sometimes he had the flowers delivered to her office and sometimes he brought them in person when they would meet for lunch or dinner.
It caused a bit of confusion when Peter met her the first time, as she was disguised to avoid public attention. She had to introduce herself to him, and only when she started talking did he recognize her voice and the laughter in it.
While waiting for the equipment to arrive, Peter reviewed the plans on a daily basis. He made a few preparations and contacted Rube and Sombra to make sure they understood the plan and were ready to go on short notice. He admired the two, who were real nerds and city dwellers all their lives, but didn't hesitate to offer their help for a very dangerous mission.
Owen delivered the equipment to Peter, who then met with Rube and Sombra, passed on their gear, and conducted a few walkthroughs with them. They checked the weather forecast for the next five days and decided to execute the plan the next night, when there would be clear skies. He and his team were ready.
It was a Thursday, one of the busiest days at the warehouse. That was the day when hospitals and clinics would stock up on chips for the weekend, preparing for the rush of people who could not make it during the week due to work commitments. It was also two days after full moon, which meant they’d have enough light and didn’t have to use flashlights to find their way.
Late the next afternoon, Peter drove to a safe house outside New York, parked his car on the street, and entered the apartment building where Rube and Sombra were waiting. He changed into his John Webber disguise. When it was dark, he left in the Chevrolet Impala that was on standby and headed for Wappinger. Rube and Sombra would leave an hour later.
At ten o’clock, the three men were in place on the hill that Peter selected previously, which had an unobstructed view of the warehouse about five hundred yards away. The entire compound was brightly lit by the spotlights, and the trucks were forming a queue that stretched outside the gates, all waiting their turn to pull up to one of the four loading bays.
The three of them spent about half an hour observing what was going on, and then Peter launched the first owl-drone. Holding a small box in its claws, it landed on the roof of a truck, waiting in the queue outside the gate in an area that was not reached by the spotlights. They waited a few minutes to make sure everything was okay after which Rube launched the second owl-drone onto the roof of a truck immediately behind the first one.
While they were waiting for their trucks to pull into the loading bays, they prepared and checked the rest of their equipment. Sombra made sure that he had good reception of the Wi-Fi signals from the inside of the buildings. He logged into the robot control unit with the administrator’s credentials collected by the spyflies a few weeks ago and made sure he could see the controls on his screen.
Peter got the third drone ready. It was one of the old hummingbirds Roy had developed during Sword of Cyrus crisis, equipped with a small laser-cutting torch. He launched the hummingbird and steered it to the main power control unit, where he landed it on top of the box, waiting for further instructions. Finally, the two trucks pulled up to the designated loading bays and the doors at the back were opened.
They waited until they could see the robots on the screen as they approached the loading bay. Peter activated the hummingbird and latched it onto the thick black cable running out of the power control box. The robots were three yards away from the door when he gave Sombra the thumbs up. It was show time.
Sombra increased the speed of the approaching robots and steered them off track towards the piles of boxes at the doors. At the same time, Peter activated the laser-cutting torch on the hummingbird, and when the robots crashed into the boxes, the power went off, leaving the entire compound in darkness. The only lights came from the trucks and the moon.
Instant chaos erupted inside the warehouse. People were swearing and yelling at each other, truck drivers and crew were hollering at the staff, trying to find out what was going on. People inside were falling over boxes and robots until the manager shouted at everyone to stop moving while he attempted to get a flashlight.
Peter and his team had five minutes before the backup generator would start up. He handed the control of the hummingbird to Sombra to retrieve it while he and Rube maneuvered the owls off the trucks into the warehouse towards the boxes scattered across the floor by the collision from the robots. The owls dropped their loads, picked up another box each, and flew back to the roofs of the trucks.
Sombra had already retrieved the hummingbird and was busy swapping the RFID tag signals on the two boxes in the claws of the owls with those of the boxes left behind. He gave his companions the signal, and they launched the owls from the top of the trucks, steering them back to their position on the hill.
While the owls were on their way, Sombra completely disabled the RFID tags on the boxes they were carrying. As soon as they had the boxes in their hands, they would take the tags out and destroy them. Four minutes and thirty seconds after the power went out the three of them were smiling at each other while they held two boxes containing two hundred and fifty chips each in their hands. These were placed in Faraday bags and into their backpacks. The Faraday bags would protect the chips from any electromagnetic pulses and from any scanning devices looking for electronic circuits.
They had a few more things to take care of. All the spyflies had to be extracted from the compound, and the relays Peter planted weeks ago had to be collected. With that all done, they packed all their gear and loot and left, Peter with one box of chips in his possession, while Rube and Sombra had the second box.
Back in the compound, the power generator kicked in, and the lights unveiled an incredible mess to the angry warehouse manager. The collision of the robots with the piles of boxes not only collapsed the boxes and scattered them all over the floor, but some of the boxes were also split open and the chips strewn everywhere. He had to order everybody out of the building while he and a few authorized staff members cleaned everything up.
It took them a very long hour to get back into operation. All that time, the manager was wondering what exactly happened. It puzzled him that the robots all of a sudden went haywire before the power tripped. However, he was under pressure and way behind schedule. The trucks were lining up outside, and the drivers were getting impatient. As far as he could ascertain, everything was back to normal. He would report the incident to his superiors in the morning and ask that they send out electricians to see if they could track down the cause of the electrical problem.
Before Peter and his comrades split up, he phoned the Rabbit Hole, where Sam and many others had been waiting in anticipation for what seemed like ages. When the call came, Sam put the phone on speaker.
“Good news, Sam. We’ve got it. Everything went well, exactly as we planned it.” Peter’s voice came through loud and clear for everyone to hear.
Sam was grinning broadly when he said; “I love it when a plan comes together. Job well done,
boys! Excellent! The first battle of the war belongs to us.”
Peter could hear the elation of the people in the background, listening to their conversation. “Okay, we’re on our way now. I’ll call you again in about two hours to tell you in detail how the whole thing went down.”
Peter drove back to the safe house, removed his disguise, and returned to his car parked on the street. As he got into the car, he pulled the Faraday bag with the chips out of his backpack. He then placed it in a cleverly designed, hidden cavity behind the speaker in the door on the driver’s side and headed back to Manhattan.
Rube and Sombra would hand their box to Owen the next night, and he would transport it to the Rabbit Hole. Peter would stay in New York until he received a message from the Rabbit Hole to confirm that Owen had delivered the first box to them, before he transported the second box he held.
***
On her return to work, Kelly took a keen interest in the technical side of broadcasting. She made contact with the head of the technical division at WONN TV and persuaded him to agree that she would be allowed access to the computer and control rooms and the staff working there. She explained that she wanted to create and broadcast a special edition of “The Edwards Dynamic” to show her viewers the history and development of the fascinating technology used in broadcasting today. The techies, who were always in the background and never got enough recognition for what they were doing, were all very happy to answer any questions she had and were most outgoing.
Slowly but surely, unnoticed, she managed to deploy the new generation spyflies throughout the entire WONN TV complex. At the Rabbit Hole, Sam and his team were delighted with the wealth of information they were busy collecting from WONN TV.
Peter met with Kelly a few more times before he got the call from Sam confirming that they’d taken delivery of the first box of chips. On the last night they had dinner, Peter accompanied her back to her apartment in a taxi. She invited him in for a drink.
The next day, Peter made the three-day trip to Mount Ararat in his car with a song in his heart. It seemed Kelly Edwards liked him! She’d invited him in for coffee and they’d continued to talk until after midnight, when he finally left her, saying he’d be in contact while away and looking forward to see her when he returned.
He could not believe what a lucky man he was.
That glitch must have been ironed out
On the day after the execution of Operation Night Owl, an electrician turned up at the warehouse in Wappinger to investigate the electrical malfunction reported by the manager. He quickly tracked the problem down to the cable outside the main switch box and called the manager. He pointed the cable out to the manager and told him that it was obvious it had been cut. They both concluded that it must have been an inside job. The cable was fixed and the power restored but the manager was a worried man – the buck stopped with him.
One or more of his staff or the truck operators was a traitor. He asked for a face-to-face appointment with his superior to report the problem. A team of investigators was assigned and they turned up at the compound the same day the manager recounted the incident to his superior.
The investigators suspected the power cut was part of a plan to give the perpetrator time to get hold of some of the chips. However, they scratched their heads when an examination of the computer records showed that every box and all the chips were accounted for. In the end, they concluded that something must have happened that foiled the perpetrator’s attempt. They closed their investigation with a recommendation that the compound’s security system be upgraded to include the tracking of all staff movement through their implanted chips.
Consequently, the computer system was improved and the manager was now able to start collecting information about the movements of every employee and truck operator on the premises at all times. Next time an incident happened, they would know exactly how to track down the culprit.
The two boxes containing the fake chips landed at a hospital in Brooklyn, where they found that the first chip from a box would not activate after the implant. The patient was given local anesthetic and a second chip inserted, which also failed. The box was removed and put aside to be returned to the plant in China. The same process was followed a day later with another box when two chips again failed to activate.
All defective chips were gathered and shipped back once a month. Two months later, Guozhi, a quality control officer in China walked into his small lab, looked at the room in dismay, and sighed.
The boxes were stacked to the roof. He barely had space to work, he was completely drowned in boxes and work, and his manager wouldn't hire an assistant for him. Not only did he have to check all the parcels containing defective chips shipped to him from every country, but he also received a container with chips from the production line every half hour. Those chips from the production line received priority above everything else. They had to be tested and the reports send to the managers within half an hour of receipt.
He started the testing routine on the container of chips from the production line and while the computers were running the tests, he opened a parcel received from New York containing two boxes and read the enclosed report. “This is stupid!” he thought as he read the date and the hospital name on the one-line report that said the chips would not activate.
“That is why you send it to me idiot! I want to know what you did. What procedure you followed? Have you checked the activator? Why didn’t you complete the prescribed defect report?”
He quickly opened the boxes, looked at the chips, and couldn’t see anything suspicious. He looked up the date of manufacture and shipping and saw that these chips left the plant almost four months ago. He concluded that it must have been some glitch on the production line, but surely, that glitch must have been ironed out by now. He placed the boxes in the container marked for destruction; he didn’t have time to waste on stupid operators who couldn’t follow instructions and complete proper defect reports.
He followed the same procedure with each packet he opened, if it was not accompanied by a correct defect report, the box landed in the container marked for destruction. When the sender went to the trouble of filling in the form correctly, he would place the chips into small cylindrical devices about three times the size of the chips. There were ten of those devices attached to each line of computers on the bench in front of him. Then he would activate the quality check sequence.
The chips were analyzed by a computer program, which would run it through courses that tested each component individually and in combination with the other elements. The entire sequence took less than two minutes and required several activations and deactivations of the chip. The program would automatically generate a report, which was sent to the quality control team to review and act as required.
It was a monotonous and soul-destroying job. The only pleasure he had was to listen to the music playing through his headphones from his iPhone.
To build a puzzle without seeing the picture
Getting hold of the chips was one of the major milestones for the Rosslerites. They'd been working on that goal for months. It was with great expectation that they awaited JR and Mark’s return from Mount Ararat with the box.
Roy and the rest of the technical masterminds, which included Raj, Rebecca, and Jack Walker – Susan’s oldest son, a PHD in biochemistry – were all ready to dig in and unstitch those evil little devices.
There was a lot they had to discover. What technology was used? How was the chip controlled? How was the chip linked to the carrier’s DNA? What mechanism was used to make it tamper proof? What power source did it use? Which body functions did it control and how?
After that, more questions - how was it linked to the Skywalkers? By their estimation, they had months of work ahead of them. They also expected they’d have to get outside help from medical scientists and other nanotechnology experts.
In the months and weeks leading up to the arrival of the chips, Roy, Raj, Jack, and Rebe
cca had collected the names and details of leading nanotechnology scientists, seeking people who could advise them. This was handed on to Raj, who would contact his Tectus people and their hackers who would, in turn, gather information from sources that would give them insight into whom they could trust.
Salome and Daniel studied the information from the Spiderweb, which they’d brought with them in the hope they’d find a way to use it undetected. They then collected information about the biotech companies in which the seven members of the Supreme Council owned shares.
Once the chips arrived, all of this turned out to be very valuable information to help direct the focus of Tectus’ collaborators.
There was a large audience present when Roy opened the box, picked out one of the chips with a pair of lab pincers and held it up so that everyone could see. The chip was half an inch long and the diameter of a grain of rice.
Sam commented, “It is incredible to think that such a small device can embody so much evil and cause so much suffering and destruction.”
“How much information could be stored on a device of that size Roy?” Sarah wanted to know.
“Impossible to say until we have a chance to study it. Just to give you an idea, ten years ago, nanotechnology was used to put the entire Bible on a chip half the size of a grain of sugar. The Bible consists of a little over eight hundred thousand words. This chip is about half an inch. There are approximately twelve and a half million nanometers in that chip, and you can store ten hydrogen atoms in a nanometer,” Roy replied, while placing the chip in one of the powerful 10th Cycle electron microscopes.
“Wow! That is staggering. So if I understand you correctly, those chips by comparison can be as powerful as, if not more than, the laptop and desktop computers we have today,” Sara said in amazement.
