by Gini Koch
“Oh, Malcolm, you disappoint me. I expect to be caught within one minute and then talk my way out of it. Like always.”
CHAPTER 80
THE FOUR MOTHERS said good night to our children, who were all pretty much ready to go to sleep and were just waiting for their kisses.
“Where are you going, Mommy?” Jamie asked drowsily.
“Girls’ night out.”
“Can I go?” she asked with a yawn.
“Not this time, it’s for big girls only. But one day you’ll be big enough to go with Mommy, and that will be fun.” Wondered if Mom had ever had conversations like this with me, and figured she probably had. Lots of them. Kissed Jamie one last time, hugged Dad, and went to the isolation bedroom.
The entire team agreed that the placement for the hidden gate was both ingenious and really awkward. However, we presumed that touch would continue to work its magic and pull everyone else along, since it had for me and Gladys.
Most of the team were wearing black backpacks. I wasn’t. Instead, I hooked my purse over my neck. Why change what had been working all this time?
Buchanan insisted on being the person holding my hand, and Adriana insisted on bringing up the rear. Let everyone else link up however they wanted because, really, I hoped it wouldn’t matter.
We all did one last equipment check, then I looked at the blueprints—which we’d brought to the isolation room and put onto the bed—one last time. Got the image of Gaultier Research in my mind, then the specific room. “Link up.”
“Ready,” Adriana said.
“Then hold tight and do not let go for anything.” With that, I put my hand onto the gate.
As before, the trip was immediate and pleasant. The room wasn’t completely dark—there were a couple of red lights on opposite sides. Happily, all of us were here.
“It’s hot in here,” Abigail said in a low voice. “Is that what we were expecting?”
“This looks like a control room of some kind,” Adriana replied in kind. “For power grids or similar. It might control power to the whole facility, or at least the underground portion.”
The room did indeed resemble this—there were grids with muted dots of light, lots of levers and switches, and things that seemed very Power Company.
Looked around for the sparkly square and saw it right next to me. “Okay, everyone, see this?” I whispered as I pointed to it. “That’s what you need to touch to get back.”
They all looked at me blankly. Claudia waved her hand where I was pointing, and her hand went through the square. “There’s nothing there, Kitty.”
Why I couldn’t spot the square when Gladys and I had been in Guantanamo seemed obvious now. “Crap. It’s there. But I guess I’m the only one who can see it, and since Claudia actually touched it and nothing happened, that must mean I’m the only one who can activate it.”
“Fantastic,” Lorraine said. “So, we stick together.”
“We have limited time,” Buchanan said. “We could have less than five minutes. I realize hyperspeed makes many things easier, but we’re not just looking to see what’s here, we’re searching to see what’s going on. Computer downloads will not go as fast as you want, either.”
“Malcolm’s right, and the plan’s always been to split up.” Resisted the urge to curse. “Okay, we all know what room this is, we just make sure we’re back here and, um together.”
“We could all go back and come in separately,” Serene suggested.
Before I could say that was a great idea Buchanan put his hand up. “Quiet.” He was listening intently and I did the same. Sure enough, there were voices in the distance, coming nearer.
Amy was walking around the room, examining it. “There are two doors, that’s what the lights are over.”
Buchanan gave her a look that said he was already regretting this wasn’t a solo mission.
The voices were getting closer, though I couldn’t make out what they were saying, and they sounded like they were near the door opposite from the one Amy was at. She opened hers slowly and carefully.
As she did, the opposite door started to open. A-Cs grabbed humans and—instead of grabbing me and us all jumping back to the Embassy—ran through Amy’s door. I could go back to the Embassy or follow my team. I followed, figuring that, for once, I honestly knew how Jeff, Christopher, Chuckie, and the rest of the guys felt when I did stuff like this.
Buchanan got the door shut behind me what sounded like just in time. He motioned for us to keep moving, and we did.
This room wasn’t all that interesting because it appeared to be mostly huge pipes and similar. A-Cs have better vision, including night vision, than humans, so only the humans had penlight flashlights. But, other than being higher than normal, probably double the height of a floor on a regular building, this room didn’t look like much.
Checked my phone—the blueprint confirmed we were in an L-shaped room. Realized that the blueprints weren’t going to help us all that much. Worried for a second that we had only one way out, back the way we’d come in, but there was another door at the other end of the L.
Found a different, better reason to worry—my phone shared that it had no bars and no access to any network. Meaning not only could we not call out for help, but we couldn’t call each other.
Sent Buchanan a text. “Really, Missus Chief? I’m right here.” He looked at his phone. “Oh.” We passed along the information that, from now on, all we had a hope for was in-system texting and that might only work if we were in close proximity.
“The generators in here are huge,” Serene said as we walked along and around pipes and such.
“They look large enough to power a city,” Claudia agreed.
“Which explains why there’s no power drain anyone’s noticed because of this facility,” Lorraine added.
Ensuring that our luck remained consistent, when we reached the door at the far side of this room it was locked. Showing why Buchanan didn’t need any of us along, he picked it in less than a minute.
We exited onto a short corridor. There was nothing to our left but wall, so we went right. Within a few feet we had a choice to turn right or zigzag left. Since we could hear voices to the left, but not clearly enough to understand what they were saying, we went right again.
We were in some sort of weird cubicle farm. There were partitions, and desks, but no barriers between workspaces, and no organized rows either. Sadly, no computer terminals, either.
Each workplace also had a locked metal cabinet attached to the floor. Buchanan picked the first one, then, seeing as there was indeed stuff inside, showed Naomi and Abigail how to pick the next ones. Being Dazzlers, they learned quickly. Adriana already knew how to pick locks, of course.
There were at least a hundred locked cabinets. Buchanan had the Gower girls and Adriana start unlocking while Claudia, Lorraine, and Serene handled the heavy lifting in terms of searching, since they were higher-level scientists than the Gower girls, and certainly a lot higher than the rest of us.
Amy and I were the slow learners of the group in terms of lock picking and searching, but before it became an issue, Buchanan put us on guard duty.
So, zigging and zagging, getting turned around, and backtracking, we managed to search every workspace. Because most of the team was using hyperspeed and Buchanan and Adriana were really efficient, this didn’t take as long as it could have. But Buchanan was correct—it took a lot longer than a normal hyperspeed search.
“Most of this stuff has to do with facility maintenance,” Lorraine said as we finished the last cabinet.
“There’s something else down here,” Abigail said. “Beyond what we’ve seen. The blueprints make it look like the ‘outer’ walls we’re hitting are the real outside, but these rooms aren’t coordinating correctly to the blueprints.”
“They’re not even, either,” Serene said. “There isn’t as much space in here as there should be.”
Managed not to ask how they figured this. I was a
lready hopelessly lost and unsure that I could find our return room without help. I wasn’t focused on comparing where each wall sat. Though experience said that I should be.
Adriana nudged me. “I’m back. I found a door I believe we can use to get to the other levels.”
She’d left? I hadn’t noticed. I was really sucking as Commando Leader. Then again, I expected my team to use initiative, so I wasn’t unobservant and unaware so much as a hands-off manager who allowed her personnel to use their own resourcefulness to solve challenges. Yeah, I could still cough up the marketing-speak when I needed to.
“Before we do, where are the people we’ve heard talking?”
Lorraine and Claudia looked at each other, nodded, and zipped off. They were back quickly. Presumed this was because they’d memorized the maze we were in already.
“There’s no one down here but us right now,” Claudia said.
“I didn’t see or hear anyone when I went to recon the elevators,” Adriana added.
“So that means Abby and Serene are right—there are other rooms on this level we haven’t found entrances to yet.”
“How do you figure?” Amy asked, while thumbing through what looked like the Gaultier version of the Briefing Books of Boredom that Lorraine had put down after her last cubicle search.
“We know people are down here. They went into our entry room, and they were in that area because we heard them. And now they’re not here and they didn’t stumble on us rifling through their secret stuff. So, they’re elsewhere, on this level.”
Adriana nodded. “There appears to be only one way to get to the elevator from here and I saw no one in that area, or even close to it.”
“We need to find out what’s hidden within the hidden level.”
“We need to lock everything back up first,” Naomi said.
“We haven’t found what we came for, or anything useful yet,” Amy pointed out. “The information I’ve seen just looked like gibberish.”
Buchanan stiffened. “Show me.”
She handed him the big binder. “The words make sense, and yet they don’t.”
“There was nothing suspicious in any of that,” Lorraine said. “At all.”
“That’s what I mean,” Amy said.
“I agree with Ames. There’s no reason something completely mundane should be locked in a cabinet, let alone in a cabinet in a secret level in the bowels of the earth.”
Buchanan opened it, took one look, and closed the book. “It’s in code. Your father could break this, I’m sure. Are they all the same?”
The A-Cs grabbed two books each and started comparing. Considered helping. Didn’t feel confident enough in the skills to be able to guarantee I wouldn’t rip the pages, so I refrained.
Didn’t matter, they were done quickly. “No,” Lorraine said. “They’re all different.”
“Then there’s no choice,” Buchanan said, voice clipped. “We need to copy all of them.”
Naomi asked the question on everyone’s mind. “Why?”
Buchanan heaved a sigh. It was clear he was, again, asking himself how he’d gotten assigned to the Girl Scout Troop. “They’re very aware of how easy it is to be hacked—they just did it to you, remember? Anything that’s written and coded and down here is of the highest-level importance. And that means we need to copy all this data and get it deciphered, as soon as possible.”
“We don’t have enough time, let alone have a copier machine handy,” Amy pointed out.
“No copying equipment that I saw anywhere,” Adriana said. The others all nodded.
Considered the dilemma. “Actually, I have a better idea.”
CHAPTER 81
EVERYONE LOOKED AT ME EXPECTANTLY, which was nice. “We’re just going to take them.”
Got a lot of the “you so crazy” looks. “Wouldn’t that be, I don’t know, the exact opposite of being a covert team?” Naomi asked, clearly once again speaking for everyone.
Heaved a sigh and forged on. “If we cared that they knew we’d been here, then, yes, we’d need to copy these and leave no trace. But, point of fact, we don’t care. Let them know we’ve retaliated. Let them panic, and, above all, let them freaking recreate the work they don’t have on computer because they’re going Old School for this one to avoid having their data found, stolen, or corrupted.”
“If we didn’t care, why did we bother to pick all these locks?” Buchanan asked, sarcasm knob definitely heading for eleven.
“Ahhh, well, we want to lock them back up. Confuse our enemies a little longer. Sort of thing.”
“I have a different question,” Adriana said, nicely saving me from my admittedly lame answer. “How are we going to get a hundred and ten binders of this size out of this facility?” She’d counted? She was Olga’s granddaughter—of course she’d counted. “We aren’t sure that we can get back into the room we came in through, in part because people may be in it. So how do we get out, let alone with all this data?”
I was about to admit that I had absolutely no idea when I heard a soft mewing. Looked into my purse—sure enough, despite my direct order to the contrary, I had Poofs on Board. Sent a silent thank you to Algar and gave myself a “duh” just to be fair. “Poofs assemble.”
In moments there was a blanket of adorable fluffy cuteness at my feet. Resisted the urge to snuggle all of them—we had work to do. Decided saying I’d told them to stay home would be both stupid and pointless. “Poofies, can you help Kitty? We need these big binders to get safely home to the Embassy and to my dad. Can you help us do that?”
Harlie purred at me, mewled with authority to the other Poofs, and the Poofs went large, each one gulped a binder, then they went small and disappeared.
“I don’t want to leave that way,” Amy said. “If we have a choice, I mean.”
“Look, I think we’re okay now. Everyone has their own Poof, right?” Buchanan and Adriana cleared their throats. “Well, almost everyone and you two are on my mini team. So, for the rest of you, if you’re in trouble once we separate, you call your Poof and ask for help getting out of here.”
Naomi shook her head. “Kitty, they listen to you.” Chose not to mention that, no, they didn’t all the time, like tonight. “But when it’s us they listen to us like . . . like . . .”
“Like cats or dogs do,” Abigail finished. “If they feel like understanding, they do it. If not, not.”
“They listen to Richard.”
“Because he’s with you when they do so and they want to,” Naomi said patiently. “But, look, it doesn’t matter. It’s worth a shot, right? You mentioned separating. Who’s going where?”
“You, Abby, and Amy can go to the floor above, Lorraine, Claudia, and Serene go to the one two levels up.”
“What if we need locks picked?” Lorraine asked. “No one showed us how to do it.”
Buchanan gave us all the brave smile of a Scout Master being forced to teach his troop something they weren’t ready for just so they could get one more stupid badge. But he did it. First, he showed everyone how to relock something with the lock picks. Then, after Naomi, Abigail, and Adriana went off to lock up and Amy and I, Klutzy and Klutzier, were put back onto guard duty, he showed the others how to pick locks and lock them right back up again.
This task completed and everyone other than me and Amy sporting their Lock Picking Badge, we followed Adriana through the maze to a long corridor that ended at a steel door.
“Do we need to pick this lock?” I asked.
Buchanan gave me a look that said he feared that I’d taken a blow to the head that he’d missed somehow. He pointed to the flashing box on the wall near the door. “It needs a keycard.”
“Do we have such a beast?”
“I do.” He pulled a keycard out of his backpack. “Here’s the thing—once I put this in it will short out this keycard lock and any others attached to it electronically. Once I pull it out, they’ll all go back to normal.”
“Wow, the government has some coo
l toys.”
“It’s Israeli,” Buchanan said. “And it’s still experimental.”
“Sorry, Mossad has some cool toys.” Didn’t have to ask how he’d gotten it. Mom was former Mossad and still top of their Most Successful Graduate list. It didn’t surprise me to discover they sent their prototypes to her for her to test out and give the thumbs up or thumbs down sign. For all I knew, Mom sent them requests for toys she’d like them to create.
“I’m stuck on the word ‘experimental,’” Amy said. “Does that mean you don’t know if it works or not?”
“Oh, it works, I’ve tested it already. The issue isn’t whether or not it works. The issues are these. First, we don’t know how many locks this will or won’t affect—if they’re all on the same grid, then it’ll probably hit all of them. If they’re not, we’re limited to this one card. Second, if it works on more than one lock, then anyone trying to use a keycard-protected door will know that something’s wrong, because their keycards won’t work but the doors will open anyway.”
“Where’s the experiment in all that?” Naomi asked.
Buchanan shrugged. “We also don’t know how long it will work.”
“Wow, that adds a special level of excitement to all of this, doesn’t it?”
“It lasted an hour when I tested it. I wasn’t able to test any longer.”
Chose not to ask why, because Buchanan’s reason undoubtedly related to national, international, or galactic security. Maybe all three.
“Fine,” Amy said. “So what do you propose we do? I thought we were going to split up. We can’t do that safely if you only have one card.”
“Sure we can.” Got everyone’s attention again, go me. “First off, this card works just like a regular badge scanner. If we just put it in and take it out, we can go in and out and no one’s the wiser. These things blip all the time. Malcolm goes up with everyone while Adriana and I examine the rest of this floor, at least what we can find of it. He lets everyone in, comes back to us, and we move on with this floor. You guys send him a text when you’re done, he goes to get you, and we regroup.”
