Dead Shift (The Rho Agenda Inception Book 3)

by Richard Phillips

  “Why did you wake me?”

  Janet released his shoulders and leaned back into a seated position opposite him on the bed.

  “Your eyes popped wide open, pupils fully dilated and glinting red, but you looked right through me. When you didn’t even blink for over a minute, it seemed like the thing to do.”

  Jack rubbed his face with both hands, trying to stop the room from spinning around him.

  “Anchanchu,” Janet said. “Did you catch him?”

  The memory of the last part of his strange dream sequence burned so brightly in Jack’s mind it almost felt as if a part of him was still there, striding toward a violent encounter on a distant world. Even though he’d never seen anything remotely like it, somehow it had felt very familiar.

  “It started the same as my last two dreams. Old London. I chased Anchanchu through a door and into a different night. When I managed to grab him, suddenly I wasn’t me anymore. I wasn’t even human.”

  “What do you mean you weren’t human?”

  “Exactly what I said. It was like I was riding along inside someone else’s head, hearing his thoughts, feeling his emotions, seeing through his eyes. And it damn sure wasn’t Earth that I was looking at.”

  “Bullshit.”

  Jack bit off the angry response that rose to his lips, intentionally lowering his voice several decibels. “Was this my dream or yours?”

  Janet hesitated and then reached out, placing her hand atop his left knee, the feel of that gentle touch immediately siphoning away his annoyance.

  “How do you know it wasn’t Earth?”

  “Last time I checked, we didn’t have a purple moon and I couldn’t read minds.”

  “But you’ve had strange dreams before,” Janet said.

  “It felt like I’d walked that alien hallway a thousand times before. And there was something else.”

  “What?”

  “I think I was about to kill someone important.”

  CHAPTER 54

  The sudden loss of the mind-link with Jack disoriented Anchanchu, but nothing like the vision had done. No! Not a vision. A memory. MY MEMORY!

  The knowledge tore at Anchanchu, shredding his knowledge of what he was. Everything he had believed about his true nature was a lie. He had once been a physical being, with a physical body. Not some ethereal mind worm. Not just an IT!

  Someone had taken all that from him, had robbed him of his memories and cast his mind into eternity, void of all feeling. Only Anchanchu’s discovery of his ability to bond with certain humans had allowed him to feel again. And that had led Anchanchu to Jack Gregory, a singular being who had released a memory that had been locked away.

  Not all of Anchanchu’s memories had been restored. Just the one. But Jack had made a chink in the dike that held the others back, allowing Anchanchu to faintly sense what was dammed up behind that blockage. He wanted those memories back. He needed them. He would have them!

  The next time Jack Gregory dreamed, Anchanchu would welcome his embrace.

  CHAPTER 55

  Unaware that his mind was being fed a simulation, Jamal Glover blinked his eyes, struggling to clear his tired mind. Despite the three hours of sleep he’d gotten on a cot in the small room Levi Elias had arranged for him here in the NSA headquarters building, Jamal couldn’t even remember making his way from there back to the War Room. But here he was, already settled into the zero-G chair in his Scorpion workstation, so apparently he’d made his way back with his brain on autopilot. Jill had often laughed at him for missing a freeway off-ramp because he was so lost in his own thoughts that he failed to notice his surroundings.

  At the thought of Jill, Jamal found himself rubbing his arms as if to ward off hypothermia. The image of her bloody body slumped back against his oven left him shaking as he fought down a wave of nausea. Jamal clenched his fists and then gradually forced his fingers to uncurl as rage replaced the weakness. He could rest later. Right now he needed to find Jill’s killer.

  Jamal studied the message window in the upper right corner of his leftmost display. Levi’s latest situation update brought a grim smile that felt more like a snarl to his lips. The haze disappeared from his mind as his brain achieved full alertness.

  What he’d just read indicated that a group of terrorists, associated with the man who had killed Jillian, had been involved in a shootout in San Francisco’s Chinatown neighborhood around 1:30 A.M. Pacific time last night. So far the NSA had only been able to identify one of the terrorists, a shadowy assassin named Jack Gregory, known to some in the underworld as The Ripper. What puzzled Jamal was the line in Levi’s message that stated the NSA databases contained no additional information on The Ripper.

  Jamal’s task was to see if he could identify the other members of the terrorist group and trace them to wherever they were currently hiding. Furthermore, he was granted authority to override control of any satellites or surveillance assets he required to accomplish that search. Since the time sensitivity of these actions was so critical, Admiral Riles had further authorized Jamal to directly hack his way into any systems he required rather than waiting for access requests to be processed through normal channels.

  Clearly Riles was pushing legal boundaries in his determination to nail these terrorists. He had just granted Jamal the kind of free hand only authorized in an attack on foreign targets. But Riles had been known to push the limits of NSA authority before, and those kinds of decision were way above Jamal’s pay grade. So he’d stick to what he was good at and leave the political bullshit to the admiral.

  Over the next hour Jamal hacked his way into a variety of classified domestic databases, including CIA, FBI, and DHS, amazed at the dearth of recent information on Jack Gregory. The CIA still maintained a file on Gregory but officially listed him as deceased. That dossier contained a deathbed photo and a copy of Gregory’s Calcutta death certificate. Prior to that, he’d been part of a CIA special unit tasked with high-value target deactivations. All references to specific targets that had been assigned to Gregory had been redacted from the file, but Jamal gathered that he’d been regarded as one of the agency’s best.

  Although Gregory’s body had disappeared from the Calcutta clinic where he’d died, the CIA had discounted rumors that he was still alive. As to the whereabouts of his body, the report stated that it had most likely been stolen and desecrated by the Ghurkari gang that had killed him.

  Surprisingly, the FBI and DHS databases contained no references to Jack Gregory or The Ripper. Shifting gears, Jamal turned his attention to the Russian FSB. Jamal’s fingers trembled. Bingo. Not only did the file contain some of the same information in his CIA dossier, it also included more photos of Gregory. More importantly, it stated that his fingerprints, along with those of a woman known as Janet Mueller, had been found at the scene of last fall’s terrorist attack on the Baikonur Cosmodrome.

  Jamal examined the additional photographs of Gregory and of the tall blonde woman, then copied the digital images into a folder for later access by his favored facial recognition algorithm. He forwarded Janet Mueller’s name and image to Levi Elias along with a request for NSA information about this woman.

  That done, Jamal began his search of the camera footage in and around the Chinatown area where last night’s shoot-out had occurred. He activated a botnet, uploading an executable program designed to scan recorded camera data for the previous eighteen hours, looking for any matches with the Gregory or Mueller images.

  That done, Jamal leaned back, linking his hands behind his head. It was a lot of camera footage to scan, but his program would assign one computer from the botnet to each camera feed, and they would only report back for each probable face match. While it was doubtful that Mueller was involved, it wouldn’t hurt to check for her presence, especially since she’d been recently linked with Gregory.

  As he waited, a new message arrived from Levi Elias. Jamal
read it and shook his head in disbelief. No data for Janet Mueller, and the results of a facial recognition search on the NSA database had returned no matches. What the hell was wrong with those guys out at the Utah Data Center? He’d heard about an ongoing spate of hardware and software problems out there, but zero for two on high-priority targets wasn’t doing a lot to build his confidence in that operation.

  The feeling that there were too many odd anomalies with this mission tickled his mind, but Jamal dismissed it. All that mattered to him right now was finding Jill’s killer and bringing the weight of the world down on him and his terrorist associates.

  An alert on his screen brought him back to full attention. One of the bots had found a match and had forwarded the address of the system on which the data was stored and the date and time stamp of the video segment where the face match occurred. Jamal acquired administrative permissions on the computer in question and brought up the video in a new window on his central monitor.

  The video stream had originated from a security camera in a parking lot on Fisherman’s Wharf, a few minutes before noon Pacific time on Wednesday, May 21, just over twenty-four hours ago. His eyes were drawn to the man dismounting from a black motorcycle that had just pulled into a parking space. When the rider pulled off his helmet and fastened it to the handlebars, he turned so that for a few seconds, the camera captured a clear view of his face.

  Jamal’s sudden intake of breath hissed through his teeth as he paused the playback. Zooming in pixelated the image but it was recognizable. The darkly tanned face framed by short brown hair looked lean and powerful, and it clearly belonged to Jack Gregory. Jamal continued the playback and watched as Gregory walked out of the camera’s field of view before once more pressing “Pause.”

  Again Jamal zoomed in on a part of the camera image, a sudden warmth spreading through his core. The motorcycle license plate was clearly readable.

  That’s right, you bastard. You’re mine!

  As Qiang Chu looked over Dr. Landon’s shoulder at the inner tank display, he saw Jamal Glover’s body twitch, sending ripples across that strangely illuminated surface as a slight smile lifted the corners of the NSA hacker’s mouth. With a nod of satisfaction, Qiang turned and walked out of the lab to make ready for action. He had a feeling it wouldn’t be long in coming.

  CHAPTER 56

  Levi Elias looked up as Dr. Denise Jennings hurried into his office, her gray hair tied back in its usual tight bun. She walked up to his desk and dropped a small stack of papers directly in front of him.

  “Hello, Denise,” Levi said, leaning back in his chair without bothering to look at them. He didn’t know why she often insisted on printing things out when she was flustered, knowing that she would just tell him about it anyway.

  “Big John just dumped that,” Dr. Jennings said. “It’s a list of MAC addresses and IPs for computers involved in an ongoing botnet attack in San Francisco. It also specifies the physical location of each computer in the botnet.”

  Now she had his full attention. “What are the targets being attacked?”

  “Stored video from cameras throughout the San Francisco Bay Area. It seems that someone is very interested in footage for a twenty-four-hour period beginning at 6 A.M. Pacific time yesterday.”

  Levi rubbed the back of his neck with his right hand, trying to relieve the tightness that hadn’t been there a few moments ago.

  “Did Big John identify what the botnet is searching for?”

  Dr. Jennings shook her head. “Inconclusive.”

  “Transfer the list to the War Room. I’ll get the team down there working the problem. In the meantime, I want you to brief Admiral Riles.”

  With a slight nod, Dr. Jennings turned and walked out of his office, leaving the sheaf of papers on his desk where she’d dropped it.

  Levi stood and followed her out of his office, but he turned toward the elevator that would take him down to the War Room and the half dozen cyber-warriors that occupied the workstations within. This had turned into a round-the-clock operation, so the team had been split into two shifts with a half hour of overlap on each end.

  Since it was now 7:05 P.M. eastern time, that handoff was currently in progress. That was a good thing, because it saved him from having to recall the off-duty shift. From now until they had this attack figured out and stopped, Levi wanted every one of the Dirty Dozen manning their workstations. For the folks that had already worked a full shift, it was about to become a very long day indeed.

  CHAPTER 57

  The motorcycle license plate turned out to be useless. Although Gregory had later ridden the motorcycle into Chinatown, he’d abandoned it there. Jamal would have been frustrated if not for the second link from his botnet, a video of two ICE agents rousting a Chinatown shopkeeper. The male agent was of no interest, but the woman’s face matched that of Janet Mueller, a tall beauty with the eyes of a stone-cold killer. Although her hair and eyes were both brown instead of blonde and blue as they had been in the FSB file photo, there was no mistaking that face.

  But Jamal struck real pay dirt when he received a link to a third video, this one from a security camera near the spot where Spofford Street teed into Washington Street. Last night, shortly before the lights went out all over San Francisco, a black van had pulled to the curb and discharged five heavily armed people, each wearing ICE bulletproof vests. Janet Mueller was clearly identifiable in the group from that relatively short clip, but her companion from the dry cleaners wasn’t among those who climbed out of the van, leading Jamal to conclude that he must have been driving.

  Feeling his pulse race, Jamal paused the video and clipped the faces of each of the four new agents, saving them for later use. Then as he let the video continue to play, the tactical assault team rounded the corner, disappearing up Spofford Street’s pedestrian walkway. Behind them, the van pulled away from the curb and Jamal again paused the video to capture an image of its license plate.

  A few things puzzled Jamal. If Janet Mueller was really an agent for the Department of Homeland Security, why had she been involved in the terrorist attack on the Baikonur Cosmodrome, why had her fingerprints been found there beside those of The Ripper, and why had Jamal’s previous search of the DHS database failed to yield any reference to Janet Mueller?

  Of course he hadn’t searched the DHS personnel database. That was okay. He would remedy that right now.

  Forty-five minutes later, Jamal had his answer. Not only was there no mention of a Janet Mueller in either the ICE or DHS personnel databases, a facial recognition search failed to yield a match to her photo or to any of the other people who had participated in last night’s assault on Spofford Street.

  Jamal popped his knuckles to relieve some of the tension that had been building in his body. The fact that these people had only pretended to be ICE meant that they were probably part of the group of bad guys he’d been searching for. And since they had arrived on the scene at approximately the same time that a traffic camera had captured Gregory’s motorcycle license plate number in Chinatown, it was likely that they were affiliated. Now if he could just find an image of Jill’s killer in that same area, he could put a bow on the whole package.

  The trouble was, Jamal didn’t have a picture of Jill’s killer. And neither did Levi Elias. Shit. Why hadn’t he taken the time to sit down with the police or FBI and let a sketch artist use facial construction software to create a sketch? Or had he? A deep despair and his drunken binge had left his memories of the intervening six days a fog that he couldn’t seem to penetrate. Not that he had time to waste on that at this moment. Jamal could only work with what he had. And without a picture, he couldn’t use the botnet to search all available cameras for a match.

  Jamal changed tactics and began a search that wouldn’t require the botnet. In addition to capturing images of drivers, traffic and stoplight cameras took pictures of the license plates of every passing vehicle,
and those license numbers were automatically stored in a database that included the location, time, and date of said passage.

  Although the power outage had taken down all of those cameras in San Francisco and kept them out of action for several hours following last night’s attack, that didn’t apply to any of the surrounding cities. If the black van had been driven out of San Francisco as the terrorists made their escape, it would have left a trail.

  Penetrating the systems that maintained the records that interested Jamal was trivial. The van had taken a route that appeared on the map as a series of dots that took it through Oakland and then onto California Highway 24 to Walnut Creek and Concord before exiting onto Ygnacio Valley Road. After entering Concord, the next detection showed that it had turned east on Clayton Road. The last detection was at a point where Marsh Creek Road exited Clayton, headed southeast into a hilly rural area.

  Jamal expanded his search in that vicinity but found nothing more. He leaned back farther in his chair and took a deep breath to clear his tired brain. The fact that the van’s license plate had not been spotted in any of the nearby towns meant that the terrorists had gone to ground somewhere in those rolling hills bounded by a polygon with corners at Clayton, Antioch, Brentwood, and Livermore. Close enough.

  Jamal typed a quick message and forwarded it to Levi Elias, who looked down on the War Room from the glass-encased control room.

  Levi’s response was almost instantaneous and immensely satisfying.

  Jamal hacked into the FBI headquarters in Washington, D.C., and composed an official message, alerting the San Francisco FBI office of the identities and suspected location of the terrorist cell responsible for last night’s cyber-attack. Attached to the message were photographs of Jack Gregory and the six false ICE agents, along with the description and license plate number of the black van.