by Jeff Adams
“It’s about time you got up,” he said, forcing me away from him. “There’s work to do. Let’s go.”
His voice was monotone, even more than it’d been before. So much for that idea.
Dad stepped back and waved his gun, gesturing for me to leave the room ahead of him. I’d seen this movie too many times, and deep down I felt like laughing because it was absurd I was in this position.
“Where’re we going?”
“The control center of course. You’ve got a job to do.”
“What kind of job?”
“Finish what Blackbird started. Control the TOS agents we can and identifying and taking out the others. It’s time to bring TOS down.”
A chill washed over me, as if all the heat in my body rushed out. I knew exactly how to do what they wanted, given the research I’d been doing. They already had most of the technology, and since I’d set up the system that encrypted the TOS database, I’d be able to give them both.
Was I willing to die to protect that?
Mom and John had old chips. I couldn’t let Blackbird get them like they’d gotten Dad.
We walked down what seemed like endless corridors, going past many closed doors. Every now and then, others would pass us but no one spoke.
I had to shut this down from inside. There had to be a way to do that. If I worked inside their network, I’d be able to do anything. I just had to make sure they weren’t watching too closely.
As we passed yet another door, Dad suddenly grabbed my shoulder, jerked me back, and shoved me against a door. The moves were so fast, I nearly tripped over my feet.
“We’re here.” He jammed the gun into my back to make his point. “Open it!”
“Dad?”
“Do it.” His tone was low, evil, and scary.
I sighed and fought to keep myself in check. I had to learn how to stay calm and focused. Does TOS teach that? It seemed like it’d be an important quality for an agent. Hopefully I’d get out of here to ask.
The room he shoved me into was enormous. “Control center” indeed. It looked like they could run the International Space Station from here. Huge monitors on the wall filled the front of the room. Without context and time, I couldn’t decipher what all the data was.
There were individual computer consoles all around the brightly lit room. My eyes initially rebelled at all the light and movement. There were dozens of people manning desks, while six guards stood at the perimeter of the room.
“Theodore Reese, also known as Winger,” said a man who didn’t seem much older than my dad. He wore jeans and a dark shirt. If it wasn’t for the gun at my back, I could have been at a tech startup, talking to the boss. “Glad you’re up and around,” the man continued from his desk at the center of the room. “We’ve been waiting for you. We should’ve met last week, but you eluded my men. They didn’t think you were an agent. Foolish of them since we employ teenagers when it’s required. Your father let us know that you could help us achieve our objective. You saved us a return trip to Boston by coming to us.”
Dad shoved me toward an empty desk. Catching myself on the desktop, I stayed upright and did my best to look defiant.
“You might as well have a seat. No one’s going anywhere until you give us control over the remaining agents. You’ve certainly given our team a handful, trying to keep up with you. Now you’ll just do what we say. No chip required.”
The calm tone was unnerving. He was right out of a movie, too, just laying out his expectations. I really wanted to offer a smartass action-hero response, but I didn’t want to make this worse. I had to buy time so Lorenzo could find me.
“You’re looking for a way out,” the man said. “There isn’t one. You’ve got no weapon, and your father has you covered. He’s ordered to shoot you if you go near the door. Your only option is to sit down and do what you’re told.”
Dad pushed the gun into my lower back.
I hoped I was good enough to pull off a double cross that would end this. And free Dad.
Chapter Twenty-Two
TWO OF Blackbird’s techs, identified as Angel and Westside, flanked me. Both watched what I was doing on my screen and monitored their network.
I burned a little time making them show me around their setup even though I’d already caught a glimpse of it during my investigation. After all, I needed to see as much of their configuration as I could if I was forcibly going to give them the rest of the TOS system so they’d control it.
Angel and Westside showed me a lot and it was very helpful.
As they gave me the tour, I contemplated if I was going to be sloppy and make it painfully obvious to Lorenzo what was happening, or if I was going to try for a solo inside takedown. I didn’t like either option. There were too many variables that made them both risky.
“Enough chatter,” the leader finally said after I’d been getting a rundown for nearly an hour.
“It’s better for me to know everything now, so I don’t damage your systems or trip any alarms within TOS,” I said with an authority that surprised me.
“He’s right, Raven, it will make this more efficient,” said Angel, who was to my right. Her response led me to believe her skill set was likely lower than mine. She should know at least half of what I was asking didn’t really matter.
Raven was a great codename. It fit a bad guy within an organization called Blackbird.
“I don’t care! Get me those controls. Now!”
Okay. Raven’d had enough.
To emphasize the point, Dad jammed his gun between my shoulder blades.
“Okay, fine,” I said, deliberately sounding like a petulant teenager. I didn’t do that often, because it didn’t usually get me anywhere. However, reminding these guys I wasn’t an adult might be useful later.
I had open network access. Not only could I see theirs, but I was out on the internet too. As far as I could tell, I could get to anything I needed.
Time to get to work. The first thing was to transfer all the Blackbird information on this network to TOS’s cloud. That alone should tell Lorenzo I was in front of a computer because not just anyone would be loading to the cloud, and if he figured out what was loading, it’d be all the better.
“What’re you doing?” Angel asked.
“Yeah, that’s a lot of data flowing out,” said Westside from his desk on my left.
“Just making a backup. If anything goes wrong, we need a clean, recent backup to restore quickly.”
Westside typed furiously across one of the keyboards in front of him. “We’ve got backups. We don’t need another one.”
I fixed a hard glaze on him, further asserting my expertise. “When was the last backup done?”
“We backup every day overnight.”
“Exactly. So your last backup is more than twelve hours old. We’re doing major work here. There’s no reason to not have one that’s more current.”
“It’s fine,” Angel said. “We’ll make sure it’s wiped when we’re done. But he’s right. A fresh backup is a good idea before we do something this significant.”
So far, so good. It seemed like Angel was going to play right into my plan. She wasn’t objecting to anything I did and she kept Westside under control. Maybe she was in charge.
Next thing to do was get into TOS. Revoking my credentials should’ve been the first thing Lorenzo did after my capture. I wanted that to be true so I’d have to spend the time to hack into TOS.
Unfortunately I got on the TOS private network with no problem, which pissed me off. I helped create these protocols, and they weren’t followed. Next I went to the tech group log-in and it worked too. That sucked.
What was Lorenzo thinking? The bad guys had me and, even though I was trying to control the scenario, I could get into TOS and do anything I wanted. If I got out of here, there’d be some serious discussions.
“That was too easy,” Angel said.
“Yeah. They should’ve had that locked down so I couldn’t walk righ
t in.”
“So much the better for us,” Raven said. “Now get me what I want. I want every agent in our system.”
“Well, the agent list is tough,” I said. “I put an encryption layer on it that’ll have to be cracked to make it work for your version of the system.”
“You built it, so you can make it work for us.”
“It’s not that easy,” I lied, sort of. “If you’ve made any configuration changes on your version of the tracking system, it may not be possible.”
“You’ll make it work,” Raven said, barely keeping his temper under control. The guy seriously liked to yell.
“I might not be able to, at least not quickly.”
“If a gun on you isn’t inspiration enough, maybe this will be.”
He typed into his console. Dad moved in front of the terminal where I was sitting and put his gun to his temple.
How much worse could this get?
“Theo, please.” The look on Dad’s face was pleading and his voice was normal.
“No!” I screamed as I slammed my hand down on the desk. Two could play that game. I pushed back from the desk and stood up. “You do whatever you want to me, but I won’t do anything while you’re putting him in danger.”
Did I mean that? I was pretty sure I did.
I was the only guy who could get them what they wanted, and I wasn’t going to have Dad standing in front of me ready to shoot himself.
Raven and I stared each other down with Dad standing between us.
Dad’s finger twitched on the trigger as Raven typed.
“If you do that. I won’t do anything for you.” I surprised myself with how confident I sounded.
Our stare down continued. After a few moments, a grin broke out on Raven’s face.
“You’re good, Winger. You sure you’re not a real agent? Maybe you’ll consider joining our team once you finish this job.”
Dad silently brought his gun back to his side and his expression went blank. It was like he was dormant—neither himself nor the guy who had manhandled me earlier. Raven typed, and Dad silently moved to where he had been before.
At least that was over. I said nothing, simply took my chair. I was still in the TOS system. Maybe they were using it to trace back to me. That was a possibility.
“I’m scrambling our data stream,” Westside said. “We can’t let them trace you.”
So much for that idea. At least these guys had some brains. As a geek, that made me happy. As an agent in trouble, I hated that I hadn’t deceived them more effectively.
I had some ideas on how to destroy the entire operation, but it was going to take some noodling around in their systems to figure out the best way to do that. Meanwhile, I took my time going through the TOS system to get where I needed to be, and it frustrated my audience.
“I need to make sure they haven’t laid traps,” I explained. “You don’t want me bringing a virus or worse back here.”
“He’s right,” Angel said. “Caution is advised since TOS isn’t following their normal security measures.”
Thanks, Angel.
Perfect. Lorenzo was onto me.
He left me some clues in the TOS system. There were new directories, but he’d gone to the trouble to change up the time stamps so they wouldn’t look new. The biggest clue was the Watch Me directory, which contained a replicated tracker system. I brought it online, and it looked perfect. I was confident he was monitoring my activity despite Westside scrambling the data.
My heart pounded like it was going to jump out of my chest. I didn’t know what the plan was. Hopefully Lorenzo and I had worked together long enough that we wouldn’t surprise each other. I wanted to know who was around, so I brought up the map and had it triangulate on Mom’s location. I saw her, Yoshi, and Lorenzo on the map in different locations, but John and Coach were missing.
“He’s in,” Westside said.
Raven left his post for the first time. He stood behind me, leaning in to look at the screen with the map. I had nothing suspicious on my screens, but Raven’s presence made me nervous.
“Is that the entire team that came with you?” he asked.
“There’re a couple missing,” I said, keeping my voice even. It was true. There was no need to hide that.
“Indeed,” Raven said. “We snagged two men when we got you. Why aren’t they on the map?”
“We transferred them to our system,” Westside said. “Once they were here, we could easily identify their chips. The injured one is in detention. The other is under our control.”
Interesting. The patches I’d designed were still susceptible to hacking at close range. Curious.
Westside brought up the Blackbird version of the system. There were at least a dozen other TOS agents in this facility including the four in this room. Westside pointed out two dots. “That’s them.”
“What’s next?” Angel asked.
“So we need to bring over the program and the database. Then there’s the matter of the decryption system that’s got to be installed. I need to run some tests to make sure I pack up everything that needs to go with this. If it’s moved incomplete, you’ll end up with something that won’t work and could potentially be destructive to your system.”
“Get to it.” Raven returned to his central desk. “You’ve got twenty minutes to get it moved. I want you out of that system. The longer you’re there, the more likely someone traces you even with our scramblers running.”
I hoped Lorenzo knew what he was doing when he set up this fake system. I didn’t have time to dig into it to see what he might have changed, because he had to have done more than just replicate it.
“I need some tools off my system. I’m going to tap into my private network.”
“Watch him,” Raven said. “Don’t do anything you’ll regret. I have no problem killing you and your father, because I suspect there’s someone nearby who could finish the work for us.” The menace in his voice sent shivers down my spine.
I didn’t respond. I simply went about getting into my home system, where I had tools to package up and move code. If I didn’t focus on what I was doing, the situation would overwhelm me for sure. Keeping to the mission and shutting all this down was the best way to stay calm.
“I’m in the TOS system as well,” Westside said. “I’m going to do some damage as long as we’re in there.”
The grin on his face was horrifying. I had a feeling he’d be just as happy being a bully in real life as being one behind a keyboard.
I knocked the keyboard away from his hands. “You’ll do nothing until I have what we need. If you just go deleting stuff, you could easily take out a subsystem that’s required.”
“Seriously. What’s wrong with you?” Angel sounded annoyed as she looked to Westside.
“Hey, we’re all on the same side.” Westside raised his hands to show he wasn’t doing anything. “Just trying to move this along.”
“And to be clear,” I fixed an icy glare on him, “we are not on the same side.”
I returned my attention to the work and the plan I was hatching.
Chapter Twenty-Three
THE TWENTY minutes went by way too fast. I did have time to think, though. I wanted to create permanent damage in the Blackbird network, just like Westside wanted to in TOS’s. The biggest unknown was what would happen if I shut down the controller chips abruptly. Was there a proper shutdown sequence to bring someone out of the mind control?
I couldn’t solve for that variable.
One of my screens flashed that the fake tracker system was ready.
“Now I can—” Westside flinched and stopped talking when I glared at him.
I suppressed a smile. There wasn’t much good going on here, but at least I had one of the bad guys somewhat scared of me.
“No. You can’t. I still have to get the decoder system, otherwise you won’t be able to identify anyone.” I turned to Angel, who I definitely liked better. “If you want to take the tracker pack
age and deploy it in the same place as your version of the tracker, we can work together to get them merged once I have the decoder.”
If I gave her something to do, she wouldn’t pay attention to me. I was pretty sure Westside would be easier to deceive, so I didn’t really care if he was watching.
Angel nodded. “Will do.”
Turning my attention back to the TOS network, I saw the decoder algorithm I’d set up, but I didn’t see a duplicate for me to take. I was pretty sure Lorenzo would’ve made a backup like he had of everything else, but even if he didn’t, I had no choice but to pack this one up.
It occurred to me that an excellent project to work on would be safeguarding programs so moving them off a server would be more difficult. A system like that would’ve prevented this from the start, because any shred of code would’ve failed to work here. I’d have to think about how to do it, because there was a lot to account for, like server maintenance, but there had to be a way.
The decoder was quick to package because I’d written it to be very compact, even with the database that stored the information.
Without checking to see who might be watching, in a couple of keystrokes, I deleted my log-in to the TOS network and VPN. I couldn’t get back in there now, at least not easily. I could probably hack in if I needed to, because I knew the network so well, but it wouldn’t be fast. I quickly closed all the connections to TOS. I wasn’t going to give Westside the chance to wreck things.
“Okay.” I turned to Angel again. “Is it in place? I’ve got the decoder information.”
“Very good, Winger.” Raven sounded eerily happy. “Let’s get it online and see how many people we can bring into the fold. How long, Angel?”
“The TOS package doesn’t have the controller system”—Angel looked at her screen—“so we’ll have to reintegrate that as we bring the data into our version.”
Suddenly Westside spun my chair toward him.
“What did you do? I’m not in the network anymore.”
“Oh, sorry,” I said with deliberate snark. “I logged out.”
