Phantom Wheel

by Tracy Deebs

“You know what, I think I’m done surveilling,” Seth says. “I think I’m going to go see if I can catch the circus. A horde of psychotic clowns has to be nicer than you.”

  “Good luck with that. Try not to get eaten or chopped into little pieces.” Harper turns to Ezra. “No, hold his hands by his sides. We want to tape his arms to his body so he can’t use them at all.”

  “Jesus. Who are you?” he asks, even as he follows her directions.

  Harper doesn’t answer, just concentrates on taping Willis up so securely that it’ll take three days and an army to get him undone. I can’t help wondering if maybe I’ve misjudged the whole situation. All this time, I’ve been wariest of Ezra and Issa, not sure if I could trust either of them. But maybe Harper’s the one I should have been watching all along.

  17

  Harper

  (5p3ct3r)

  Obviously, I’m not in as good a shape as I think I am.

  Or, conversely, Silver Spoon and the Lone Ranger are in crazy incredible shape.

  Either way, we’ve just run up seventeen flights of stairs, and they’re barely winded. I, on the other hand, am so lightheaded from lack of oxygen that I’m afraid I’m going to pass out at any moment. Which is so not an option—partly because they need me for this next portion of the plan, and partly because I’m afraid I’ll end up taped up somewhere like poor Mr. Willis.

  Like Mad Max constantly reminds me, karma is a total bitch.

  I stagger up the last flight of stairs like a ninety-year-old, only to find Silver Spoon and the Lone Ranger waiting for me at the top with grins on their faces. Neither of them is even sweating, the jerks.

  “Remind me again, Porcupine, why I’m not the one sitting on the grass right now, moving a few security cameras around?” I gasp out between shuddering breaths.

  “Because you have control issues and wanted to be the one to go in?” he answers. “And, oh yeah, you’ve never hacked this many security cameras at once before.”

  “The fact that you have disturbs me on so many levels.”

  “A boy’s gotta get his kicks somehow.”

  “Playtime’s over, children.” Buffy’s voice comes through the earbuds loud and clear. “Russ finished his rounds, and delightful as Alika and I are, he’s decided he and Joe have to get back to work. So we’re out, and they’re heading back to the desk.”

  “Where they’ve got live video feed from every camera in the building,” Snow White reminds us.

  “Damn. How long have I got?” Mad Max asks. “Never mind, I see them. Okay, I’m turning the cameras in every unsecured hallway on the eighteenth floor toward the corners. Stay in the middle of the hallway and close to the opposite wall when you make turns, and they shouldn’t pick you up. And, if luck is with us, Frick and Frack in the control booth won’t notice until you’ve gotten what we came for.”

  “That’s a lot of shoulds and ifs,” the Lone Ranger says.

  “Yeah, well, you want the truth or some made-up BS? I’m not a fortune-teller, you know.”

  The three of us look at one another, brows raised. Despite the nickname, Mad Max has the most even temperament of all of us, and if he’s frazzled…

  “We’re definitely not in Kansas anymore,” Silver Spoon tells us.

  “Ha! Even I know that one!” Buffy interjects. “Is this the part where I say we’ll ‘get you and your little dog too’?”

  “Considering where we are, I really hope not,” the Lone Ranger tells her.

  “Right? Nobody is getting anybody at this point,” Mad Max agrees.

  “Fine.” Buffy sounds totally disgruntled. “Can I at least say, ‘Lions and tigers and bears, oh my’?”

  “More like, cameras and servers and guards, oh my.” Mad Max snickers.

  We all groan.

  “You should probably never say that again,” Snow White tells him, and I can all but see her patting his arm in her good-girl way.

  “You ready?” Silver Spoon asks me as everybody laughs. And it’s not embarrassing at all that I’m the one he has to ask, especially since he looks braced to catch me if I collapse.

  Definitely time to start exercising more. I take a couple of deep breaths, eventually get my head to stop swimming and the rest of me to stop shaking from oxygen deprivation.

  Then I nod. “Yeah, I’m ready.”

  “Let’s do it, then.”

  “No, wait,” Mad Max says. “I’ve been working out a way to help you, if you give me a minute.”

  “You mean beyond stick to the middle and hope for the best?” the Lone Ranger asks.

  “Or I could go check out the psychotic clowns. Whichever you prefer…” The threat is as empty as his first one, his absent tone telling us he’s already deep into his plan. “So, the station downstairs has twelve screens, which means they can only watch twelve cameras at any given second. There are two hundred and seven cameras on the system, so the thing cycles through all of them every ninety seconds.”

  “You want us to try to run in between the cycles?”

  “No, that’s too complicated. But I’ve been working on figuring out the pattern for the last twenty minutes, and I think I’ve got it. So if I can loop footage in to each of the cameras on the eighteenth floor while the system is circling through the other cameras…”

  He pauses for several interminable seconds. “Well?” Silver Spoon is the one who breaks first. Of course. “Can you do it?”

  “Calm down,” Mad Max tells him. “I am doing it.”

  “You are?”

  “Five more to go… okay, three more… and two… and done! Unless I missed one, you guys should be golden. At least until you get to the server. Those cameras are on another system, one I can’t hack.”

  “Awesome,” the Lone Ranger says as we jog down the hallway, a lot more confident than we were just two minutes ago. “So, why exactly didn’t we do this with the cameras on the ground floor?”

  “Because one of the weird little tics of this system is that the cameras go blind once you loop them. So if you wanted me to be able to help you out by, say, letting you know where that security guard was, I had to have a live feed going.” He sounds a little insulted, like we’re doubting his skills.

  “Hey, we didn’t mean—” I start.

  “Apologize later,” he interrupts. “Right now, just concentrate on getting into that server room undetected.”

  “We’re on it,” Silver Spoon assures him, even as we approach the half of the floor where security gets extra tight.

  The whole area is walled off, a steel door attached to an oral recognition system the only way in. There’s also a large camera pointed at the big set of double doors.

  “You’ve got this, right?” I ask Mad Max as we stand just out of range. It’s not that I don’t trust him.… It’s that I don’t trust anybody.

  “I’ve got you,” he assures me, and though the wording is casual, the sincerity in his tone is absolute. It gets to me, as does the change in pronoun. No one has had me since my parents died, and the fact that he can say so confidently that he does…

  I shove the stray thought to the back of my head. No time for that now, not when everything is on the line. I unclip my phone from my belt, shrug off my backpack. Then I open the front pocket and pull out Talia’s badge. She’s the administrative assistant for Jacento’s American chief technology officer and, as such, has access to all of the eighteenth floor.

  With my hand shaking only a little, I step forward—right into camera range—and swipe the badge. No going back now. An incorrect password try will alert the front desk and send them running, especially now that the looped cameras block them from seeing what’s actually going on.

  “Please say your password now.”

  I press Play on the recording I put together earlier, breath stuck in my throat as we wait to hear if it will pass muster. Seconds later the system says, “Welcome, Talia.” The greeting is followed quickly by the sound of a deadbolt unlocking and the three short beeps that tell us i
t’s okay to enter.

  Silver Spoon grabs the door and pulls it open. This time he doesn’t gesture me through ahead of him—I guess ladies first only counts when he’s certain there’s no danger. I’m not sure how I feel about that—endemic sexism and all—but I’m not about to stand here and argue, so I let him go ahead of me, just like I let the Lone Ranger bring up the rear. If they want to pretend like they’re protecting me, who am I to tell them different? At least for now.

  “Don’t forget!” Mad Max says as we take our first steps into Jacento’s forbidden land. “I can’t control the cameras in there. You’ve got to be careful.”

  “Believe me,” Silver Spoon answers, “we haven’t forgotten.”

  “The first one is about ten steps in front of you. It’s to the left, on the side hallway you have to pass to get to the inner door.”

  I know. We all know, because we all memorized the layout of this area from the blueprints—paying particular attention to anything that might trip us up, like unhackable security cameras. But it’s nice to know that in their own way the others are right here with us, doing what they can to make sure we get through this unscathed.

  “We need to get a look at that camera,” I tell the guys, and they both nod as we inch forward.

  The system in here is different from the rest of the building, not just because it’s offline and unhackable, but because the actual cameras are different too. Instead of being focused on a fixed point, they move, sweeping back and forth across a certain area so that no part of any room or hallway is unsurveilled for more than a few seconds at a time.

  Which means we have to be exact if we have any chance of moving between cameras undetected.

  We crowd up close to the corner of the hallway where the first camera is, making sure to stay out of range of the second camera that’s about three hundred feet in front of us. Eventually, we’ll have to deal with that one too, but first we have to get past this hallway undetected.

  “Okay, so we need to time the one in front of us,” I tell the guys. “Then pray that the one down that side hallway has the same timing.”

  “I’ve got a better idea,” the Lone Ranger says, his phone already in his hands, along with—

  “Is that a selfie stick?” Silver Spoon asks incredulously.

  “It is.” He slides his phone into place. “And before you start, I picked it up yesterday because I thought it would come in handy here.”

  After the phone is secure, he crouches down and starts his video recorder. Then slowly, slowly, slowly he extends his phone into the hallway, just far enough for the lens to record.

  It takes him a few seconds to get the phone angled correctly, but once he does we can see the camera doing its job from its spot halfway down the hallway.

  Silver Spoon and I crowd in closer so we can get a better look.

  “Let’s just watch it a couple of times,” I suggest. “So we know where to start timing from.”

  “Good idea,” Silver Spoon agrees as he pulls out his own phone and prepares to time the sweeps.

  The Lone Ranger doesn’t say anything, just continues to watch the camera move. After about two minutes, he says, “Okay, I need you to start timing… now.”

  Silver Spoon starts the stopwatch on his phone’s clock, and we wait, impatiently, as the camera runs through its cycle. And 19.3 seconds later, the Lone Ranger gives the signal to stop timing.

  “That’s better than I thought it’d be,” he says. “We can do a lot in nineteen seconds.”

  “Depends on where the camera is, but yeah,” I agree. “It’s totally doable. Do you think we should time this one again, just to be sure?”

  “I would,” Silver Spoon agrees. “Considering the extra twenty seconds might be what keeps our asses out of pri—”

  “Don’t say it!” Mad Max, Snow White, and Buffy all shout at the same time.

  “There you are!” Silver Spoon says. “I was beginning to think you guys had cut and run.”

  “We thought about it,” Buffy deadpans, “but you’ve got the car keys.”

  Silver Spoon ignores her, but he’s grinning as he times the camera a second time, and then a third and a fourth. Once we’ve verified that it’s got a nineteen-second sweep, there’s really nothing to do but go for it and hope for the best.

  “The range of the camera in front of us stops at the red door,” I tell the guys as we get ready to run. “I’ve been watching while you’ve been working on this one. And it’s also on a nineteen-second loop.”

  “Here goes nothing, then,” the Lone Ranger says.

  This time none of us correct him. Instead, I push onto the balls of my feet, and the second Silver Spoon says “Go,” I take off running. We slide past the camera with several seconds to spare, then grind to a halt right before the red door to avoid the other one catching us.

  And that’s when the flaw in our plan catches up with us. “We don’t know what the camera’s doing on the hall we want to turn into,” Silver Spoon says. “So even if we manage to avoid this one—”

  “We could very well get caught on that one,” I finish up. “Crap.”

  “We’re going to have to risk it,” the Lone Ranger says. “We’ll assume it’s on the same program as the one on the hallway behind us.”

  “And if it’s not?”

  “If it’s not, we’re screwed. But we’re screwed anyway, so I say let’s think positive.”

  “That’s not exactly my strong suit,” I tell him.

  “Yeah, well, fake it ’til you make it,” he answers.

  “We need to get right under that camera,” Silver Spoon says, pointing to the one in front of us. “That’ll give us a couple of seconds to figure out what the other one is doing… if we’re lucky.”

  “All the luck in the world isn’t going to make it possible for the three of us to hide under that camera. It’s going to pick us up,” I tell him.

  “So what do you suggest?”

  “We do it one at a time, which helps us hide and gives us the best chance of getting the timing right all the way around.”

  “She’s right,” the Lone Ranger says. “I’ll go first.”

  “Wait—”

  But it’s too late, he’s already gone. Seconds later he stops right under the camera, then dodges back a couple of yards while it’s still pointed away from us. “The other one isn’t quite where it needs to—” He takes off again without finishing the sentence. About two seconds later, so do I.

  We tag team like this all the way down three hallways and around two corners, until we get to the second barrier to the server. The Lone Ranger gets there first, and he’s already got what he needs in his hand. He holds it up to the palm-print scanner, and one, two, three interminable seconds later, the lock clicks open.

  He makes it inside, then turns to watch the last camera. It takes thirty seconds before the coast is clear, and I run, full out, sliding through the door right before the camera catches me. Another thirty seconds and Silver Spoon races in behind me. As soon as he clears the frame, he lets the door slam behind him.

  We all take a minute then to slump against the walls and just kind of grin at one another in relief. Jacento’s so paranoid that there are no cameras in with the servers, no way for anyone to record anything that goes on in there that they don’t want recorded. Which works out perfectly for us, no matter how suspicious the practice is.

  “Hot damn! You made it!” Buffy whoops in our ears. “I’m not going to lie. I was a little worried there for a minute.”

  “We were all worried,” Snow White says.

  “Not me,” Mad Max chimes in. “I never doubted you guys for a second.”

  “Well, that makes one of us,” Silver Spoon says, even as he holds his fist up to the Lone Ranger and me for a bump.

  “Hey, I have a question,” I say as I pull from my backpack the photo that will get us past the third security gate. Hopefully. “What was that red thing you had the handprint on? I was trying to figure it out, but
I was too far away to see.”

  The Lone Ranger frowns as he holds up a scrap of red leather.

  “Wait a minute.” Silver Spoon takes it from him. “Was this part of Alika’s dress?” He looks at me. “That was part of Alika’s dress!”

  “Which part?” Buffy asks.

  “Don’t ask,” Snow White replies.

  There’s a few seconds of silence, and then Snow White speaks again, all business. “I’m fine. We got what we needed.”

  I’m not sure what to say, so I scoot around row after row of the filing cabinets that make up this hard-copy storage room and walk the hundred feet or so that separate us from the last scanner. As I do, I can’t help but notice the huge picture of Jacento’s CEO, Roderick Olsen, hanging next to the door—the third portrait I’ve seen of him since we made it inside the building. What kind of megalomaniac needs that many portraits of himself in one place? I wonder as I stop in front of the scanner. No wonder he’s so proud of the damn kiosks. Anyone with an ego that big surely thinks he deserves to rule the world.

  “Everything okay?” the Lone Ranger asks when I pause.

  “It’s fine,” I tell him as I hold the enhanced photo up to the retinal scanner.

  “Please let this work, please let this work,” I mutter to myself. I’m sure Buffy followed the directions she found online to the letter, but this kind of scan is so precise, the science so absolute. One little mistake and we’re—

  “Unable to confirm,” says an automated voice. “Please step closer.”

  “It doesn’t work?” Silver Spoon moves forward.

  “I don’t know.” My hand is shaking now as I look back at the two of them. “Should I try it again?”

  “If it doesn’t work a second time, it’s going to set off every alarm in the place,” the Lone Ranger reminds me grimly. Like I could possibly forget.

  “Try it again,” Silver Spoon says. “It’s good.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Guys, I’m sorry.” Buffy sounds gutted.

  “Try it again,” Silver Spoon urges. “Issa has this.”

  “I don’t know!” she says. “Maybe you should—”

  “Do it!” he urges me, mouth tight and dark eyes blazing.