Phantom Wheel

by Tracy Deebs

  And I do. Because if I’m ever going to trust anyone, now’s the time to do it.

  I put the photo up to the scanner a second time. This time I can hear the system whirring. And then it says, “Welcome, Dr. Otto,” just as the door unlocks.

  “Yes, baby!” Mad Max’s shouts are echoed by Buffy and Snow White.

  But the three of us can’t do much more than sag in relief, hands braced on our knees as we take in a few deep gulps of air.

  Then Silver Spoon is moving, opening the door and sliding inside. The Lone Ranger and I follow, and our heads nearly explode when we see what’s waiting for us on the other side.

  18

  Owen

  (1nf1n173 5h4d3)

  It’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.

  I know, I know, I should be appalled, considering what Jacento is doing with all this, and I am. But come on. It’s gorgeous, so freaking gorgeous I can barely wait to get my hands on it.

  “They’ve got a Cray XK7,” Harper whispers as she walks deeper into the room, and it sounds a little like she’s considering genuflecting.

  Not that I blame her. Just the thought of being in the room with one of these babies is enough to bring me to my knees. The fact that it’s right in front of me… I lock my knees just to be on the safe side.

  “Why do they need a supercomputer?” Ezra wonders as he follows her, but there’s reverence in his voice too.

  “And who the hell has one of these and keeps it offline?” Issa sounds outraged.

  “Is it pretty?” Seth whispers. “Tell me it’s pretty.”

  “It’s soooo pretty,” Harper says, and she’s actually petting the thing. Well, part of it, since the XK7 is usually housed in anywhere from four hundred to five hundred cabinets.

  “Are you going to kiss it?” Ezra asks her, obviously amused by the way she keeps running her hand back and forth over the cabinet.

  “I might,” I say, moving forward to get my first in-person look.

  “Well, this is going to make it faster to download what we’re after,” Alika says. “But you should still probably get started.”

  It’s the wake-up call we all need, but still. “Always the party pooper, aren’t you, girl?” I ask as I pull what I need out of my backpack.

  “I prefer the voice of reason,” she tosses back. “It’s not my fault you people tend to leap before you look.”

  “Sometimes it’s better not to know where you’re going to land,” Ezra tells her as he prowls to the other side of the room. “The servers are over here, guys.”

  “Awesome. Let me hook into this baby, see what we can do,” I tell him as I connect manually. Seconds later, I’m in, running a brute-force attack at the password.

  “Want some help?” Harper asks, crouching beside me.

  “Why don’t you go see what you can do with another one of the servers? Whoever gets in first wins.”

  These computers aren’t uplinked, but they do form their own LAN. Which means once we’re in one of them, we’re in all of them. And if my hunch is right, they’ve got the data for all of Jacento—not just North America—on them.

  Otherwise, why the hell would they have a Cray XK7 sitting pretty over here? It’s got to be the only one. At a cost of tens of millions of dollars, it’s not like they’ve got half a dozen of these babies just lying around.

  “How’s it going?” Issa asks. “You’ve been inside more than forty-five minutes now. The entertainment’s set to end in half an hour. If you aren’t out by then, it’s going to get a lot harder to pull this off.”

  “We’re trying,” Ezra answers, and he sounds a little testy. Not that I blame him—it’s not like we’re standing around twiddling our thumbs. I mean, sure, we took a minute to worship at the Cray altar, but we’re working now.

  Besides, until we brute-force a password out of one of these machines, our hands are tied.

  “Hey, who wants to hear a joke?” Seth asks.

  No one answers.

  “Aww, come on. It’s a good one. I swear.”

  Harper sighs, but then she says, “What’s the joke?”

  “Okay, are you ready?”

  “No,” Ezra says, but there’s no heat behind it.

  “What does one bone say to the other bone?”

  More silence.

  “We have to stop meeting at this joint!” he finishes triumphantly.

  Still more silence.

  “Get it?” he asks after a minute. “Because bones meet at joints—”

  “We get it,” Issa tells him. “I wish we didn’t, but we do.”

  “Hey, that’s a quality joke. I got it out of a Highlights magazine when I was seven.”

  “Why doesn’t that surprise me?” Alika says.

  “Knock, knock.” This time it’s Harper.

  Ezra groans, but I play along. What else do we have to do right now? “Who’s there?”

  “A cow says.”

  “A cow says who?” I ask obediently.

  “No, silly. A cow says moo!”

  It’s my turn to groan, and I’m about to call her on the ridiculousness of the whole thing when my laptop dings. “Shit!”

  “Hey! It wasn’t that bad!” Harper complains.

  “I’m in!”

  “Are you serious?” Ezra says. “That was fast.”

  “I guess I’m just that good,” I tell him as my fingers fly over the keys.

  “Or that lucky,” Harper tells me.

  “Don’t be bitter.” But it’s a joke, and we all know it. Just like we know that the password shouldn’t have been that easy for us to crack. But the fact that the supercomputer is offline and locked in a secure room has obviously made the Jacento IT guys lazy.

  Sucks to be them.…

  “They’re running open-source Linux,” I say as I dive in.

  “UNICOS?” Alika wonders.

  “I don’t think so. It looks a little like it, but I think it’s their own variation.”

  “Shoot the password over here, will you?” Harper asks.

  “I’ll do better than that.”

  A few keystrokes later, and Harper says, “I’m in!”

  “Me too. Thanks,” Ezra adds.

  We work in silence for a few minutes, downloading whatever we can get our digital fingers into. It’d be better if we could upload it to the cloud, but with them deliberately killing any and all internet access in the area, that’s not exactly an option. It will be my job, at the end, to go in and hide what we did—so that even if they figure out they’ve been hacked, they won’t be able to tell where the data went.

  While the stuff is downloading at a rate so fast it’s making my head spin—hell yeah, Cray—I go in and create a back door obscure enough that it’ll be almost impossible to find in the middle of all this code. Just two little lines buried so deep that they’re almost invisible will give me access to Jacento’s servers—and this Cray—whenever I want it as long as my laptop is hooked into the LAN.

  While I’m at it, I mess with that too, disguising my port and burying it so deep in the middle of a group of customer service machines that it should take them weeks to find it. If they ever do. And when they do, it’ll ghost, tracing back to nothing and no one.

  “How you doing over there?” I call to Harper and Ezra.

  “Not as well as you, considering you’ve got the Cray,” Harper complains. “But we’re holding our own.”

  “Hey, guys, don’t panic, but we might have a problem,” Seth says. The fact that he sounds pretty panicked himself makes all three of us sit up and take notice.

  “What kind of problem?” Ezra demands.

  “The kind where Otto and a bunch of his minions might be on their way to the eighteenth floor.”

  “Are you freaking kidding me?” I demand.

  “You’re just telling us this now?” Harper sounds pissed.

  “The group of them walked into the building and went straight to the elevators. We’re giving you all the warning we can.”


  “So you don’t know for sure that they’re coming to the eighteenth floor,” Ezra says.

  “Oh, no, they’re coming to the eighteenth floor,” Issa tells us. “They just pushed the buttons for fifteen and eighteen.”

  “How do you know?” Alika asks. “There’s no camera feed—”

  “Because I hacked the elevators. Call it intuition, but I had a feeling.…” She pauses for a moment, then says, “The elevator just stopped on fifteen. You need to get out of there.”

  “On it,” I tell her as I start covering our tracks as fast as I can.

  “Come on!” Harper urges. She and Ezra are already packed up and standing above me.

  “I’ve got to finish this—”

  “There’s no time, man. Close it up and let’s go!” Ezra peers around the corner at the main door. “Where are they, Issa?”

  “I don’t know. Remember, we’re blind out here. The elevator doors just closed, though. They’re on the floor.”

  “Come on!” Harper says again.

  I ignore her as I write code faster than I ever have in my life. A few more lines, a few more lines, just a few more—

  “Owen, we need to move!” Ezra’s in my face now.

  “Got it!” I slam my laptop shut and spring to my feet as I shove it into my backpack.

  “Hey, Seth. Can you fix the cameras so we can see what they’re doing—”

  “Already, did, my man. They just logged in at the voice recognition door. And, crap. Now they’re inside the secure part of the floor. No more cameras. Sorry, guys. They’re in there with you, and I’m completely blind.”

  19

  Issa

  (Pr1m4 D0nn4)

  “Get to the elevators!” I order.

  “How are we going to get out of here without them seeing us—and without tripping the alarms?” Harper hisses.

  “You’re not,” I answer, hoping with everything I have that they’re making their way out of the server room this very second. “At this point, it doesn’t matter if you’re seen. The second Otto stands in front of that retinal scan, the whole system is going to lose its mind. A record of him going in two times in a row—without exiting in between—is going to set off every alarm in the place. So make sure your hoodies are up and your sunglasses are on—and whatever you do, keep your heads down!”

  “How do we stop it?” Owen yells.

  “You can’t,” Seth tells him.

  “So what do we do?”

  “I already told you. You run!” I take control of the elevator Otto just vacated and return it to the eighteenth floor. “But you’ve got to get to the elevators. Now!”

  “Shit!” For the first time since I met him, Owen sounds panicked—even if he is whispering. “They just walked in the server room.”

  “This way!” Ezra hisses. “Come on.”

  For long seconds, there’s no sound at all as the three of them make their way through the server room—in what I hope is the opposite direction of Otto and his crew. Not that I think they stand a chance in hell of getting out of there without being detected, but whatever kind of head start they can muster is better than no head start at all.

  “What’s going on?” Seth whispers after about two minutes of total silence.

  Alika hushes him—and I get it. The last thing we need to do is distract them right now. But poor Seth looks like he’s going to lose his mind at any second, and I totally sympathize, because I’m right there with him. How Alika can stay so cool when it looks like Ezra, Owen, and Harper could get nabbed at any second, I will never know.

  “Hey, stop right there! What are you doing in he—”

  “Run!” Owen says, and then all I can hear is the sound of feet slapping fast and hard against the floor as indistinguishable but too-close-for-comfort yells make their way through the earbuds.

  “Get to the elevators!” I shout, hoping to be heard above everything else.

  “The stairs—”

  “Will lock down as soon as the alarm sounds. If you manage to get in, you won’t be able to get out!”

  “So will the elevators!” Harper says, and she sounds winded. I don’t even want to think about how fast the guys have her moving.

  There’s the sound of a metal door slamming hard against something—a wall, probably—and then more feet pounding and more shouting.

  “I’ve got control of the elevators! They won’t be able to lock them down. I’ve got one open and waiting for you. But you’ve got to get to it!”

  “We’re trying!” Owen snarls. “It’s like a damn maze up here!”

  “I can still see you through your phone! Keep it clipped to your belt!” Seth jumps in to the conversation.

  “Not planning on taking the time to remove it right now!” Harper pants.

  “I know where you are! Go to the left!” Seth orders them as he stares hard at the building’s blueprints. “Now right. Now left again!”

  That’s when the alarm kicks in, and the whole inside of the building starts sounding like an air-raid siren that’s just gone off. Amazingly, outside—from our spot near the cliffs—we can’t hear anything. I’m hoping that will buy us a few minutes before anyone outside the building figures out something is wrong, as will the fact that it’ll take the guards from other buildings a little time to get here after they get the call. Which—if we’re lucky—should be enough time for us to get them out of there.

  “You better be right about the elevators,” Ezra says, and even he sounds winded now.

  “I am,” I promise. “Just run!”

  “What do you think we’re doing?” Harper wheezes out.

  “Left again!” Seth yells. “Right! You’re almost there!”

  “Even if we get them out, they’re still going to be sitting ducks,” Alika says. “We all are.”

  “We’ll worry about that when it happens,” I tell her, as I lock down the other elevators. Yeah, the security guards can use the stairs, but if all goes well, they’ll be down and gone before the guards even realize where they are.

  “You worry about it later,” she tells me. “I’m going to worry about it now.”

  “Where are you going?” Seth asks. “You’re just going to walk away and leave them?”

  She gives him a dirty look. “I’m going for the SUV.”

  “But Ezra has the keys.”

  “Like that’s ever stopped me?” Alika takes off at a jog, and I watch her go—at least until Seth suddenly yells, “Left!” and I realize he’s back to staring at his laptop screen.

  Something I should be doing too.

  “One more turn and you’ll be at the elevators,” Seth tells them.

  “I’ve got the first one open and ready for you. Just get on it.”

  “Right!” Seth tells them. And then, “Okay, Issa, they’re on!”

  “Hurry, hurry, hurry!” Harper chants. “They’re—”

  I slam the elevator doors shut and get the thing moving.

  I can hear Harper panting as Ezra says, “The guards know where we are!”

  “It won’t matter. I’m going to disguise—”

  “Of course it matters. I can see one of the guards waiting for us in the lobby!”

  “How can you see that?” I ask, a sinking feeling in my stomach.

  “Because it’s a glass elevator!” Harper wails. “I can see them looking at us—from the eighteenth floor and from the lobby. We’re trapped.”

  How did I not think about the elevators being glass? I’m an idiot.

  Desperate to fix my mistake, I stop the elevator on the closest floor—nine. “Get off, get off, get off!”

  “What?” Owen asks, but it sounds like they’re running again, so they must have followed my orders.

  “Get to the freight elevators on the other side of the building.”

  “Are you kidding me with this?” Ezra says.

  “Do you have a better idea?”

  “Don’t worry. I still have the cameras on loop,” Seth says. “I don
’t think they’ve figured it out yet. Just run!”

  “We’re running!” Harper sounds even more pissed than she did before. “Believe me, we’re running!”

  “Go right!” Seth tells them. “Then make a left three hallways down.”

  “This again?” Harper groans.

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t realize they were glass elevators. I screwed up.”

  “It’s not your fault,” Seth says, reaching out a hand to pat my knee.

  But it is. I should have paid more attention when I was in the lobby, but I was so busy trying to distract the stupid guards that I didn’t even look at the elevators. I mean, usually an elevator’s an elevator—especially in an office building.

  “Go left up ahead,” Seth continues. “The building schematics say the freight elevators should be two hallways over. But you need to move—the elevators are right next to one of the main stairwells.”

  “Of course they are,” Owen mutters. “Because why should anything be easy?”

  “I’ve got the regular elevators locked down so they can’t use them, and a freight elevator should be at the ninth floor in three, two, one… It’s ready for you!”

  “Fine, but what are we supposed to do once we get on it?” Ezra asks. “They know we need to get out—they’ll be waiting for us on the first floor when we get there. And we’ve got to get there eventually.”

  “Not necessarily,” Seth tells him.

  “Well, we can’t play cat and mouse in this stupid building forever!” Harper exclaims.

  “You don’t have to. I think—”

  “You think they know we’re running for the freight elevators?” Ezra asks.

  “I’d bet on it,” I tell him grimly as my mind races, trying to figure out how to fix my colossally huge screwup.

  “That won’t matter if we do this right,” Seth says.

  “By all means,” Owen tells him, “let’s do it right.”

  “Send the elevator up,” Seth tells me. “All the way to the roof.”

  “And then what?” Ezra demands. “We can’t fly.”

  “You won’t have to,” I answer as Seth’s idea crystallizes in my own head, becomes a full-fledged plan. “You’re going to be in the second elevator.”