“Trap?” Rex laughed. “Like in a mummy’s tomb or something?”
“I’m not kidding. I wouldn’t put anything past Kiran. He’s desperate.”
Rex lay down on his stomach in front of the wire and then traced it with his eyes from the bookshelf to the wall. At the wall, it went into a small hole, just the right diameter to contain the wire.
“Whatever it does,” he said, “I don’t think we should mess with it.”
We stepped over the wire and nothing happened. But ten yards away, we found another one. This time I spotted it first. It went across the room in a similar fashion, from one bookshelf to another. But this one wasn’t three inches from the ground—it was four feet off the ground, right at chest level.
Black box lab
“This is ridiculous,” Rex said. “No one could work in here like this.”
“They must have put them up when they were leaving.”
“Or no one actually works in here,” he suggested.
“Then what?”
“It could be just a storage place.”
“What explains the croissant?” I asked.
Rex shrugged. “Maybe there’s a guard.”
Our cell phones buzzed in our pockets simultaneously. We took out our phones to see a text from Tunde. We hadn’t contacted him since Dural had dropped us off, and he was concerned. He asked if we were having any troubles. I replied to him that we were okay. Then I opened a video messaging app and called him. He answered right away, and it was nice to see his smiling face in the midst of all the dull beige.
“Tunde,” I said, “check this out.”
Using my phone, I panned across the room and then brought the cell camera lens close to the trip wire. I went along it, showing him both ends so he could see how it was tethered. “What do you think?” I asked.
“I do not think it is designed to bring down the bookshelves or to set off an alarm,” Tunde said. Then he asked, “Can you show me the ends of it again?”
I did. “Now move the camera up, toward the ceiling.”
After he’d gotten a good look at the bland, featureless ceiling tiles, he asked me to examine the bookshelf where it was tethered more closely. I held the camera as close as I could. He noticed that there was a cylindrical object embedded in the wood panel on the bookshelf. It was silver and black and the size of a pinkie finger.
“What is it?” Rex asked.
“A blasting cap, I think,” Tunde said.
“Hang on, what?”
“Friends,” Tunde said, his voice deep with concern, “I need the two of you to be incredibly careful in this place. That is a blasting cap. I have seen similar ones before. They are used to set off charges. My guess, and this is just a guess, is that the room in which you are standing is wired to explode, or maybe only burst into flames, if you set off one of those trip wires.”
“Only burst into flames?” I asked.
7.3
Rex and I looked around the room.
All the books, all the wooden shelves, the furniture, even the chairs, were made of wood. A single match would likely light this place up like a bonfire. And all of the information contained inside it would be nothing more than smoke in a matter of minutes—including whoever was unfortunate enough to be inside at the time of ignition.
“That’s why this place is empty,” Rex said. “They’re not taking chances.”
“Just means that whatever’s in here is worth protecting. Let’s find it.”
We discovered three additional trip wires around the room. There were no other places where the 3-D key might work, so we focused our efforts on the bookshelves. Outside of the five trip wires, there were only thousands of the identical-looking books. Rex and I took several down from the shelves and thumbed through them carefully.
“These are lines of code, just printed out,” Rex said, turning pages.
He moved from shelf to shelf, quickly glancing through the books. He must have looked at a dozen before he walked over to where I was and glanced over my shoulder at the book I was holding. Every single book contained page after page of computer code. There were many different coding languages—some simple, others incredibly complex—and they covered all sorts of programs.
Rex deciphered them as he read.
“This one is about timing on a fan, that one’s for camera movement. They’re all kind of just garbage codes, nothing special, not even clever. It’s like if you just dumped all the manuals you got with every electronic item you purchased—a toaster, a cell phone—into a library and made them fancy.”
He motioned to the rest of the library.
“This is a con,” he said. “None of this is useful. None of it worth burning.”
“So that means the key is for something else.”
Rex’s cell phone rumbled. It was a text from Teo.
Might need to hurry it up. There’s someone down the street—looks like a police officer or something—he’s going door-to-door, checking on the buildings. He’s moving pretty slow, but I’m guessing he’ll be here in about five minutes. I can try to distract him, but you need to get a move on.
Rex showed me the message. We were going to have to think on our toes. Searching for a keyhole in that black box lab was going to be nearly impossible. It might be hidden under the carpeting or up on the ceiling. But I was certain it wouldn’t be random. The data Naya stole that led to the printing of the key was kept secret. If anyone was able to print the key, then that meant it was supposed to be used—finding the key was the trick, not where it went.
I had an idea. The only way we’d uncover the purpose of the 3-D key and the real reason all this junk code was filed away in this bland analog library was intuiting why Kiran would put it here in the first place. The Game, OndScan, the data stolen by Naya, it all came from Kiran—his creation, guided by his hand.
“What if the key isn’t a key?” I asked Rex.
“How do you mean?”
“I’m trying to think like Kiran here. A key is so obvious. Someone gives you a key, you’re going to start looking for a lock, right?”
“Yeah…” Rex looked a bit confused.
“So what if it’s not the lock that’s important but the key itself?”
I took the 3-D printed key out of my pocket and examined it in the flat light. If the key wasn’t designed to open something obvious, then maybe it was to be used in a different way—the answer, of course, was in the clear disk at the top of the key.
It wasn’t a disk. It was a lens.
“I think I figured this out,” I told Rex as I walked to the center of the room, in the only space clear of bookshelves and trip wires, and held the top of the key to my eye. Sure enough, I had been right—the key wasn’t a key.
Skeleton key
Looking through the lens I could see the library, the bookshelves, but overlaid on top of what I was seeing was a grid. It was three-dimensional and a neon-blue color. I smiled; this was very, very clever.
“What are you seeing?” Rex asked.
“It is an augmented-reality overlay,” I said. “There is a grid over the room.”
As I turned my head, the lines moved with me. To my surprise, big blue arrows appeared and hovered digitally over the locations where the trip wires were hidden. Looking farther, some of the books on the shelves were lit up in the neon blue as well. I walked over to one—through the lens, the spine and cover were glowing an eerie blue. I could see fifteen other books highlighted the same way.
“There are specific books,” I said to Rex as I handed him one. “Whatever code is hidden in this library, it is probably in these.”
It took us several minutes to grab all the highlighted books. As we pulled the last one from its shelf, Teo texted to let us know time was running out. And fast. The man inspecting the nearby businesses was crossing the street toward him. We had to go; there was no more time to explore the library.
Still, we couldn’t just hand these books over without understanding what they contained. While
we could have examined them carefully on the journey back to the opera house, I was worried about having Teo look at them with us. Given that he’d admitted involvement with Terminal, I wanted to take precautions.
Rex and I piled the books on a desk near the front door.
We thumbed carefully through the pages, and Rex read through the code as quickly as he could. “These are just the same junk programs,” he said. “There’s nothing about these books that makes them any different from the others.”
Teo texted again: Hurry—the man wants to come inside.
I could feel my blood pressure rising behind my eyes, my heartbeat quickening; we had to at least get a cursory sense of what these things were. We could be handing Terminal the keys to Kiran’s empire. That is when I saw it—a series of shapes, mostly lines and dots, running along the bottom right corner of each page. They looked like pieces of letters and numbers.
“What about that?”
I pointed out the lines and dots to Rex. He flipped through the book, looking them over. “Yes,” he said, eyes glued to the pages, “there’s something there.”
As Rex turned the pages faster and faster, I figured it out.
“Here,” I said, picking up one of the other books. Holding it by the spine, I flipped through the pages as fast as I could. As we watched, the lines and dots, bits and pieces, came together when the pages were in motion. They formed numbers at the bottom of the pages. Suddenly the purpose of the books became clear as the numbers danced and moved, appearing to scroll across the page.
“It’s a flip-book,” I said. “They’re all flip-books.”
Flip-book
8. Rex
5 DAYS UNTIL SHIVA
Cai was right.
The books, all fifteen of them, were basically a big version of a kid’s toy.
You know those flip-books you buy at the zoo or the museum?
The ones that you flip and they show you a dinosaur stomping across some primordial swamp or a rocket ship jetting between the stars?
Well, this was the same way, but instead of some cool illustrated scene, they showed me a long series of program codes, most of which I recognized immediately. I flipped through as many of the books as I could, just enough to get a sense of what they were hiding, before Cai and I stacked them in our arms and headed to the door.
“It’s all here,” I told Cai. “The snippets of code that I was able to read include pieces of WALKABOUT 2.0, some of the data Naya stole from General Iyabo, and big chunks of Teo’s bio-computer stuff.”
“What does it do?”
“I’m not sure what Kiran intended,” I said, “but this is the kind of thing that would get Terminal’s heart really racing. From what I can tell, it’s a virus.”
“A virus?”
We stopped at the door. I was keenly aware that my brother, a now-known Terminal associate, was standing just on the other side. Even though it wasn’t necessary, I still lowered my voice.
“All these disparate elements come together in this code. It’s kind of sloppy, clearly written pretty quickly, but it works like this: The data that Naya stole from General Iyabo has the names and address of the target accounts—banks, international companies, conglomerates, even governments. Those accounts are entered into the WALKABOUT 2.0 program, which covertly populates them with back door access programs. Then Teo’s bio-computer tech acts as massive organic processors, able to store all the data necessary to distribute the virus to all of the accounts. Essentially, this thing is a stealth bomb.”
“To blow up what?”
“All global trade.”
It wasn’t until the words left my mouth that I realized how big this whole thing was. At the Game, Kiran had used WALKABOUT and the quantum computer to hack into thousands of accounts—stealing data on banking, business, etc. But this was the reverse; this would be putting a virus into those accounts to destroy them.
“If this thing gets out,” I told Cai, “it’ll do some serious, probably unrepairable damage. It’ll wreck countries. Economies will collapse. People will die.”
“Shiva,” Cai said.
“In Kiran’s hands, yes,” I replied.
“But in Terminal’s hands?”
“Even worse,” I said.
We both looked at each other, knowing that we’d just found ourselves in an incredibly delicate situation—we had our hands on an explosive and we had to do something with it. We certainly couldn’t let Kiran use this virus for his Shiva program; we also couldn’t let Terminal take it over.
Both routes were dead ends.
Literally.
“So what do we do?” I asked Cai.
She flashed me her trademark Painted Wolf smile.
“You’ll be shocked to hear this, but … I’ve got a plan. When we get outside, you’re going to call Tunde and tell him what we need. Some sort of scanner, to scan the pages of these books and extract the code; then, while it’s being translated into a form they can use, we’ll alter it.”
“Alter it how?”
“That’s what you’re going to figure out.”
8.1
We opened the door and stepped outside to find Teo arguing with a security guard.
At least, the guy looked like a security guard.
He didn’t speak English, and Teo was stumbling through some ugly Mandarin. I was never the languages type—that was always one of Teo’s fortes—but I knew that his Mandarin was always the weakest of the six languages he’d taught himself.
Cai took right over.
Handing the books to Teo, she spoke to the security guard, gesticulating wildly with her hands. The conversation got heated for a few moments before the security guard put up his hands and backed away. He moved on, walking over to the next building on his route.
“All good?” I asked Cai.
“We’re good,” she said.
Truth is: I was curious to know how she’d run the guy off, but, frankly, we didn’t have time to discuss it. We needed to know how we were going to hand the flip-books with a dangerous virus in them over to the one group of people who we knew should never have them.
As we walked back toward the road and out of the restricted area, Teo asked about what we’d found inside the building.
“First off,” I said, “Dural’s blueprints were totally off. It was an analog library, but it was one giant room lined with trip wires and explosives.”
“Explosives?” Teo honestly seemed shocked.
“Kiran was pretty serious about protecting the place.”
Teo asked, “So what was he protecting?”
“Those books,” Cai said.
Teo tsked. “This is like pulling teeth. Just tell me what’s up.”
“There’s a code hidden in those books,” I said. “We’re not sure what it does, but it’ll have to be extracted.”
“Hidden how?”
“These fifteen tomes are flip–books; the code can only be seen by flipping the pages fast. Pretty impractical, while clever,” I said.
“Any idea what the code does?” Teo asked.
I shrugged. “We’re just going to have to find out. Hang on.…”
I pretended I was getting a call, and instead of answering a call, I surreptitiously called Tunde. I slowed my pace and then signaled Cai before I turned around and jumped onto the call.
Tunde said, “I am ready, omo. Tell me what we need to do.”
“We’ve got fifteen books with codes hidden inside them. Essentially, they’re big flip-books that we—”
“Flip-books? What are flip-books?”
“Seriously? It’s a book that, uh, you flip. The pages, I mean, you flip the pages and usually there’s a picture that becomes animated on them. Sometimes they’re photos that move, like how a movie works—”
“Flick books! Yes, I am familiar with these.”
“Well, great. That’s what we’re dealing with here. Kiran, clever bastard that he is, hid a code inside the flip, er, flick books. From what I can t
ell, just after a brief look, this thing is a virus. A virus designed to bring down economies, to ruin countries.”
“Shiva,” Tunde said.
“Yes. And we can’t let Terminal get ahold of it.”
“Ah,” Tunde said, getting snarky, “this is exactly the thing that I was warning you two about. I did not want to involve Terminal—”
“Tunde,” I interrupted, “too late for that. Listen, we’re going to have to hand over these books. But Terminal can’t use them unless they write the code down, which is painstaking in the extreme. I need you to build a scanner, something that will photograph the pages, pull the code out, and piece it together. These books are the size of dictionaries. Each one has at least five hundred pages.”
“Okay. Okay. But there is a twist, right?”
“There’s always a twist, Tunde. We’re going to change the code in the scanner. Render it useless. But not in a way that will be obvious. I need Terminal to accept the code and then use it. That’s when we spring the trap.”
“When the code is activated, it alerts the authorities.”
“And brings Terminal down, clears Cai’s parents, clears everyone. That’s a tall order, I know, but let’s see how clever we can make it.”
Tunde laughed. I could picture him grinning on the other end of the line.
“Of course, my friend. The machine will be easy to build, provided I can find all the necessary supplies quickly. You are going to have to help me, however, with the code and how we change it. Tell me, how much time do I have?”
“I don’t know, I’d guess a couple hours?”
I looked back at Teo and Cai. They were standing on a corner just on the other side of the police tape, and a group of police officers were standing about and smoking. I waved to Teo and he waved back.
“Do you define a couple as two or more than two?” Tunde asked.
“Better make it two.”
Just then, a car drove up; it was the same car that had dropped us off.
Dural was behind the wheel.
“Big moment,” I told Tunde.
“We are ready. Let us bring them down.”
8.2
As we drove back to the opera house, books in hand, I couldn’t help but glance over at my brother and feel a knot in my stomach.
Genius--The Revolution Page 6
