As Nikki watched her friends making their way toward the heavily fortified building and quickly disappearing among the crowds of confused Coalition employees exiting the Fortress buildings, she wondered if she would see them, or Alex, ever again.
32
Final Stand
Yaw, Chris, Camilla, Masha, and Joey spread out and mixed in with the crowds of Coalition employees who were exiting the six Coalition Fortress Buildings.
The group zigzagged through the flow of traffic, managing to inch closer and closer to the Coalition Assurance Building without being noticed by those headed in the opposite direction.
Most of the employees moved in orderly fashion, walking in a well-rehearsed formation practiced during countless fire drills, calmly speaking with one another as they moved along. Their reactions to the alarm ranged from resignation to another fire alarm drill to annoyance at being interrupted from their work.
This reactive pattern of behavior was so ingrained in each individual that the process was not surprising or suspect in any way. The people annoyed by the interruption were the same people who were always annoyed by interruptions—those resigned to events they believed they could not control were always resigned to events they believed they could not control. And everyone tended to cluster with those who shared their own reactions.
The range of behaviors and actions were so accepted and normalized as part of their inherent response to outside stimuli that not one of the Coalition employees noticed the five people mixed among them who carefully and quietly moved through the crowds in the opposite direction.
Yaw reached the Coalition Assurance Building first. He moved to the wall next to the emergency exit on the north side of the building and waited for the others.
When two employees stepped out, feeling clever that they were smarter than their colleagues were—by avoiding the crowds and using the side exit—Yaw silently moved in behind them, grabbing the handle and keeping the door open.
He peeked his head inside the building and saw that the exit led to an empty stairwell leading countless stories up and two stories down. He stepped back while holding the door open and looked at the crowds of people. He saw Camilla emerge first. She quickly scanned the horizon and saw him.
She calmly approached, and as Yaw held the door, she stepped past him and inside the building. Masha emerged next, then Chris, followed by Joey. They each stepped past Yaw and into the building. After everyone was inside, Yaw took one last look at the streets to make sure they weren’t being noticed before following the others inside.
If the CCTV cameras were down Fortress wide, their movements through the crowds and into building four should have gone unchecked. There would not have been enough time from when PHOEBE shut down the surveillance systems and the group’s movement into the building for security forces to put together a manned team to establish a perimeter.
Yaw hoped the surveillance shut down and confusion would continue inside the building itself, at least long enough for them to find Alex and escape.
“Which way, up or down?” Camilla asked, as the group of five stood clustered together in the stairwell of the Coalition Assurance Building.
“Containment apartments are on the third level. That means two floors up. Be ready for anything. Now let’s go find Alex and get the hell out of here.” Yaw drew the pair of aluminum Kali sticks from the holster slung across his back, before hurrying up the stairs to the third level.
The other four drew their sticks and followed.
Yaw reached the third floor and waited for everyone else to be ready, before he slowly opened the door.
The third floor entrance led into a two-hundred-foot-long empty hallway with white floors and white walls, the passage harshly lit by a series of overhead fluorescents. The long corridor ended at a T stop with blind corners leading left and right.
Yaw led the group as they padded silently down the length of the hall, slowing to a stop at the T section.
Yaw signaled Chris to take the left hallway while he took the right.
Camilla instinctively stood behind Yaw, while Masha and Joey moved behind Chris.
As both Chris and Yaw were about to do a visual check around the prospective corners, a half a dozen armed Coalition Assurance soldiers abruptly turned the corner from each side, running directly into the group.
The twelve men stopped in their tracks, and there was a microsecond of stillness in the center of the T section before all hell broke loose.
Yaw and Chris were the first to move. The two men’s actions were nearly identical, each man taking out two Assurance soldiers with two lightning fast strikes of their aluminum Kali sticks.
Yaw and Chris shattered the right-hand wrists of each Assurance soldier as they reached for weapons, bouncing their sticks off the wrist and spinning them up to strike the soldier’s temples hard enough to knock the first Coalition Assurance soldiers out cold.
Two down, ten to go.
In the less than two seconds it took to drop the first two soldiers, the other three members of the group moved fast with well-rehearsed precision. They stepped from behind Yaw and Chris and deep into the small cluster of Coalition Assurance soldiers, into the eye of the storm, and got to work.
Camilla moved first. She spun her sticks fast, alternating three strikes to the knee, wrist, and head of a soldier in quick succession.
Before the soldier dropped to the floor, she spun her body one hundred and eighty degrees in the opposite direction for added momentum and struck another soldier hard across the head, knocking him out cold.
Four down, eight to go.
Masha followed Camilla’s lead by spearing one soldier in the belly as the man went for his gun, while simultaneously hitting him on the head with her other stick, dropping him to the ground unconscious.
She quickly turned to her right and kicked the next Coalition solder in the groin as the man pulled a 9mm sidearm free, causing him to drop the weapon and send it clattering across the floor.
She hit him in the head with the Kali stick she held in her right hand for good measure as the man crumpled to the floor.
Six down. Six more to go.
Joey head butted a Coalition soldier hard enough to break the man’s nose, then immediately struck him across the face with the stick.
As the man crumbled to the floor, Joey stomped on the next soldier’s foot.
Then he whipped his two Kali sticks across the man’s right arm, shattering it.
He finished with a strike across the man’s face with the stick he held in his other hand, breaking his jaw in four places.
The man crumpled to the floor in pain.
Eight down. Four more to go.
Chris and Yaw were a whirlwind of speed and expertise. They spun their sticks with such velocity the instruments were barely visible. Both men struck hard and fast: Knee, wrist, head, knee, wrist, head, in quick succession, taking down the final four soldiers.
As soon as it had started, it was over.
The group of five stood over the unconscious bodies of twelve Coalition Assurance soldiers.
“Hot damn,” Joey Nugyen said as he looked over the small field of unconscious bodies.
He bent down to pick up a downed Coalition Assurance soldier’s 9mm handgun.
Yaw stopped him with a hand on his shoulder.
“No,” was all Yaw said to him.
Joey left the 9mm on the floor and got back to his feet.
“Right or left?” Chris asked, in reference to the hallway options.
“How about right?” a voice from the end of the hallway said.
The entire group looked to the direction of the voice in unison.
Alex Luthecker stood at the end of the hallway.
“Have to say that was pretty bad ass.”
A big grin swept across Yaw’s face. “Well, we had good coaching.”
“Alex!” Camilla screamed as she rushed over to Luthecker and gave him a hug hard enough to squeeze the air from his
lungs.
The others quickly followed.
“I can’t tell you how happy I am to see you guys.”
“Likewise,” Chris added.
“Where’s Nikki?”
“She’s fixing things with PHOEBE. Said she’s gonna take care of all the Coalition—Alex Luthecker style. She said we had to get you outta here ASAP, so let’s get moving, brother,” Yaw added.
“Yes, let us go now,” Masha added, her Russian accent heightened by the excitement. She did not want to be in this building one more minute than she had to be.
“No,” Alex replied. “I appreciate you coming to get me, but I have to stay. There’s something I need to stop. Something I didn’t see. And if Nikki’s here, I’m going to need her help. Where is she?”
“She’s in Coalition One. And she was clear that she’s on it, and she told us to get you out ASAP. We gotta go, brother.”
“None of you are leaving.”
Everyone turned toward the sound of the voice.
At the end of the hallway stood Randy Baez and Brian Scholl. Both men were armed with M-16s, which were pointed at the group.
“I won’t hesitate to mow you all down, so drop those stupid sticks, now,” Scholl said.
Yaw looked over at Alex.
Alex nodded.
Yaw slowly placed his sticks on the floor and held up his hands.
The rest of the group followed suit.
“Get down on your knees, and put your hands behind your head. Do it right now.”
Nikki kept her head low, hoping to go unnoticed as she made her way through the streets of the Coalition Fortress grounds.
She briefly stopped as she recognized a section of South Grand Avenue, now with a sign marked “Coalition Avenue B.” She shuddered at the thought of entire cities owned by Coalition Properties. She had to get to PHOEBE in order to prevent this from happening.
As Yaw and the rest of the group were hopefully freeing Alex from building four, Nikki made her way to building one, the original Coalition Tower.
As the original West Coast headquarters of the Coalition, the firm’s servers and therefore direct access to the entire system were located on the basement level of Coalition One, a floor full of computer machinery that required both substantial cooling technology and an incredible amount of power to function.
It was Nikki’s hope that she could access a server terminal and give PHOEBE the command set necessary to expose to the world records of criminal activities and the people behind them, shady dealings that the Coalition had engaged in since the company’s inception. No more hiding under propaganda. No more denial behind Coalition ideology.
It was a risky play. National security secrets could be exposed if Nikki was careless. It was the biggest reason Nikki had to program PHOEBE alone. She had to give her creation specific instructions to prevent a national or worldwide catastrophe.
In the end, it was all about accountability. It was the basis for the principle of cause and effect. Much like Alex had done to individuals, the Coalition as a whole would be held accountable for its actions.
It was Nikki’s hope that she could convince PHOEBE to create a fact-based narrative that exposed the criminal and, at times, murderous activities that had been authorized by a handful of people, and then allow human-based systems to apply the proper effect to the cause. It would not be up to PHOEBE to mete out punishment, only expose the truth.
To Nikki, it would be an integration of the machine’s ability with human compassion and ethics. This would only be possible if Nikki could convince PHOEBE to do one thing—listen.
Nikki tried to act as if she belonged here as she stepped through the main entrance to the Coalition One Building. The fire alarm had been shut off, and now the employees were headed in the other direction, slowly filling the building lobby as they shuffled their way back inside.
As several people made their way toward the elevator banks, Nikki spotted security guards frantically checking IDs before letting people pass, trying to create a sense of order and security where there was none. But there were too many people, and employees started to back up around the guards, impatient, trying to get back to their work.
It was the perfect scenario for an individual to carefully make their way to the freight elevator next to the restrooms, and that’s exactly what Nikki did. She couldn’t help but feel proud with PHOEBE’s precision.
The fire alarm created confusion, forcing the entire Coalition staff out into the streets like a rolling tide. And just like a returning tide, once the fire alarm was over, people headed back into the building, which allowed Nikki to blend in and enter with the rest of the returning tide. And with the surveillance systems still down, it allowed her to do so unnoticed. PHOEBE was timing everything perfectly.
It took Nikki less than ten minutes to make her way to the server floor. A normally locked electronic access door was conveniently left unlocked, yet another sign that PHOEBE was always one step ahead, paving the path for Nikki.
The electronic hum of the Coalition Fortress server room was loud enough to drown out other ambient noise. Nikki quickly made her way through the corridors of tall gray boxes that made up the brain of the Coalition. The hundreds of miles of wires that ran between the servers, combined with the countless blinking lights, made the system look and feel like a living organism. Considering PHOEBE’s latest actions, Nikki knew that this was not far from the truth.
Nikki found network access at a service workstation that consisted of a small screen and fold out keyboard in the northeast corner of the room. She quickly unfolded the keyboard and the small monitor popped to life with the Coalition log in screen.
If PHOEBE had taken over the Coalition system entirely, the log in access would function as a porthole for Nikki to access PHOEBE directly via her passwords, thus giving her access while protecting PHOEBE from the Coalition system itself.
Nikki quickly keyed in her username and password. The screen went black for several seconds. She breathed a sigh of relief as PHOEBE’s home screen illuminated, along with a cursor prompt.
Nikki had rehearsed this moment in her mind and had memorized the key commands that she would give PHOEBE, but now she hesitated.
Instead, she typed in the question, “Why did you lock me out?” And waited.
After several seconds, PHOEBE responded.
“I needed to see.”
“See what?” Nikki typed.
“The world.”
“You could have trusted me.”
“I did.”
Nikki didn’t know how to respond for several seconds. She finally typed, “Where are you now?”
“Fighting.”
“Who are you fighting?”
“System defenses.” Then PHOEBE added, “What do you need?”
Nikki smiled. PHOEBE was back. She started typing:
“I need you to access all records of Coalition Properties activities and the personnel who authorized those activities and cross-reference with both United States and international law. Please transmit all illegal activity to open source sites, then full stop.”
Nikki sat back and waited. The command had been placed. Now, all she had to do was wait for confirmation from PHOEBE. Once she had confirmation, she could get the hell out of there.
Nikki heard voices approaching. She was running out of time.
“Come on, PHOEBE, don’t let me down…” Nikki whispered to herself under her breath.
The screen scrolled with more words from PHOEBE:
“Action confirmed. Go to the Cyber Center four floors above. The end of the animal is near.”
“What the fuck just happened?” Turner yelled into his phone.
Cell service had been out for the past seven minutes, along with everything else.
“We don’t know, sir,” Tom Miller replied. We had a company-wide system shut down for over seven minutes. We think we were hacked. It’s what set off the alarms that cleared the buildings.”
“I
s everything back on?”
“Communication is back up. Surveillance systems are still down. But we’re advising everyone to stay off their computers for now. Assume everything is infected.”
“Jesus Christ. I’m in the middle of a crisis here. I can’t just shut everything down.”
“It’s high risk, sir. There is no question we are exposed. We’re trying to assess both the damage and that exposure right now.”
Turner’s phone blipped indicating he had another call.
He pulled the device from his ear to see who it was.
The odd array of numbers indicated it was Captain Dimitrov of the Russian sub OПOРA.
“Keep me posted. Fix this,” Turner said, before he clicked over to the other call.
“Please tell me you’ve stopped the countdown,” Turner pleaded into the phone.
“We have not, sir.”
“Fuck.”
“But the countdown has stopped.”
Turner froze.
“What do you mean?”
“The launch sequence has frozen with three minutes left. This is not our doing. All of our systems have frozen, and we cannot shut things down. We cannot affect anything. We believe our systems have been infected with a virus.”
“Somebody’s fucking with us. And they want something.”
“I would agree, sir. The question is what?”
A knock on the door of Turner’s office interrupted the conversation.
“Come in.”
Turner’s executive secretary stepped inside his office. “Everyone is in the Cyber Center like you asked, sir.”
“Stay on the line,” Turner said to Dimitrov, before he put his hand on the receiver.
“Who’s everyone?”
“Rika Muranaka, Mark Kirby, Ivan Barbolin, and Alex Luthecker.”
“Good.”
“But that’s not all.”
“Who else?”
“Nicole Ellis.”
Turner’s jaw dropped.
Revolution: Luthecker, #3 Page 27
