by Karl Weber
One guard turned his head toward the door when it opened, but Anna fired a sedation round into his chest, making him fall out of his seat. The other guard sitting directly behind the door turned to face his fallen buddy but froze when he felt a gun barrel poke him in the back of the head.
“There’s a reason you should always have somebody watch your six,” Anna sadistically stated.
The guard turned his gaze to the left and made a grave face when he saw his friend lying face down on the floor.
Anna kept the same tone as she continued, “Don’t worry he’s not dead. I figured he needed a nap. You know, stress of the job and all. However, if you don’t make yourself useful to me, then I might be compelled to have you retired, permanently.”
“I’ll do whatever you want. I’m just an average guy, please don’t hurt me,” the guard begged.
“The central core.”
“What? You can’t break into that, it’s impossible.”
“Well, then you have nothing to worry about. Any help you give me will be redundant. How do I get past the first layer of security?”
“My fingerprints are in the system and will get you to the maintenance corridor,” the man said while holding up his right palm. “But to get past the main doors and into the room itself, you’d need the authorization of somebody way above my pay grade.”
“I got that covered,” Anna said before firing a sedation round just below the man’s shoulder, making him fall asleep in his chair.
Anna turned her attention to the control console. The entire wall above it was nothing but video feeds of all white rooms and hallways. She plugged her SCU into the console and made the SCU’s hacking module work some digital magic. After about ten seconds of waiting, Anna had access to all the camera feeds on her SCU.
Then with a few swipes of her index finger, she had every camera in the facility playing loops of empty rooms and hallways, all while keeping the actual live feeds at the convenience of her left wrist. If only the whole job was this easy, Anna thought. Before leaving the room, she also made sure to capture the guard’s fingerprints on a Blot Sheet to use later.
Anna looked down at her wrist and checked the camera feed for the white hallway just outside the security room. It was lined with identical single black-frosted glass doors that led to various rooms full of servers. One of the doors opened, showing a group of skinny male server technicians. They were all drenched in sweat, from working so closely with huge heat generating servers.
Checking the clock on her SCU, Anna saw it was eleven fifty, ten minutes left. The technicians were blocking the hallway that Anna needed to head down, and she didn’t have the time or patience to wait on them to move out of her way. After pulling the guard on the floor away from the door on the slight chance he could be seen from the hallway, Anna reactivated the MLS device on her suit.
As soon as none the technicians were facing the security room door, Anna opened it and walked into the hallway before quickly shutting the door behind her. Anna grabbed ahold of the shiny white wall nearest her and utilized her MAG gloves and boots to climb up to the nine-foot-high ceiling. She crawled her way past the technicians like a spider on the ceiling.
After putting a good amount of distance between her and the technicians, Anna climbed back down to the floor. On her feet again, she hurried down the hallway, taking full advantage of the invisibility. She came to another intersection where there was a large elevator equipped with a biometric sensor that helped Anna confirm that it led exactly to where she was going.
She pulled out the Blot Sheet with the guard’s fingerprints, not to waste time, and pressed it against the scanner. While it scanned, she checked the connected hallways for anyone that might see the elevator door open, but she saw nobody. Something Anna knew she should’ve done before starting the scan but didn’t due to being on a clock. The name Wilton appeared above the scanner. The outline turned green, and the elevator door opened.
Anna quickly stepped inside and pressed the button for the bottom floor that contained the facility’s central core. There was a camera mounted in the elevator. Anna double-checked her SCU to ensure she had control of it. The video feed of an empty elevator on her SCU confirmed that. Her MLS device shut off, rendering her visible. The video feed on her SCU continued to show nobody in the elevator.
The elevator came to a halt, the door slid open, and the first thing that came to view was the large, thick metal door that served as the final gateway to the central core unit. Anna stepped out of the elevator and approached the monstrosity of a door. It was equipped with both a biometric and retinal scanner.
Anna checked the clock on her SCU again. Eleven fifty-five, five minutes until the meeting began. Nowhere near enough time for Anna to find the person needed to unlock the door. She had figured this problem might occur, but after going over the room diagram with Price enough times, she thought she had an idea on how to get around it.
On both sides of the door were tight hallways with clear bulletproof glass windows looking into the large room containing the core. Opposite the windows there was nothing but solid concrete walls. Anna entered the corridor to her left.
Every few feet on the metal floor were removable panels to allow technicians access beneath the floor of the room. Anna got down on one knee, pulled out her pen laser, and quickly melted away the panel’s metal lock. She then flipped the panel open and dropped inside the cramped space full of electronic hardware, forcing her to crouch.
There was a fan blowing cool air as cold as the Antarctic behind Anna, but even then, she could still feel the relentless heat from the electronic hardware on the small amount of skin her tac suit and balaclava didn’t cover. It was a good thing the Spectral Covert Tactical suit was designed to maintain the wearer’s normal body temperature no matter the environment. Otherwise, Anna would’ve felt like she was melting inside the cramped space.
The diagram of the room Price provided Anna was needed for her to navigate the maze of electronics. She paid close attention to the holographic diagram on her SCU, needing to find a specific ventilation grate to enter the room and not trigger an alarm.
After making several left and right turns around all the identical looking electronics connected to the magma tiles or floor of lava, as Anna preferred to call them, she found herself looking up at the specific grate she wanted.
She once again got out the pen laser and started melting away the bolts. While melting the last bolt, Anna held onto the grate with one hand to keep it from falling on her head. Anna slowly set the grate down in the cramped space with her.
The clock on her SCU read eleven fifty-eight. Only two minutes left, no time to waste. Anna took out the Magnetic Grapple Gun that Waldo had given her. She pressed the device’s magnetic backplate onto the surface directly underneath the rectangular hole she made with the barrel pointed out up at the ceiling. With a press of a button on her SCU, the suction cup shot up, making no more noise than that of a sneeze followed by a quiet thump as it connected to the concrete ceiling. Anna retracted the cable just enough to gain tension and then attached herself to the nylon cable. She slowly made her ascent.
Through the hole in the floor, Anna ascended towards the high ceiling. All of the equal square sections of tile glowed such a bright red that it made Anna almost need to squint when looking directly at it.
She eventually reached the concrete ceiling. Anna attached one limb at a time to the ceiling and started crawling upside down until she was above the large glass box that contained the central core. It served as the heart of the facility. If it failed, the entire system would shut down.
After attaching her winch to the ceiling, Anna then dropped the rappel line onto the roof of the glass room she needed to infiltrate. She grabbed the line and then descended it until her feet made contact with the glass roof.
Anna quickly pulled out her glass-cutting device and attached it to the glass roof. After the press of a button, metal prods came out from the round object. An
na set the prods diameter to be wide enough for her to fit through, and with another press of a button, the lasers began cutting. The prods made a full 360-degree rotation, so the cut glass was lifted up by the prods and set to the side. Anna jumped through the hole and landed on her feet inside the glass room.
The room was only eight feet high with an area of about three-hundred square feet, most of which was taken up by electronic hardware. She took out a small cord from her belt and hooked one end to her SCU and the other end to one of the many ports on the server hardware.
“Price, I’m hooked up,” Anna said in her earpiece. She checked the clock on her SCU to see that there were still thirty seconds left till midnight. Plenty of time to spare, she thought.
“Alright, I’m in,” Price responded.
“Can you get us a good view of the meeting?” Jack asked as he stood behind Price.
After typing away furiously on his keyboard, Price looked back at Jack with a cocky grin on his face, “Here’s your answer.” With one more tap of his keyboard, Price’s screen, along with the one on Anna’s SCU, had a full aerial view of the virtual meeting.
There was a black boardroom table in the shape of a V in the center of a white void. Directly across from the large table was a small table with a single chair. The seats were all empty, and then one by one people started to instantly appear sitting down in them. After a trickle of seconds, every seat was filled but the one at the individual table facing the rest.
There were thirty people in total sitting at the much larger V-shaped table. With fifteen on each side, most were dressed in regular business suits with the exception of the five men at the end of one side of the table who were wearing formal military attire.
Anna recognized only a few of the faces in the group. Gregory Donavan, the House Speaker, was one of them. He was sandwiched between two other congressmen dressed in equally expensive dark-colored suits. Upon further analyzing the seated group, Anna realized something. One side of the table was nothing but politicians with the other side being either economical tycoons or military men.
Then almost as if on cue, the entire table turned their attention toward the lone desk and chair where a man appeared. He was as sharply dressed as the rest. Couldn’t have been a day under fifty, as there were a decent number of wrinkles all over his clean-shaven face with noticeable graying in his business-cut blond hair.
The unknown man sitting by himself then spoke in a deep but gentle masculine voice: “I see that everybody is here. Let’s begin with the meeting.” Everyone seated at the V-shaped table looked at the man as if he were the judge in a trial.
“Price, who is this guy?” Anna asked.
“Not sure. I’ll run his face through every database we have access to. That should tell us who he is.”
The mysterious man continued while he stared at Todd Hellmuth, the chief of staff at Homeland Security. “Mr. Hellmuth, is everything in place for tomorrow’s operations.” Everybody else at the V-shaped table had his attention drawn toward Hellmuth, eagerly waiting his response.
Hellmuth cleared his throat before answering, “Yes, overseer. My man is ready and understands his task, along with the CIA assets that Mr. Donavan has supplied me with. They will all converge at the president’s gathering in Tampa Bay to execute and frame the operation as needed.”
Price suddenly spoke up in Anna’s earpiece. “Anna, I found something on our mystery man. His name is Hoyt Daniels. He was a CIA spy who was declared deceased several years ago. His record also states that he was responsible for killing his handlers at the agency.”
“And it sounds like he now plans to have the president killed tomorrow at his own social gathering in front of his biggest supporters,” Anna said.
“I’m disappointed that you didn’t go for my idea, overseer,” Alan Patterson pitched in. He was the owner and CEO of Black Technology Incorporated, one of the biggest suppliers of military grade technology for the U.S.
Hoyt Daniels scoffed at Patterson’s comment. “We can’t sacrifice our ace in the hole. We invested too much into him to have our own personal mole at Huckleberry’s side.”
Huckleberry has a mole. The fact that the Deep State had the influence to have a mole placed within Huckleberry’s inner circle was very concerning news to Anna.
“We’ll keep your idea in our back pocket in case we need it as a last-ditch effort. Hopefully, it won’t come to that,” Daniels stated.
“Alright, have it your way,” Patterson carelessly responded. He seemed so much less serious in demeanor compared to everybody else seated at the V-shaped table. Being a billionaire with was as much power as he had probably had something to do with it.
“Switching topics. What happened in Nova Scotia, Mr. Hellmuth? Tobias Blake is a liability needing tied off. However, the only casualties in the operation were the entire hit squad deployed to carry out what should’ve been a simple task.”
“Our contacts in Canada are still trying to figure out what happened themselves. All we know was that Blake had help.”
“How did you come to that conclusion?”
“The cleanup team recovered security footage from the surveillance system that was installed on sight. The suspect we believe to be a CIA specter, based on the design of the tac suit they were wearing.”
“Well, it obviously wasn’t one of ours,” Daniels stated.
Ours? That statement caught Anna’s attention. The CIA’s specter, or spook, program was dismantled not long ago. Was the Deep State recruiting retired specters, she wondered?
Donavan continued, “Taking into fact the suspect had a female and a slim figure, we believe the culprit to be …” Donavan paused. He looked uncomfortable and timid to finish his thought. “Annabelle Perkins.”
“Jesus, Greg, we all thought you were keeping an eye on Huckleberry’s little pet project,” Johnathan Ivey, the Senate minority leader, spoke, critical of his peer.
Donavan furiously pointed at Ivey. “Don’t give me crap over shit you know little to nothing about, John. Of course, I’ve been paying attention to it …”
“Not enough apparently.”
Donavan was about to make another retort but was cut off by Daniels. “Enough bickering, you two. You both sound like women with your pointless arguing.” Daniels looked toward Donavan. “Mr. Donavan, how do you believe Vigilance found out about Blake’s whereabouts?”
“Well, as I was about to say before I was cut off,” Donavan looked toward Ivey with discontent. “The only logical conclusion is that we have a mole in our midst.” Everyone at the table shuttered at the statement.
“Care to expand on that accusation, Mr. Donavan?”
“We went after Blake not long after your source, sir, gave us the intel that he was in Nova Scotia. But even after acting upon it immediately, we still got beat to the prize. Somebody within our group had to have tipped off Vigilance.”
“Any idea who?”
Donavan shook his head. “No idea, sir.”
Daniels slid back into his chair, looking up into the endless void of white. “That sure is unfortunate.”
“It is indeed, sir. What should we do about it?”
Daniels sat up straight again and looked toward his audience. “I’ll look into it myself. And with that said, we should’ve covered everything for tonight’s discussion. The next time we talk, everything will hopefully be more to our favor.” Everybody at the V-shaped table grinned before they reached for their faces to pull off their VR goggles and one by one disappear from the meeting room.
Anna disconnected herself from the server. Having seen everything there was to see and overhear.
“That was interesting to say the least,” Jack said over comms.
Anna was then quick to reply, “Yeah, especially since we now have a very important question to ask someone we know.”
Chapter 9
"What do you mean you don’t know him?” Jack interjected to Price, who he had ordered into the interrogation room to questi
on him for who his source responsible for giving up Blake’s location. It was way too much of a coincidence that Price’s source would discover Blake’s whereabouts at the same time the Deep State did. Either it was a humongous coincidence or Price’s source was the Deep State’s mole.
Price shrugged. “We’re hackers who communicate on the dark web. Not pals who converse on social media. Other than our online usernames and history of hacks, we like to brag about how we don’t know each other. We don’t even know each other’s real names. We’re still criminals, remember.”
Jack sighed. He used to work for the NSA like Price and understood the universe that hackers lived in. There was nothing about Price’s answer that made Jack think that he could’ve been lying. Price sat there in the metal chair with his feet kicked up on the metal table in front of him with the look of a punk teenager waiting impatiently to leave. Jack was just about to excuse him until he thought of something he figured he might as well ask.
“What was your guy’s username?”
Price took a sip from the can of soda he’d brought into the interrogation room before answering, “AK2032. I met him … or she, online only a few weeks ago.”
“And you didn’t find that suspicious in anyway?”
Price shrugged. “I’m always meeting new people online. What can I say? I’m just such a sociable guy,” Price said while he pushed his long greasy hair out of his eyes that he probably hadn’t washed for a few days at that point.
Jack rolled his eyes. “Of course.” He gestured at the door. “You’re excused. Get back to work.”
“Alright.” Price stood before grabbing his soda and exiting the brightly lit interrogation room. Jack followed him out. Anna stood alone inside the dark observation room, having witnessed the entire conversation. As soon as Price had left and Jack had joined her, she spoke up.
“You think he could’ve been lying?”
Jack shook his head. “I’ve worked at the NSA long enough to know that being anonymous to one another is typically how hackers operate. His story made sense. With that said I’ll still keep a close eye on him just in case.”
