by Blaze Ward
Doing crazy, impossible stunts like jumping over barbed wire fences and breaking into buildings, because that fuse really was burning.
Handsome had stopped at the top of the stairs, next to a metal door that swung out onto the landing. Alicia joined him, pointing her hand scanner at the frame.
Fire code said this was a demising wall that was at least fire resistant to a certain degree. Outside door hadn’t had any alarms on it that she’d been able to see.
Something caught her eye.
There we go. Aha.
She pulled out a teeny flash light and shined it on a little box sticking out from the top of the door, and a matching one on the frame itself.
“Near field inducer,” she murmured to Handsome, expecting him to have her hack it.
To her surprise, the man pulled a strange device from one of his pockets and reached up to put it on the frame side, flipping a tiny switch as he pulled a part off and attached it to the door side.
“Signal booster,” Handsome smiled at the look on her face. “Nigel’s hobby is cracking commercial security systems and then building the tiniest devices he can to defeat them.”
“What’s it do?”
“Picks up the signal from the alarm system and runs it through the wire when the door is open, so the frame thinks the door is still almost touching,” Handsome grinned.
“Huh.”
Alicia did computer security and cryptography. Apparently she’d missed out an entire field of physical security that cowboys dealt with regularly.
She made a note to take few classes when she got back. And maybe meet this Nigel Phipps dude that Handsome and Esme seemed to hold in such awe.
Alicia stepped back down onto the steps. Handsome pulled the door open and had his gun ready to kill people, but there was nobody visible.
And no sudden transmission of an alarm on her scanner.
She followed the armed killer into a hallway like an office building. Every third light in the ceiling was on, so it was brighter in here. Esme trailed a bit, but Alicia was close behind Handsome in case he needed her help.
None of the doors were marked, but the first one was locked. There was a little plate at waist level where you could put your security fob and the system would unlock the door for you.
She watched Handsome pull out a screwdriver and pop the face off in a motion so smooth it had to be practiced. Inside, the usual electronic guts of a commercial system.
Rather than offer to help, she watched, wondering just how good the cowboys were at something like this. Wasn’t a hardened system, like she was expecting. Just leads, relays, and chips connecting on a board.
Handsome stuck the screwdriver tip into the machine and turned a slot like a flathead screw. The system chirped politely and the man nodded.
“It’s open,” he said to her.
Alicia turned the knob a little way, but it opened freely.
She entered to find herself in a control room of some sort, but it was mostly dark.
Screens and a variety of controls did esoteric things. Most looked like physical controls, rather than anything computerized.
Handsome and Esme followed her in before she could sort it all out.
“This is where the men sit when they control the range,” Handsome explained. “Lot of remote turrets, manikins that can pop out, or projections that can change depending on the controller.”
“Is what you want here?” Esme asked the man.
“No, but I figure all the computer systems will probably be close to each other, and the fancy stuff is at the far end of the hallway,” he shrugged. “Little people would be down here.”
“What are we looking for?” Alicia asked, tearing her eyes away from the boards.
“Server room,” Handsome replied, gesturing to another door at the back. “Maybe through there.”
She followed him over, but this door wasn’t even locked. No security. No alarms.
Nothing.
Which made a twisted, lazy kind of sense. The control room was locked, so you didn’t need to lock the closet, did you?
He opened it and Alicia found herself in nirvana.
At least a noisy, freaking cold version of it.
Six server racks that reminded her of upright black coffins, the way the doors were closed. The sound of the fans told her everything she needed to know. The refrigeration system was just icing on the donut, as it were.
Esme stepped close now, as Handsome moved back and out of the way, almost behind the door, but at least not underfoot.
Alicia wasn’t sure she was ready to deal with a male agent who knew when to just shut up and let her work. Too many of the men, even down in Crypto, liked to show off their brains, even when they didn’t have any.
Handsome Rob just shut up and got out of her way.
She could get used to this sort of thing.
“Assuming it’s all secured at some level, what’s the best way to access the data we need to prove our case one way or the other?” Esme asked, suddenly sounding like the former Director of Data Analysis, instead of a lowly field agent.
Dillon’s peer, in more ways than one.
“Fast way is to sidestep the operating system entirely and put my tools directly against the datacore,” Alicia replied, pulling her messenger bag around front where she could get at her toys, like Handsome had had all his.
Showtime.
Esme holstered her pistol and moved opposite Handsome. Not back as far, but still out of her way and letting her think.
Alicia began to talk out loud. Partly showing off, partly to walk herself through everything. It fixed everything in her head better when she did it this way, however much it annoyed her coworkers. And she had to talk louder now, because this many fans and the HVAC system put out some noise.
“Okay, main controller,” she said as she opened the closest case front and looked in. “Where you want to work to access the others, because you’re lazy and predictable.”
Alicia moved to the next one, cracking it and looking inside.
“Machine controllers, maybe?” she continued, thinking about the range Handsome had described. She turned to look at him and got enough of a nod.
All guesswork for now.
Third case on this side looked like the second one, so she presumed either a backup system or more controllers. Alicia changed sides and started at the front again.
Number four looked boring.
“Ah, house alarm systems controller,” she announced. “Might need to crack that later and take a look at some things, but not yet.”
She pulled open the face plate of the next coffin.
“Here we go,” Alicia felt her face break into a smile.
Number five, and when she leaned over to look six was identical, was just a stack of datacores with a single controller unit at the top. Serious amount of memory storage here from the numbers she was reading on the front.
Ones and zeros didn’t take up much space, but somebody had crammed this thing more than half full of something, reading the basic health monitor screen on the front designed to let someone see what they needed without accessing the system itself.
If she had more time, she might just steal the backup in six, but it probably weighed two hundred pounds by the time you disconnected the controllers and moved chasses around.
Problem: she didn’t have enough storage space with her to do more than sample everything here. She had grabbed what she thought was enough for a small business, but this Tanaka fellow could run an interstellar bank from here.
Looking at how much data he had accumulated, he might have been running one for more than a decade, too.
Where would I put it all? Gotta have disaster recovery systems in place, since I have both a primary and a backup right here where a fire could take them out.
Ah. There. Of course. Good, old-fashioned non-volatile storage media. What they called tape, even though it wasn’t. Some words stuck, long past their original technology.
Alicia smiled as she saw the tape recorder just below the main controller. Better, there was a cartridge in it right now. Not running, so either it had completed tonight’s run, or not started. Worst worst, she had yesterday’s backups in a stable media, and not just a random incremental.
Alicia looked around and found a shelf she’d missed earlier, above Esme’s head. It had an open box of cartridges, and a pair sitting off to one side, scrawled in marker with a sloppy hand as she got close.
“Bingo,” Alicia announced, grabbing them and turning them over. “Last month’s nightly full backup, probably compressed down tight, and a weekly backup. Guessing they move things off-site to a salt mine or something, but keep one here in case the machines break.”
“Translate, please?” Esme asked, her eyes crossing a little.
“His whole business is probably right here,” Alicia smiled and showed Esme both cartridges before slipping them into her bag. “Like, everything we needed to know.”
“Everything?” Handsome spoke up now.
“Won’t know until I can unspool it somewhere and start chopping out the dross,” Alicia replied. “But yeah, probably enough evidence. We looking for anything in particular?”
“Arms shipments to Ramsey, or other Lincolnshire systems,” Esme said. “Find me those and we’ve made our case, one way or the other.”
“Hmmmm,” Alicia grimaced. “That’s on the datacore. Sounds like I need to get inside it and poke around. Probably fifteen minutes, unless he’s got some freakishly complex military crypto around it.”
“Go to work,” Esme ordered her.
Alicia pulled out her better computer, the one that looked like a large laptop rather than just a reading tablet. An interface wire came from another pouch and got plugged in to her target machine.
The front not having what she wanted, Alicia worked her way around the back of the cabinet, cursing inside her head as the tiny space squished her breasts, until she found the plug she wanted and got her cable attached.
Now the datacore had two masters, just like every administrative system allowed.
She worked her way back out and thought dark thoughts about fewer desserts in her future as she got free and knelt before the tower like a supplicant priestess getting ready to call down the fury of the Goddess on these stupid punks.
31
Mac watched Alicia work, listening to the grumbles mostly by watching the way her jaw moved and the other body language. The woman was a desk agent, not a field person, but hadn’t let it slow her down.
Maybe she’d work out after all.
Mac could see talking to Miguel about starting her own version of Rob’s famous Can’t Shoot Straight Gang when she got back. That group had been built around Jorge Royo as a loud, public figure that distracted everyone. Roxy Omdahl pretending to be Mrs. Jones, who then distracted with beauty and was utterly deadly with a gun. Longbow as a down-on-his-luck musician who had been famous once and was now reduced to doing soundtracks, although a comeback was apparently under way. Nigel Phipps, formerly of Aquitaine’s Fourth Saxon Legion, a true cowboy who was equal parts boffin and redneck under that disarming cowboy hat he wore whenever he could.
Handsome Rob, Assassin. Alicia Sepeda, electronic breaking and entering. Esmeralda MacTavish, team lead, who could disarm you with long-since-faded fame as a fashion model, especially if she kept the cover of a rich widow traveling.
Yes, Miguel might go for it. Mac wasn’t sure what other specialties she needed, but she had a start.
She glanced over at Handsome, standing silently back behind the open door and watching serenely as Alicia convinced Tanaka’s computer datacores to tell her everything she wanted to know.
Alicia muttered something and sat up straight. Mac turned to see what it was. Handsome even perked up.
“I’ve got something here,” Alicia said over the noise of the fans.
Mac approached, moving around behind so she could see the screen. This had been her case, so she knew it better than probably anyone, but this was just a set of files listed.
“What am I seeing?” she asked.
“A whole set of files and sub-files in a top-level folder marked Lonelyman,” Alicia said, her voice brimming over with excitement.
“That is rather unfortunate, young lady,” a voice announced suddenly.
32
Rob watched as the ladies got to work. Mac’s case. Alicia’s expertise.
He was just the hired gun on this one, which was actually kind of fun, when you got right down to it.
“What am I seeing?” Mac was leaned over in such a way that Rob had a hard time not ogling her bottom.
“A whole set of files and sub-files in a top-level folder marked Lonelyman,” the lady from Crypto replied in a hungry voice.
“That is rather unfortunate, young lady,” a voice announced suddenly over the sound of the fans and blowers.
Rob froze. Dead still. The man hadn’t come far into the room, so the door was exactly between them. He wondered if Leonard Kim even realized that there was a third person in here. Fourth now, with him.
Mac spun around, but there was presumably a man standing in the door with a pistol pointed at her, so she didn’t try to shoot him. Or draw fire.
She wasn’t wearing a mask of any kind, beyond having stripped off all her makeup and tying her hair back. Still, it made her look different.
“Mrs. Morgan?” Leonard evinced shock.
So, not different enough.
“What are you doing here?” another voice intruded.
Lower. Angrier, as one might expect. Older.
Eugen Tanaka sounded like a grumpy, old man who had been dragged out of bed in the middle of the night.
Apparently, Rob had missed an alarm somewhere. He would assume him. Alicia had done everything he had asked her to, and done it well, so any mistakes tonight had been his.
Thank the Creator that neither woman glanced at him right now. Rob figured he had about three seconds before everything blew up in their faces.
Fortunately, he had been trained in this sort of thing by Jorge Royo.
Rob pulled one of the stun grenades from his pocket as Mac carefully bent down and set her pistol on the carpet.
Never drop a live pulse pistol where it might jar a shot off.
“You wouldn’t believe me, Tanaka,” Mac said loudly, standing slowly upright and raising her hands.
Hopefully, it was distracting both men.
“Both of you,” Leonard barked, so Alicia set her computer down and did the same.
Rob silently holstered his pistol and braced his free hand against the wall.
He thumbed the grenade live and reached over the door itself, tossing the thing into the other room softly.
Then he pushed off the wall with a hand and a foot and jammed Leonard Kim into the door frame hard.
The man started to struggle and then the grenade went off.
Rob only caught a hint of the blast, so hopefully the huge man had absorbed most of it himself.
Stun grenades at that range can scorch, but don’t generally start fires. Not that Rob minded right now.
Rob ripped the door back, stepping out of the way and drawing his pistol in one motion.
Leonard Kim was going to have one hell of a hangover when he woke up. Mel the mercenary was out cold from the blast.
Tanaka was gone.
The outside door was just bouncing back from where someone had burst through it.
“Get the evidence!” Rob yelled over his shoulder as he started chasing.
Hopefully, there weren’t any more mercs awake right now, but he went through the door to the control room low and in a forward roll anyway.
A shot passed over his head and Rob fired on movement. A class four pulse pistol was an ugly weapon at this range, but Rob had decided to bring violence tonight rather than the heavy stunner. There had always been a chance that they’d blow everything, and the stunner had a shorter range.
“One down in the hallway!” Rob yelled, pivoting to make sure nobody was about to shoot him in the back. “Giving chase.”
It was quiet out here. Silent as a tomb. Hopefully someone else’s.
Rob heard footsteps racing away from him. Sounded like Tanaka going down the same stairwell Rob had come up earlier.
Rob started after him. It wasn’t going to be enough to take the man’s organization down. Eugen Tanaka had to go down with it.
Otherwise, he would probably rise from the grave tomorrow and start all over again.
Rob took off after the man. The women were competent to handle the rest. Hopefully, they would get everything they needed and then retreat to the truck or at least someplace safe.
Actually, Rob wondered how long he had until law enforcement arrived. Or if Tanaka trusted them enough to bring them in.
Even crooked cops would be trouble.
He kicked open the door but didn’t immediately stick his head out. No fire, so he ran, bouncing off the door and letting the momentum carry him down.
Tanaka was just turning a corner ahead of him as Rob started down the stairs.
Man should have gone out that emergency exit. At least that would give him a head start. Inside, he was back in the tactical range. The only thing the man could probably do now would be to escape long enough for cops to save him.
If he hadn’t called for them by now, that was probably next on his list.
Rob had thirty years on the man, and was in better shape. Tanaka had the look of a guy that worked out, but just to stay in shape, rather than training in movement and fighting on a daily basis.
Rabbit, running from the dogs.
Rob hit the bottom of the stairs, turned enough to race a little up the wall next to the door, and let that cushion and push him off the other direction.
He got to the corner low and aiming.
Tanaka had ducked into the next alley and fired this way. Low and away, the shot blew a chunk of pavement up at Rob’s feet. His own shot was hurried and slammed into the wall above Tanaka’s head.
