Trojan

by Brandon Clark

  “Says the gun smuggler?” Josef snapped.

  Vlad grinned at him. “Do you need something?” he said. “I may even give you a discount. As long as you don’t get caught, of course.”

  Josef glared at him, and he started to reply when his phone buzzed three times in his pocket.

  “How would you do it?” Josef asked Gil instead of responding to Vlad.

  “Probably shoot a few proton torpedoes at the glowing orange holes,” he said. “Oh wait, that’s how you destroy a spaceship reactor . . .”

  “If I wanted to deal with idiots, I’d hang out in the football team’s locker room” Josef snarled. “If you don’t have anything that will help me, let me out. I need to do some recon.”

  Vlad reached into his jacket again, and Josef stiffened but relaxed as he saw it was just a phone.

  Vlad tapped the screen a few times, and Josef felt his phone vibrate again, only once this time. He pulled it out, watching Vlad suspiciously.

  He glanced at the notification below the table and couldn’t stop his jaw from dropping.

  “That’s half your payment,” Vlad said. “You’ll get the rest of it as long as you stop it from reaching its full productivity before October, and if it can’t operate a full capacity through the end of quarter one, you’ll get a bonus of the same amount.”

  “What the hell did they do to you?” Josef asked in disbelief.

  “Don’t worry about that,” Vlad said. “Just get it done.”

  Josef blinked several times to make sure he was reading the number right. Then he nodded.

  “I expect an update next week,” Vlad said as he stood.

  Gil joined him, and they walked out of the coffee shop.

  Josef watched them go, unsure how he felt about the latest development. Then he felt his phone buzz three times again.

  He tapped the notification and Haley answered immediately.

  “You get all that?” he said.

  “You alone?” she asked.

  “No, want me to hand the phone to my buddy Vlad?” Josef said. “Yes, I’m alone. You hear that?”

  “How much are they offering?”

  “Hundred grand in Cyber Coin,” he said.

  Haley whistled. “Can’t turn that down without looking suspicious,” she said.

  “How the hell am I going to shut down a car factory?”

  “You’re not,” Haley said. “We are.”

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Bonnie crept through the marsh, her boots squishing in the mud. She’d traded her sequin dress and perfume for more appropriate khaki fatigues and insect repellant, though the bugs still swarmed around her head.

  The grass was up to her shoulders, and she waded through carefully, trying not to break the fragile stalks. Stryker was several paces behind her, trying to follow the path of bent grass she left behind.

  Ahead, she could see ten identical buildings rising up in a neat row, roughly several hundred paces apart. The buildings were massive, stretching out in either direction until the ends grew hazy in the summer sun, which was moving quickly across the sky.

  A river rushed past to their right, and Bonnie knew that if they climbed up the bank to their left and crossed the narrow plateau, they’d find an identical river in an identical flood plain just beyond.

  “How far up do we have to go?” Stryker asked. Bonnie heard the slap of a palm on skin and glanced back to see him rubbing his neck.

  “We’ll know it when we see it.”

  “How reassuring,” he mumbled.

  Bonnie ignored him and kept walking. The sun set a few minutes later, and she clicked her flashlight on. Frogs and crickets sang through the night, and lights blinked on in the factory. They were close enough now to hear the whirl and clanging of machinery and metal, and as Bonnie trudged up the side of the floodplain bank, she saw a line of midsized hatchbacks of a variety of colors rolling down ramps at the end of the building in steady lines.

  The two knelt in the last bit of grass that shielded them from the guards on either side of the assembly line. The guards themselves were giant robots, nearly as tall as the buildings themselves. They were armed with swords that looked like windshield wiper blades and had four wheels on the bottom of each foot.

  “You gotta be kidding,” Stryker said. “Rogue didn’t happen to buy a magic password, did she?”

  “We’re doing this the hard way,” Bonnie said. She pulled a pair of binoculars from her pants pocket and started to scan the side of the factory.

  “What are you looking for?”

  “Anything that will help,” she said. “See what you can find.”

  Stryker produced his own pair of binoculars and lifted them to his eyes.

  The sun rose again, and Bonnie had to stop scanning to wipe sweat from her eyes several times throughout the day. Near dusk, she spotted a large pipe with a metal grate protruding from beneath the factory, half-submerged beneath the river water. A small dock with a rubber dingy stood next to the pipe. Two people in shorts, loosely buttoned shirts, and white lab coats sat on the dock, dipping test tubes into the water and swirling them into the air.

  Haley watched for a moment, and one of the scientists stood and picked up a tray of test tubes. Walking to the dingy, he set them carefully in a container at the back, then untied the boat and cast off.

  The other man also stood and walked toward the metal pipe. When he got close, a door Bonnie hadn’t seen spiraled open, and he walked through.

  Bonnie’s eyes darted back to the boat, which was picking up speed and starting to weave through the tall grass. She reached out without taking her eyes off the boat.

  “Stryker?”

  He placed something substantial in her hand. She brought it forward and flicked the flare gun’s safety. Then she took careful aim and pulled the trigger.

  The yellow-white flare raced over the marsh and struck the rubber boat’s starboard side. It bounced straight up and then exploded in a cloud of a thousand fireflies. The blinking lights formed letters and numbers but continued moving as the dingy raced through the swamp.

  Bonnie tapped her chin thoughtfully, watching the greenish-yellow letters float down the river.

  “What was that?” Stryker said.

  “Seems that Corvo Motors is getting a third party to monitor their environmental impact,” Bonnie said. She glanced back at Stryker. “And how much you want to bet they don’t have giant robots guarding their network?”

  Bonnie eased the small dinghy’s throttle back as they approached the dock, and her lab coat, which had been flapping in the wind behind her, fell back into place. Stryker stood with the docking line in hand, ready to jump out and tie them off.

  The hardest part of breaking into the environmental science company had been not laughing at how little they’d had to do. One default password and a three year-old unpatched vulnerability, and they’d had full administrative access. Creating the appropriate covers and renting a boat had been simpler than skipping rocks after that.

  Stryker jumped onto the dock and pulled them close. As he did, the porthole in the pipe spiraled open like a camera’s aperture, and another man in a lab coat walked through.

  “Who are you?”

  Stryker and Bonnie held up their fake badges for the man to inspect. He adjusted his spectacles and peered down at the plastic cards.

  “We’re not supposed to get another inspection three days.”

  “That’s why they call it a ‘surprise’ inspection,” Stryker said.

  Bonnie shot him a look, and he fell silent.

  “There was an error with the last batch of data you sent over,” she said. “We’re just trying to make sure that everything is still checking out.”

  The man let out an exasperated sigh.

  “Wait here,” he said. “I’ll get it for you.”

  He reached into the pocket of his lab coat and produced a stack of test tubes and another box. Bending down, he scooped the water into the tubes and stacked them n
eatly in the box, which he handed to Stryker.

  Haley pulled out a fancy looking gizmo that looked like a hypodermic needle and an iPad had an affair and stuck it down into one of the tubes.

  The screen flashed red, just like she’d modified the code to do, and she tried another, which got the same result.

  She made a show of frowning and turning the screen so Stryker could see. He also frowned and shook his head.

  “I was afraid of this,” she said. “Looks like you’re dropping high levels of arsenic into the river.”

  “That’s not possible,” the man said, his eyes suddenly wide. “We just performed an internal review last week, and everything reported normal.”

  “I want to believe you,” Bonnie said. “But that’s not what they data you’re giving us is saying. We’ll need to report this up the chain.”

  “Wait,” the man held up a hand. “There’s no way this is accurate. We’d have seen spikes on our equipment.”

  “I don’t know what to tell you,” Bonnie said. “You’re either dumping chemicals into the marsh, or your data is corrupted.”

  The man’s eyes lit up, and he nodded vigorously.

  “That must be it,” he said. “Something got changed on our sensors. It must be it. I’ll reset the configurations myself and—”

  “Forgive me,” Bonnie said. “But you can’t do that.”

  The man blinked several times, his mouth opening and closing several times.

  “Conflict of interest,” Bonnie continued. “You can’t reset the devices yourself if we have to rely on them. Anything happens . . .” She made a cutting motion across her throat.

  “You don’t have access to the monitors,” he said.

  “Well you either need to give us access, or we have to report this.”

  The man looked back at the pipe for a moment, then nodded. “Follow me.”

  He walked back down the dock, and the door opened as he approached.

  Bonnie grabbed Stryker’s shoulder and leaned down, so her mouth was close to his ear.

  “When we get in, I need you to find a backdoor,” she whispered.

  “This is my mission,” he said. “You find the back door, and I’ll disable the plant.”

  “We don’t know what we’re going to find,” she said. “If you trigger something before we get a second way in, we could get locked out with nothing.”

  “Or I could just go ahead and knock this out, so we don’t need to come back.”

  “Don’t blow your load on the first day,” she said. “We have time to do this right.”

  He glared at her, but then nodded.

  Bonnie turned back to the tech in the lab coat, who was waiting for them just inside the pipe. She gave Stryker a gentle nudge, and together they joined the other man.

  There was a step down into the pipe, and they splashed into a steady flow of brown sludge that smelled like bleach and gasoline. Bonnie tried to forget what kinds of chemical byproducts were produced during the manufacturing process and wondered how long it would take for the sludge to eat through her rubber boots. The inside of the pipe was lit by a line of LED strips that bisected the ceiling. The pipe was tall enough that they could stand without hunching over, but Clyde would have had to weave to avoid hitting the light strips.

  The lab tech started off without waiting for them to follow. He led them through a maze of twisting pipes and through several airlock doors with small grates at the bottom that allowed the brown sludge to continue flowing, though by the time they got to the second door it was barely a trickle.

  They reached a door, and the tech waved a badge over a reader at its side. The door slid open with a hiss. The tech stepped through and into a large factory. Bonnie’s eyes went wide as they walked onto the plant floor.

  Huge machines hung from the ceiling like robot spiders, their double-jointed arms twisting in impossible directions. Above each one was a giant vat of orange liquid, and as the arms moved with surgical precision, sometimes only avoiding a collision by inches, they squirted small streams of the orange fluid into smaller machines spread across the floor. Some of the devices had satellite dishes pointed up through the windows high above the cement floor, while others churned pistons and spat out the engine parts with a tag. These were rolled off the end of a conveyor and dropped into the bed of pickup trucks the size of Jacob’s fire engines, which then zipped away through small garage doors the size of doggy doors. Each truck left a thin line of brown goo in its wake, which slowly crept toward the door they had just come through.

  In the center of the room, there was another building that appeared to be a scale model of the one they currently stood in. Multiple spider arms hovered over the building, and occasionally one would jab a needle-like arm through the metal roof. Miniature cars rolled down the ramp in front of the factory and marched on like a line of ants to other machines on the factory floor.

  “The calibration units are this way,” the tech said, walking down the right-hand wall.

  Bonnie looked at Stryker, then at the small line of trucks. He cocked his head, and she rolled her eyes. She mimed opening a door and then driving a truck.

  He looked at the line for a few seconds before understanding dawned on his face. He nodded once more to Bonnie, then slinked away from the tech, who had stopped in front of a machine that looked like Dr. Frankenstein’s wet dream.

  Clear tubes carried neon-colored liquids, most of them a shade of hideously bright orange, in and out of the metal casing. Beakers bubbled and steamed on top, and thin arms swept measuring devices through the rising chemical steam or dipped compact instruments into the orange gunk. Lights flashed across the front casing. Most were green, but a few were yellow. None were red.

  “We use the latest file-integrity monitoring tools to ensure our configurations are not modified,” he said. “The last change was logged four weeks ago at three-oh-eight a.m. It was a routine patch update.”

  Bonnie ignored him and walked around the edge of the machine, stepping over the pipes that carried the liquid to the monstrosity.

  “Everything appears in order,” she said. “Which must mean that you’re actually dumping the chemicals were concerned about . . .”

  The man’s jaw clenched. “We follow every precaution required by the state and federal government,” he said. “We couldn’t possibly have—”

  “I just want to double check,” she said. “I’ll run a few tests, and if everything checks out, then I’ll be out of your hair. It may have just been an error on our end.”

  “Of course it’s an error on your end,” he snapped. “I could have told you that from the beginning.”

  “It’s my job to do the due diligence,” Bonnie replied. “Besides, if everything is in order, what are you worried we’ll find?”

  The man opened his mouth but apparently thought better of whatever he was going to say and closed it quickly.

  “Let me do my check, and we’ll head out,” Bonnie said. “Shouldn’t take long.”

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Stryker watched Bonnie go and suppressed the urge to give her back the finger. Taking a deep breath, he crossed the floor to the machine with the engine parts and watched for several seconds as the metal widgets rolled off the line.

  He knelt and lifted one of the trucks as it started to roll away.

  The tiny horn blared, and the tires spun futility as he held it by the bumpers. The part in the bed looked like a radiator, but he couldn’t be sure, since he hadn’t spent as much time working in the junkyard as Miguel had wanted.

  Instead, he looked at the small tag attached to the tiny component. There was an IP address, along with a customer name and service record identifier.

  Stryker adjusted his grip so he could hold it with one hand, then fished a pocket knife out of his trousers. He wedged the tip of the blade between the front gate and the main body of the radiator and twisted so the grate popped off. Without moving his hand holding the truck, he replaced the knife in his
pocket.

  In its place, he held up a tube full of clear liquid. Floating in the center was a twisting worm with sinister looking hooks at its head and tail. Or tail and head. Stryker wasn’t sure which way was which.

  He popped the cork with his thumb and carefully poured the contents over the radiator. The liquid sizzled as it touched the metal, and the bug slithered out and landed on top of the engine part with a small splash. Some of the liquid splattered over Stryker’s hand, and he winced as it burned his skin but managed to hold the truck steady.

  The worm dug its hooks into the interior of the part and curled its body, so it was entirely inside the rectangular compartment.

  Stryker took his knife out again and pushed the front gate up until it clicked back into place. He held the truck up to his eye level to examine the radiator, but he couldn’t see any sign of the worm inside the part.

  He set the truck back on the cement. The tires spun and screeched, tiny blue, acrid smoke rising from the back two before the truck lurched forward and blasted off toward the factory wall. It wobbled slightly as it curled around a metal support for another conveyor due to the worm’s extra weight but righted itself and sped through the garage door.

  Stryker tapped his watch, and a holographic display popped up in front of his face. It showed a satellite view of the factory and the highways that connected it to other, smaller buildings. A red dot raced down one of the roads, swerving slightly to avoid other traffic, and disappeared into one of the connected buildings a few seconds later.

  Stryker waited, chewing his bottom lip.

  Then the whole building flashed red, and a white logo with the worm’s silhouette appeared on top of it.

  Stryker grinned, then glanced at the clock in the lower right-hand side of the hologram’s display.

  He looked over at Bonnie, who was still fooling with the lab tech and the giant machine he’d led her too. She seemed focused on fiddling with one of the panels on the device.

  He looked back at the scaled factory in the middle of the floor. With one last glance to make sure Bonnie was still preoccupied, he strode to the model.