Jack Be Nimble: The Crystal Falcon Book 3

by Ben English

  “Right. Well, that we know of.”

  Jack stood and circled the table. Eyes on the map. Alonzo noticed he still held the glass bird; he began to roll it back and forth across his fingers and palm.

  “Do you suppose the guardhouse in Cuba communicates with the main building the same as in Corvallis?”

  “The main line will be buried, and they’ll have a wireless—oh, I get it.” Steve made a rude sound. “They’ll have their own server physically running at the guardhouse.”

  “Do your thing.” Jack muted the mike. “Al, we’re going to need a bigger distraction. What’s Vern got with him up on the ridge? Anything that can make a big noise over the PicoMorph target?”

  Alonzo nodded. This was the first big mission for the Cuban forces since their training, and he was willing to bet they wouldn’t lose an opportunity to haul out all their new fancy hardware. He knew just the thing.

  *

  Nicole eased up on the accelerator as they rounded the driveway toward PicoMorph, listening intently to Jack’s instructions. No need to glance over at Allison, the other woman was receiving the same audio. Besides, Nicole didn’t want to think about what else the major was doing; she’d already taken out three grenades and placed them on the floorboard next to her gun. She then dropped their map at her feet and covered everything with a beach blanket.

  At least one of them was a front-line operator. And their part of the plan hadn’t changed significantly, thank God. “The halogen flashlight? Of course we brought it. It’s on the list. We brought everything on the list.” Her voice sounded shrill. She forced it down half an octave. “What do we do if they search the car? Why does Steve need to use my phone? Will I have communications?” She shouldn’t be this nervous.

  Steve spoke quickly. “I’m going to use your phone to feel out the wireless network in the guard shack.” He sighed. “I’ll ride your communications signal off Allison’s phone. Take me a sec to set that up. Honestly, Jack, I really need an intern or something. Aren’t there any Stanford freshmen we can blackmail into joining the team?”

  “We make it through tonight, I’ll look into it,” said Nicole.

  “Nicole,” said Jack. “If you don’t want to do this—”

  “No, Jack, I get it. You need us at the gate. They own the bottle, but we hold the cork.”

  Alonzo spoke up. “Woman after my own heart.”

  The guardhouse loomed ahead, largish, at least two rooms, with the requisite expanse of tough-looking glass fronting the road and a single entrance outside the fence. A pair of not-so-requisite Kentucky farm boys in uniform looked out, waited for them to stop. Not that there was much choice. The gate consisted of a double row of fencing, decoratively festooned with all sorts of warning signs in English and Spanish.

  No jungle, no grass, no green of any kind grew within fifty feet of the gate. She wondered how Ian was going to get close enough to get inside. Showtime. Nicole permitted herself a full five seconds of giddy fear, counting each second as the anxiety drained away. As it mostly drained away.

  What would Jack do if he were this scared? she thought. Easy: build the nervousness into her character.

  “Hi!” she said brightly to the young guard. “Is this the road to the Cantillo winery?” Didn’t have to work at all to build the bubble into her voice.

  *

  “How is he getting us video from PicoMorph?” Alonzo asked, watching the screen. “I thought Steve couldn’t get into their system?”

  The video was jumpy at first, then increasingly smooth. They had views of multiple angles of the guardhouse, including an over-the-shoulder shot of the interior guardroom itself, so the watchers could themselves be watched. By whom?

  These people were paranoid.

  “He’s using the wireless radio in Nicole’s phone to hack the local network in the guardhouse. I bet it’s a temporary fix.” Jack activated his mike. “Groucho, thanks for the eyes on the ground. Can you launch a full denial-of-service attack against the main server from here?”

  “Against this system? From a phone, are you crazy? That’s pureplay science fiction. Ask me again in a year or two.” Steve was finishing up his sandwich. “Until we physically tie into a hard line, we don’t have enough bandwidth. I can’t even scrub the video.”

  *

  Ian raced along the perimeter as near the fence as he dared, not bothering to plunge back into the foliage when he drew within sight of the gatehouse. Nicole and Allison were already there, waiving a map at the two guards. Both the uniformed men had their eyes on the women, and Ian slowed only slightly as he approached. Thankfully the ground was baked solid, and there was no grass to disturb.

  Even so, the windows were wide and illuminated both within and without, giving the guards one hundred and eighty degrees of bright visibility; all either of them had to do was turn his head slightly.

  Ian angled his body and slid into a crouch, still moving. He was more than halfway to the building when he saw the surveillance camera.

  “Okay everybody,” said Steve, “The network in the guard house is just what we expected. There’s definitely a server inside, just get to it, Ian.”

  Both of the guards were standing now, one had crossed in front of the car to get a better look at Allison’s map. The other stood in the doorway, leaning out to get a better angle of view into the car. His hand rested next to an open rifle cabinet.

  “Security cam,” whispered Ian, forcing himself to breath quietly despite his run. “Surveillance on the entrance.” On the other side of the glass, the video monitor shifted feeds, and Ian clearly saw the outside of the building and himself, facing away from the camera.

  He started to cringe involuntarily, then froze. Ian willed the guard to keep looking towards the car. Tried to believe.

  *

  “This has just been the best vacation,” Allison gushed. “We had to get out of New York, the city is terrible this time of year—”

  “So many tourists,” said Nicole.

  “—we just had to see the island for ourselves. You know, before it becomes overrun with tourists.” She patted the guard’s arm. “Now, you can’t tell me this is the Cantillo Winery, what with all these fences and guns.”

  “No, ma’am, you’ve taken a wrong turn. You should go back to the main road.”

  Ian crouched at the edge of the guard house. The second guard still stood in the doorway.

  “But we’re on the main road,” Nicole said. “We followed the directions from the hotel all the way. Here, look.” She fluttered the map toward the guard in the doorway. He took it, while the man on the other side of the car continued to watch Allison appreciatively. She nattered on.

  Nicole almost felt sorry for them. According to their HR files, the guards were brought to the island and basically sequestered for the duration of their tour. No dating, no time off for the span of the mission. Terrible thing to do to a young man.

  She knew why Jack had asked the two of them to work the gate approach. Jack understood the universal law that a man will reshuffle his priorities to look at whatever woman is in his immediate vicinity.

  It took the guard a full thirty seconds to realize she had handed him a map of the other side of the island, and he broke the news as gently as he could.

  “Is that so? Oh, I gave you the wrong one, I’m so sorry.” To Allison, she said, “Look around for the other map, didn’t we have it out just a minute ago?” Nicole dug around in the glove compartment long enough to come up with the flashlight, which she turned on and directed around at the cushions and her feet, making sure to shine it as long as she could in the faces of both young men. Eventually she rested it against the steering wheel while she leaned forward and felt under the seat. The beam of light just happened to be pointing overhead, full into the security camera.

  *

  His eyes on the security monitor, Ian saw the picture wash out as soon as Nicole’s flashlight shone at the camera. Thank God for halogen, he thought. The camera would b
e useless as long as she kept the light on it.

  He began to wonder exactly how they were going to deal with the second guard in the doorway, when Allison made a noise and half-stood. Turning, she braced her hips against the seat and began to rummage through the pile of towels and bags in the backseat. She leaned as far over as physics would allow.

  The guard immediately left the doorway to get a better look, and Ian slipped right in behind him.

  He ignored the bank of controls and monitors, and made straightaway for the locked door at the back of the small room.

  Jack spoke in his ear. “We see you. There’s a security camera at your three o’clock; if you hunker down you’ll be outside the guards’ field of vision.”

  A security camera inside the gatehouse? Damn, but these folks were paranoid. Ian trusted the voice, and moved accordingly, mindful of his exposed back. Any second now, one of the guards could decide to return to the nice, brightly-lit control room.

  “Great, now: the door to the server room is locked and alarmed. Groucho has defeated the electronic alarm, there’s just a single door lock between you and the server. Nothing your LockAid gun can’t handle.”

  He reached for his LockAid gun, and realized it was in his vest, back in the brush with all the rest of his equipment. Resisted the urge to plant the heel of his hand against his forehead, and took a good solid look at the lock.

  Right, then. Lock picks it was.

  The Strine was new to the market, a top-of-the-line interior door lock popular with American contractors working overseas. Ian had never heard of a burglarproof lock, but he had yet to work on a Strine.

  Would be nice to stick one in a vice and cut it in half with a diamond saw blade. Probably ruin three blades in the process, but it would be worth it. Locks are easy to pick once you see how the guts all fit together.

  Brad had probably done just that. Ian wondered how quickly Steve could set up a con-call with Brad’s hospital in England.

  Cold air eddied around his knees where they touched the floor, and the surface of the door was cool. There was an air conditioning unit running in the next room.

  Ian resisted the urge to turn around and check on the guards’ positions. Withdrew his picks and got to work.

  The kids outside the guard shack sounded relaxed, even cheery, but he couldn’t be sure. The voices were low, conversational. Pleasant, even. He supposed that was a good sign. Between the idling car engine and the ambient hum of the electronics, he couldn’t make out more than a word here and there. Not enough to tell when their attention was turning toward the guard shack, but more than enough to distract him.

  He probed gently with the pick, but couldn’t find a pin. Couldn’t even find the first pin. Ian swore. He selected another pick and went to work again on the lock. Time crawled and lurched at the same time, and Ian kept expecting to feel a gun barrel on the back of his neck.

  “What’s happening?” Jack asked. Calmly, from a thousand miles away and thirty thousand feet up.

  “None of my picks are the right size.”

  “What kind of lock is it?” asked Alonzo.

  “A Strine. A new model. Never seen it before.”

  “Not a problem,” answered Jack. “Here’s what you need to do. You need to file your Number Three down about a millimeter, and taper the end to a tight point. Do you have a file in your kit?”

  He did. Quickly as he could, Ian filed the Number Three according to Jack’s instructions. Outside, someone laughed. Men tended to laugh at most anything a pretty girl said.

  Jack took a drink of something. Still cool, so calm he was almost bland. “The cylinder will turn counterclockwise. Can you feel it?”

  Ian inserted the torsion wrench into the lower portion of the lock. Sure enough. Applied enough tension to reveal the pins. Gingerly probed with the sharpened Number Three.

  The first pin aligned almost immediately, surprise-surprise. Ian continued to manipulate the tools, marveling at the steadiness of his own hands. The lock gave the tiniest bit.

  “I’m past the first two pins,” he announced.

  “You missed your calling,” said Jack. “Should’ve been a jewel thief.”

  “Yeah, well. My mom wanted me to be a chiropractor.” And he was stuck. Where was the last pin? He was doing everything right, easing his way through the lock’s interior, but nothing. Any moment now he should feel the pick twitch and the lock rotate open. Any moment.

  A tiny reservoir of sweat pooled at the corner of his eye. Any moment now.

  *

  With a proud flourish, Allison produced the correct map. Rather than immediately handing it over to either of the young men, she leaned over the windshield towards them and spread it across the hood. Upside down from the guard’s perspective, of course. Nicole had to admire her style. She positioned the map so both guards would keep their backs to the guardhouse and their heads close to the idling engine. She hoped the noise would be enough to cover whatever nonsense Ian was pursuing with the lock.

  She mimicked Allison, leaning over the windshield and giving the guards an additional reason or two to direct their attention away from the guardhouse.

  “Hey,” when she had their attention. “You want to play the expat game? I’ll bet we can guess where you’re from back in the States before you can guess where we’re from?”

  “That sounds alright,” said the first, eyeing her shrewdly. He thought she’d forgotten that Allison already mentioned New York. Yup, let the boy believe he’s smarter. Was it really this easy? Nicole could keep this sort of thing up for hours.

  Of course he was from Ohio. Probably from Marietta and Waterford, at the southeastern corner of the state. She’d picked it from his voice, in the sound of his ‘o’s and ‘r’s.

  Jack’s voice whispered in her ear. “Nice hack.” From somewhere completely different, yet still in the same ear, Steve made a derisive sound. She smiled, but understood: social engineering and hacking really were two different things. Techno hackers like Steve tended to look down on those who mostly "hack" through social engineering rather than understanding a tech system to exploit its technological holes and weak points.

  She didn’t care. To her, they were both parts of the same game.

  Nicole beamed at the young guard, and he lowered his gun even further. “What do we get if we win?” he asked.

  *

  Ian’s didn’t realize he was holding his breath until it exploded from him, and he nearly lost his grip on the pick when the last pin sprang to the shear line. “Alright,” was all he said as he eased himself through the door. He wondered how many years of his life he left there on the floor with that damn lock.

  The room was simple, windowless, with steel boxes set in the wall for a telephone junction, a nearly-empty server rack that looked more like a guillotine, and a workstation. The largest thing in the room was a man-sized air conditioning unit, blasting its arctic best.

  Ian ignored all of these things, making straight for the main cable box on the wall behind the server. This part he was prepared for. “Get ready, Groucho.” Plunging his arm into the spaghetti-mess of cables, he isolated the proper line, clipped a collar around it, and spliced into the cable. The bug itself didn’t require that much power; letting it communicate with the outside world did. Steve attached the transmitter to an unused power line in the back of the cable box and set the fist-sized transmitter itself behind the bundle of cables.

  He’d plant another transmitter outside somewhere, in the brush, to further boost the signal. Once he got the hell out of here.

  “Ollie, Harpo, you got a back door for me?”

  *

  “We’re not supposed to leave the base—I mean, the plant,” said the younger guard, “But our shift is over pretty soon, and we could—”

  The sky lit up, throwing his shadow starkly down against the hood of the car. A colossal, crackling flash burst above the compound, filling the air and drowning out all coherent thought. The guards cried out, and the w
omen screamed theatrically. Both Nicole and Allison sat down hard and screamed again. Nicole wondered how much of her panic was purely for effect—the explosives were detonating high above the ground, but a huge part of her remained convinced she was going to die. Her bones fluttered under her skin. Everything blurred as the shock wave passed through the vitreous matter in her eyes. The car rocked back on its shock absorbers and refused to settle.

  She forced herself to look up at the sky, and saw at once that the missile, mortar, or whatever had exploded over the far side of the PicoMorph compound. The cloud of smoke and particulate expanding over the area was nowhere near the gate.

  One of the men had regained his feet. “It came from the ridge, look!”

  Flares went up from the nearby mountain. A second barrage of explosions sundered the night, rippling like chain-lightning over an area not two miles distant.

  “What’s happening?” Allison asked.

  The guard shook his head. “Nothing up there but farmhouses and sugarcane fields.” The sound of alarms reached them from the main building. Belatedly the alarm lights inside the guardhouse lit up, a whole Christmas tree’s worth, and the guard took two steps toward it before swinging back towards the women.

  “You need to stay right where you are,” he shouted. Panic lent volume to his voice. “We’ve got procedures—”

  The rest of his declaration was peppered out by another explosion from the far edge of the compound. A massive, rolling fireball surged up, drawing a gout of black smoke after it. It distended hideously, burning equally into the compound and the dense jungle beyond the fence.

  Jack’s voice was loud and clear. “Curly and Shemp, go.”