Chimera Code (Jake Dillon Adventure Thriller Series)

by Andrew Towning

  been having a dream, and was most likely mumbling in his sleep,

  which had woken Tatiana up.

  Dillon shivered. “I think I’m suffering from exhaustion or

  something and didn’t realise just how weak I must be. I’ll be okay, let

  me get some sleep.”

  “Good,” soothed Tatiana. And as she lay back down, she

  suddenly felt lonely - and incredibly vulnerable.

  She shivered as a gust of wind and rain whipped up leaves

  around where they lay.

  What would she do if Dillon died out here?

  What would she do if she was left alone?

  Tatiana shivered again, deep down to her bones.

  When she looked around at Dillon, he was asleep. She reached

  over and pulled the blanket up around his shoulders; she did not see

  the 9mm Glock in his hand as he nestled in the darkness. She did

  not see that the safety catch was slipped into the offposition. And,

  of course, she could not see the bullet already loaded into the firing

  chamber.

  * * * A white mist hung lazily in the valley; the wind and rain from the previous night had completely blown itself out, leaving only the cold and an eerie stillness. They had decided against building a small fire, despite the chill of the mountains; this part of the Scottish Highlands was not as desolate as it first appeared, and all they needed was for a spy satellite to pass overhead and pick up their heat signature, or Kirill’s security force stumbling across them as they cooked their breakfast.

  Tatiana, weirdly, felt very alive; as if she’d never been tired, never been asleep, as she sat huddled in her parka and wrapped up in a thick blanket, only her face visible from within the furry hood, eyes staring up at the hazy sky.

  Around her, ancient Caledonian pine trees added colour and texture to the wild glens - and the mountains beyond - everything was still. Occasionally noises would interrupt the silence; the cries of stags, and the unmistakable sound of antlers locking in combat. After a while, Tatiana gazed across to watch Dillon’s face in sleep. She studied the lines, the broken line of his nose, the profile of his strong chin, the unruly hair that she knew he would claim required a thorough washing. His shape was obscured by the fur lined parka coat and thick blanket covering him... and her mind wandered off to better, happier times that they had had together...

  She killed the fantasy.

  Dillon had been cold since Santorini. Cold and strange... He had killed so many times on behalf of the realm, that he

  carried a demon in his soul that took possession of his mind during times of extreme stress. Who would have believed that a man who appeared calm and calculated on the outside - could be so tormented and damaged on the inside.

  Tatiana smiled to herself, lifted her hands and rubbed at her eyes. Pain stabbed at her shoulder like a hot poker; the bullet wound nagged her, it still hurt every time she moved her arm - and to top it all she was starting to wish for a shower...

  Paid Assassins.

  She smiled again, although the taut grin held little humour. She had met numerous men - and a few women - while working

  as a liaison officer for Ferran & Cardini International; many killers, murderers, Assassins, members of the security services... their names were various, their objectives usually one and the same. To locate, and to terminate. And she had found one connection that linked them all like a gold skein - as they tiptoed on eggshells, skirted around the edge of insanity. After all what sane person could kill in cold blood? Kill in the cold light of day... No matter what the cause or justification.

  And, sooner or later, something had to give.

  With all the security service people that she knew, no matter how professional, how adept at killing, how granite-like they appeared - it was still all bullshit. They were just flesh and blood, like every other human being. And they might be able to block out the self-loathing for a while, but it always came back to haunt and torment them. Their lives as trained killers was finite; only as long as they could hold on to their nerve and their sanity.

  Scorpion, Ferran & Cardini, and the security services, were just like the Armed Forces, Tatiana understood this now. They all absorbed people; used people; destroyed people - and then they pissed them away. Field operatives were expendable; they hadto be expendable because there was no such thing as a killer without a conscience, no such thing as a person without a soul. There was always a spark there... somewhere.

  Tatiana sighed, and felt for her mobile phone in her pocket. She pulled it free and stared at the black touch-screen. When in GPS SatNav mode it could navigate somebody to anywhere on the planet, but of course, Dillon had forbidden her to switch the thing on, which made her feel insecure. And that wasn’t a nice feeling... She caressed the slender device between her thumb and forefinger, then, settling back, pulled a small knife from her pocket, slipped back the rear casing to expose the battery, and removed it. She took the blade and levered out the printed circuit board. The phone gave a warning buzz that Tatiana ignored; she examined the inside of the phone without its innards, and smiled.

  She pulled out a slender LCD Screen - about the size of a credit card - and using an extendable cable, plugged it into the phone’ battery. It immediately came to life, brightly glowing blue, and Tatiana couldn’t help feeling very strange about using such a high-tech piece of equipment in the middle of such a natural place. And yet here she was, using the latest cutting-edge agent technology.

  She started to scroll through a series of scripted instructions.

  She tapped in a short message.

  With a pursing of her lips, pale and dry from the harsh cold environment, Tatiana clicked on send .

  And then it was done...

  GCHQ Transcript 7.REUTERS NEWS ARTICLE OF RECENT INTERNATIONAL INCIDENT. One of the world’s largest financial clearing houses was left stunned and in chaos after the mainframes serving their worldwide network crashed this morning.

  Despite having multi-tier cryptographic security authentication and digital laser back-up systems, it left the company without facilities to carry on their business. Executives and traders were left staring at blank screens as system technicians desperately attempted to resurrect the mainframes staged at the company’s main locations around the globe. The shutdown started in London, and within seconds had spread to: Paris, Berlin, Rome,

  Hong Kong, New York, and Rio de Janeiro and after only ten seconds ended up in Sydney. Sir Julian Rochford-Yarlington, C.E.O of Schwarz & Schwarz, claimed: “This is quite clearly an act of cyber terrorism! We have been attacked by some kind of super-virus, a new type of hack intent on causing total disruption of the world’s largest and most powerful computers.”

  The effects of this crash will be felt by all; as even the most simple of tasks such as the everyday trading of currencies, have become, at least for the immediate future, impossible...

  Chapter 17

  Claudia Dax rolled over and opened her eyes, and stared at the ceiling. Darkness was all around her. Everything was silent - deadly silent. And yet, She knew. Knew that she was almost there, that it was almost finished. Knew that it was almost complete... A few tweaks here and there, some re-writing of certain codes and Chimera would be 100% ready; the world would not be the same again once Chimera was launched.

  That could only mean that the programme was...

  ...alive.

  She whispered softly.

  Why then, Claudia mused, did she feel so pissed off? And it came to her, a feeling of frustration, and anger: to create

  something so brilliant, to be involved in a project of such magnitude, ground-breaking, and then to have it snatched away and taken to some secret Government depository. To be placed in a strong box and hidden for all eternity! It was like creating a work of art and then hanging it in a damp cellar, never to be seen by anybody.

  The Chimera Programme could be the ultimate weapon in the fight against t
errorism... Chimera was self-learning, intuitive, could find out multiple encrypted computer trails, simultaneously, even the most heavily fortified mainframes could not hide from Chimera. Terrorists worldwide could not hide their computer activities as Chimera could; scan, decode, extract, and then send every scrap of data back to the relevant government agencies, in whatever country the tracked computer was located without anyone knowing that it was there, and all within seconds... But no. The British Government had other ideas for this breakthrough in virus programming, and that was to hide it away, because the politicians and bureaucrats were afraid of it. Were terrified of it falling into the hands of the very people being hunted. Terrorists...

  And she could still remember Ezra’s words, when he had contacted her. Claudia shivered.

  She had complied with his wishes...

  Copying the entire blueprint had been the easy part; getting them to Ezra had been where the real difficulty lay.

  Don’t ever call me un-resourceful, she mused.

  Claudia smiled,emotions on her face conflicting, and she rubbed at her tired eyes. She knew that the Chimera Programme was a tip-top secret, and the top brass at the facility had the security so tight, not even a mouse could fart without them knowing about it. But what the hell, Chimera was almost ready, and she would be able to have a long, long, well-earned-rest.

  Her duty to humanity, and Ferran & Cardini, and Ezra, was nearly complete.

  Claudia Dax thought all these thoughts as she stared at the ceiling. Her hand came up, ran through her long auburn hair, and then she heard something; not so much a noiseas a single high-pitched note on the very edge of her hearing...

  Claudia frowned, and then sat up.

  The sound was coming from the living quarters of her apartment. She leaned over the edge of the bed and peered through the connecting doorway to the other room; she saw a glow from one of her terminals. She didn’t remember leaving it on. In fact, she knew she had not left it on.

  And the terminal was protected. Electronically. Her own code. Her own sophisticated firewalls to intercept hackers, which she had tested by attempting to hack her own system; she had found it impossible. That meant that someone had hacked it, but that was highly unlikely. It must have been accessed; either remotely from somewhere else in the huge facility, or someone had entered her apartment. Claudia Dax shivered.

  She jumped off the edge of the bed, looked quickly around, and picked up a heavy looking bronze sculpture from her dressing table. She had purchased it, after much deliberation, from a rare weekend break to Edinburgh, and was now thankful that she had.

  She hefted the makeshift weapon.

  It would make a very good weapon...

  Claudia crept towards the open doorway. The light from the terminal grew brighter. Her grip grew tighter around the slender piece of sculpted bronze; her gaze flickered from the doorway to the head of the bronze. She made a concerted effort to control her breathing and her racing heartbeat.

  Why would somebody be inside her private apartment? Why would somebody from the facility be spying on her? Unless they knew.

  Suddenly she went cold.

  And then something hit her - with the force of a sledge hammer in the face. If they had discovered that shehad been the one to copy the blueprints and pass them on to Ezra... Then they would want to know why?

  They would be extremely harsh with her, and would certainly not thank her.

  Claudia reached the doorway. Peered cautiously around the frame. And saw - nothing.

  The terminal screen was blank; a bright blue with only a flashing red triangle. Claudia’s eyes fixed on this because it was a symbol that she had never seen on the terminal before - and it was herprivate terminal; she was the only person who could give it commands. It was her own from the ground up; including all of the software.

  Claudia stepped across the threshold, moved towards the terminal, her gaze sweeping left and right, hand still gripping the bronze sculpture tightly. Fear had dried her mouth, she had difficulty swallowing; the thought of Kirill’s Big Boys possibly suspecting her of the Chimera blueprints’ leak was there, a foreboding of a realityof particularly nasty proportions just waiting to surprise her.

  The red triangle sprang to life, a black cursor started to flash in the middle of it;

  # Hello Claudia Dax.

  Claudia stood motionless, staring at the screen, a frown on her face. She shook her head and sat down, placing the bronze sculpture down on the top of the workstation, and typed her fingers a blur across the keyboard.

  # Who are you? How did you get past my firewalls?

  # It’s not important who I am. The important thing is that I know who you are. I would like to thank you Miss Dax - you have done a remarkable job in creating Chimera; I must congratulate you on a superb piece of programming and I give you full credit. Your scripts stand out from all the other gibberish I’ve seen. Tell me - where did you learn such a skill?

  # Why should I tell you anything? What’s to stop me from shutting this terminal down and informing this facility’s cyber security team?

  Claudia sat back, staring at the blank screen, and reached for the comm. But something was strangely wrong, and the IP address from where the message was coming from was being blocked; somebody had to be re-routing the message around the globe to mask its place of origin. She felt annoyed, and started to punch in the code for security as the following text appeared on her terminal.

  # I suggest you don’t do that if you want to live. Claudia’s fingers halted, her stare moving from the screen to the comm. in her hand and back again. Were they watching her? Were they watching her now?

  Damn - was there somebody in her apartment?

  She picked up the sculpture and spun around.

  But there was nobody there. She was completely alone. She lightly bit her bottom lip.

  Sweat tickled the small of her back under her pyjamas. # I am giving you this information because you are the one

  who created Chimera; I am giving you this information because you are the only one who can possibly stop it... Your programming skills are world class, but you will need every ounce of this skill to stop a catastrophic act of terrorism being carried out by the programme you created...

  Claudia stared. Her jaw dropped.

  Holy shit, she thought, this can’t be real. Chimera - terrorism? She typed:

  # What do you want? And why is my life in danger? # Listen carefully - Professor Kirill knows that you leaked

  the blueprints. Because of the leaks and several other factors concerning the re-location of the facility where the final countdown and implementation of the Chimera Programme will take place, the complex you are now located in will be destroyed. At least half of all the employees involved within your unit are to be terminated - you have no idea how high the stakes, being played by people who employ you, are - it would appear though, that Kirill’s agenda is at odds with the very highest echelons of Government.

  The killing has already begun; check your personal govlink to verify this.

  You have perhaps five minutes before Assassins arrive in your private apartment.

  Claudia smiled. It had to be a joke, right? A wind-up of monumental proportions by one or any numbers of her nerdy colleagues downstairs in the programme suite. The bastards! She had almost believed them!

  The grin still beaming across her attractive face, she typed: # Who is winding me up?

  # Not a wind up - check your Gov-link NOW... The word NOW continuously scrolled down the screen. The

  grin fell from Claudia’s face. She moved back into the bedroom and went quickly to the side of her bed, felt for and located what she was looking for, and withdrew it. She had pulled free a tablet computer. Hit the power switch and watched its screen come to life. The 10” screen split into six smaller screens, each with a live feed from the facilities own security surveillance cams. She punched in the digits for one of her co-workers apartment, and her mouth dropped open. Then closed again. Quick
ly.

  There was lone black-clad figure; black balaclava; it was standing outside the bedroom door. It held a silenced machine pistol. It did not turn as another figure - another Assassin - dragged the man from the bedroom. A tiny neat hole in the centre of his forehead. His head twisted towards the camera, eyes staring blankly straight ahead. Blood was running down over his left eye and cheek, and dripped as he was being dragged across the tiled floor and dumped by the door.

  Claudia switched channels. Bateman - hands held high above his head, a look of disbelief and horror on his face.

  The knife flashed across his throat, severing major arteries cleanly, spraying blood up the wall and ceiling, spattering the large watercolour that he had loved so much. As he slumped down onto the hard floor in a heap, a red pool instantaneously gathered around his head.

  Claudia flicked through the other channels.

  More rooms were empty.

  Some of them contained mutilated bodies.

  She punched in another series of commands and a moment later the upper cargo level appeared on the screen. There were three Chinook transport helicopters, rotors idling, their cargo doors fully lowered and open, two of the three interiors revealing a plethora of dead bodies. Men and women, with whom Claudia had worked, bantered and talked with only a few short hours ago.

  Claudia hastily moved back to her terminal.

  The screen was blank.

  Why? Screamed her brain.

  Why are they doing this?

  Why are they killingthem? Because they know too much? Because of the blueprint leak?

  She was sweating, suddenly panicked now. She ran back into her bedroom, opened the wardrobe, and pulled out a small prepacked travelling rucksack. She threw her laptop inside and zipped it back up. She paused for a moment, thinking, what the hell was her next move going to be. Claudia ran to the door and halted abruptly, hesitating before opening it. They could be in the corridor outside. They could be in the lifts. They could be watching her right now on the security system, ready to terminate her contract of employment - permanently...