The Little John plants, thank heavens.
Taking her last statement as a carefully coded question about whether we were who she thought we were, I nodded.
“We are the special team,” I said quickly. “We’re running short on time, however. What do you need to make this handoff complete?”
I watched anxiously as the old execs, looking confused and slightly alarmed at this chain of events, handed the new execs a set of badges similar to the Authority badge Jace was holding. They were made up of several high-tech-looking layers and held the Ministry’s logo. What were those badges, and what exactly did they do?
The new lead executive turned to me and nodded once.
“That completes the transfer,” she said, letting me see for a moment the triumph mingled with fear in her eyes. “And now, unless I’m mistaken, you have places to be. We can handle things from here, including dealing with these imposters.” She gave the unconscious soldier a distasteful look, then switched her gaze back to me. “Please… tell everyone back at headquarters we wish them well and that we will not fail in this new chapter of the Ministry’s glorious history.”
I nodded, surprised at the tears that pricked at my eyes. These were Little John operatives stuck in the Ministry’s world. They hadn’t seen friendly territory in quite some time.
We turned, gestured to the former execs to follow us, and rushed past the Little John plants, leaving them to their lonely, dangerous world in the heart of the Ministry.
40
The moment we were back in the corridor, the group of execs filing along behind me, with Jace and Alexy at the end of the line, I put my hand to my ear and switched my comm back to transmission mode. I chose my next words carefully. The Ministry executives were within earshot, and I didn’t want them overhearing anything that would make them nervous. Or difficult to handle.
“Kory, heads up,” I said. “There are other… hostile groups in the building.”
After a slight delay, his voice came back to me. “What?” he asked. “What are you talking about? More Authority teams? We took out—”
“They weren’t the only ones,” I replied, cutting him off. “I don’t know how many there are, and I don’t know what they’re doing here, but apparently there’s been an update in orders saying there might be imposters in the building.”
I hoped he could decipher my double meaning, because I wasn’t sure I could say any more than that.
“We’ve just run into a team of them up here,” I continued, when he didn’t say anything.
We reached the door back into the stairwell, and I placed my hand on the pad, barely waiting for the door to slide all the way open before storming through. We needed to get back to the computer room as quickly as possible. This whole situation had just become a whole lot less secure.
“What did you do with them?” Kory asked. “You didn’t kill them in front of those execs, did you?”
“We didn’t. The replacement executives dealt with the imposters and told us to continue with our orders. We’re bringing the old execs down the stairs now.”
I was taking two stairs at a time at this point, counting on the others to keep up with me.
“They’re no longer an issue,” I said, my breath coming quick. “That’s all that matters. I have no idea whether there are more of them, but our situation just became a whole lot more complicated.”
“Got it,” Kory answered grimly. “Just get here as quickly as possible. Nathan and the others are still working. I have no idea how close they are to being finished.”
That didn’t sound good. Nathan had made it sound so simple when we were planning this whole thing. What the hell was taking so long?
I reached the bottom of the first flight of stairs, grabbed the banister with my left hand, and used it to slingshot myself around into the next flight.
I assumed the execs were going to have more trouble with that than I had, especially since the women were wearing high heels. I was therefore somewhat surprised when the woman in red appeared at my side on the stairs, until I saw she held her shoes in her hand.
“What on earth is going on here?” she asked, her breath sharp. “Why are we in such a hurry? Is this how the protocol is supposed to go?”
Right, time for some quick thinking—and a few lies.
“This isn’t standard protocol, no,” I answered. “But that man upstairs was telling the truth. We were warned we might find imposters in the holding centers during this exchange. Rebels attempting to take advantage of the systems being down.”
No harm in throwing a little truth into the lie, right?
“Since I know my team to be true Authority soldiers, and I wasn’t told about any other teams coming into the building, it stands to reason that those men above us were, in fact, imposters trying to eliminate your group. Why, I can’t say, but that gunfire you heard earlier? The rogue employee my colleague mentioned was trying to do the same thing. We dealt with it, but I want to find the rest of my team and get out of here so we can contact HQ. From there we can get further orders about how to handle the situation.”
Her silence told me she was considering all of this… and most likely coming up with alternative plans. She’d been an exec, after all. Surely that meant she was intelligent.
We got to the bottom of the stairs, and I pulled to a stop, facing her, content to wait for a moment while the rest of our group caught up.
“Couldn’t you just call HQ from here and find out?” she asked, frowning.
“Negative,” I answered, the word rolling off my tongue with an ease unfamiliar to me. “There’s a firewall in place around this building right now to interrupt all long-distance communications. Once the update is done that will change. Until then, this place is a black hole.”
Probably a complete falsehood, but nothing that would cause any problems. I hoped. I also hoped it would get her to stop asking questions. My mouth quirked in an unwanted smile as I realized this must be how Nathan and Corona and Alexy and Zion felt about me sometimes.
The other execs finally caught up to us at that point, along with Alexy and Jace.
I placed my palm on the reader and took in the nervous expressions on the faces of the execs. This had to be a much more intense experience than what they’d been expecting, and if Kory hadn’t hidden those bodies effectively, it was about to get a whole lot worse.
A few seconds, two beeps, and an “Approved” line later, the door slid open to reveal chaos.
Nathan was on a computer on the far wall, helmet still off, his face tense with stress as his fingers flew over the keyboard in front of him. Lux, looking pale as death in the glow of the monitors, was slouched against another wall, shouting instructions at Gabby, who was next to her on another computer. Nelson was on the opposite side of the room, her computer hooked up to what looked like every external drive Nathan had brought with him. Rio was running back and forth between the three of them, moving cables, typing commands, and trying to put out the fires still smoldering in a few places.
Kory was safely out of the way, gun up and eyes shifting from one door to the other, looking as if he was ready to take on an army by himself.
The moment his eyes met mine, his demeanor loosened; it didn’t take a genius to guess he was relieved to see us.
The bodies of the Authority agents were, I was relieved to see, hidden. I didn’t question where.
“All of you, stay together against the wall,” I barked at the execs as Jace and Alexy ushered them in. “The exchange isn’t going as smoothly as we hoped.” I added this primarily for the benefit of the woman in red, who looked as if she was about to start asking questions again. “We’re trying to help it along, but we’ve got a limited amount of time to make that happen. The quieter you all are, the better chance we have at success. I don’t think I need to tell you of the consequences if we fail.”
The looks on their faces assured me that they would be very quiet and very still. Their fear, of both me and the hov
ering threat of the Ministry, prompted another mark in the column of “Reasons to Feel Sorry for These People.”
“Alexy, keep an eye on these five, just in case,” I muttered. “I don’t want them going anywhere, and I don’t want them getting too close to the computers. They don’t need to know what we’re doing here.”
“Will do,” she said, her mouth a grim line. She turned her gun in to the room and gazed at the chaos of our team, then took a step back and stood in front of the executives, her body language clear. They would have to get through her if they wanted to do any spying.
Kory appeared a moment later. “Thank goodness,” he breathed as he strode toward me. “They found the main computer, but something’s gone wrong with the upload. Nathan’s been working on fixing it this entire time. He’s pretty angry.”
I took one look at Nelson and Gabby, saw the frustration on their faces, and crossed the room to Nathan. I drew to a stop next to him and stared at the computer, but couldn’t make sense of the letters and symbols running across the screen.
“Nathan, what’s going on?” I asked.
“Additional firewalls,” he said, his teeth gritted. “There were additional damn firewalls. We found the main hub, and that should have been it, but they’ve built walls within the system itself. Walls that are playing havoc with our equipment. They allow digital files through if they’re coming in electronically but don’t allow files in if they’re arriving physically. Like from external drives.”
I took a moment to process that, while still keeping one eye on the doors. I’d left Jace with Kory, and they’d taken a door each, guns at the ready. Alexy, as well as covering the execs, kept checking the third door, the one that led to the main corridor, and looked prepared to shoot anything that came through it.
“What are you doing about it?” I asked Nathan. “Are we aborting the mission?”
“No,” he snapped. “I’ve worked too hard and sacrificed too much to make this happen. We can’t afford to screw this up. Too much is depending on it.”
I bit my lip on my answer, which would have been something to the effect of this mission already being screwed up right and left, and that it might be better to leave with our lives intact.
“Even worse, this is affecting the entire mission. Every other holding center system is controlled by this one. The teams in all the other holding centers are waiting for us to figure this out. If we don’t get it done, we’re all going to get caught. I’m working around the firewalls,” he continued. “Gabby and Nelson are supporting me, trying to build a hole I can get through. Once we’ve got that in place, I can insert the bug, everyone else can do their jobs, and we’ll be finished here.”
“Won’t the Ministry notice?” I asked.
“Negative,” he replied, eyes wild in the light of the skittering numbers. “We’ve got cover for what we’re doing, thanks to that program I brought. No one will see anything. As soon as the hole is built, it’ll be filled by the virus. If we don’t get that done, though…”
“Right,” I said. I didn’t need to hear the rest. If they didn’t get the hole filled, the Ministry would know we’d been here. Our mission would fail. “What do you need from me?” I asked.
“I need you to stop bothering me,” he said, eyes never leaving the screen. “This will go a whole lot faster if I’m not answering your questions. Go see if Gabby needs anything.”
I didn’t answer. Instead, I spun around and dashed toward Gabby. I didn’t know why they had her on a computer rather than Rio—who had to have years of experience on her—but that wasn’t my call.
“Gabs, can I help?” I asked quickly.
She shook her head, but then stopped herself and nodded.
“Take one of the thumb drives,” she said. “Get onto another computer, get into their files, and start downloading everything you can find.”
“Downloading?” I asked, my mind working to catch up. “Why? I thought we were building a back door into their system.”
She paused to cast me a deeply disapproving glance. “We are. But the less we use it, the less chance we have of getting caught using it. Get it? Download everything. Files with the names of the kids here, files of their processes and systems, employee files, everything. Even if you don’t think it’s important, someone else might be able to get something out of it. Nathan…” She paused and ground her teeth in frustration. “Nathan asked me to do it, but I can’t work on programing a hole into the firewall and download stuff at the same time. I’m… I’m not fast enough. If you can—”
“Say no more,” I interrupted. I grabbed a thumb drive from the pile sitting to her right, turned, and darted toward Nelson for further instructions.
“Any computer,” she snapped when I asked which computer I should use for Gabby’s task. “Nathan’s crazy to think Gabby could handle both things at once. I’m barely managing it myself.”
“What are you doing?” I asked, glancing at her computer, then throwing another glance Jace’s way. He gave me a solemn nod, but also lifted his eyebrows. No sign of the Authority yet, then, but he wondered what the hell was taking so long.
“I’m hacking my way through the firewall as fast as I can,” Nelson replied. Then she gave me a loaded look that I couldn’t read. “And I’m downloading the archives.”
The rest of the world went silent.
“The archives?” I whispered.
They were always there, in the back of my mind, and I’d had visions of Hope dancing in front of my eyes ever since we started touring the holding centers. I hadn’t thought they were going to be at our fingertips so quickly.
“I’ve seen them,” she blurted out. “And Robin—”
“Nelson, are you through yet?” Nathan snapped.
She tore her gaze from mine and turned back to the screen, the pace of her typing increasing. “Nearly there!” she called back. “Give me two more minutes and I’ve got it. Gabs?”
“I can do two minutes!” the younger girl replied.
That was my timeline, then. If they were going to be done in two minutes and I was supposed to grab as much as I could before then, I needed to get moving.
I rushed to the computer next to Nelson, and ten seconds later I was looking at a screen that gave me folders for a chat function, Ministry connections, and Smally records.
Well, that was relatively easy. The Ministry connections weren’t my problem, and I certainly wasn’t interested in chatting with anyone from the mothership. I hit the folder for the Smally records, and the screen filled with employee records, records labeled “Current Occupants,” and a set of folders that read “Deceased.”
I shoved the thumb drive into the correct spot and started moving folders as quickly as I could.
As those were transferring, I noticed some folders which didn’t have such clear labels. A15. Q23. I clicked into them, finding them to be… blueprints. Whatever these files were connected to, they showed how the buildings themselves were structured.
If we were going to be infiltrating any more government buildings, those would definitely come in handy.
I added them to the queue of files being transferred from the hard drive over to the thumb drive, which, I noticed was rapidly filling up. I dashed back across the room toward Gabby, grabbed three more drives, and darted back to my computer. When my flash drive indicated it was full, I yanked it out, shoved a new one in, and repeated the process.
My skin felt electrified. Every moment we spent here was another moment we might get caught. And what about the bodies? We couldn’t leave Savannah and Ajax here. It felt wrong, like we were abandoning them.
“Done,” Nathan stated emphatically, the single word cutting through the room like a fresh breeze. “Let’s get out of here.”
Without another word, he started packing up, followed immediately by Nelson and Gabby.
I glanced back at my screen, panicked. Only about half the files in the queue had downloaded. We had all the employee records and all the current oc
cupants, but most of the blueprints were still waiting to be transferred. I kicked myself for not having moved those up, as they probably would have been the most useful, but we were out of time. I yanked the thumb drive out of the slot, grabbed the other drive, stuffed them both in my pocket, and whirled around, ready to get out of there.
Nathan, Gabby, Rio, and Nelson were all piling equipment back into the bag Nathan had brought with him. Jace, Kory, and Alexy were now standing in the middle of the room, Alexy bouncing on her toes in her need to get out of here.
The former execs were looking at us with some level of suspicion now. The quicker we got them out of this building, and away from the real Ministry employees, the better. I didn’t think they were going to be unquestioningly cooperative for much longer.
“Rio, you’re in charge of Lux,” Nathan said. “We’ve got to get her out of here, but I don’t want her damaged any further, understand?”
Rio, whom I’d never had so much as a conversation with, nodded and moved to Lux’s side, where he bent down and shoved an arm under hers. A second later she was on her feet, pale but still conscious, her face as intense as anyone else’s.
“I’m fine,” she said. “Let’s get out of here.”
Nathan gave her a look of pride, then turned to Jace and Kory. “You two carry Savannah and Ajax. We can’t afford to leave anything that might indicate our presence.”
“What about the Authority guards upstairs?” I asked. “They’ll tell everyone they can find about what happened.”
“They won’t,” he answered. “Our people have a very good idea of how this was supposed to go down, and they’ll make sure those guards never tell anyone anything ever again. Robin, you’re in charge of the execs. Keep them with us, keep them moving, and stay toward the middle of the group. Keep your guard up. They might be compliant for now, but we still have to get them out of the building.”
Pulling his helmet back on, he started making his way toward the door that would take us into the hall leading to the foyer and then the exit. The rest of us, each carrying something, filtered after him.
The Child Thief 4: Little Lies Page 31