by P. R. Adams
“A couple times.” His face pinched up, a sour look. “She was—she liked it rough.”
“I didn’t know. And no, it’s about how we never had any drama. We kept it professional. Except for you and Morena, I guess.”
“Only a couple times. She mostly swam in the other pond. The, um, the lady pond.”
“Yeah, I figured.” I sighed. “Danny, you’re not making this easier.”
“Sorry. They fighting?”
“A lot of tension. Things are getting complicated, and now there’s this weird dynamic between Chan and—”
“Oh.” He leaned closer to the control system.
“What?”
He handed the device to me. “Here.”
The drone was getting a pretty good video of the facility already, and it wasn’t pretty. Two or three stories, a high stone wall with concertina wire on top, a big parking lot that was empty except for some security vehicles and a handful of cars. Tall lampposts, obvious cameras. And only two entries into the building, both of them heavily secured. It was more like a fort than a data center.
I passed the device back, annoyed. “You know how the intel imagery guys never got much of anything right?”
“Yeah. It didn’t look all that impressive from available imagery.”
“Well, it’s impressive now.” My eyes drifted over to Ichi, who had pulled her jacket off. She rolled her shoulders and stretched her arms over her head.
Danny hummed, then asked, “Mission abort?”
“I’ll take her out there, see what she thinks.”
“Norimitsu would have—”
“She’s eighteen.”
“Um. I know. Yeah.” He squinted at the controls.
I walked over to the SUV and tapped Ichi’s sneaker. “Let’s go check this place out.”
She stared at me for a few seconds, still stretching, as if something were compelling her to taunt me or just to frustrate me. Then she grabbed her jacket and slid off the roof, landing so close I could smell the hotel soap on her skin.
We jogged to the intersection, then crossed it at a sprint. Grass grew waist-high on the shoulders, which quickly sloped down into drainage ditches filled with even taller reeds and cattails. I stayed on the slope, keeping low enough that a vehicle speeding by wouldn’t notice me. Ichi did the same, but she did it gracefully.
About a quarter mile out, I slowed. The grass was lower, the lower part of the drainage ditch now concrete. Nothing stood between us and the wall surrounding the data center but mowed fields, a dull gold in the dying sunlight.
Ichi squatted. There was the slightest touch of color to her face. “There was no fence in the pictures before.”
I dropped to a knee beside her, winded, still feeling the strain I’d put my back through at Heidi’s apartment. “Probably fairly old imagery. This one’s tough. The way they’ve built that place out since that last satellite shot…” I pulled out my data device and connected to Chan. “Chan, can you send me Danny’s drone feed?”
“Yeah.” Chan’s voice was soft, pleasant. “Getting it?”
“Looks good. Thanks.” Chan and I were going to have to have a talk at some point. The idea of attaching to me in some way after what Jacinto had done was dangerous. I handed the data device to Ichi, watched to make sure she had the playback controls down. “That wall, the big parking lot, all those cameras—you’ll be exposed. Very exposed.”
“Where do I go?” She froze the image and angled the device to where I could see it.
“Well, if it were a typical data center, there’d be a loading dock.” I tapped where it looked like they’d built up over the rear of the facility, then shifted the image to a better vantage point of the rear. “There’s still a door, but it looks just as secure as the front.”
She brushed my fingers aside. “I can climb the fence, run to this corner of the building. But the cameras. Even in darkness, with my suit on, they will see me, will they not?”
“You spend all that money on security, you’re not going to rely on a simple camera.”
“So, Chan?”
“That’s the plan. Chan, you still there?”
“Watching. Those cameras.” Chan went silent.
An overhead image of the entire facility replaced the image we’d been working with. Circles and cones indicated areas the cameras covered. Some of the cones ran all the way out into the surrounding fields and through the front gate, where an old Cytek sign with dulled paint hung. That meant the security team had limited visibility even beyond the parking lot.
I traced a path through the field, running between two of the coverage cones, then traced another path to the northeastern corner of the building. The path crossed through the fields of vision of three cameras. “Can you deal with those?”
Chan was quiet for a moment. “I think so.”
Ichi’s brow wrinkled. She looked from the image to the field, then to the wall. “It will not be easy.”
I thought of Norimitsu, the confidence he carried himself with. Too much confidence sometimes, and yet he always came through. “I know. And those guards are going to have guns. I’d rather you not do this.”
“But you will let me decide?”
“Yes.”
She raised up into a half-squat, then lowered herself, then repeated the motion, testing her legs, sucking in cleansing breaths. She bowed her head, just as her father used to—meditating. “I can do this.”
My heart sank. “You’re sure.”
“I am sure.”
I connected to Danny. “We’re a go. You see any positions with good elevation?”
“Yeah, yeah. Um. Fifteen minutes?”
“Fifteen.” It would be getting dark by then. “Danny’s moving to a sniping position. Chan, you ready for those cameras in fifteen?”
“Can be,” Chan said. “Let you know.”
“Thanks. Any sign of Huiyin?”
“No.” Irritation. Chan didn’t care for our Chinese ally. Sharing a room the previous night seemed to have made that worse.
I muted my line and rubbed my forehead. “Last chance to pull out.”
Ichi smiled. It was so pretty. Too pretty. “It was always like this?”
“For your father and me?”
An excited nod. For someone who had taken years off his life with one rebellious act after another, she had obviously loved him.
“Well.” There had been many times we could have—should have—died. But that was different. “Not this bad, but…yeah. You learn to trust people. A few. They become like family.”
“Like you with Tae-hee?”
I blushed. “I told your father when you were little that I would always be there for you and your mother. He would’ve done the same if I’d had a family.”
“Why did you never marry, Stefan-san?” Her eyes bored into me.
Could she see the truth, the love I’d had for her mother? “I guess I’m not the marrying kind.”
“You do not want a family?”
“It’s like I said, this is my family.”
She looked away, finally. “And this is what you want? All the risk and death?”
“Want? I-I’m not sure what I want. I thought I knew, but…”
“It is what I want,” she said.
Confident. How could someone possibly know what they wanted at eighteen? I had thought Margo was all I wanted at that age. Then when I met Tae-hee, I was sure she was all I wanted. Now in my thirties, I still didn’t know other than being sure I was tired of risking everything for people who had dark agendas.
The sun disappeared; twilight slipped into night.
Danny’s voice was a whisper. “In position.”
A few seconds after that, Chan said, “Cameras under control.”
Ichi took a deep breath; I handed her a ski mask. “This has cameras built in. Full radio. Chan’s hacked them. You’ll be connected with us the whole time.”
A nod—quick, sure—as she slid the mask over her head and stood.
My heart pounded like I’d just finished a half-mile sprint. “We’re here for you.”
She stood and patted her pack of tools. “I will enter the back. You will see.”
And with that, she leapt across the ditch and climbed to the other side, legs and arms pumping wildly. I felt old watching her, but I didn’t look away. Thermographic imagery caught her heat, her shape.
Stay low.
Across the field, then up to the wall. She had a sticky cover on her gloves to grip the surface. Unlike me and Huiyin, Ichi was natural, full of grace to match her power, beauty, and skill. I wasn’t sure how human the Chinese agent was, but she had been changed enough to keep up with me. Ichi hadn’t needed anything but hard work and dedication to become who she was.
Ichi cleared the wall in seconds, squatted slightly at the top, flipped over the concertina wire, then was gone from sight.
The drone showed her form—gray and low to the ground—moving across the parking lot, following the route I’d drawn out with the precision I would expect from a gymnast.
But she was out in the open. Naked. Vulnerable.
“Chan,” I whispered. “Anything?”
“No chatter.”
I licked my lips. “Danny?”
“A problem.”
I squinted at the data device, flipped to Ichi’s camera. She was doing fine. I flipped back to the drone’s view. “I don’t see—” And then I did. A guard. Wandering around the parking lot, not following the patrol patterns from before. Just…wandering. “Ichi, drop.”
Ichi’s gray form went flat.
“Danny, where’d he come from?”
“Gate,” Danny said.
One guard there, so the gate was empty now. “You have a suppressor?”
“Yeah.”
Sweat trickled down the side of my face. “Chan, how long before they notice the gate guard’s missing?”
Chan’s breathing seemed to speed up. “Ten minutes. No chatter. Went out on his own.”
“It’s not your fault. Maybe he just likes to take a walk before shift turnover or something. Danny, is he still heading toward Ichi?“ I could see just as well as Danny. Ichi could either try to sprint to cover, return to the wall, or risk going outside the path we’d cleared. None of them were good options. And the guard was drawing closer to her.
Ichi whispered, “I can kill him.”
“No!” It was a harsh growl. Even I could hear how foolish it sounded. I was protecting her. “Not before he would have a chance to key his mic. Danny, take the shot.”
The guard staggered, then crumpled to the asphalt as the delayed, hollow whumpf of the suppressed shot floated out over the air.
I started a timer. “Ichi, go. Everyone, ten minutes.”
The seconds flashed by as she sprinted to her destination. Once again, our time was running out.
Chapter 16
The data device screen showed Ichi’s world: a gray, hi-res, upside-down image with a timer overlay. Seven minutes and change. We had planned for twice that. Based on all the work we could see had been done on the building exterior, our blueprints were almost certainly out of date. Ichi was directly over the rear door, suspended ten feet off the ground from a light fixture. She had a handful of rocks, from which she took a small one and flicked it at the door glass. Her radio picked up the tink of the strike.
Seconds passed.
She flicked another rock. Larger. Tink!
A uniformed guard appeared behind the rectangular viewing panel of the door. Middle-aged, puffy faced, red bulbous nose, a mustache going white. His bloodshot eyes darted left, right, left.
He stepped back, the door lock buzzed, and he pushed it open. He poked his head out.
Ichi’s view shifted, moving away from the building. She was using her lower body strength to create a pendulum effect. Just as the guard started to pull his head back in, she launched. The world flipped around in a sickening roll, and then she was on the ground, gloved fingers inserted into the door crack. She yanked it back—young, powerful muscles easily wrenched the handle free of the guard’s old, surprised hand.
She was in the hallway lightning quick, her hand coming up with a sai. The guard’s eyes bulged; his hand dropped for his pistol.
She struck his forehead with the top of the sai’s hilt.
His head rocked back, and his eyes lost focus.
Another strike. Harder.
He collapsed.
She dropped to his side, pulled a small canister from a belt pouch, and sprayed it on his thumb, then peeled the resulting strip of material off and attached that to her gloved right thumb. With her new fingerprint secured, she collected the badge hanging from the guard’s breast pocket, the keycard suspended from his belt by a retractable reel, the radio clipped to his collar, the speaker curled over his ear, and the pistol from his holster. I heard clipping and rustling sounds through the ski mask—probably the radio and speaker being attached. She slipped the badge into a thigh pouch and clipped the keycard to her wrist. The pistol stayed in her left hand.
The hallway was bare except for the guard station. She loped to a door at the far end and peeked through the viewing panel.
“It is shorter,” she said. “Another hallway and a bathroom door—that is all I see.”
Beyond the door, a bathroom door stood on the right-hand wall. The hallway ran to the left, then hooked to the right, out of sight. There were no obvious ways the blueprints would have been changed to have moved the bathroom to where it was, and the hallway Ichi was in seemed to end about ten feet early. The changes were substantial.
We were close to six and half minutes. Where the hell is Huiyin? I had to make the call. “Take that hallway left until you find a door. We want a secure room.”
“Labeled cryptography or network, yes.” Ichi slapped the keycard on the door, then thumbed the biometrics panel.
The door buzzed, and she was in the hallway. About sixty feet in, it hooked right. Doors appeared on either side. Janitor. Machine room. Security.
She stopped at the fourth: Crypto.
There was a keypunch below the card and biometric readers.
We had just under six minutes.
Ichi unzipped her tool pouch and fumbled around, finally pulling out a scanner. She ran the light over the keys, identifying five that had more wear and tear than the others—14570. The scanner went back into the pouch, and a cracking device came out. She attached two probes to the keypad skin, typed the five most-used numbers into the device’s interface, then hit the button to kick the cracking attack off.
Something scraped on the concrete behind me. I spun, pistol raised.
Huiyin was crouched about twenty feet back, mask up, hands raised. “Radio’s out.”
I waved her forward and holstered the pistol. When she was beside me, I showed her an updated layout of the facility.
She braced herself with a hand on my thigh and tapped the display. “They moved the entire wall out. Why?”
“More security, bigger area for the processors. It’s certainly not for more staff.”
She looked up to the wall but didn’t pull her hand from my leg. “It’s a messy bundle to untangle—all the ownership changes. My contacts aren’t sure who’s running this or what it does. Yours?”
“Everyone I know in the game is here, dead, or wants me dead. I’m not a people person.”
“People don’t understand intensity.” Her hand drifted up to my neck, then cheek.
“Huiyin…”
She pulled away. “We’re alike. You know it.”
Maybe my body sensed the sameness quicker than my mind. I turned back to the data device. Focus. “We can talk about it later. Right now—”
Ichi’s cracking device flashed a string of six numbers: 717045. She punched those in, slapped the card onto the reader, then ran her thumb over the biometric scanner. The door lock buzzed, and she shouldered it open.
The timer read 4:39.
It was a narrow room,
maybe twenty feet wide and twice as deep. Racks of equipment with flickering lights lined the walls. Most of it looked the same—gray, blockish, with thick cabling and plugs on the back. Wingnut screws secured the devices to the racks with mounting braces.
I un-muted to Chan. “You seeing this?”
“Yeah.” There was a new tone to Chan’s voice, something approaching awe. “Heavy crypto. Like banking cartel uplinks.”
I’d forgotten about Jacinto’s hacking effort, what everyone thought had gotten his snowcrash killed. “You see one we could grab?”
“Not one we want. These are good. We want something—” Chan gasped. “Ichi? Your left. The silvery one? Stainless steel? Shiny?”
Ichi’s view shifted so that the device in question moved from peripheral to center view. “This?”
“New,” Chan whispered. “The only one. That’s it.”
Ichi unscrewed the mounting brace. “The plugs are different.”
Chan sighed. “One second.”
Time remaining: 3:48.
The video flickered, then deafening klaxons came to life.
We’d been discovered.
I put the data device in my shirt and sprinted for the field. “Ichi, time’s up. Get the device and go.”
Chan screamed, “No! Unplug it wrong, dump the code.”
Shit.
Huiyin was beside me, not matching my stride but matching speed. “We can fight—”
“No.” I skidded to a stop, fighting the urge to storm the facility. Ichi could handle herself. “Bring the SUV up here. We need to be ready to go.”
Huiyin tensed; she seemed ready to argue, then her shoulders relaxed. “All right.” She darted across the field, headed back for the gas station.
At least we had our escape prepared. “Danny, get your bird up higher. Keep an eye out for incoming. Chan, what’s on the Grid? Law enforcement? Private security?”
Chan mumbled, “Checking.”
The drone video shifted again as Danny sent the aircraft higher. “Roads are…um.” Danny’s voice faded. “Yeah. Roads are still clear.”
When Huiyin was well out of sight, I sprinted for the wall and leapt up, gaining a fingertip hold. I pulled myself up just as a charcoal gray form dashed from the corner of the building.