Marcus grinds his teeth together, and the sinews in his neck tighten and stretch his skin. “You’ve got to let me out. In real life, no one will find me. I’m not…I’m not in a chair. She gave me a headset. And a terminal. I’m off the campus. I’m in the middle of nowhere. There’s no one for miles. So I can’t hurt you. I won’t come after you, I promise. I won’t even come back to Northridge. I’m out of here. I’ll be on the first flight back to the States. I’m gone.” He licks his lips. “Please, just let me go. My chest—it hurts. It’s crushing me. You’ve got to help me.”
Sanjay sits back a little and smiles. “You see, that wasn’t so hard, was it?” She reaches out and touches the side of Marcus’s face. “Your skin is like ice. We don’t have long. I think I need to be there when you come around. You’re going to need my help. But I think you’re lying. You can’t be out in the open, so, for your own safety, you’d better tell me exactly where you are.”
Marcus hangs his head. “No. I can’t tell you. Just log me off, for Christ’s sake.”
“I can’t do that, Marcus. Not yet. We have unfinished business.”
Slowly, and shaking with the effort, Marcus looks up. “What do you want from me, Sanjay? I’ve got nothing left.”
“I want AGILE, and I want to know as much as you can tell me about where it comes from, and how you got it.”
“I don’t…I don’t have it. I never really had it. I don’t even know what it does.”
Sanjay frowns. “I figured you didn’t know what you had there, Marcus. But you must have access to the mod. You sold it to me. Well, some kind of cut down version of it anyhow.”
“She gave it to me, but I wasn’t allowed to try and use it myself. She told me to give it to you. She said you’d want more.” He pauses, fighting for breath. “She was right. She always is.”
“And what were you supposed to do when I came back for more?”
“She said we’d string you along. Raise the price. Make you pay. She said we’d be rich.”
Sanjay’s jaw goes slack. “This is about money?”
Marcus manages to lift his shoulders in a feeble shrug. “What else?”
Sanjay blinks rapidly, her mind working overtime. If someone was planning to get rich on her meager funds, they’d be sorely disappointed. But perhaps this mystery woman used the idea of making money to persuade Marcus to play his part. The real objective must be something else—perhaps a neat line in blackmail further down the line when Sanjay might have more to lose. There’s no way to be sure right now. Whoever the woman is, she’s probably too smart to trust an idiot like Marcus with her plans. The only way to beat this woman is to track her down and deal with her directly.
“OK, Marcus,” Sanjay says gently, “your contact—what do you call her? She must have a name. You must have some way of identifying her.”
Marcus swallows. “She…she uses the name Scarlett. We meet online. In the jungle. That’s why she gave me a headset—so we could meet up.”
“OK, but how does she arrange it? Does she send you a message or what?”
The color drains from Marcus’s face. “No. I’ve said enough. I’ve told you what you wanted. Now let me go.”
Sanjay smiles and stands up. “You’ve been very helpful, Marcus. But we’re not done yet. Not by a long way. And since you refuse to tell me where you are back in the real world, I really can’t think of a good reason to let you go, can you?”
Marcus’s lower lip trembles, and when he tries to say something, his breath rasps in his throat, but no words emerge.
“I’ll see you later, Marcus,” Sanjay says. “And don’t go thinking anyone’s going to miss you. I hear there’s a rumor going around that you went on a hiking trip. And I know it’s a rumor because I started it.” She lets out a cruel laugh. “Sorry to rush off, but I’ve got some things I need to do.” Then she focuses on her UI and thinks, Log off.
CHAPTER 9
HANK AND MERVIN WALK ACROSS THE EXHIBITION HALL together, heading to the curved screen and the three-dimensional image of a woman. “Laura and her dad were kind of stuck up,” Hank says. “If this program is going to be full of people like that, you can count me out.”
Mervin shakes his head. “They’re just a little uptight. They’re probably every bit as nervous as you are.”
“Nervous? I’m not nervous.”
“If you say so,” Mervin replies as they arrive in front of the screen. “So, what’s this all about? Is this woman computer generated or what? Because, if she is, it’s a very impressive job.”
The hologram of the woman turns to face them. “No, I’m real enough,” she says, and her English accent is cold and unfriendly to Hank’s ears. “I’m just a few thousand miles away in the UK,” she goes on, and a wicked grin curls her lips. “But that doesn’t mean I can’t hear every word you say.”
Mervin scratches his head. “Sorry, ma’am. No offense intended.”
“That’s perfectly all right,” the woman says. “My name is Angela Rosalyn, and I’m the head of faculty here at the Downlode Trust’s main training center. I’m here to answer any questions you may have, although…” She stops talking and stifles a yawn. “I have to warn you that it’s getting late in the afternoon here and I had an early start this morning, so I may not be quite as sharp as usual.”
Hank looks at Angela, taking in the fierce glint in her eyes. If this is her when she’s half asleep, he thinks, I’d hate to see her when she’s wide awake. He looks away. There are at least a dozen questions whirling around his mind, but he’s not sure whether he wants to ask this woman anything. Instead, he feigns an interest in the building displayed on the curved screen behind her. It shows a modern building, four stories high. Its curved walls are made from glass and most are lit, but as he watches, a window goes dark, followed by another. “Excuse me,” he says to Angela, “but is that a live video feed?”
“Yes, well spotted. That’s the Learning Hub at the Northridge Center, and it’s where I’m standing now, although thankfully I’m indoors.” She hesitates. “I think you must be Hank, and I’m guessing that the distinguished gentleman at your side is Mervin.”
Hank’s eyebrows almost shoot off the top of his head. Is everyone going to know who I am?
“That’s right, ma’am,” Mervin says. “Tell me, did you memorize everyone who’s coming today?”
Angela smiles. “You must call me Angela. And yes, since you ask, I did go through the mugshots, and I have a good memory for faces. When you work with a lot of young people, it’s a good skill to have.”
“I’ll bet,” Mervin says. “But can we back up a bit? The main center is in England? That’s the first I’ve heard of it.”
“The Trust has centers all over the world, Mervin, and if Hank wants to join us, he’ll be able to stay in the States if he wishes. He could be based in the building you’re standing in right now, but we like our very best students to attend our UK center. Northridge House is wholly owned and run by the Trust, and it has the finest facilities anywhere in the world. It’s a center of excellence and it really is the hub of everything we do in the Trust.”
“I see,” Mervin says. “That’s kind of unexpected. It wasn’t in the brochure.”
“I know and that’s deliberate,” Angela says. “Many of our candidates will simply not be good enough to make it to Northridge. But, I’ll be honest with you, Hank, I recognized you straight away. I’ve heard a lot about you from Stewart, and from what he says, I’d be very surprised if you didn’t meet the requirements.” She studies Hank intently. “I’m sure you remember Stewart. He was your first contact with the Trust.”
Hank juts his chin forward. “Yeah, I remember him. He gave me the card.”
“Good. But what Stewart probably didn’t tell you, is that he’s the Trust’s head of operations, so when he tells me someone is good, I sit up and listen.”
“Wait a minute,” Mervin says. “We’re getting ahead of ourselves here. Hank hasn’t even decided if he�
�ll join your program yet, so there’s no point talking about him going to England.”
“Quite right,” Angela says. “Take your time, gentlemen. Have a good look around. Ask as many questions as you can. And if you think of anything you’d like to know after you leave today, be sure to contact us. We’ll get back to you directly.”
“We’ll do that,” Mervin says.
Angela smiles. “Good. Why don’t we start as we mean to go on? Ask me anything you like.”
Hank takes a breath. “Why is it in the UK? Why not here in the States? I mean, you’re something to do with Agrippine, right? And they’re based over here.”
Angela shakes her head. “We get this a lot. The Trust is not part of Agrippine, and although we get a nice chunk of funding from them, we are not run by them. The Trust is run by an independent board, and although we liaise with Agrippine, there are no employees of Agrippine on the board, OK?”
“I guess so,” Hank says. “It just seems a little weird. I hadn’t figured on going abroad. I thought it was all here in Austin.”
“Hank, no one will force you to go anywhere,” Angela says. “But if we offer you a place at Northridge, I’d like you to consider it very carefully. There are a limited number of places, so it’s not an offer we can repeat.”
“I get it,” Mervin says. “But I just don’t know. It’s a hell of a step.”
Angela purses her lips. “Mervin, think of it like this—a place at Northridge is harder to obtain than a place at Harvard. We take only a tiny fraction of the Trust’s candidates, and we select the best from around the world. If Hank takes up a place here, he’ll be entering an exclusive club that will put him on the fast track to success. Yes, he’ll have to work extremely hard, but if he’s as good as Stewart says he is, and Stewart is never wrong about these things, then Hank will never have to worry about where his next paycheck is coming from.”
“Set for life, huh?” Mervin asks. “It’s really that good?”
Angela raises an eyebrow. “I think you know the answer to that question.”
Hank exhales noisily. “Dad, I think we ought to take a look around. I need to take a minute to get my head around all this.”
Mervin puts his hand on his son’s shoulder. “You can say that again, Hank.”
“Take your time,” Angela says. “You’ve got a lot to think about. It might be a good idea to sit down and talk it over. And help yourself to the refreshments.”
“Thanks,” Mervin says. “And next time, I certainly won’t be asking for decaf.”
CHAPTER 10
STEWART SITS ALONE IN HIS OFFICE, hunched over his desk, his hands moving rapidly over his keyboard as he scrolls through the security logs. “It must be here somewhere,” he mutters. He pauses and rubs his tired eyes with his fingertips. You asked for this, he tells himself. You asked for access to everything. But never, in his wildest dreams, had he imagined the sheer volume of data Agrippine would hand over. “Maybe I need to subdivide the data again,” he murmurs. But when he switches to his task management application and looks again at his plan of action, he can’t see any way to improve it. It gives him a headache just trying to comprehend the sheer scale of the problem. “I wonder if my faithful spiders are faring any better than me.” He opens his suite of security utilities and checks on the progress reports. Three hours ago he set a whole range of spiders to crawl the data, each one looking closely for a different type of anomaly. So far they’ve found nothing, and the spider that’s running the fastest is still only reporting two percent progress. The other spiders have barely started, as if they too are intimidated by the size of the task ahead of them.
Stewart sits back in his chair and stares up at the ceiling. “This is pointless. I need a fresh approach.” He closes his eyes for a moment and takes a deep breath, releasing it slowly. “If I was trying to manipulate one of our students into causing a security breach, how could I contact them within the system while keeping my intentions hidden?”
He tries to relax, tries to let his mind wander in the search for new possibilities. Somewhere, there has to be a clue: an error in the perfectly ordered patterns of the data; a loose thread that he can chase along until he finds its source. To manipulate someone, you need to have leverage, he thinks. You need to have something that someone else needs or craves. But even then, you need access to your victim. He opens his eyes and sits up in his chair. The networks at Northridge House are either closed or heavily monitored, and the MENT0R system is protected up to the hilt. There’s no way that someone outside the Trust can contact anyone inside Northridge via the computer systems without being detected. The answer must be something simpler, something more direct. The perpetrator must have somehow made contact with a member of staff, or a student, in the real world. They must have set up a system to communicate with the person they’re trying to manipulate. “Old school tradecraft,” Stewart says. “A dead letter drop perhaps.”
Stewart scratches his chin. His real world counterintelligence skills are a little rusty these days, but he’s done his time in the field. He thinks back to the long hours of pounding the streets, the time spent in squalid rooms in forgotten alleyways; a life lived in the shadows. He remembers the constant vigilance, the ever changing cleaning routes, the endless hours of waiting. Dark times, he thinks. But the memories rekindle a familiar flame in his belly, and a thrill of anticipation runs through him. “I’ll need a two-pronged attack,” he says. “I’ll look for the point of contact in the real world, while I let my spiders do the donkey work in the virtual one.” He allows himself a small smile. It’s a long way from being a fully formed plan, but it’s a start. And it gives him something to do. He stands up and paces the room, running through a dozen different possibilities in his mind. There are many ways a person could’ve made contact with a member of staff or a student. Northridge House is secure, but it isn’t a prison. The students visit family and friends outside the Trust at regular intervals, and while the senior staff live on-site, there are plenty of visiting professionals and ancillary workers who come and go every day.
“There’s so much to do,” he mutters. “So much to cover.” It will be too difficult to run in-depth surveillance on every single person who has access to the Northridge site, so he’ll have to be extremely selective. And he can’t leave his spiders totally unsupervised as they crawl through the mountains of data. His spiders are good at flagging up issues, but they aren’t smart enough to interpret the results. They’ll need someone to keep an eye on them.
“If only they’d let me bring in Eileen,” he grumbles. With her cybersecurity experience, she’d be the ideal person to tackle the scree of security data, and that would leave him free to focus all his energies on uncovering the real world perpetrator. Or perpetrators, he thinks. Whatever Brunner’s suspicions about Grimwood, any attempt to infiltrate a system as secure as MENT0R must certainly be a team enterprise. I’ll be looking for a whole network, perhaps divided into autonomous cells. He shakes his head. I’m jumping too far ahead, speculating beyond the available evidence. He crosses to his desk and sits down heavily in his chair. And as he stares despondently at his computer screen, a notification appears in the center of his screen:
Probable Access Violation - Code 0037F: Time Stamp Mismatch
Stewart sits bolt upright, and his hands go to his keyboard. But just as he opens his diagnostic software and selects the notification to expand it, another notification pops up—this time from a different spider although the message is the same. Stewart stares, slack-jawed as his screen fills with notifications: a blizzard of identical warnings from all of his spiders at once. He opens his diagnostic dashboard and the orange digits in the Probable Access Violations column are rocketing up into three digits, then four, and the rate of increase shows no signs of slowing. “Bloody hell!”
Stewart almost smiles at the audacity of his opponent; what better way to hide the evidence of tampering than by creating a perfect storm of false positives. But for someone to do
this so successfully, they’d need an intimate knowledge of the Trust’s systems, and they’d have to thoroughly understand the Trust’s security protocols and procedures. “That rules out a student, doesn’t it?” Stewart stares into space. The Trust’s students are the brightest and the best, and they’re chosen for their creativity and ingenuity as well as their technical skills. There are certainly some final year students who could give any security system a run for its money. But what would be their motivation? They’d be biting the hand that feeds them. And surely the final year students would have the most to lose; they’re just months away from bright futures and glittering careers. Who would risk throwing all their hard work away, just as they reach the final hurdle? And why?
Stewart closes the lid of his laptop, then he stands up and heads for the door. There is one person at the center who’ll be able to tell him straightaway whether any of the students at Northridge might be capable of such an attack, and she’ll probably know if there’s anyone who might be vulnerable to manipulation.
I’ll have to be pretty clever, he thinks. I can’t let her guess why I’m making inquiries. But with the person he’s going to see, that’s easier said than done.
Stewart exits his office and shuts the door behind him, checking that the lock has engaged, then he makes his way quickly down the corridor. He takes out his phone and makes a call, and when it’s answered, he keeps his voice light and his tone cheerful. “Hello, Eileen. I was just going to pop in and see you for a chat. Is now a good time?”
The Trust (The Downlode Heroes Book 2) Page 9