“How do you get out of there when we have what we need?” Lolly asked.
“Why not the same way we go in, the rope?” Hap said.
“We can’t leave the rope up there,” I said. “The guard patrols would see it. We’ll go down to ground level and either climb over or cut through the fence at either end of the wall that runs by the building.”
“What do you think Fell will think of this. He’ll be impressed I bet,” Hap said.
“Maybe,” I replied, “but let’s wait and see if he has a plan of his own. Close to the vest, Hap.”
My bet was that Fell had a plan. A plan he made up relying on maps and images. Time would tell. “Let’s sleep on this and meet in the morning. If it still looks good we’ll call Fell.”
The hackers showed up at my office bright-eyed and early. Too bright-eyed and too damned early for my taste.
After review, we all still felt our plan was the best we could come up with, so I called Fell. He sounded bright-eyed as well and said he’d be right over. Said he had a plan.
Half an hour later Fell showed up. “You guys have something?” he asked.
“We have some information, but you mentioned you had a plan. Let’s hear it,” I said.
He went to the map and walked us through it. “You approach the computer center from the west at night and go through the fence here,” he said pointing at a spot on the map.
The point was twenty-five or thirty meters south of the four-story building we were going to use, beyond the end of the wall that stood in front of the three-story building inside the BluCorp compound. It was close to where we considered going through the fence on our way out.
“There is some plant cover there that will hide the damage to the fence,” he said.
“Once you are through, you bear south to this narrow alley, then you head east two hundred meters to here,” he said indicating a cutout in the wall. “You can access the communications lines there.”
“How do—” Hap said before Fell cut him off with a wave of his hand.
“I’ll cover it all. Save your questions till I am finished.”
Hap held his hands up and nodded.
“If you move behind this wall you will be out of sight if a patrol goes by. From that spot you can access the internal system and get the data I need, and see if the Savans are actually there. As long as you are quiet the guards should go past you,” he said encouragingly.
“You might be worried about the cameras, don’t be. One of you can hack into them from outside the compound and keep the security people from seeing any of this. BluCorp screwed up and didn’t isolate the cabling on the cameras. Lolly would be best suited for this task I think.”
She glanced at me with a questioning look. I nodded slightly.
“Where would I do this?” she asked.
“I was coming to that.” He poked the map once again, landing on another building south of his proposed entry point. “Right here. Ground floor. You can see down the alley through the fence and watch their progress. You can keep me informed on what is going on by mobile phone.”
“And she can keep us informed via beamed data carrier,” I said.
Fell glared at me. “Where am I supposed to get that?”
“I don’t know, Security Forces wouldn’t have anything like that I guess.”
The hackers all laughed at my sarcasm.
Fell scowled at me. “Fine. I’ll come up with something.”
Fell put his finger onto the map again. “Once you get what you came for, you exit to the east. You follow the same alley you were in before until you get near the eastern edge of the compound, then you take this route north,” he said zigzagging his finger across the map. “You have numerous places to hide among these buildings in case you run into any guards. You make your way to this gate at the northeast corner where you’ll exit and head into this alley just down the street. It’s secluded so you don’t have to worry about being spotted. Once you’re out your phones will work. You call me and I’ll pick you up in the van we’ll be using. I’ll be waiting nearby.”
“What about Lolly?” Lob asked.
Hap had a sour look on his face when he glanced at me.
“We will pick her up on the way out,” Fell said.
I knew Fell must have used some other resources to come up with his plan. There was no other way he could know there was a spot to access communications lines in the middle of the BluCorp compound. It was not visible from the outside. I was sure he had assets to use we didn’t know about, but this was the kind of thing he should have shared with us.
“How does it look to you guys? You actually looked at the place,” he said.
“Interesting,” I said. “You came up with this just by using maps and images?”
“Blueprints also,” he said.
He was full of it. I could see by the looks on the hackers’ faces that they felt the same as I did.
“Did you have a different idea?” Fell asked.
“We had some other ideas, sure,” I said. “But yours is much further along than anything we came up with.”
I would have asked him a lot of questions, especially about the long circuitous route out of the compound, maybe picked his plan apart on other points as well, but without saying anything to the hackers I was sure we were going with our plan.
“So I take it you approve?” Fell said.
“As far as you know,” I said with a smile. Fell pursed his lips and glared at me. “Let us go over it and we’ll get back to you. We might need some extra gear.”
“Sure. Call me when you know,” he said. Fell waved and headed for the door with a smile on his face. I think he was rather proud of himself.
As soon as he was gone, all four hackers started talking over one another, complaining about Fell’s plan.
“One at a time,” I said.
“We ain’t really going with his plan, right?” Hap asked.
“No, we’re not.”
“Good. Thought so. Why does he have us taking that stupid path out?”
“Maybe he doesn’t know what he’s doing?” Lolly said.
We all laughed and I thought that maybe she had a point. Then again, it was obvious he knew things we didn’t, but he wasn’t sharing. I decided it was better to go with what we knew rather than trust Fell.
We walked through our plan once again, this time with gear in mind. We needed to compile a list of any special equipment we’d need and see about acquiring it.
Some of it was easy. The hackers knew what they would need to get into the systems inside BluCorp’s compound and to take control of the cameras. We knew we’d need rope to cross from one roof to another, a come-along to make the rope taut, and since we’d be going from the roof of a four story building to a three story building I thought a rope trolley would be easier and safer for us to use once Worm crossed. We knew we might not be able to find a trolley quickly, so I thought a pulley would work just as well and it beat trying to emulate a chimpanzee. A hardware store would have a pulley.
There were other, more mundane things like gloves, water, proper clothing, first aid kits, tape, wire, a few basic backup tools, and a dozen other things. Once we knew what we were taking with us we needed to decide who would carry each item.
Our plan called for Lolly to operate out of the office we were in the day before, and since she would be on her own she needed to be self-contained and carry only the gear she needed.
For the four of us that would be going into the compound it was not very difficult to determine either. We were travelling light. I would carry the bulk of the gear: the data reader, beamed data carrier receiver, first aid kit and other gear in a shoulder bag. Lob would also carry a small bag with some items.
I insisted that we itemize and list everything we were taking with us and make sure we had each item, checking it off a list as we packed it. The hackers didn’t like it, but it’s been my experience that people always forget something if you don’t check. There
is a reason the checklist was created.
We piled everything on a table and went down the list, packing as we went along.
“Do we really need to do this?” Hap said. “I mean we each know what we’re taking along with us.”
“No,” I said, “we know what we are supposed to take along, but we don’t know what we actually have until we put eyeballs on each piece and see it getting put into a bag or pocket.”
Hap rolled his eyes.
“I think that’s smart,” Lob said.
“Yeah, he has a point,” Worm said. “I mean we forgot to bring the two data readers with us today.”
“I know,” Hap said. “But we ain’t going anywhere today so it don’t matter.”
“But what if we forget something important when we are actually going?” Lolly said. “That’s why we get ready now, right RR?”
I nodded. “Say, Hap, you got that thing that’ll save our asses? Uh, no dude, I left it at home. Great, we’re dead then,” I said scowling at Hap. “I don’t want to have that conversation with you inside BluCorp’s compound.”
Hap sighed heavily. “Okay, okay. I get it.”
“Okay, among the last few items we have are screw tape, two rolls,” I said.
“Got’em,” Lob said. “You carry one, I carry one.”
“Why do they call it screw tape?” Worm asked.
“You ain’t seen the ads?” Hap said. “‘Say screw you to loose items with screw tape! In hot or cold, dry or wet weather, this stuff sticks things like they were screwed together!’ You had to have heard that before.”
“I don’t listen to that stuff closely enough I guess.”
“What kind of clothes should we wear, RR? Black like you see on vids?” Lolly asked.
“Black is okay. It will be dark. If they flash thermal or certain kinds of IR, black might ping on some of that, but we didn’t see any evidence of that kind of gear. Most darker neutral colors will work at night. I’m going to wear grey tactical pants and jacket since we’ll be urban and I’m stylish. Wear what you want, just make sure what you choose is durable and quiet.”
“So tap shoes are out?” Hap asked. He got four sets of glares.
“Back to the list,” I said. “One twelve gauge shotgun, one .45 caliber pistol, each with ammunition, Five shotgun slugs, sixteen double-aught buckshot, forty-one rounds .45 ACP and magazines. “
“We getting gats?” Hap asked.
“Do you have much experience with firearms?”
“No, but aren’t they point and shoot? That’s what they do in the vids.”
I shook my head. “I’m not asking to go into the computer with you, because I’m not trained for it. You don’t go in with a firearm for the same reason.”
“It’s psycherspace, man.”
“Whatever. You kind of proved my point right there.”
“Okay, but what if you get killed?”
“I’ll be dead, that’s what. We had better hope there isn’t any shooting because even if we were all armed we’d still be outgunned. If there is gunplay and I get killed then you can use my iron. I won’t complain. You’d be better off getting the hell out of there.”
“Just like Sowtown, Hap. We’re ghosts, not cadre. Remember what happened to my brother,” Worm said.
Fell stopped by in the afternoon and brought us the beamed data carrier broadcast unit and receiver, a data reader, and comcodes and other information for hacking the camera system at the BluCorp compound.
He told us that if we were ready we would go the following evening. He didn’t stay long.
Lolly looked over the information concerning the cameras and felt confident she could accomplish her part of the job. Hap and Worm cracked open the data reader Fell provided and declared it “junk.”
“This thing is bone stock from the looks of it,” Hap said looking over the guts of the machine.
“Not enough ports for four of us plus the receiver,” Worm commented.
“It looks a lot newer than your data readers,” I said.
Hap laughed. “It is, RR. The problem is the thing’s stock, like I said. No mods. Ours have extra ports for more data plugs, more memory, tweaked processers. This thing smells better, but it ain’t got anything different or better than ours.”
“Except maybe that,” Worm said looking intently inside the case of the data reader. “What is that?”
“Dunno,” Hap said. “Lob, you know what this is?”
Lob stopped what he was doing and walked over with a bundle of short wires in his hand and looked inside the data reader.
Worm tapped a part inside the case.
“I think it’s a tracking device,” Lob said. He looked closer. “Passive. It doesn’t connect to a power source.”
“Anti-theft device maybe?” Worm asked.
“Maybe. I ain’t seen anything like it before.”
“Maybe Fell thinks we’ll steal it,” Hap said.
“We aren’t taking it with us, right?” I asked.
“No. It’s almost useless to us,” Worm said.
“Then we’ll leave it here…,” I said, “but pull the tracking device.”
“Why?” Lob asked.
“If Fell put it in there to keep tabs on us, he’ll ask about it. We take it with us and ditch it somewhere.”
“Not a bad idea,” Worm said. “I’ll take care of it.” He stuck his face inside the data reader once again.
Lob went back to what he was doing before, looking at a short connecter of some kind, It was maybe five or six millimeters in diameter at one end and tapered down to a port for a common data plug. The thick end had a small C shaped clamp attached to the outside with a screw adjustment on the side.
“What is that?” I asked.
“We call it a rat’s tail. You clamp this around an insulated wire. As you tighten the screw a non-conducting blade slices the insulation on the wire. As you continue to tighten it widens the cut until non-conducting gel coats the exposed portion of the wire. As you continue to turn it, particles get released into the gel that increase the conductivity very, very slowly until you have a complete connection. It’s a way to splice into a live data wire without detection. If they are monitoring their throughput or bandwidth they’ll never see a change.”
~~~:{o}:~~~
Chapter 13
on the QT News Service - Local, High Town, Riser, Midtown
Nothing Happens
Locally, nothing happened today. Nothing. Not a blasted thing. At least nothing worth reporting, and that itself is worth reporting, at least on a day like this.
Don’t believe us? Here are the top stories in local news:
Bolt 2 the Head has 127th best selling day in franchise history.
Some people you don’t know died.
The sky is blue.
Water is wet.
Someone’s payment is due.
And the sun doesn’t sweat.
Someone on the on the QT staff had time to write that.
Like we said, nothing happened.
on the QT - Damn it! We had something for this.
---o---
Fell called the next morning and said he would come by that evening before dark. He had a ground van for transport.
The hackers came by my office in the middle of the afternoon and we went over everything again, including checking and repacking our gear once more. This time we had everything.
We ran through our plan one last time. Once we were finished I bundled everything that Fell had provided us with, along with anything else that could conceivably tie us in with what we were about to do, and took it all to a moldy storage room in the basement and stowed it in a rusty locker in a back corner, just in case.
We were just finishing a light supper when Fell stopped by.
“When you’re ready I’ll take you down to the van,” he said.
Fifteen minutes later we left my office and walked to the alley that ran behind Building 313.
Fell had acquired a gener
ic-looking white service van. A good choice if you wanted to avoid attracting attention.
We also discovered Fell had another surprise for us, four armed toughs who would be travelling with us.
“These guys are the cavalry,” Fell said gesturing at the four men standing behind him. “If you get into trouble these guys will get you out. You didn’t think I’d hang you out to dry if things went wrong in there, did you?”
I’d seen a lot of men like Fell’s four-man trigger team. Young men with hard eyes. Mean eyes that brimmed with confidence, but I doubted they’d ever really been tested. I don’t know where he got them, but I was reasonably sure they weren’t Security Forces personnel.
“Any more last minute changes to the plan?” I asked. The four goons glared at me. I ignored them.
“No changes, Johnson. This is my op, not yours. I don’t have to tell you everything.”
“I never said you did, but when it affects our part in this you should mention it.”
“This changes nothing,” Fell said.
“It might. You should have told us we had such a formidable force behind us. I feel a lot more confident just knowing they’re ready to come riding in and save us. It really puts my mind at ease.”
Their glares told me my sarcasm wasn’t lost on them.
“You think we care about your opinion?” asked one of them.
Fell interrupted our exchange.
“Enough. You’re right, I should have mentioned these guys. They are very good, Johnson.”
“If you say so. They look a little green to me.”
The four toughs renewed their glaring. I took it as a good sign. I was sure we’d be good friends by morning.
“Johnson, I need the maps and the other things I provided you with,” Fell said.
“They are in my office. I can get them for you,” I lied, feeling him out a little.
“That’s okay,” he said with an odd smile. “They’ll be fine where they are. You can worry about it later. Let’s get aboard.”
His answer didn’t make me feel any better about the guy.
Two of Fell’s men climbed in the front seat and the rest of us piled in the back. The hackers sat closest to the cab, two on each side. Two of Fell’s goons sat across from me and Fell. They took turns glaring at me the entire trip.
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