by Wesley Cross
“There’s something else,” she said. “I didn’t want to say it in front of Brian.”
“What?”
“Our base has been hit. I can’t get access to the direct link and the urgent message that I received is scrambled so bad, it’s impossible to understand what it says. I can’t tell for sure what happened. But whatever hit us was powerful.”
“How powerful?”
“Could’ve been nuclear.”
He looked at her for a moment, lost for words. Then he turned around and headed across the parking lot to the gas station across the street. “We better hurry then.”
42
“At least it’s only two of them at each entrance,” Chen said, pointing Connelly at the two guards in front of the scaffolding surrounding the building. “And there’s the truck. The other sides are too exposed.”
They had been hiding in a tiny square across the street from Orion Tower for the past two hours. A steady stream of cars going for the Holland Tunnel was flowing next to it, the honks and engine noise drowning out the rest of the city. The pungent smell of exhaust filled her nostrils.
After leaving Sorkin at the hotel, they stole another car, a black Beetle that seemed to have had seen enough trips to circumvent the globe several times. Its engine sputtered and coughed along the way, but it dutifully delivered them to the city in a few hours. They ditched it not too far from the Staten Island Ferry terminal in lower Manhattan and then took a few trips on the subway going up and down the island. Finally, they got off at Canal Street and cut across the city on foot before going north to the tower.
In the few days after they had fled the headquarters, there had been scaffolding constructed around the entire building that restricted entrances to four choke points. A pair of guards clad in black combat gear guarded each entrance, openly carrying submachine guns. They picked this side of the building because the street was narrower and there was a flatbed truck with a few plastic barriers on top parked next to the curb and partly obstructing the guards’ view.
“Are you sure we can’t do this from anywhere else?” Connelly said. “This place is crawling with Black Arrow.”
“Yes, I’m sure,” she said, watching the guards at the entrance. They were chatting, occasionally throwing glances up and down the street. One put out a cigarette on the side of the building and then flicked it toward traffic. “We need to know what happened at the compound before we go there. Apart from the quant at the silo, which might not even be operational anymore, this is the most powerful machine we’ll be able to get our hands on. If we want quick answers, this is the only place we can get them. Once I’m able to use the system again, I’ll be able to access it from anywhere.”
“And you can’t access it from the outside?”
“No.” She cringed. “I built it this way. The system will light up like a Christmas tree if I try. It seemed like a good idea. The irony is, I’ve always built back doors in the systems I had designed before. Just in case. Here it didn’t seem appropriate. Like leaving the garage door open at night in your own home.”
“I understand.”
“Once we are inside the building, it’ll be easier. I had paired my new neurolink with the system before we fled the tower. But since I got it installed at the silo, I haven’t had a chance to try it yet. We’ll have to figure some things out on the fly, but I’m fairly certain it’ll work. It’ll give us an advantage. Any ideas?”
“Maybe.” Connelly looked around and then pointed at a white Range Rover parked at the end of the block. “That SUV looks fancy enough. It should have a modern nav system. Can you access it?”
“Yes.” She pulled up the internal view of the remote neurolink and searched for the SUV’s signal. Once the system established a connection, she saw a smaller window pop up that mirrored the navigation interface of the car itself. She tried the hazard lights. The car’s taillights blinked.
“This is like magic,” Connelly said. “Can you program it to drive around?”
“I can. But not for too long. It’s not built for a fully autonomous drive. It’ll start making mistakes and will eventually crash. I’d give it fifteen, twenty minutes tops.”
“No, we don’t want that. How about you make it drive a few blocks away and park itself?”
“I can do that.”
“Okay.” Connelly checked his watch. “But we won’t get much time, anyway. These guys seem to check in every thirty minutes and the next one is due in roughly two. We have thirty minutes at most and that’s only if we are lucky and nobody calls on them for something random. We should aim for fifteen minutes, anyway. Is it enough time for you?”
She thought about it for a few moments. The best point to access the system would be her own place on the twenty-seventh floor. But it was also the place most likely crawling with Black Arrow agents. Going there also meant taking the elevator that could limit their options of escape. But from anywhere else, it could take longer.
“I’ll make it work,” she said. “But we might run into a guy or two on our way there.”
“Understood.”
“Are you sure about these?” She nodded at a pouch of heavy marbles, one inch in diameter, that Connelly bought when they stopped at a gas station.
“No,” he shrugged, “but the moment the shooting starts, all bets are off. We should try to keep it quiet as long as we can.”
They stayed hidden until the guards did the next security check. She watched as the guard who had smoked before spoke to someone, pressing his finger into his ear. The man stood straighter for a moment as he reported his status and then relaxed again, returning his attention to his partner.
“Back up the car now and bring it to the building. Make it dramatic,” Connelly said to her and sprinted across the street, keeping behind the flatbed.
She brought up the nav system again, touched the virtual ignition button, and plotted the path terminating in front of the truck. The tires squealed as the powerful engine jerked the car out of its parking spot and propelled it in rear gear toward the building. The guards snapped to attention as the vehicle sped toward them, and that’s when Connelly snuck around the flatbed and struck.
Chen had never seen him in real action before. A few times she’d watched Connelly spar with Jason, when Hunt was calibrating his systems, but that was not a fair fight. No man, no matter how skillful or talented, could outpace a machine. It was like using a cheat code in a computer game. Remotely starting a car with something that had been implanted in her brain might have looked like magic to Connelly. But watching him ambush two highly trained and armed to their teeth mercenaries? That looked superhuman.
The guards were out before they knew what had hit them and Chen popped the trunk of the SUV, letting Connelly stuff two unconscious bodies inside. Then, with another tap on the virtual button, she sent the car into drive and watched it disappear around the corner. She’d programmed it to park five blocks away from the tower. Then she crossed the street to meet Connelly by the doors.
“Ready?”
“Let’s do it.”
They went through the double doors and headed for the reception desk. A lone guard in a black uniform looked up at them in surprise.
“How did you—” The man made a gurgling sound and collapsed backward and out of his chair as one of Connelly’s marbles struck him squarely in the forehead.
“I’ll never play bingo with you,” she said, struggling to keep up.
“Are you in?”
She rushed behind the reception desk, doing her best not to look at the guard. A massive purple welt on the man’s head looked like an alien trying to break through the skin. Chen opened the computer terminal and punched in her credentials. Then she navigated to the main security system and enabled access to her neurolink. A cluster of icons peppered her internal vision, and she swept them aside, leaving only a handful of security controls.
“Let’s go.”
They ran toward the elevator bank, the doors chiming as Ch
en overrode the system.
“Magic.” Connelly smiled as they went inside. “Can you tap the security cameras?”
“Already have,” she said as the elevator’s doors closed. “There are two people in my apartment right now.”
“Anyone on the floor?”
“There were,” she said, “but at the moment they are investigating what’s going on at the room at the end of the hallway.”
“And what’s going on in that room?”
“Led Zeppelin.” She smiled. “Pretty loud, too.”
“Definitely magic.”
The elevator stopped at the twenty-seventh floor and they stepped outside. She could hear the sounds of “Whole Lotta Love” coming from down the corridor. They tiptoed their way to the door of her apartment and she raised her hand, signaling to Connelly to stop.
“There are two men, one in the living room looking out the window and one, ugh, is using my toilet,” she said. “I’m going to turn on the shower vent and unlock the door at the same time. Ready?”
“Go.”
The door clicked and opened, and she saw Connelly rush into her living room and strike the man by the window.
“Rob?” a voice came from the toilet. “Did you say something?”
Connelly disappeared in the bathroom and a moment later, Chen heard two quick thumps, followed by a thud of a falling body.
“Sorry,” Connelly said, coming back to the living room. “I’m afraid he made a mess.”
She nodded, slid behind the desk and powered her computer terminal. “Let’s get some answers.”
43
It was strange to be a fugitive in her own room. She accessed the server and her hands continued on autopilot as if they were some nimble animals with minds of their own. Chen glanced around the room as her fingers continued to fly over the keyboard. A man, his hands and feet tied up, was lying face down on her couch. He was unconscious, but alive. She could see the light-blue linens—her linens—that Connelly pulled over his head move up and down as the man breathed.
The other man stayed in the bathroom. A pair of feet in black combat boots were sticking out of the door, and judging by the fact that Connelly didn’t bother to tie them up, Chen suspected the mercenary was no longer capable of being a threat.
“I don’t mean to sound like a kid on a road trip,” Connelly said, coming back from the door where he had been watching the hallway. “But are we there yet?”
“There’s a lot to process,” Helen said, pulling away from the computer terminal and turning back to him. “There’s good news, and there’s bad news.”
“Give me the bad news first.”
“They tried to break into our servers and failed.”
“How’s that bad?”
“That part isn’t bad on its own,” she said. “But it triggered our defense systems. Some of them are written in. But there’s also another level of protection. It was Jason’s idea. He insisted that in the event somebody was trying to hack us, our servers would get physically disconnected from each other and the outside world.”
“That’s smart. It flipped a switch somewhere?”
“Yes.” Chen glanced at the screen. The diagram of Orion’s network resembled a group of islands—a few blinking lights scattered in a big dark sea. “All twenty of them.”
“Twenty?” Connelly leaned on the corner of the desk and looked at the monitor. “How do we turn them back on?”
“There are two ways.” She brought up a three-dimensional blueprint of the building and expanded it for him to see. “There are four switches on each of the top five floors. They are in a hidden panel next to the stairs. They look like regular circuit breakers and act the same way, too. All you need to do is flip them back on, preferably without running into any of the Black Arrow guys.”
“What’s the second way?”
“I could override the system from the penthouse. That would flip all the switches back. But…” She swapped the window on the monitor and brought up the security camera view. There were no cameras inside of the suite itself, but the large double doors of the elevator were open and the high-resolution camera on its wall gave a wide-angle view of Jason’s living room. Two guards were positioned at either side of the entrance, and there were what looked like at least a dozen men in black uniforms inside the penthouse. “It’s a hornet’s nest. I don’t see how we get the servers up and running again.”
“Agreed. Sounds like a lot of bad choices.” Connelly stood up and paced the room back and forth. “You said you had some good news too?”
“It’s sort of good news,” she said. “The tower’s system analyzed the hit on our silo before it was shut down. There’s not a lot of information to draw conclusions from, but some things are obvious. It was powerful, but it wasn’t nuclear.”
“Thank God. Can you tell where the missile did come from?”
“I don’t think it was a missile.” She hid the building’s schematics and brought up another screen. “This is one of the side projects that Max and I have been working on for some time. We initially created it for the covert communications with our assets overseas. A giant relay that bounces the message through a series of unsuspecting satellites, but we never used it. I tried to repurpose it to track a beacon in Jason’s built-in chassis, but with little success. The signal is there, but it’s so weak, I can’t triangulate it without access to the mainframe. But the fact there’s a signal gives me hope.”
“We’ll find them, Helen.” He walked back to the desk and put a hand on her shoulder. “I know we will.”
“Maybe if the silo is operational and I can tap into the quant’s power, I can give it another shot. Regardless…” She paused, collecting her thoughts. “We designed the system for a specialized satellite, but it tracks almost every satellite over the planet. Some data is coming directly from NORAD. Most of this information is not even classified. They track orbits, calculate positions of weather satellites, make satellite decay predictions, and do a lot of other things. What it doesn’t see is space junk and inert satellites.”
“You think it was a satellite that hit us? With that much precision? How’s it even possible?”
“No,” she said, pointing at the map with a scattering of white dots moving over the continents. When she zoomed out, the dots merged into a shape that looked like a donut—a wide torus with Earth in the middle of it. “There’s a ton of them—thousands. But all these are known objects, so unless you are looking for something specific, the system doesn’t care about it. You can zoom in on it, and read what it’s used for, when was it launched. The system also tracks all launches, so every time a new object appears in the sky we know where it came from.”
“Okay.”
“Here,” she opened another window and scrolled through a seemingly endless table of data, “you can see the data on every launch. You can open each and read a fair amount of information about it. Even the classified ones have stats. When the system doesn’t know something, it highlights the object, just like this little fellow in bright yellow.”
She clicked on the link, and the view expanded into a generic picture of a satellite. Unlike others, the page was entirely empty, except for a large word at the top: UNKNOWN-b80.
“What’s b80?”
“That’s our internal classification. It simply means this rock had been launched before nineteen-eighty, but we don’t know exactly when. It’s not necessarily true, either. It’s simply an extrapolation from available-to-us data. What’s more interesting is this,” Chen said and looked up at Connelly from the chair. “This is an interactive system. It stores the data continuously, but for the last seventy-two hours, I can access it right from this console. Whatever hit our compound, hit it yesterday at nineteen forty-four. Guess where our friend here was at that time?”
“Directly overhead?”
“You got that right.” Chen got up and paced the room. “I think Engel hit us with some kind of orbital weapon.”
“I don’t un
derstand.” Connelly sat at the edge of the desk and leaned closer to the screen, as if trying to see something encoded in the empty table. “A new satellite that is not new but was launched before the turn of the century? Where did it come from?”
“I don’t know for sure. But I suspect it was inert for a long time.”
“You think Engel reactivated it somehow?”
“Maybe.” She shrugged. “It doesn’t really matter. It’s there, and it hit us. Which means as long as it’s out there, it leaves us vulnerable. Now that we know the silo has survived, we need to move. We need to get back to the compound and get the quant working.”
“What are you going to do?”
“What I always do.” Chen stood up, a roguish smile on her face. “Hack.”
44
Jason Hunt tensed like a coiled spring getting ready to strike when one of Victor’s torturers would have to unlock his arm, but the man never gave him a chance. He approached him from the side and, without saying a word, jabbed a small syringe that seemed to have appeared from thin air into Hunt’s thigh. Then he proceeded to Schlager to do the same.
A warm wave spread from the site of the injection. It felt as if he had gotten a new, tiny heart that was now beating inside his thigh, sending out wave after wave that traveled through his body, one hotter than the one before. Goose bumps covered his entire body—his skin felt electrified, like a thundercloud pregnant with a charge, ready to release its power in one blinding microsecond. Even the air flow over his skin produced a sensation that was almost too much to bear. He was sure when the doctors started their work, he would descend to the levels of hell so deep there would be no coming back. A few seconds later, Hunt felt his muscles stiffen, refusing to answer his commands. His face seemed to be the only part of the body not affected by the poison. He squared his jaw, not to show any weakness, but a sickly sense of dread started to settle in.
The goons silently watched the two prisoners for a few minutes. When they seemed to be satisfied that the paralysis had taken hold, they removed Hunt’s restraints and dragged him to place on top of the wooden table. He bit his lip as his bare skin slid over the rough surface. His mind raced to the small corner of his neural interface. Buried deep under the multiple levels and firewalls, there was a small rectangular button. If he pushed it, if he willed it to be pushed, a capsule buried under the back of his cranium would release a toxin a hundred times more potent than the venom of the black mamba. He’d be dead in seconds. It surely looked like it was going to be used today.