by Jeff Adams
“Well, log back in.”
“No can do.” Even as I talked, I wasn’t sure where all this confidence was coming from, especially since my heart was thumping so hard. I could easily get myself hurt worse or cause someone else to get hurt. “I wiped out my log-in.”
Westside flew out of his chair and pulled me up by my shoulders. It hurt, and I tried not to show that. I hadn’t realized how big he was. The dude definitely worked out.
“Westside!” Raven called from his perch. “It doesn’t matter. I’m sure there’ll be someone in IT we can control to do the damage for us.”
“But I wanted to.”
He stepped back.
“Maybe you can take out your frustration on Winger once he’s finished.” As Raven spoke, Westside calmed down. “Now have a seat and pay attention to his activity so he doesn’t get the chance to do something like that again.”
“Yes, sir.”
He slammed himself into his chair. He was seething, but at least for now, he wasn’t going to be a problem.
“Winger?” I spun my chair to face Angel. “Faster to overwrite the existing data in our system or to merge the databases?”
I had to think about it.
“Show me what’s in place in your system.” I moved closer to Angel so I could easily read her screens.
“Our system’s on the right and what you just downloaded is on the left.”
She passed me her mouse so I could scroll. There were a lot of similarities in the code, but some differences I didn’t understand.
“I’m not sure a merge would work. There are differences I can’t account for. What about just writing the data into your system? I’m thinking it would work much the same way as when you were hacking the individual chips out of TOS control. Doing that would keep your existing data in place and operational.”
I wish Angel and I were working toward the same goal. Despite my first impression, she was thoughtful and smart. Was she the one who had set up what Blackbird was using? It wouldn’t surprise me to find out she was.
“In theory it should. When we add chip IDs and send out the signal, it overrides TOS’s and makes ours the primary. There’s a security hole that—”
“Angel!” Raven called out and she flinched.
Damn, she’d almost slipped. But at least I had some clue about how all this was working. We would need Angel for a debriefing.
“Anyway,” Angel shook off the admonishment. “The same theory should work as we put the data in. We’d just be doing it on a lot larger level. How many agents are we talking about importing?”
“I don’t know. When I built the encryption, I tested on a finite number and turned it over. I don’t know how many are in there.”
That was sort of true. I knew it was in the thousands, but I hadn’t needed to know, so I hadn’t looked.
That was it!
I could design a decryption and import program that could bring the whole Blackbird system to a halt.
“Can you write a decrypt and import script?”
Yes!
Angel played directly into my plan.
“One sec.”
I moved through various screens on my monitor to put on a show about making sure I had everything to do what was necessary. I knew I had enough information. If I failed to bring their entire network down, which would be preferable, I could at least crash their tracker-control system.
“I should be able to,” I finally said.
“It’s gonna have to be all you since you designed the encryption.” Angel gave a shy smile as if she was sorry she couldn’t help. “Where’s the decrypt usually occur?”
“The key is inside the tracker system so that it decrypts on the fly. It slows the job down a bit, but it keeps the data from being too easy to capture and do what you guys did.”
“Nice.” Angel looked lost in thought for a moment. “Really elegant since the control system is behind so many firewalls and security protocols.”
“Exactly.” I was sort of excited that she understood what I’d done.
“Okay you two.” Raven spoke with a hint of sarcasm. “You can go make out later.” It sounded like a parent giving us grief.
Angel actually blushed a little. I shrugged and cocked an eyebrow at her before turning to my screen.
“Where’s your database?” I asked.
“Here.”
Angel leaned over and typed rapidly on my keyboard. She brought up the database. I wasn’t surprised to see that it looked exactly like the TOS one, the key exception being the information in the “control” column. That data was in more than a hundred of the database’s rows. Wipe that data out, agents should be free—unless there was a safety I didn’t know about.
I would need to be a magician to pull this off. I wanted to flood the database to crash the system, while looking like I was doing what they wanted.
Thinking under pressure was usually one of my strong suits, but this was a lot to process. If I messed this up, the consequences could be disastrous.
“Okay. Let me work on the decrypt, and then we’ll merge.”
Angel nodded. “Let me know if I can help.”
The first thing I needed to do was set up a data loop so Westside, who I suspected was monitoring me more than Angel was, couldn’t see what I was actually doing.
Essentially I needed to do three things at the same time, keep Westside in the dark, decrypt the database since Angel was likely watching that, and write the code to reduce this network to nothingness.
I tried to tell myself this was all in a day’s work, so I wouldn’t focus on this being make-or-break time. My fingers manipulated the keys in front of me as I worked quickly to set up the loop. I’d built one of these in computer science class years ago to keep the teacher fooled while I worked on more interesting things than the assignment. It was a little harder to set up here, because I didn’t have a library of commands to pull from to use as part of the illusion.
Within a few minutes, I had Westside in the dark and Angel seeing what I needed her to.
“You’re fast,” Angel said.
I shrugged. “Years of practice.”
“Is this kid for real?” Westside continued to look at his screens. “You’re sixteen, so give it a rest.”
“West, don’t,” Angel cautioned. There was an edge in her voice she hadn’t used before.
“How about ten years?” I spun in the chair to face him. “You wanna test me, or do you want me to do this work that apparently you guys don’t know how to do?”
Raven watched.
Westside stood, looking like he might punch me. This time I didn’t care about his threat.
“You couldn’t get past our security. We zapped you pretty good yesterday.”
I stood and put on my hockey game face, a sneer along with a partially crouched stance that said bring it. He flinched just enough for me to know I had him.
Score one for the hockey player.
“Yeah, and when I came back, the only way you kept me out was sending someone to physically stop me.”
“Boys!” Raven bellowed, apparently having enough. “Enough stalling.”
Westside flinched even more as Raven yelled at us. I remained in place, glaring at him.
“Do you want to finish this on your own? Sounds like Westside can handle it.”
I pushed my luck, but it was worth it. If I were in his head, he’d be even less likely to see how I was duping him. Westside tried to puff himself up. He squared his shoulders and expanded his chest. Even though it made him more imposing, I didn’t move. I didn’t need to.
“West, why don’t you go? I got this.” Angel was up now and stood between us.
“Westside! You heard her. Go!” Raven would make an excellent drill sergeant. That tone, plus the volume, would make anyone’s blood run cold. It kind of reminded me of Darth Vader using the Force.
Westside tried to stare me down for a couple more seconds before he slammed his chair into the desk and
turned to beat a hasty retreat from the room.
“Sorry about that,” Angel whispered. “He gets too worked up sometimes.”
I held my stance for a few moments, as if making sure he wasn’t coming back. It couldn’t hurt to show a little more alpha dominance. It might come in handy later. I didn’t want to underestimate Angel. She was petite, but if she had fight training, she could be a problem since I had no skills outside of the occasional hockey brawls. Eventually I nodded at Angel and took my seat.
Dad seemed to ignore the entire exchange. As far as I could see in my peripheral vision, he hadn’t moved. His gun remained leveled on me, but he took no action to get me to sit down or force me back to work. It probably would’ve been different if I’d made for the door, but Dad’s instructions didn’t seem to include stopping a disturbance.
It was time to get this done.
Angel watched my screen. I needed to be careful because if she clued in to what I was doing as I wrote code, I’d be screwed. I wrote more lines of code than I needed to, to bury the true intention.
“Any chance you could tell me what you’re doing as you go?” Angel watched as lines of code scrolled up the screen.
“It’ll slow me down.” I stopped typing and looked over to her. “I can go over the code once I’m done.”
“Makes sense, I guess. I don’t really talk and type at the same time either. I’ll try to keep up.”
I nodded and went back to it.
It took longer than I expected. More than once I thought of something else to add to the code so I could really stick it to these guys. My concern was that I wasn’t going to be able to test anything. It had to be right the first time because I was unlikely to get a second chance.
At least Raven didn’t push. He must’ve known this part would take a while. Angel stayed quiet too. I had no idea how much she understood or if she was even keeping up with what I typed.
“Okay,” I said after a couple of hours. “Just to be clear, once I do this you’re letting my dad go.”
I stood as Raven swiveled his chair my direction.
“Let’s not jump to conclusions.” His look was harsh and got the butterflies in my stomach going. It occurred to me too late that if I failed, I likely wasn’t just going to lose Dad, but Mom too. “Let’s make sure it’s working first. After all I’d hate to let tech support go too soon.”
I wasted no time. It was going to work. It had to. “Running the execute now.”
I typed a few characters, hit Enter, and it was off. Angel went from watching my screen to hers. Part of the bonus code I wrote made it appear as if the database was being updated as Angel and I had discussed. In reality, though, the database was being corrupted.
I watched the real code lines scroll up my screen as they executed while I also had a display showing the fake information to Angel. Unfortunately I couldn’t see what was really going down in the system. I could only assume the code was doing its work as it scrolled by.
The only good news I had was Angel wasn’t saying anything and my program didn’t get stuck.
“Raven, sir, we’re seeing a database strain,” called out someone across the room.
Damn. What were they looking at? I should’ve had that buttoned up.
“Looks fine from here,” Angel said.
As far as I could tell, she was only looking at what I’d set up.
The database would be straining since I was replicating more data than it could handle. What had I missed that alerted that other person? Little tremors shook me as my nervousness became more apparent.
“Let me take a look.” I willed myself to keep it together.
My heart pounded as I raced to track down what this random guy could possibly be looking at so I could jam it. I looked at the actual database output and saw the issue—monitoring software. Rookie mistake not creating the necessary script to fool the monitors.
“Found it. Stabilizing.”
I swiftly wrote another program to handle making that alert look normal while I swept the system looking for anything else obvious that I should’ve accounted for already.
“It’s returning to normal,” the blabbermouth reported.
Suddenly Dad jabbed his gun twice in between my shoulder blades. He hadn’t touched me since we’d come in here, so the jabs startled me and I hoped no one noticed my slight flinch.
Was it a sign he was free? Or was Raven silently reminding me he had control?
The program was far enough along so the controlled agents should be free. Because Dad hadn’t moved for some time, the nudge might be the only signal he could give without revealing himself.
“I lowered the rate of adding new records and also made the decryption asynchronous, which should help the strain,” I said, offering a reason why the situation appeared to resolve so quickly.
“Everything looks normal,” Angel said. “Records are flowing into the DB, and they look to be in the standard format.”
Did the other TOS agents in this room free up? I knew from the earlier look at the Blackbird tracker map that there were four others in this room.
There were a number of guys along the walls with guns, who were like sentries, unmoving. I didn’t think Angel had a gun. I suspected most of the others didn’t either, since they appeared to be techs. I was sure, however, that Raven had a weapon. He had the look of a badass who carried at least one weapon.
In quick succession, red lights flickered on across the consoles in the room. Angel’s screen, where she’d been watching the fake database load, went dark.
“What’s happening?” Raven asked, remarkably calm, still facing the large forward screens as they all went black.
“Checking,” said the guy who’d found the issue before.
The other techs and Angel sprang into action as well. My screen went blank as my program finished executing. The system was rebooting and encrypting itself.
“System reboot,” Angel called, a frantic edge to her voice. “Did you expect that?” She turned to me expectantly.
I gave her my best confused face and called up the same system prompt.
“No.” I feigned surprise. “That shouldn’t have happened.”
I typed. Except I wasn’t typing anything useful. It was for show. I’d gotten this far, but I didn’t know what to do next. The endgame was for Dad and any other agents to snap into action.
A klaxon went off at a station to my right. That couldn’t be good, at least not for the system. But it really didn’t matter. I figured it’d been at least a minute since the reboot, maybe more. If I’d done my job right, their system wasn’t going to come back on in functional condition. At this point even I couldn’t reverse it.
“Nothing’s coming back up.” Angel sounded more panicked. “Not even log-in screens.”
She typed frantically, but her screen would only display the system prompt as she hit Enter again and again.
“I’ve got nothing.” I worked hard not to sound smug.
“What did you do?” Raven swung to face me. Each word escalated in volume. “What?”
He stood, reached behind his back, and pulled a gun. I was going to be shot. Nearly point-blank. In the chest.
Gunfire sounded behind me and by reflex, I ducked. Raven jerked back, dropped his gun, and fell back into his chair.
“Do not threaten my son!” Dad commanded in a voice that rivaled Raven’s.
Three others along the walls raised their guns to cover everyone else in the room. They had to be the TOS agents. Two Blackbird agents were shot in the arm when they tried to engage. It looked like I was right about the techs having no weapons. All of them raised their hands, including Angel.
I leaned back in my chair as my energy dissipated fast. It was over.
“Mountaineer, restrain Raven.” Dad was very much in command of the situation now. One of the TOS agents moved quickly to Raven.
I shook uncontrollably. Everything that’d kept me going drained away. I really could’ve died here.
But I saved Dad. And the other agents.
Tears fell and I leaned forward so I could bury my face in my hands. Relief flooded through me, but there was embarrassment too. This wasn’t agent behavior.
“Make sure, for now, that no one can get in here.” I wasn’t sure who Dad was addressing. I certainly wasn’t going to cover the door.
A strong hand settled on my shoulder. I moved my hands slightly and saw Dad sitting in Westside’s chair.
“I’m so proud of you.” Dad squeezed my shoulder with a reassuring grip. “I promise we’ll get out of here as soon as possible.”
I looked up, even more embarrassed that I was crying in front of him.
Three other agents moved around the room, securing everyone.
“You okay to do something?” he asked, voice soothing. Not at all like the command voice he’d used with the others.
“Of course. Anything.” My stupid voice cracked. I swallowed hard, willing myself to stabilize.
Dad needed me. Defender needed me.
“Can you get a message out that we’re okay and in control of the situation?”
“Yeah. I’m on it.”
He smiled and that gave me the strength to get it done. He moved off to work with the other agents while I got busy.
I reconfigured one of the computers so it would boot up with its own operating system rather than attempt Blackbird’s. Once that completed, I got on the internet and connected to my home network so I could call Lorenzo.
“Doctor Possible. Winger here.” It was shocking how tired my voice sounded. At least it didn’t betray my emotions.
“Winger!” Lorenzo shouted and then cleared his throat. “Situation?” he asked more professionally.
He was following protocol, although it was obvious he didn’t want to.
“Under control and we’re on speaker.”
“Yong Chi and Snowbird are with me.”
“Report?” Snowbird asked, trying to sound like an agent and not a worried mom and wife.
“Defender is here and in command,” I said, struggling to decide what was important to say. I heard a sound of relief that had to have come from Mom. “I haven’t seen Shotgun or D-Man since I was captured.”
“This is Defender,” Dad called out, loud enough so the mic picked up his voice from across the room. “We’ve locked down the control room we’re in. I’ve got four TOS agents with me and there are at least eight others here, but it’s unknown if they were able to lock down their sections. We’re in an underground complex that’s adjacent to the ice rink, but I’m not sure how best to get you our position.”