Brainrush 05 - Everlast 02: Ephemeral

by Bard, Richard

  The engineer’s monitor displayed an active 3D model of TurboHacker’s brain, various regions glowing and sparking in a seemingly random fashion. The image was generated from the specialized probes in the Spider headset. Pak studied the wave patterns and streaming data beneath the image. “Nothing unusual,” Pak said. “He’s presenting as if he’s a new user.”

  Jiaolong frowned. “How is that even possible?”

  “With any other user I’d say it isn’t possible,” Pak said. “But we learned long ago that everything is different with this man’s patterns. In his previous games, parts of his brain didn’t present at all, as if his mind recognized the intrusion and blocked it out. That isn’t the case today, thanks to the new probes. Which means that when he attempts the hack this time around, we’ll have him, every mental keystroke, every turn, every action—the system will track it all. Shall I activate the advanced program?”

  “Not until we begin to see at least some activity.”

  Jiaolong turned back to the game screen. The avatar was downing targets with an assault rifle. The movements were more fluid, but still nothing close to the whip-fast speed he’d witnessed in the past from the famous hacker. TurboHacker was putting up a good front. Almost too good—

  “We need to loosen him up,” Lin said. “So he’ll lower his guard and get lost in the game. I have just the thing.”

  “Of course,” Jiaolong said, appreciating the symmetry of her suggestion. He’d used video games as his personal coping mechanism all his life, as had each of the high-ranking targets of the Spider program. It’s what had made them vulnerable to his approach in the first place. TurboHacker was resisting in light of the unusual circumstances he’d been placed in, but with the right cocktail...

  “Let the beta testers join him,” he said to Lin. “He seemed more relaxed with them around. Can you work the drug into a snack or something?”

  “Easily,” Lin said.

  “Then let’s make it happen. Get him free and easy before the tournament. Between the drugs and the involvement of his peers, perhaps the real TurboHacker will surface.” Looking to Min, he added, “Otherwise, he’s all yours.”

  She smiled.

  “In the meantime,” he said to Zhin, “are we ready for Mr. Bronson?”

  Zhin nodded. “Oh, yes.”

  Chapter 8

  Hong Kong

  JAKE AND PETE STUDIED the west face of the domino-shaped building from a darkened twelfth-floor apartment across the street. They were dressed in black jumpsuits and equipment vests, with MP5 submachine guns slung over their shoulders and quick-donning face masks strapped at their sides. Each held a pair of binoculars to his eyes, panning them slowly as they looked for signs of Geppetto’s team.

  There were four hundred rooms on this face of the building, twenty per floor. Jake had started searching from the top, working his way down, while Pete had started at the bottom. Jake’s binoculars swept faster with each floor he scanned, his brain capturing the images with increasing speed. For the time being at least, his brain seemed to be working okay. By the time he scanned the bottom floors, Pete was only a third of the way up.

  “Nothing,” Jake mumbled, rubbing his eyes. He leaned out the window and looked down at the street. A swirl of wind tossed his hair, carrying with it the smells of fried foods and rice. Colorful neon lights stretched in both directions and throngs of people crowded the sidewalks, taking advantage of the mild autumn temperature. Feng and part of his crew were down there somewhere, waiting for the signal. Jake pressed the binoculars to his eyes and started all over again, this time working his way up from the bottom.

  “They all look the same,” Pete said.

  “I know.” He was already halfway through his second scan. “It doesn’t make sense.”

  There was a click in his earbud and Skylar’s voice sounded over the comm net. “What’s taking you so long? The wind’s picking up.” She and Lacey were on the rooftop above them.

  “Hold yer horses,” Pete replied. “Feng, are you up?”

  “Right here, boss.”

  “Your boys on the other side notice anything unusual?”

  “Nothing but residents so far.”

  “Tell ’em to keep searching.”

  “Will do.”

  Pete nudged Jake. “Whad’ya think?”

  “Something’s not right,” Jake said as he continued his scan. “I can’t put my finger on it but I can feel it.” The former high-rise factory was banded with ceiling-high sets of small-paned windows designed to allow in more natural light. It made it easier for Jake to glimpse inside, despite the grunge that covered much of the glass. The lower panes of each set opened outward from below, and laundry hung from many of the sills. Jake had figured that a cursory inspection would reveal the location of Geppetto’s headquarters. Instead, the glum interior views appeared the same in each unit, with families crowded into twelve-by-twelve rooms, bunk beds lining one wall, and shelves and cooking areas on the other. There was barely enough space in between for a card table. The flickers of TVs were the only signs of modern living.

  “They’re in there somewhere,” Pete said.

  “We’re missing something,” Jake said, stair-stepping his scan toward the higher floors. Earlier, two of Feng’s men had sauntered into the building’s lobby. They hadn’t encountered any security so they’d started up one of the staircases. It wasn’t until they’d reached the fifth floor that one of them had noticed a miniature CCTV camera hidden behind an overhead lighting fixture—an irregular addition for a rundown building, especially in this part of the city. They’d turned around immediately, acting as if they’d forgotten something, and spotted more hidden cameras on the way down. The modern equipment was further confirmation they were in the right place.

  Jake was searching the top floor when something odd caught his attention.

  Even though the scene was vague and silhouetted, there was something familiar about the room he focused on. A family of three was seated at a card table, eating. A young child dropped something and leaned over to retrieve it. It was an innocuous event but it triggered something in his mind. Hadn’t he seen another child do the same thing in a different room? Or was his deteriorating memory playing tricks on him? He hadn’t blanked since the event in the equipment room, and he’d successfully rememorized the blueprints since then. But he couldn’t be certain. He whipped the binoculars back to the first floor and quickly searched for rooms with three people, sweeping the lenses from floor to floor.

  “Thirty-two rooms,” he muttered.

  “What’s that?” Pete asked.

  “Thirty-two rooms with two adults and a child.”

  “What are ye—”

  Jake waved him off. “Eight rooms where the three of them are seated at a table. But only two rooms where the family is seated in the exact same configuration... ” He trailed off, his eyes darting back and forth from one room to the other—one of which was on the top floor, while the other was three floors down. In the lower apartment, one of the adults rose from the table and took something to the sink. A few seconds later, the remaining adult and the child did the same. Jake moved his focus to the top-floor room.

  “Keep your eyes on the top-floor window,” he said. “Fourth from the end on the right side. Two adults and a child having dinner.”

  Pete swiveled his binoculars. “Got ’em.”

  “The adult on the left—I think he’s the father—is about to get up and place something in the sink, probably his dinnerware.”

  “How on earth could ye—”

  “Wait for it,” Jake said. “Right. About. Now.” The father got up and moved to the sink.

  “I’ll be damned.”

  “Probably, but let’s keep watching to make sure I’m right. The mother and child should follow him to the sink in…three, two, one.” The two rose from the table exactly on cue.

  “Brilliant,” Pete said. “I guess Lacey was right. Ye truly are the full shilling.”

  �
��They’re using projected videos to disguise what’s really going on.”

  “So let’s take a look behind the curtain,” Pete said. He lowered his binoculars and pulled his smartphone from his vest. There was a clamshell attachment on the back of the phone—an infrared adaptor for the camera lens, great for seeing in the dark or through smoke. “Hold this,” he said, handing it to Jake.

  “Will it work at this range?” Jake asked.

  “Not without this attached,” Pete said, unclipping a handheld monocular scope from his vest. He connected it with a wire to the phone and pointed the scope at the building. The magnified image jiggled on the phone. The building was depicted in green-scale tones while the heat-emitting occupants and appliances shone as bright yellow. Pete steadied the scope on the windowsill and they both saw it immediately. The top four floors of the building—the twenty-first to the twenty-fifth floors—looked entirely different from those below, with people and equipment gathered in clusters in various-sized rooms on each floor, none of which coincided with the false projections.

  “Clever,” Pete said.

  “The puppet master’s headquarters,” Jake said between clenched teeth.

  The glowing heat signatures were limited to people and warm objects within fifteen to twenty feet of the windows, but that was enough to give them a feel for what lay beyond. Pete panned the twenty-first and twenty-second floors with the scope, and the heat signatures on the smartphone screen revealed dozens of figures lying on bunks and gathered in sitting areas. “Dorms and lounge areas?” Pete wondered.

  “Looks like it,” Jake said. He pointed to a large space with people seated around tables. “They’ve even got a cafeteria.”

  “These upper two floors gotta be the work areas,” Pete said, after guiding the scope to where rows of figures sat at computer stations and others seemed to be gathered in a conference room. He swiveled the lens to a double bank of windows near the corner of the twenty-fifth floor and zoomed in. “And here’s our target.”

  The room wasn’t large, but the array of stacked computer equipment glowed brightly enough for Jake and Pete to identify it as a security room. A lone figure was seated inside, facing a wall of screens. Jake cross-checked what he saw with his memorized blueprint of the original factory layout. The interior buildout was dramatically different but the bones of the building seemed unchanged. “It’s about thirty feet from the southwest stairwell,” he said as he laid out the ingress course in his mind.

  Pete stowed the scope and phone in his vest. “We’re on our way up,” he said over the comm.

  Jake led the way out of the room and up the staircase toward the rooftop.

  Ready or not, here we come.

  ***

  Jake peered over the ledge and fought a wave of vertigo. High altitudes with a plane strapped to his butt were one thing, but leaning out over a thirty-five-story building was another matter. The target rooftop seemed much farther away than it had when he first saw it on the satellite view.

  Insufficient intel and a crazy-ass plan. We’re breaking our own rules, he thought, glancing at Lacey and the others.

  A gust of wind rushed up the face of the building, forcing him back from the edge.

  Skylar was beside him, crouched within the triangular control frame of a hang glider. The fabric wings popped and ruffled in the sudden turbulence. “Oh, yeah,” she said with an exuberant grin, struggling to hold the delta wing steady. “The wilder the ride, the sweeter the victory.” Pete stood behind her, one hand bracing the glider’s tail.

  Jake shook his head, glad it wasn’t him in Skylar’s place. Piloting a plane was one thing but a hang glider? That was just asking for trouble. But Pete and Sky were pros. He and Lacey, on the other hand, were way out of their league. Lacey stood on his other side with a calm determination that belied her trembling, white-knuckled fists. The moon was out, the target was in sight, and the winds were only going to get worse.

  It was time to go.

  He sat down and braced his feet against the ledge on either side of an aluminum-encased spool of wire that Pete had clamped to the rooftop. The high-strength monofilament was the same type used in wire-guided missiles. The other end was attached to the glider frame. It was Jake’s job to sever the line if Sky encountered any control problems. He nodded to Pete. “Let’s do this thing.”

  “Okay, Feng,” Pete said over the comm. “Start the show.”

  Faint pops of automatic weapons echoed from the street below, sounding like distant firecrackers. Five seconds later, Skylar leaped off the roof, trailing wire as the spool unwound between Jake’s legs with a high-pitched whine. The glider’s nose dropped and disappeared from sight. Jake felt his stomach lurch in empathy. A moment later, the glider popped back up and began a series of wobbling S-turns toward the target, the whine of the spool shifting with each gust of wind.

  “My God,” Lacey said. “She’s unbelievable.”

  Pete stood at the edge, binoculars pressed against his eyes. “Steady, lass,” he said over the comm. “Yer looking good.”

  From his seated position, Jake had to crane his neck to watch Skylar’s final approach to the lower building. A maze of equipment and piping covered most of the roof. The only flat surface available for landing was on top of the fifteen-by-fifteen service structure at the far end of the building. If Skylar landed short she’d be mangled, and the array of panning cameras they’d spotted would sound the alarm. But if she flared too late, she’d drop over the far edge and their plan would be a bust. The glider’s S-turns narrowed as it passed over the near end of the building, and Jake inched his palm closer to the emergency cut-off lever on the spool.

  Her altitude was too high.

  The spool whined, the glider pitched downward, and Jake held his breath. Just as it seemed about to crash into the piping, the glider leveled off like a crop duster spraying a field and raced over the jungle of obstacles toward the target. At the last possible moment, the nose popped upward, the wings flared, and Skylar landed dead center on top of the roof of the service structure.

  Jake blew out a breath.

  “Easy peasy,” Skylar said over the comm. “That’s twenty bucks you owe me.”

  “Add it to the bill,” Pete said with a sigh of relief.

  Jake rose and clipped the cable loop on the end of the wire to the spooled zip line they’d already attached to the wall behind them. “Ready on our end,” he said over the comm, knowing Skylar was securing to the target roof a high-speed, motorized pulley that she’d use to pull the zip line across.

  Two minutes later, the wind was blowing in Jake’s face as he zipped toward the target, his heart pounding. Skylar helped him stop at the end. The specialized equipment was next and Skylar unfastened it with efficiency. She lugged it over her shoulder and pointed to each of the four panning cameras mounted on the eaves of the structure they were on. She moved toward the access ladder.

  “Once Lacey and Pete are here,” she said, “be sure to time your descent down the ladder to avoid the cameras. When you reach the rooftop, you’ll be okay as long as you hug the wall of this structure, and then stay low behind that equipment over there as you make for the door.” She pointed out the route they should take, indicating where the cameras were. “Since they’re panning, they’re easy to spot. Got it?”

  “Got it.”

  She turned around and placed a foot on the top rung of the ladder, hesitating as she looked left and right at two of the swiveling cameras. A whizzing sound behind Jake turned his attention back to the zip line. Lacey was on her way down, her eyes wide, jaw clenched. She applied the brake a moment too late but he braced himself and cushioned her stop.

  “Whew,” she said. “What a rush!”

  He looked back to the ladder. Sky was gone, and he knew she was running a zigzag route to set up her equipment. He crossed his fingers that she’d make it unseen.

  Pete was next and stopped without assistance. Sirens reverberated in the distance, and Jake realized Feng�
�s feint would end soon. They needed to be in position before then. He briefed Lacey and Pete on the route and camera locations. “Remember to stay low,” he said. He led the way down the ladder and through the maze of rooftop equipment to the door of the southwest stairwell. Skylar was there picking the lock.

  “The equipment?” Pete asked.

  “In place and ready to go,” she said, opening the door.

  Jake stepped inside first, leading with the suppressed muzzle of his MP5.

  Chapter 9

  Hong Kong

  Earlier

  AIM...FIRE...SWIVEL...duck...swivel...aim...toss grenade...

  Marshall allowed himself a sense of satisfaction as he dropped another of his computer-generated opponents. He’d opened his mind to the game, starting this time with the built-in tutorial, searching for anything unusual as he taught his brain the commands. Movement had been relatively simple once he’d gotten the hang of it, so he’d moved on to the weapons and combat commands. The tutorial had taken him through its “training” program, showing him scores of flash-card images of various weapons and commands, apparently learning his brain patterns as he’d focused on each image. They’d flashed by slowly at first, the sequence changing in a seemingly random fashion. Then the process had accelerated, until finally the images had appeared in rapid-fire succession. Before long, select images had dropped off the list, as if the software had what it needed regarding that weapon or command. Ten minutes later, the last of the flash cards had disappeared and Shamer’s sultry voice had said, “Let’s play.”

  He’d dove in.

  He thought AK-47 and his avatar switched to that weapon, then aim, and the aiming reticle settled on a computer soldier that was charging in from Marshall’s right, then fire, and his avatar squeezed the trigger. The soldier flew backward from the impact of the rounds. It all happened in the blink of an eye. Marshall had to admit it was awesome, and in different circumstances he could imagine immersing himself in the game for hours. There was no denying its genius as he progressed through the practice rounds. The speed with which it learned his unique brain patterns was astounding. The technology was beyond anything he’d come across, and its applications were...