“How’s that working out for you, double-oh-seven?”
“Not very well, Mason. I don’t think anyone anticipated the extent of the crisis. It’s far beyond any predicted scenario.”
Mason snorted. “You have a gift for understatement.”
“I have many gifts,” said Carson, a little impatiently. “One of them is seeing through the smoke and identifying the essentials. If I had any vestige of loyalty remaining to the program that gave me this mission, I wouldn’t be revealing any of this. But the fact is I was set up from the start, betrayed by my own director and marked for death. The same guy, the DHS director that set me up, has the black box that was the backup drive for all the data I spoke of. What I’m trying to do now is get it back, or get at the secrets it contains.
“I don’t have a working computer or the manpower to extract anything from that facility in Longmont. But I’m betting you do. So let’s overlook the fact that you don’t trust our fallen government, and the fact that whatever’s remaining of the government considers this whole conversation treasonous. Our best weapon now is information, and that facility holds it all. What do you say we figure out what’s in it, before the Correctionists roll down the highway and knock on your little hideout’s front door?”
Mason grinned. “Dude. You’ve got balls, I’ll give you that.” He looked at the others. “And you’re right. I’ve got all kinds of tech guys, people displaced from their city jobs in Fort Collins and elsewhere. We haven’t exactly made it an area of focus, but I know they’ve gotten a couple laptops working. Powered by our occasional generator cycle or a solar panel one guy re-wired. With no internet they’re not good for much, but maybe they can figure something out from this data facility you found. Come with me and I’ll introduce you. Careful, though, they’re a pretty nerdy lot.”
They rose and followed Mason down the hall. As they passed the cafeteria Mason stopped a woman carrying a bowl of steaming soup. “Jana, where are the tech-heads? Are they still in their hole in the basement?”
Jana shook her head and pointed into the cafeteria. “Are you kidding? Those guys are always first in the dinner line.”
Mason thanked her and led the others into the cafeteria where a giant cauldron of soup was set up at the end of a row of tables, and forty-odd people were lounging about with spoons and soup-bowls. “Might as well eat up while we chat,” he told them. “My stomach is rumbling enough to show up on the Richter scale.”
A thin smile creased Dana’s lips. “I wondered what all that shaking was. And I thought you were never going to ask. I’m starving.”
They each filled a bowl with the hot soup, which looked and smelled like a creamy potato bisque. Then Mason seated them near a group of ten men and women at a table slightly apart from the rest of the cafeteria’s occupants.
“These are the tech-heads, Carson,” he said by way of introduction. “They’re supposed to have been finding us new ways to evade and outmaneuver Tamare and the Correctionists. Mostly, though, they’ve been eating up all our supplies and bickering about what kind of computer chip is better.”
A chorus of outrage rose from the people at their table, but Mason held up a hand to silence them. “This is Carson, an ex-federal agent who has a lead on a goldmine of data that might give us some answers to all the questions we’ve been asking each other since it all went down. Listen to what he has to say for a minute, while I eat my soup.”
Carson explained to the group about the facility in Longmont and what he suspected was there. “The really convenient drive, the backup device that has all the most important stuff on it, is missing,” he said. “Stolen by one of the colluding bad guys. But my hope is that what’s left in the facility is enough for you guys to sort through and find out what we need to know.”
The men and women asked a few questions about the technology in the Longmont facility, what kind of power sources were present, and how the drives had been configured. Carson and his companions couldn’t answer any of it beyond a basic description of the appearance of the drives they’d seen.
“And you just left it all there, to be ransacked by whoever comes along next?” asked one of the techies, a thin man with a goatee. “How do you expect us to retrieve it now?”
Carson had his mouth full of soup, but Dana had already finished hers. She eyed the man disdainfully. “We were interrupted. By a bunch of soldiers that didn’t like the fact that we were in possession of their only helicopter.”
The man’s eyebrows went up, and he checked Dana out with undisguised interest. “No kidding?”
“No kidding. And then we were whisked away by this guy,” she continued, pointing a thumb at Mason. “And now I’m back in high school at the nerds’ table. Rough day. So can you get the data or not?”
“Sure, we can get it,” the man said, undeterred and winking at her. “Hey, I’m Tyler, by the way. It’s very nice to meet you. Can I get you another bowl of soup?”
“No. I’ll get it myself, thanks.” Dana got up and went back to the soup line.
Carson leaned across the table toward Tyler. “Hey, buddy. She’s taken, all right? This is your only warning.”
Khalil cackled. “Oh-ho! Does she know that, Carson?”
Carson glared. “Sure she does. Now mind your own business. Tyler, what’s it going to take to get the data out? There’s probably a bajillion gigahertz of it, more than you could load onto a CD or something.”
Tyler grimaced at the woefully inaccurate advice. “Well, I’m not sitting out there the whole time. We need to bring the drives back here.”
A young Latino woman next to him spoke up, looking at Mason. “Right. We’ll need a few hours on-site to remove the drives, and you need to send enough people to guard us. Once we get it back here, it’ll take a few days to get into it, and you’ll have to provide all the generator time we ask for.”
Mason sighed. “Within reason, Beth. Don’t you have enough solar panels to make it work?”
She shook her head. “Not even close. And once we get the drives up—if we get them up—we’ll probably be blocked by some serious encryption. Without the key, it could take weeks.”
Another man across the table, with a large belly and an unruly beard, shook his head. “Nah, not weeks. I can crack it in two days, tops. Less than that if anybody can find me an old vending machine full of Mountain Dew.”
Others in the group chimed in and soon the entire table was squabbling over the best methods for getting into the data.
Mason got up and motioned for the others to follow. “That’s our cue to leave,” he said. “These guys never stop. We don’t have the drives yet and they’re off in fantasy-land working it over hypothetically. Come on, I’ll show you some quarters where you can rest tonight, and tomorrow we’ll make a plan to go get the goods.”
It was several days before they actually got back to Longmont. Mason’s group operated below the radar, and that meant they couldn’t just run around the area without careful planning and scouting first. It required a lot of coordination to mount a patrol without running into enemy troops, and they had to cancel and regroup several times.
Mason didn’t want to risk taking the chopper up in the air again so soon after their battle with Tamare’s men, and Carson agreed. Everyone in the area would be on alert to spot the aircraft, so when they decided to go airborne again a long patrol would be best, not a quick daytrip where they could be run to ground. When things finally things aligned, they organized a patrol to go to Longmont on foot, with two of Mason’s tech-heads team and several fighters. Dana and Khalil stayed behind with Mason, while Carson and Brunson accompanied the patrol to Longmont.
They left under cover of darkness, arriving at the facility near midnight. The place was still quiet, with no sign of intrusion or a return of Tamare’s troops. Carson and Brunson led the techies and two fighters into the facility while the rest took up positions outside.
“Careful down here,” Carson told the others as they descended the
stairwell. “We found an explosive trap last time.”
“You didn’t mention that,” Tyler said, pausing on the stairs. “Maybe you should check it out while we wait.”
Carson ignored him and pushed forward to the bottom. He found the door shut and locked. He and Brunson looked at each other, senses alert.
“You came up after I did when we left this place,” Brunson said. “Did you lock it on your way out?”
“No,” Carson replied. “In fact, I stuck the wad of duct tape left from your disarmed trap in the doorjamb, to make sure it wouldn’t swing shut and lock us out.” He turned to the others behind them on the stairs. “Someone’s been here, and I lost my key months ago. We can’t get in.”
He leaped back and bumped into Brunson when a voice echoed out from the other side of the door. “Carson, is that you?”
It was a woman’s voice, muffled by the door, but it sounded familiar. “Who’s in there?” Carson asked, readying his weapon.
“An agent of Deep Thaw. Who are you?”
It was Scala. Carson breathed a sigh of relief while simultaneously grunting in shock and surprise. “It’s Carson, with a whole team of others. What are you doing in there, Agent Scala?”
“Am I okay to open the door, or do you have hostiles with you?”
“Open up. We came to see about the data drives in there.”
The door opened. Scala stood inside, alone. Her hair was longer now and she wore very weathered clothing. She had a shotgun ready, but when she saw Carson, she lowered it. “Carson! You nearly gave me a heart attack. I was preparing to defend this place to the death.”
He grinned, holding out a hand to shake hers. “Likewise. What on earth are you doing here? I thought you were with your daughter down by Colorado Springs!”
Scala beckoned them inside. Carson noticed a sleeping bag and some gear set up in the corner. “Same thing you are, I assume. I came for 905T4.”
“What, after all this time? You never cared before.”
Scala stopped and stared at him as the others filed past to examine the data room. “I assumed you were dead, Carson. I finally traced you to that prison camp, but then I learned that they had executed prisoners. There was a rumor of an escape attempt which I figured might be you, but they claimed to have caught and killed the escapees. So I decided to make the trek up here and finish what we started.”
Carson waved the others away. “Go ahead, you guys, it’s safe. This is a fellow agent.” He shook his head in wonder and continued his conversation with Scala. “Incredible. That’ quite a trek. I came here by helicopter, myself. Long story. But why are you back on the mission? Did you ever find your daughter?”
The look of pain on Scala’s face made Carson instantly regret bringing it up. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. Is she… gone?”
Scala shook her head and cleared her throat. “She’s alive. I did find her, though it took me longer than I thought it would. My ex had taken her south to Pueblo. She was sick. It was just an ear infection, the kind of thing antibiotics would have cleared up easily before. But without medicine or good medical care, there were complications, and we almost lost her.
“Fortunately there were some people in Pueblo that had a functioning medical facility going, much better than what the Commissioner was offering in Colorado Springs. After several weeks of scary ups and downs, she recovered. She lost some hearing, but she’s all right. My ex and his parents are caring for her.”
Carson touched her on the shoulder. “I’m glad she pulled through. So what made you leave and come up here?”
Scala shrugged, pain still evident in her features. “There wasn’t really a place for me there. Things got kind of uncomfortable with my ex-husband and his family. And even though they didn’t know or care about my Deep Thaw mission, the things you said before we parted ways kept coming back to haunt me. I kept wondering if maybe I could have done something after all, something to turn back the tide of chaos and bring about a better future for my daughter to grow up in. It was all conjecture, though, questions swirling endlessly in my head with no answers. Finally I realized the answers were up here, so I left and I’ve been on the trail ever since.”
“When did you get here? I came through a week or so back, and all I found was a booby-trap Coulter left for us.”
“I arrived last night,” Scala said. “And found 905T4 missing. Been trying to get into some of this equipment ever since, but all I’ve got is an old smartphone I’m charging with a miniature solar panel. I don’t think it’s even configured to handle the same format of data as those drives. Who’s Coulter?”
While the techies began dismantling the data towers to get at their contents, Carson explained about the visit he’d had in the holding cell from their treacherous director, and what he’d learned since about Tamare and the Correctionists. Scala nearly wept.
“I told you, Carson, I warned you! Why didn’t you listen to my hunch?”
He held up his hands. “I know, I know. You were right. Women’s intuition, I should have listened. Believe me, I spent months in prison regretting it.”
“Not just that, Carson. The flash drive! You handed them the means to get into Cheyenne Mountain and link up with the Correctionists!”
Carson nodded gravely. “Hey, not so loud. I’m not real proud of that fact. But I came here to get it all back, and we’re very close now. We’ve joined up with a band of fighters that are sticking it to the Correctionists, and these techies are going to see if we can recover some data and figure out what 905T4 was hiding.”
Scala breathed a long sigh. “Okay. Well, I’m with you, then. It’s been a long, hard road getting here, and I’m glad to hear I’m not the only person in the world struggling to bring back the truth.”
It took a couple of hours to remove the necessary components from the data facility, and then the entire group packed up and left, Scala accompanying. They made it back to the high school in Boulder at daybreak.
Chapter 10: The Decemvirate
Mason’s tech-heads got right to work on the data drives, hooking them up to computers they’d reassembled and connected to a flexible power source fueled by a gas generator outside. The others watched for a while, amused by the now-rare sight of working computer equipment and office workers going about their business. But they soon realized it would be a while before anything came of it, and the techies weren’t very accommodating, so Carson and his friends left to help Mason’s people with other chores.
There were supplies to be gathered, weapons to clean and repair, and routes to scout throughout the surrounding countryside. Denver was largely controlled by Correctionist forces, but the area between Boulder and Fort Collins was no man’s land, and they wanted to keep it that way. That meant setting up ambush sites, caching weapons and supplies in hideouts along the roadways, and working with civilians to keep enemy troops from getting comfortable.
Scala was pleased to meet Brunson and Khalil, and spoke with them about their experiences in and around Colorado Springs and the balance of power between Commissioner Masters and General Tamare. Dana was very cool toward the female agent, however, and positively bristled when Carson related the events of their journey southward together. Scala didn’t take her very seriously, and a quiet enmity grew between them. Carson tried to keep out of it.
After two days Tyler came and found Mason and the others where they were examining intelligence reports from the Denver area and planning how best to use the chopper to harass the supply lines to the east.
“Bad news,” Tyler told them. “Those drives have encryption on them that would take serious hackers a year to break into, if it’s even possible at all. And none of us are hackers.”
Mason looked skeptical. “Then what are you? I hear you guys talking about bitcoins and wireless protocols all the time. Isn’t that hacking?”
Tyler gave an exasperated sigh. “Come down to our lab in the basement, and we’ll try to explain.”
Downstairs, Carson and Scala a
nd the others gathered around a laptop the Latino girl, Beth, had running.
“Wow, this is so cool,” Dana said, clapping the girl on the shoulder. “I haven’t seen a computer turn on in so long. Too bad you can’t get on Facebook.”
“We could play Solitaire, maybe,” Brunson joked.
Beth rolled her eyes. “This isn’t even Windows, you guys. It’s Linux. Anyway, check this out.” She showed them a list of the files from the data drives they had connected. “This is about a tenth of what we brought back from the facility, but as you can see the file names are meaningless, and the contents are all encrypted. Gobbledy-gook. We have no idea what’s in them, and have no way to begin reading it all. The one thing I was able to figure out is that nearly all of the files were last updated mere hours before the power grids went down. So whatever’s on here, it’s definitely relevant and fresh.”
Carson sighed in frustration. They were so close. “So how do you decrypt it? What would it take to get that done?”
Tyler ran his hand through matted hair. “A key. It’s pretty much the only way, without a team of professional hackers and a supercomputer.”
“What, you mean like a password?”
“Not a password. The encryption key that was used to lock all this data up. Without that, we’re powerless.”
Carson shrugged. “So we need to get the password.”
Tyler stamped his foot. “No, totally different. We need the key, which might even be an actual, physical key. One of the drives, a metadata manager system, was unencrypted, and it referenced an external device called 905T4 that supposedly could be accessed by inserting an electronic key into a port on its side.”
Scala reached into her shirt and pulled out a necklace on which hung a black key. “You mean like this?”
Carson instantly recognized the key, which had 9-0-5-T-4 engraved in its plastic handle. “Where—how did you—!”
Beth narrowed her eyes. “Give me that.” She took the key and examined the electronic contacts at the end of its smooth shaft.
Assault on Cheyenne Mountain (Denver Burning Book 4) Page 7