by Wesley Cross
“Oh.” He drew in a short breath and forced a smile. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to assume that—”
“Relax.” Sofia laughed out loud. “I’m messing with you. You still owe me a proper date, because whatever it was yesterday—doesn’t count.”
“Yes, right.” He laughed too, a little louder than he would’ve liked. “I’ve got to run. I’ll see you later.”
He gave her a quick kiss on the lips and left. He took the stairs, skipping two steps at a time, feeling the need to burn some nervous energy, and headed for the parking lot.
It was the smell that yanked him from the happy frame of mind first. The fire department must’ve towed whatever was left of the car and the few vehicles that were parked next to it. But the view of the blackened concrete in his parking spot with black streaks of soot stretching out of it like the petals of some flower from hell removed the last shreds of his good mood.
“Every person you’re close to,” he heard the voice of Rick Porter, his instructor at the Camp, “anything that you’re attached to is a liability, that your enemy can and will use against you at the first opportunity.”
He frowned, looking at the scorched concrete. Then he pulled out his phone and punched in a number.
“Connelly?” the voice said.
Guardian Manufacturing had a fleet of cars. At some point, the fleet had grown so large the company acquired a repair shop to maintain them. The man who had owned it, a Turkish immigrant whose name nobody knew, so everybody called him Turk, stayed on. If you needed your car fixed, Turk was the guy to talk to. Or if you needed an entirely new vehicle.
“Turk. I need a car. Somebody doused mine with a Molotov cocktail over the weekend.”
“Oh my, are you all right?” the man replied, his accented English giving his already animated speech an extra level of drama.
“I’m fine,” Connelly said. “I wasn’t in the car. Some hooligans in the neighborhood, that’s all.”
“When do you need it?”
“Like thirty minutes ago.”
“Oh, that’s a tall order, my friend. I can get something for you in, say an hour?”
“Crap.” Connelly looked at the watch. “Sure. Bring it to the office then. I’ll take a train.”
“Okay. Just so you know—from now on, we’re only driving town cars. Don’t ask me why.”
“Hang on a moment.” Connelly’s phone vibrated in his hand, and he took it away from his face to take a look at the text. “Turk?”
“Yeah?”
“Hold off with the car. It looks like my boss isn’t coming back from Europe today so I’m going to take a day off for a change. You can send me the hearse tomorrow.”
“Day off sounds nice. Enjoy it. And it’s not a hearse. It’s a perfectly capable vehicle. Dependable as they come.”
Connelly hung up the phone and looked back at the building. It’d be nice to go back to the apartment and spend the day with Sofia. They could take a stroll by the water and have a nice lunch, watching the boats on the East River.
Connelly sighed. He knew it wasn’t going to happen. For starters, Sofia probably would have a lot on her plate after the abrupt resignation of her boss. He looked at the scorched concrete. His mind took him back to the Camp again. The pockmarked face of Rick Porter watched him and his teammates doing the millionth round of mind-numbing calisthenics.
“There’ll be times,” Porter was saying, “when you’ll find yourself at a disadvantage. You’ll suffer an injury, or a loss of equipment, or incur some kind of tactical drawback. You have to find a way to turn your weakness into a strength.”
Connelly looked at the scorched concrete again. An idea started to take shape.
7
Hong Kong
The lack of sunlight bothered her today. The sky was overcast when Helen woke up in the morning to the chirping of her alarm clock. It got darker as she went about her apartment, getting ready for work. They served free meals, including breakfasts, at the main building’s cafeteria—a perk most people took advantage of—but she insisted on having the first meal of the day at the place she’d been calling home for almost two years.
It wasn’t about the food, of course. It was the routine that had a soothing effect on her. Some people jogged, and some meditated. Helen made herself breakfasts.
Today, however, as she ate the bowl of cold cereal, waiting for the kettle to boil, she found herself restlessly glancing through the wide window at the low, pregnant sky that grew darker by the minute. By the time she was drinking her first cup of coffee, the light had almost completely disappeared, making the view outside of her wide frames look apocalyptic. She expected the skies to open up any moment and give the pent-up tension a way out with a torrential downpour and the violent energy of a thunderstorm.
But no storm had come even as she drove to work, her hands gripping the steering wheel with too much vigor in anticipation of a crackling of nearby thunder. The sky remained ominous, but not a single drop of rain landed on her windshield.
She parked and, stealing glances at the clouds overhead, walked across the parking lot to the low-slung brick building next to the wire fence separating the property from the jungle outside. For the uninitiated TLR employees, it was a testing facility where people with appropriate rank could work on new research projects that required extra sensitivity. It was partially true, and the small building had several offices where employees with high clearance had worked on projects that weren’t accessible to the rest of Tillerson’s personnel. But the most crucial feature of the building was a secret elevator that granted the few chosen ones access to the lower level downstairs that featured the golden chandelier of the quantum computer.
There weren’t any tests scheduled for today that involved the use of the monstrous machine, and she usually would work out of her cubicle in the main building, but Helen had something else in mind, and the privacy of the secluded office was perfect for her goal.
She punched a code into the digital keypad, nodded to the security guard, and headed through the brightly lit hallway past the row of frosted noise-canceling glass doors. She entered her office—a small rectangular room near the end of the hallway—and, glancing at the nearly black sky outside the small window, turned the lights all the way up.
The furnishings of the room painted in clean gray were Spartan—a slick ergonomic desk that could be converted into a standing station with a push of a button, a chair, and a polished coat rack in the corner by the door.
She hung her jacket on a hook, threw a small umbrella on the floor, and sat at her desk, powering up the workstation. She logged in and worked for a few minutes—arranging meetings, answering emails, and checking her calendar for the upcoming tests. Satisfied that she created enough of a log for normal activity, she glanced at one of the icons in the corner of her screen depicting three monitors connected by thin lines—the internal TLR network. Her cursor hovered above the icon for a few seconds and then she double-clicked the mouse.
Like most people who worked on the Minerva project, Helen had access to a bigger part of the network than regular employees. Some parts of the net, however, were only open to Tillerson himself and showed up as grayed-out directories on the list. The one Helen was particularly interested had the acronym ET. She didn’t need a lot of guesses to figure out it was Edmund’s personal server.
She was sure that pinging the server directly was not going to lead to anything at best, and at worst would set off alarm bells that might land her in hot water. Helen poked around the bigger directory, trying to see if there was a way to access Tillerson’s server through another sub-directory, but that didn’t yield any results either. It seemed that if she wanted to get inside, her only way of doing that without leaving a long trail of crumbs was going directly through Tillerson’s personal computer. That, of course, required breaking into the man’s personal office.
Helen logged off the network and swiveled her chair to face the window. It was still ominously dark,
and the wind had picked up considerably. It was swirling loose leaves around the parking lot, occasionally throwing a handful against the window as if trying to get her attention.
She stood up and pulled her cell phone out of her purse. Then she opened the camera app and switched it from photo to video mode. Leaving the camera active, she swapped to the main menu and scrolled through the folders until she found one named Audio and opened it. Inside there was a single app called Micro, and she clicked on it. It opened an interface similar to a music playlist, but instead of a list of artists and songs, it contained a single audio file with no name and a large Play button in the middle of the screen.
Satisfied, she switched back to the camera app, picked the jacket off the hook, and headed outside.
It was a few degrees colder than when she’d left the campus and Helen shivered, buttoning the jacket all the way up as she walked across the parking lot to the main building. The wind was slapping her face with gusts of humid air that smelled of ozone and promised rain, and she rushed to the front door, leaning into the gale.
When she entered the building, she headed straight through the hallway, toward Tillerson’s office. She passed the cafeteria, its bright spotlights trying and failing to battle the darkness seeping from outside of the glass bricks that let little sunlight in even on the brightest days. A few of her co-workers were getting coffee, and she waved hello to them without slowing down.
When she reached Tillerson’s office at the end of the hallway, Helen took her hand out of the jacket’s pocket and aimed the camera at the electronic lock above the door handle. Then, as she knocked, she switched between the apps again and hid her phone back inside the pocket.
“Helen?” The door cracked open, letting the sounds of Chopin’s Minute Waltz in D-flat major escape the man’s office. Tillerson was wearing the usual lab coat and a bright-purple bow tie. “What can I do for you?”
“Oh, hi, Mr. Tillerson.” She smiled and looked around as if trying to make sure that no one was listening. “May I come in?”
“It’s Edmund.” He opened the door wide and stepped aside. “Of course.”
She walked into the office and stood there waiting as Tillerson closed the door behind her and walked around the desk back to his chair. The iridescent sounds of piano flowed in and out of the hidden speakers, washing over her.
“It’s a lovely piece,” she said, thumbing the Play button inside her pocket. The music coming from the speakers garbled for a split second like a radio station on a stereo of a car going through a short tunnel.
“It is.” Tillerson frowned and looked up, but after a moment the music continued uninterrupted, and his gaze returned to Helen. “Chopin is one of my favorites. Too bad he died so young. What brings you here?”
“The upcoming test,” she said. “Do you think it’s a wise idea to live stream the event? What if it fails?”
“What’s the matter?” He smiled, but the eyes behind his glasses remained serious. “Are you having doubts?”
“Not doubts, per se. I’m just trying to put my marketing hat on. If we succeed, it’ll be a great boon for the company, but what if the test fails? I do not doubt we can do it, but who’s to say we do it on the first try?”
“I see.” He steepled his fingers and stayed quiet for a few moments. “I don’t think from a marketing perspective it makes much of a difference whether Minerva can pass the test during the event.”
“How so?”
“Have you ever been to a car show, Helen?”
“No.”
“But I’m sure you’ve seen how sometimes companies participating in the event would show off what is called a concept car.”
“Sure.”
“Those are not working cars,” Tillerson said and frowned again as the music garbled for the second time. “But by showing a concept, the car company shows off its forward-thinking ability. It gives people a reason to get behind the brand.”
“I see. But—”
“Don’t worry about failure.” His smile was genuine now. “I’ll be surprised if we can pass the test on the first try. But shareholders like seeing us try to break new ground. This test is going to show them that. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to get back to work.”
“Of course.” Helen stood up and gave him a smile. “Thank you for taking the time.”
She walked out of the office and headed back toward the exit. When she got to the door, she risked a glance at her phone screen. A small line of text read transmission complete, and Helen closed the app and stuffed the phone back into her pocket. Crossing the air gap between systems by using the speakers and a microphone was tricky. It took a few long seconds—an eternity in the computer world—to transmit a malware file. It couldn’t be something extremely complicated, either—the chance of errors during such a transmission was high. But few other methods offered the level of stealth as an over-the-air hack. Apart from producing a few barely audible sounds that temporarily decreased the quality of Tillerson’s music, there was no other way to detect the transfer.
There was only one way now to find out if the bold plan had worked. At some point, she’d have to try to break into her boss’s server.
The skies finally opened up, and the rain came down with such intensity it looked like a solid wall of water penetrated by frequent flashes of blue light. Helen shivered, looking at the rain, and pulled the collar of the jacket high. She stood by the door for a few seconds, listening to the mighty cracks of thunder above, and then stepped out into the storm.
8
New York
As the downtown-bound express train passed the subway station, its wheels screeching on the old rails as it turned, Mike Connelly took quick stock of the platform. The clerk in the ticket booth on the other side of the turnstile appeared to be asleep, and a young couple sitting on the bench on the other side of the tracks seemed to be more interested in exploring the insides of each other’s mouths than anything else.
He put tactical gloves on, fixed his backpack, and took a few quick steps toward the end of the platform. He walked past the “Do not enter or cross tracks” sign and went down a small ladder to the tracks below. The blue hue of the exposed bulb of the signal light gave the tunnel a ghostly look.
Connelly looked around to make sure that nobody had spotted him and jogged deeper into the tunnel, keeping close to the wall and away from the third rail that carried six hundred volts of direct current. After a few hundred yards, the station lights disappeared behind the bend and Connelly flipped his flashlight, pointing it directly in front of his feet.
A loud clanging noise almost made him jump as the rails shifted next to him and then a wave of warm air rushed past him, making the hair on the back of his neck stand up.
“Shit,” he cursed out loud and picked up speed. There weren’t supposed to be any trains for some time at this hour after the express train, but apparently, the subway gods were not happy with him today.
The low rumble was getting closer when he spotted a small alcove on the opposite side of the tracks. Built to accommodate track workers in case of emergency, it was just deep enough to fit a person, and Connelly dashed across the tunnel, taking off his backpack as he went, and wedged himself into the opening. A few seconds later, the train roared past him, its shining windows flying across the gap like some parts of a giant strobe machine. Blinded by the lights and deafened by the noise, he squeezed into the cold wall as the train rushed by.
Finally, the last car disappeared inside the tunnel, swallowed by the darkness, and Connelly continued his journey. A few minutes later, he came to a fork and took a left tunnel leading away from the main line. The lights were off in this part of the subway, and as he walked, his flashlight bobbed up and down like a lantern on a sailboat caught in a storm.
After covering another few hundred yards, he spotted a light glowing in the distance. He picked up the pace as much as he could without risking tumbling on an uneven surface and soon, he came upon the abandoned sub
way station. A few spotlights were still working overhead, illuminating the checkered green-and-orange arches gracefully stretching over the old tunnel.
Connelly pulled himself up to the platform and climbed out, breathing a sigh of relief. He walked up the stairs to the main level of the platform and that’s where he was greeted by a couple of kids—a small boy who looked seven or eight was sitting on top of the steps, drawing circles in the dust with a stick, and a bigger kid, who stood closer to the entrance and was leaning on the dirty wall. Both perked up when they saw Connelly, and the older kid stepped forward, blocking Connelly’s path, and put his hand up like a stop sign.
The boy, who couldn’t have been more than twelve, was dressed in a pair of baggy, dirty jeans, a ripped T-shirt that once was a bright-yellow color, and had a pair of surprisingly clean brand-new sneakers on his feet.
“What you come here for?” the boy asked, his eyes scanning Connelly up and down.
“I need to see the King,” Connelly said, watching the kid closely. Growing up in Brooklyn, he knew better than to trust an innocent face that hadn’t hit puberty yet. Some younger inhabitants of the city’s underbelly were the most ruthless ones and wouldn’t ask your permission to carve a new opening in your body with a switchblade.
“I don’t know nothing about kings, mister,” the kid said, spitting at Connelly’s shoes. “You should get back to wherever you come here from before it’s too late.”
“Yes, you do,” Connelly insisted. “If you can’t make this decision, then go get somebody who can. I’ll wait here.”
“Get the fuck outta here, mister,” the boy said without moving. “You ain’t gonna see no king and only get yourself hurt. I ask you, kindly—go.”
“Tell him some of his crew are crossing the line, and the King needs to do something about it before trouble comes here,” Connelly said.