Debris Line (Gibson Vaughn)

by Matthew Fitzsimmons

  “Luisa Mata,” Hendricks said, pointing to themselves and then the cannery.

  That seemed to make an impression. The guards paused to talk among themselves. One gestured to the Porsche and said, “Fernando Alves.”

  “Sim, Fernando Alves. Sim.” Gibson pointed agreeably toward the cannery again, holding up Dani Coelho’s keys. There were probably techniques for social-engineering someone in a foreign language; Gibson didn’t happen to know any of them. Hendricks joined him, and together they pointed in unison like a couple of backup dancers in a music video. The guards didn’t appear to be music fans.

  One held up a hand for silence and made a phone call.

  “Okay, this is the part where we get properly shot,” Hendricks said.

  “If it goes bad, we just say we didn’t get word.”

  “Oh, I’m sure they’ll buy that.”

  The guard stood there on the phone in silence for what felt like an eternity. At first, Gibson thought he was listening to instructions. That wasn’t it. He was on hold. Finally, someone got on the line, and the guard explained his situation for a second time. Whatever the person on the other end said caused the guard to explode in anger. A yelling match ensued. Finally, he hung up in frustration, conferred with his partner, and waved the Porsche inside.

  “How the hell did that work?” Hendricks said.

  Gibson shrugged. “Chaos. Baltasar is too busy going to war to take calls.”

  It was his first and most reliable principle—in any security setup: the human was always the weakest link. Security depended on calm, rational actors, and those were in short supply in the Algarve today. Once again, simple human error had been his ticket inside a place he wasn’t supposed to be. That and a healthy dose of luck.

  They parked around back. Hendricks drew a gun and popped the magazine so he could count the remaining rounds. Gibson stared at it. They’d been made to give up their weapons back at the hotel but hadn’t been searched. Hendricks must have helped himself to another when he was alone in the hotel room. Hendricks caught him staring and arched one eyebrow.

  “Do you have one for me?” Gibson asked.

  Hendricks shook his head. “Weren’t on the same side then, Mr. Hold Out on His Friends.”

  “We’re friends?” Gibson said with honest surprise.

  Hendricks looked him up and down. “Get out of the damn car before I loan you a bullet.”

  They went up the ramp and into the warehouse. The mountain of drugs remained undisturbed, the yellow line of paint still leading to nowhere. A lone guard sat at the security desk, shivering in a Fresco Mar parka. He must have been the low man on the totem pole to draw the unenviable task of watching a pile of narcotics wired with high explosives. They gave him a friendly wave and made a slow circuit around the shipment. Gibson wanted to make sure he hadn’t missed anything, and to refresh his memory of the layout. He pointed out to Hendricks the five cables that ran up the column and disappeared into the Fresco Mar cable tray.

  “We find where those terminate, and we’re in business,” Gibson said.

  “And you’re thinking the server closet?”

  “Well, my first guess was the roof, but the server closet makes sense too.”

  They stopped at the security desk to pick up Gibson’s messenger bag, which had been delivered sometime in the last few hours. The guard was friendly and bored out of his mind. He introduced himself as Filipe, and as luck would have it, he spoke decent English. He pointed them in the direction of the server closet and gave them a walkie-talkie in case they got lost or had any questions. Hendricks sat on the edge of the desk and chatted with him while Gibson made sure everything he needed was in his bag. When they left, Filipe seemed genuinely disappointed to see them go.

  “Nice kid,” Hendricks said as they walked away. “Dumb, but nice.”

  The server closet was down a carpeted hallway and through the dark, empty cubicles of the Fresco Mar offices. It was a small, windowless eight-by-eight concrete box with plywood-covered walls and a vinyl-tiled floor. Gibson had worked in a dozen exactly like it. The white noise of fans and air-conditioning greeted them at the door. From experience, Gibson knew the sound would gradually make a person lose all track of time.

  At most, Gibson expected to find a switch, a firewall, and perhaps a single, older server. Plenty of juice for a business this size. What he didn’t expect was a SAN or the stack of high-end servers. A SAN, or storage area network, was essentially rack after rack of hard drives linked together to manage and used to store data. Finding one in a sardine cannery was a bit like finding a smartphone on an Amish farm. There was no earthly reason a business this size would need it. He couldn’t imagine what else Baltasar might be into. Digital piracy, perhaps? In any event, that wasn’t why they were here. Best to stay focused.

  Gibson took a moment to orient himself and visualize how everything was laid out. Overall, it looked as if Dani Coelho had done reasonably tidy work. It would make spotting anything new or hastily installed that much easier to find.

  The server racks were mounted on the floor, far enough from the wall to allow access from all sides. Gibson shimmied around to the far side and began checking the cabling. Sure enough, after a few minutes of hunting, he found five network cables that came into the room along with the Fresco Mar cabling but were a different color and bundled separately.

  “Found it,” he said to himself.

  “Cool. Can’t we just unplug it and go home?”

  “Sure, if you want to risk vaporizing Baltasar’s shipment. If it were me, I would have programmed in a dead man’s switch to interpret any tampering as a self-destruct signal.”

  “Great,” Hendricks said. “How do people work in places like this?”

  Alone, preferably. Gibson traced Dol5’s cables to the core switch. What he needed now was access to the firewall between the network switch and the outside world. Problem was, it would be password protected from remote access. However, console ports often weren’t—networks were designed to defend against hacks from the outside; they tended to trust anyone with physical access. Gibson hoped Dani Coelho wasn’t an exception to the rule.

  Fortunately, it turned out he wasn’t. Once Gibson connected his laptop to the firewall, the first thing he noticed was an enormous amount of encrypted traffic originating from a single offsite IP address. Gibson felt his curiosity flare up again, but since the encrypted data wasn’t in the same network range as the cannery, he disregarded it. He didn’t have time to be nosing around and frankly didn’t want to know any more about Baltasar’s other operations than absolutely necessary. Problem was, he saw very little network traffic otherwise. It almost seemed as if the defenses around the shipment were asleep.

  Something caught his eye. A short burst of encrypted data repeating itself at regular intervals. It looked very much like a “keep-alive.” Back in his Marine days, when Gibson had been with the Activity, he’d worked in a SCIF—sensitive compartmented information facility—which was explicitly designed to protect classified data. One of its failsafe security precautions was a keep-alive. Rather than only sounding an alarm when something failed or was tampered with, a SCIF actively beaconed out to a monitoring team that everything was normal. Passive alarms were much easier to defeat than active defenses. Gibson timed the interval—eight seconds. The US standard. Gibson smiled as he realized what Dol5 had done. The entire hijacking had been designed like an American SCIF.

  Almost.

  There was a flaw in Dol5’s design. An American SCIF had two keep-alive signals—a primary and a secondary—but here Gibson saw only one. Curious again, he reconfigured the Fresco Mar firewall to temporarily block the keep-alive. Moments later, a second signal beaconing out in its place along a new path. That was a serious configuration error. Dol5’s secondary path only became active if the first was compromised. That gave Gibson an idea. He had Hendricks radio out to Filipe, who answered the call eagerly.

  “Hey, Filipe. Would you do us a favor an
d go step across that yellow line?” Hendricks asked.

  Filipe didn’t think that sounded like a very good idea at all. Gibson couldn’t say he blamed him. Hendricks assured Filipe that he would be helping to save the shipment and that Baltasar would be very grateful. That seemed to mollify Filipe, who agreed to help. Hendricks pressed the walkie-talkie to his chest. “I almost feel guilty about this. I could just go do it.”

  “No, if I’m right, I don’t want Dol5 to see it’s us. Better for us if it’s just Filipe the curious squirrel.”

  Filipe’s voice, nervous and small, announced that he was at the yellow line and stepping over. Hendricks made the sign of the cross and rolled his eyes. A moment later they heard the alarm sound through the walkie-talkie, and Hendricks had to twist the volume way down. On his laptop, Gibson saw network traffic spike dramatically as the keep-alive became an active alarm and four new devices began streaming large chunks of data. Those would be the four cameras powering up so Dol5 could see for himself.

  That was interesting.

  Filipe asked nervously if it would be okay if he got out of the circle now. Hendricks told him to act afraid and to run back to the security desk.

  “I don’t need to pretend, senhor,” Filipe said.

  “I really like this kid,” Hendricks told Gibson.

  The countdown stopped and the alarm sounded the all-clear. A few minutes later, the cameras shut off too. Network traffic returned to normal. That gave Gibson several crucial insights into Dol5. First, the hacker’s design wasn’t fully automated. The motion sensors alerted Dol5 if anyone crossed his yellow line, only then powering on the cameras so Dol5 could personally assess the situation. While Gibson understood the impulse, it was a bad one that left Dol5 vulnerable. Gibson couldn’t prove it, but despite the countdown and all the theatrics, he had to believe that Dol5 also had manual control of the explosives.

  Gibson sketched out a diagram of how he could not only deactivate the explosives, but also—if his guess was right—reconfigure the alarm to wrest away control of the cameras and explosives without Dol5 even knowing. Dol5 would keep his access to the motion detectors and the alarms, but any attempt to detonate would be greeted with a whimper, not a bang. That would be kind of sweet. Obviously, that wasn’t the goal, not the main one anyway, but he would dearly enjoy pwning Dol5. The thought of taking the hacker down a peg or two made Gibson’s evil little heart smile.

  It took him thirty minutes of gentle probing to be sure, and another hour to circumvent Dol5’s defenses, take control of the explosives, and give himself remote access and control of the explosives through the secondary path. All in all, a pretty slick piece of work, if he did say so himself. And who else would? Even if Hendricks understood what he’d done, he wasn’t the impressing kind.

  All the while, the huge dataflow that Gibson had chosen to ignore continued to pour into Fresco Mar. He did his best to tune it out, but his eye kept wandering back to his network mapper. He didn’t want to know, but at the same time he had to. In his defense, there wasn’t a hacker alive who, given access to a mobster’s server, wouldn’t feel the same itch. The same unhealthy curiosity and disregard for privacy had been getting Gibson into trouble since high school.

  After all, he told himself, if you really wanted to keep a secret, you shouldn’t be plugging it into the internet in the first place.

  So, as he was wrapping up his hack of Dol5, Gibson took a little look-see at what was being saved to Baltasar’s SAN. To his surprise, it was mostly video. Hundreds of terabytes’ worth. They were grouped by date, so Gibson opened the most recent folder and clicked on the first file.

  His arms went cold, as if the video playing on his laptop had reached up through the keyboard and drained the heat from his body. His hands recoiled, and he balled them into fists against his mouth, using them to shield his eyes to block part of the screen. As if that made any difference at all. He watched, throat unable to decide if it wanted to throw up or not. Gibson didn’t care either way anymore.

  Hendricks noticed the change and, with a puzzled expression, walked behind Gibson to see for himself. Most days, Gibson would describe Hendricks as one of the most unflappable people that he had ever known. Twenty-two years in the LAPD had given him plenty of time to build sturdy armor against the terrible things people did to one another. That armor didn’t work now.

  “Oh, what the fuck is that!” Hendricks said, his voice rising to a scream as he repeated the question two or three more times when the universe didn’t see fit to reply.

  To confirm his worst suspicions, Gibson opened other files. It was more of the same and worse. Slowly, the true nature of what they were looking at dawned on him.

  “What do we do?” Gibson asked.

  “We have to show this to George and Jenn. Can you copy it?”

  “Not all of it; there’s a thousand hours of video stored here. Maybe more.”

  “Get what you can,” Hendricks said. “We have to get out of here. Now.”

  That was for damn sure. Gibson put his head down and got to work while Hendricks packed up and got ready to go.

  By the time Gibson was done, the feeling of anguish that had greeted him after seeing the videos had worn away and was replaced with a much simpler emotion. Anger.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  Usually after a trip to Lisbon to visit the team doctors, Sebastião returned motivated and would hunker down in his gym for hours. Good news or bad, it made no difference. The personal demons that had driven him to become one of his sport’s greats wouldn’t allow him rest. Not today, though. Jenn flicked on the lights and looked at all the exercise equipment. His car was parked out front, so he must be home. She walked through empty room after empty room, calling his name, feeling nostalgic for Sebastião and his big, dumb disco ball of a house.

  In the dark of the living room, she sat on the bench of a grand piano. Sebastião couldn’t play but had it tuned once a week. The world’s largest paperweight. Jenn struck and held a key, listening as the clear tone filled and then faded to silence. She saw the flat circles of Luisa’s eyes floating in the dark. Wondered again how she wasn’t dead. Jenn had been in danger many times before, but she’d never thought she’d be a spectator to her own execution. It had been simple enough math for Luisa—leave no witnesses. How long had Baltasar and George stared each other down? Time had bent around them. And then the endless moment had ended. Baltasar said no.

  Why had Baltasar spared them? Why was Jenn questioning miracles? With two of Baltasar’s lieutenants dead and Luisa en route to Quarteira to launch a surprise attack on the Romanians, the historic Pax Algarve was fast unraveling. She needed to find Sebastião, say her good-byes, and get the hell out of Dodge.

  Out a window, she saw him on a lounge chair, staring at the ocean. It was a strangely melancholy sight. He wasn’t a man ever to sit still. Even at night, in bed, he tossed and turned restlessly, as if chasing after a ball that remained just out of reach. And he was never, ever alone if he could help it. To see him doing both at once was unsettling. Where was the household staff? Jenn wondered. Where was everyone?

  For a moment, she thought about following their lead and ghosting without saying good-bye. Rationalized that it would be easier on both of them. She ran her tongue over her teeth. In her experience, good-byes were overrated. All it did was prolong the inevitable, and besides, if you needed a good-bye to let someone know how you felt, then it couldn’t have been that important a relationship in the first place.

  She realized then how much she would miss him.

  That surprised her. She thought she’d done a better job compartmentalizing. It certainly ran counter to her philosophy about men. About all her relationships, if she was being honest. People were temporary. They came. They went. To expect otherwise made you dependent on others. Dependency led to a weakness that bled you from a thousand invisible wounds. Watching her mother disintegrate after her father had been killed in Beirut had taught Jenn that lesson. In the kitch
en, she filled a tall glass with vodka and splashed just enough juice to disguise it. Her mother had taught her more than one lesson, it seemed.

  Looking at the glass in her hand, she felt something approximating self-disgust. She could stop drinking any time—that’s what she’d been telling herself for months. Any time. Simple as that. The coldest turkey you ever saw. Baltasar Alves had almost killed her today and might still, if she were in Portugal this time tomorrow. So how was this not that time? She held the glass out over the sink but didn’t pour it down the drain the way she’d meant to only a moment before. Thought about taking a drink first. A sip. Maybe two. A wave of easy rationalizations swept up and over her until all she could hear was her thirst hammering in her ears.

  She emptied the glass down the drain.

  It didn’t make her feel better, no sense of triumph. Only a deep and abiding exhaustion. She wanted Sebastião to put his arms around her, feel the scruff of his beard on her neck. That she did made her want to throw the empty glass and see it shatter. Instead, she made another drink. Identical to the first. Maybe a touch less vodka, if you were the type to take solace in baby steps. She made the drink without meaning to do it and looked at it with surprise, unsure how it had come to be in her hand. Happy, though. Lord, was she thirsty.

  Sebastião craned his neck to look at her when she slid open the patio door. He smiled sheepishly as if she’d caught him doing something shameful. Gestured at the ocean, blaming it for luring him out here against his will. He took her hand and pulled her down beside him, shifting over to make room. She bent down to kiss him, running her fingers through his beard. He growled, a low, contented rumble in the back of his throat that she felt in her knees. His skin always smelled faintly of vanilla, and she wondered if she’d forever associate ice cream with sex.