Proportionate Response
Page 36
“Sometimes I take an aspirin, sometimes I take a calomel,” Marks whispered.
“Y’know, I’d walk a mile for a calomel,” Lip whispered.
“You mean a chocolate calomel?” Marks whispered. “I like-a that too, but you no guess it.”
“Knock knock,” Lip whispered.
Marks was eyeing all the faces out there. It was hard to believe that not one of them had noticed them, yet.
“Hey, what’s-a matter,” Marks whispered. “You no understand English? You can’t come in here unless you say ‘swordfish’. Now I’ll give you one more guess.”
“Swordfish… swordfish… I think I got it,” Lip whispered. “Is it swordfish?”
The LED light by the door handle went green.
NO f-ing way. Marks and Lip stared dumbly at the LED light. It was definitely green.
“Slap me,” Lip said.
Lip took the handle. “Ready?”
Marks nodded.
Lip opened the door and they stepped out.
137
MARKS’S face was impassive, but his eyes were alive and capturing everything. Several people looked their way as they came through the door, but nothing registered in the red flag department. Those that noticed them seemed unconcerned; only routine awareness or utter boredom read on their faces. These jokers were just doing their thing, absorbed in the various tasks at hand.
It was a good start.
Key was to keep this moving, keep things fluid. There were so many people in this joint, all Marks and Lip had to do was look like they belonged and blend in. Marks took a right. The went past some equipment. The carpeted floor had a big blue stripe. Marks followed it. They went past an endless row of workstations.
Lip was half a step behind him. They were off the map, at this point. The Yellow Brick Road in his head had disappeared, replaced with this blue-striped carpet. Mei’s plans for this area had only been electrical plans. It had showed general wall locations, but not much in terms of the specific layout. Well, they were certainly seeing it now.
The place was hopping. Cubicles everywhere with employees typing away on keyboards. Marks got a glance of what was on several of the screens. It was strange stuff. Each workstation had two flat screen monitors set up. The flat screen on the left showed stuff in English, while the one on the right was showing Chinese. It appeared the Chinese information was being inputted by the employee, as the keyboards, which were bulkier, were all configured with Chinese characters.
Marks made a mental snapshot of the English information on several of the screens as he passed. For a moment he thought these guys were surfing the web, but then realized that wasn’t quite it. On one screen was the logo for Valspar Corporation. There was some technical jargon. The font was too tiny for Marks to pick up the actual text, but he did see what looked like paint formulations. On another screen at another workstation was letterhead for McDonnell Douglas. Again, lots of the text he couldn’t quite get with his flyby. He was just picking up logos and the gist of what was on the screens. In one case, there was some kind of business memo from Boeing. Another screen had an email string where the sender was from Google.
Lip was catching some of this, as well. At one point, Marks and Lip shared a look. He’d obviously seen something funny too, as his face just barely masked his surprise. Marks kept them on track. They continued on, past the workstations. It seemed to be endless in this joint, just a maze of half-height cubicles.
Must be three hundred desk jockeys just in this room. Marks kept it casual, his stride steady, moving like he had somewhere to go. Wasn’t a lot of banter happening in this place. Employees were focused. No such thing as a water cooler anywhere. It seemed gossip time wasn’t high on the agenda.
Good thing. Chatty types were to be avoided. Marks tried to steer them towards another section, out of cubicle land. They had the Black Widow to find and their timeline was narrowing. In less than five minutes that alarm would sound and they needed to be in position to do what they had to do.
Up ahead was a tee in the corridor that seemed to lead to a different section. The workstations were not manned in this area. Marks hung a left. Lip was like a caboose, half a step behind him.
A voice split the air. Marks could sense that Lip had stopped. Marks stopped, as well, and looked at who had spoken.
There was a guy dressed like them, but he was definitely up on the rank list. Man had an officious look to him. His face was pinched like he’d bitten into something sour, and he was holding a clipboard.
He rattled off something in Shanghainese and waved his clipboard towards the open workstations they’d just passed. Lip bowed and then responded. Marks was smart enough to know they were being reprimanded for something, and he gave a short bow, as well. One more exchange occurred between Lip and the clipboard guy and then Lip started walking towards the workstation area. Marks kept his head bent down and followed Lip like a scolded puppy.
The man with the clipboard emitted a grunt and then started walking a different direction. Lip took them to a pair of matching workstations that were just off the main thoroughfare. The closest employees to them were four cubicles away. Lip sat down at a workstation. Marks sat down at the workstation on his left.
“Look busy,” Lip whispered.
Marks looked at the two screens in front of him. Both were on, judging by the green LED lights, but the screens were in sleep mode. There was no mouse next to the keyboard, only some pad looking thing that was too small to be a mousepad. Marks stole a glance at Lip.
Lip double tapped the small pad on the worktop of his desk. His two screens fired to life. Marks mirrored Lip’s move and suddenly his two screens fired to life, as well. On both his screens was some sort of portal window and lots of Chinese text. There was a blue background and a blinking cursor.
Marks stole a glance around. The clipboard guy was nowhere to be seen. Marks looked back at the screen. He moved his finger across the small pad. The cursor moved.
He glanced at his watch. The alarm was set to go off in three and a half minutes. Guess he could move the cursor back and forth for that span of time.
Next to him Lip was being a showoff. He’d managed to navigate to some other screen, and began typing on the keyboard. Marks glanced at his keyboard. It had at least two more rows of keys of any keyboard Marks had ever seen. Chinese characters were on each key. Three characters to a key. Friggin’ kidding me?
Marks looked at Lip again. Partner was ignoring him. Marks felt like he was in sixth grade again, taking a math test he hadn’t studied for, and was trying to spy what the guy on his right had scrawled for an answer.
Three minutes ten seconds. Run and wait. Story of his life.
138
LIP typed away. There was a directory of sorts. It was all in Mandarin. The spoken Chinese language had about two dozen different dialects, and hundreds of sub-dialects, but of those there were only a handful of main ones. Shanghainese, or “simplified Chinese”, was a dialect of Wu Chinese. It was very different than Standard Mandarin, which was what was on the screen. Mandarin was as close to a lingua franca for China, as any of the dialects. It was considered the official spoken and written language of the People’s Republic of China, and was similar to Pekingese, which was a dialect principally found in the capital city, Beijing.
Luckily for Lip, he knew Pekingese and he knew Standard Mandarin. Clicking to various screens, he got his bearings. There appeared to be
Lip skimmed the
contents of the memo. It was addressed to the SecDef and the contents were stamped ‘Confidential’. One quick look told Lip this was not a public announcement, but was privileged internal correspondence between the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Secretary of Defense. On the right screen was a Mandarin translation of the memo.
Holy moly.
Lip closed the project and pulled up another. He navigated to other screens, barely paying attention to the contents. One glance of each was enough to get the general idea. It was unbelievable what he was seeing. The contents were all over the board, but it was obvious what this stuff was.
The projects were categorized and labeled. Aeronautics, automotive… chemical engineering… electronics… industrial manufacturing… Lip saw at least two hundred US companies on one of the lists, and that was just in one folder. Lip flipped to other screens. He opened a few projects, skimmed them, and closed them out. A chill went up his spine.
There was one series of folders that were subcategorized under
It was a seemingly endless list of companies. These were all US Defense contractors. Lip opened other screens, clicking open specific projects. It was a treasure-trove of intellectual property. All the latest technology from these companies was available at his fingertips. Lip opened a Lockhead Martin file and industrial specs for LM’s fifth generation stealth fighter, the F-22 Raptor, displayed on his screen. The specs were all translated into Mandarin on the right.
You’ve got to be kidding me?
At that moment, the alarm started to wail.
139
MARKS took in a breath. He’d been watching Lip do his stuff. He didn’t need to be fluent in Mandarin to understand what this was all about.
Back home, the news on TV covered it from time to time. Seemed every month some company was issuing an announcement they’d had a security breach and hackers had stolen intellectual property. Lip, of course, read about such breaches every day. Man liked to be up on things. He’d once told Marks that the country was being robbed by script kiddies sneaking through the back door, and that one of these days we were going to wake up and find ourselves flat broke, buck naked, our jobs gone, our livelihoods stolen, and wonder what the hell happened.
Intellectual property, hard-earned knowledge, was the true wealth of the good ole USA. Marks put together the dots he’d seen in the last five minutes. Valspar Corporation for one; a company based out of Minneapolis. Those paint formulations Marks had seen had obviously been cribbed. Industrial specs, which no doubt was the result of thousands of hours of labor by America’s best and brightest. Engineering minds coming up with the perfect latex that would bond to substrates, withstand the elements, and basically beat the global competition by being a better paint.
That was soon to be ‘Made in China’ for one fifth the cost. Ditto for the other things he’d just seen. But that was nothing compared to the US military IP, he’d glimpsed. Now that was a whole new ballgame.
As he’d watched Lip click from screen to screen one thought had jumped to the forefront in his head. Forget just taking out the Black Widow. They needed to vaporize this place. Erase it from the map.
His thought earlier about using Tomahawks was so on point. In fact, the way the alarm was wailing it almost sounded like that was about to happen. They didn’t kid around with their alarms—it was like klaxons going off, warning of impending doom, as if there really were tomahawks raining from the sky. Guess they didn’t want folks around here ignoring it. Well, small chance of that happening. The place around them exploded with activity.
The employees, who till now were working diligently, to a man stood up from their desks. Marks quickly decided he should do the same. He stood up and scanned the place. The desk jockeys—or perhaps he should call them ‘cheater, cheater, pumpkin eaters’—began to funnel out from the workstation areas. They seemed to be heading two different directions. One section was heading one way, and the other section, the one furthest from Marks and Lip, was heading another direction. Must be the evacuation protocol.
Lip was still clicking from screen to screen.
“Nix it,” Marks whispered.
Lip ignored him and continued to type away. Partner was going to draw attention to himself. No one else was still sitting. People were beginning to file out of this joint, and fast.
“Lip,” Marks whispered.
“One sec,” Lip whispered back.
What the hell was he doing? Marks watched the employees stream past.
The alarm that was going off was courtesy of Lip and Johnny Two-cakes doing their stuff. When Lip had tinkered with those control cabinets back in the utility part of the complex, he’d cut several relay lines. Those relays were needed to send signals to the FM-200 fire suppression system. Johnny Two-cakes had disabled some of the peripherals, and Lip’s little hands-on work had done the rest. What should be happening now with the alarm going off, was a stepped-down shutdown sequence, which would systematically protect the equipment inside this facility. That was still going to happen, but there was going to be a slight delay. That slight delay was needed so that Marks and Lip could download the Stuxnet virus.
Course they needed to be somewhere else to do that, and where they were now was definitely not the place. While Marks wasn’t exactly Mr. Swifty in the computer department, he knew enough. These workstations didn’t have any connection ports, like a USB port. Without a port, they couldn’t download Jack. Or Jill, for that matter.
“Buddy, we gotta move,” Marks whispered.
Lip stood up. “Follow me,” he whispered.
Fine by him. The Yellow Brick Road was gone. Lip moved down the aisle and went left. Against traffic. Now that was just asking for it. They’d pushed their luck, so far. What the hell, Lip? Not that Marks could voice an objection. Dumb and mute, he followed suit, doing everything except saying, “excuse me, excuse me”. Instead, Marks had to resort to grunts. He was feeling more like a caveman, every bleepin’ second.
Lip kept at it, moving against the flow. Marks saw several curious expressions on the faces of employees streaming past, but not one of them stopped them, or voiced objections. You cheater, cheater, pumpkin eaters.
A part of him wanted to smash in each of their cheerless faces. But paired with that thought was bitter acknowledgment of the reality of this operation. These jokers were just patsies, bunch of mindless automatons doing what they were told.
No, to put a round in this, Marks needed to go to the top. Johnny Two-cakes had called it. This whole operation was a Party deal. The Central Politburo of the CPC had put their stinky mitts on this. They had one of their own guys leading this operation. The man of the hour. ‘Prime’. Aka the ‘man in the white mask’.
Whatever Mr. ‘Soon to be put out of commission’ was called, it didn’t matter. He was in charge here, and the buck stopped with him. Him and his cronies on the Politburo Standing Committee needed to be brought to account.
And it started with this place.
If it was Marks’s call, it would be fifty fifty right now. Flip a coin. Heads this place became rubble now, or tails, everyone got a five-minute head start before he sent the Tomahawks.
The last couple of employees filed past. Lip and he had come to a break where the traffic was petering out. Most of the employees in this section had already funneled past them. Lip hustled, double-timing his walk, as Marks kept pace.
Lip and he caught up to the last stragglers ahead of them. Those employees were going a different direction. The way they were going led into a different part of the complex. Off to the left, Marks saw the area they’d come in with the flat screens on the wall and blinking equipment.
The alarm was still wailing and the computers around them were still on. Not one of them ha
d winked out, yet. That would soon change, and once these babies went offline, it would be too late. Lip needed to find the Black Widow, and find it pronto. Let’s hope you know where you’re going, buddy.
Lip darted down another aisle, reached a door, and opened it. Marks followed. They entered a corridor that dead-ended with another door. A biometric scanner was by the door handle.
That sucked. Johnny Two-cakes, hope you’re paying attention.
Lip tested the handle. The door clicked open. Lip looked at Marks with a smirk.
“Security around here leaves something to be desired,” Lip said.
They went through the door.
140
MARKS expected they’d see someone. And he was ready to give them a quick nighty night, if it came down to that. Wouldn’t think everyone would jet this joint when the alarm went off? Least you’d think that would be the case. But judging by the rooms Lip and he quickly walked through, everyone was long gone.
Security around here was shitass sorry. These jokers raid every US company, bypass sophisticated security systems to steal the goodies, but when it comes to securing their own store they leave the vault wide open, just begging someone to walk in and take the dough.
Well, Marks and Lip were all too happy to oblige them. It was payback time.
“That it?” Marks it.
“Beautiful, isn’t it?” Lip said.
Not exactly what sprang to mind. The Black Widow. All the fuss was about this?
Marks wasn’t impressed. Thing looked like three large refrigerators standing back to back, corner to corner. Whole thing was done in matte black. A few blinking lights on it, but other than that, it wasn’t all that. Hard to believe it could do what Lip had told him it could do. Somehow this hunk of junk was putting the entire free world in jeopardy. Marks had half a mind to find something and just start swinging. Do it caveman style. Club, bat, anything would do.