Jabo went back inside the metal building, it was time to turn off the switches his men on the other roof had told him controlled the roaring engines. Once they were through with Grigor, he was content to let their horde of minions – bit loving geeks – roam the building restarting their servers. Outside their electrical problem wouldn't be hard to find – the large explosion and the jagged, smoking hole in the metal transformer pointed the way. He went to each diesel, pushing down the large rocker switch that killed the diesel engine, taking it off line and making it impossible to restart, until the heavy switch was returned to the 'ON' position. The dying sputter of the engines gave him a special feeling, like he was stabbing the hearts of the people who'd killed his grandparents. Take that assholes!
Not yet dead, the computers inside were probably still powered up by the huge collection of internal batteries, hundreds of backup power supplies stacked up inside the building, each feeding its own server rack. Cathy had assured him they would only last five to ten minutes at the most, until they died, erasing all the operating programs and their data what wasn't backed up on the computer disks, which he was sure the computer operators in the LazaRuss building were desperately trying to do at this very moment. The immense size of the building, literally crammed full of computer racks each stuffed with twenty or thirty computer trays, along with their hard disks and other equipment consumed far too much electricity for anything but a building just as big, full of batteries, to supply them a day or two.
Now their diesel backup was off-line, whatever backup batteries their server racks had connected to them were going fast. Already alarms were going off, warning of shutdown in less than five minutes, death to all those little bits dancing around in their silicon universe. Their confidence something like this would never happen had shaped the design of the data structures and the programs that accessed and updated them. Built for security, with massive data structure redundancy so nothing could be lost, the capacity of their system and operators, too few and all inexperienced, to save the 'state' of their system was limited, with programs locked into finishing ponderous routines before they released the thousands of individual files and tables on the hundreds of servers so they could be copied out over the internet. The widespread power shutdown had also reduced the server building's internet upload speed, once measured in gigabits, reduced to a few megabits per second – what was high speed nearly fifteen years ago.
No one had tested their how their system would respond to this unplanned nightmare composed of so many critical subsidiary functions, all failing at the same time. Everything locked up, refused to work, shut out commands issued from terminals and computers in the server building and in the laboratory and the offices far away. All the data, once so secure and safe was like the Titanic after it hit the iceberg, but this ship of information was going to sink and disappear in minutes, not hours, leaving nothing behind.
Grigor needed those diesels running and to do that he had to get up to the roof using the access hatch, used for minor maintenance tasks – anything major would require a rented crane or a long ladder to scale the nearly thirty foot high, smooth walls, all options that were useless to consider, much less act on. Jabo had first thought of using the hatch on the roof, that led inside, to break into the building, then saw he could turn it around, giving himself an overwhelming advantage, forcing Grigor to come to his prepared defensive position, attacking blind – giving his opponent the nasty problem he'd been trying to solve.
It would allow Jabo to take him out or his men, one by one as they emerged from the narrow hatch – transforming the battle into a shooting range, with bad guys as popup targets. They'd get no quarter. He was going to treat them exactly like the sniper who'd killed his grandparents, without pity. His war mindset clicked on. He was in no mood for prisoners. They were already dead in his mind.
Chapter Thirteen
You can be sure of succeeding if you only attack places which are undefended
Sun Tzu
Since he'd begun studying the replays of Jabo, dressed as a repairman, stalking his halls, Gigor had been running at full speed, literally, inside and out. He'd been without sleep for two days, going on three when the sun went down an hour ago. He was nearly nodding off in front of his men, many who were just as tired and sleepy as he was. Grigor felt himself succumbing to growing exhaustion. It would set a terrible example, losing face and eroding his reputation of intimidating power he'd worked for years to build up, giving them a reason to question his image as an extreme hard ass and a man of iron constitution who never faltered.
That's why he'd excused himself before they oversaw the latest shift change at six p.m.. Going into his private office, the quick snort of meth was exactly what he'd needed. The anxiety and other side effects were unimportant, a nuisance he'd deal with, small price for his chemically induced mental acuity. The flood of workers, in and out, produced their their most vulnerable time, when someone with false credentials for one of the many other companies that used this facility might slip inside, blending into the crush of night shift workers, like Jabo had.
That was the most viable method of infiltrating the building and what he'd do. Hell, it had worked quite well earlier. With a new shift coming, they were forced to take extreme care, staring at every person's face as they walked in the doors and worked through their security checks. Grigor's sharp eyes, as grainy and red as his men's, hadn't seen anyone new in the crowd of pasty faced geeks who'd shown their passes then continued inside, stepping through the metal detectors to disappear inside the building, heading to their waiting cubicles and work areas. Their appearance made them look freakishly identical. He swore they never went outside, at work or home – a new race of gnomes – all alike, each face fading into the next one.
They'd sat, day in, day out, bleary eyed, letting the programs switch between the high resolution camera feeds as the intelligent cameras reacted to movements in their field of view. They were looking for another spy dressed as a nerd or technician, salesman, client – it could be anyone. That was the problem, their lack of clues about the foe. It forced them to strain their eyes, defer sleep, stuck to the screens with few breaks, for the bathroom and food, snacks really, bought from the machines that were almost empty.
They ate at their desks, sometimes dozed off to be slapped back awake or continue sleeping when Grigor wasn't around. Either way they were glued to their chairs flattening their asses, shaking their heads to wake up, rubbing their watery, reddened eyes. The people they recognized, focusing on each face as they showed up on the entryway cameras, required to manually authorize entry, one by one. Every potential infiltrator, people who weren't on their regular entry list, had to be painstakingly verified while harmless visitors who were quickly ushered out, given a flimsy excuse and told to schedule for a another month. The constant checking and alerts had sucked the energy out of them until they were zombies, staring at the screens lining the control room walls.
After the last, late arrival for shift change finally checked in, Gigor had wished he could use the small office they'd given him to lay back in the large executive chair, put his feet up, take a nap for an hour or so. Normally that was all he'd needed, then he could return, fully revived, able to make it for another day or so and ready for what was coming. Luckily the boost he'd received from the speed let him stay on the job, insuring his crew wouldn't have a chance to ease up and relax, nodding off at their duty stations, letting someone slip through. He couldn't let that happen, not again.
Finding this man he knew only as Jabo, identifying who he was working for, what they wanted and most important. How to stop him consumed his mind every second of the day and night. Not an intellectual, Grigor was more like a hunting dog that would never stop stalking and chasing its game, killing it by running it down to rip its throat out. He'd organized the search to find the hotel they were staying in, verified it was them then sent in his assassin, alerted and called to San Marcos when he'd missed Jabo the first time, on
his successful infiltration of their building. Grigor's caution had insured she'd be on hand when they tracked down their intruders.
But Tagah, his female assassin had failed. Grigor was sure it was Jabo, the man they'd tracked down to the hotel room, who'd neutralized his best assassin who'd never failed to kill. She specialized in men, using her beauty to disarm them, playing on their inflated self image, acting like she was charmed and aroused by their virile appearance. But his opponent had survived her lethal tricks and captured her! Grigor's back channel said one of the many hated US 'letter' agencies had snapped her up, hiding her in a safe house, nearby or far away, impossible to tell – the information was all rumor and second hand, nearly useless.
Wherever she was locked up, Grigor was sure they were pumping her with drugs and threats, since she was NOC, 'No Official Cover', without a passport or a country. Russia would never acknowledge her as a citizen or show any interest in some kind of prisoner exchange. He couldn't complain or inquire officially, since she was invisible and certainly not supposed to be here in the US. They could keep her forever and both sides knew it. He didn't think she'd hold out long under those circumstances, making his options for the future very limited. She was going to be hard to replace. She had always been highly reliable, like Vladimir – yet both of them had missed the mark. It made things far worse, upping the pressure on Grigor. Unlike them, he could not fail. That was a death sentence for him. Worse, he had no one else available locally. Fixing this was entirely on his head, he already felt the cross-hairs pointing at him.
All his problems had to be resolved quickly, tonight if possible. The option of running back to Russia would completely disappear if he failed now. Those precious damned computers and their zillions of little bits were going to determine his fate – binary soldiers of the new war his country and every other was waging, slowly marching toward Cybergeddon. Grigor hated computers, even more than he had before.
A tense meeting with the LazaRuss lawyers after Missange had disappeared into the witness protection program, had assured him any official attempt by American Law Enforcement to read or copy the information on their secure servers would require notification and a warrant, neither of which had happened. But it was useless assurance since Grigor and his facility weren't safe from some kind of hacking attack like the one was sure had happened only a few hours earlier. He was certain the man had injected a hidden program that had hacked their servers. It represented the worst possible scenario for Gigor, one he still hadn't passed up the chain of command, knowing they'd fire him in their preferred style – a bullet in his brain.
He hadn't figured out how Jabo slipped through his security, since it required electronic credentials from the Bateson Corporation, their equipment supplier, that couldn't be faked. He'd had help on the inside. It was a nagging detail, along with his assumption the woman had been fooled into helping him. What were this man's resources – who were his friends or allies? Was he acting alone? Was he working with one of the many American intelligence agencies, the CIA or FBI? Sitting in his control room watching the damned screens along with his men, Grigor could see and lately, smell the results of their extended vigilance. They were all getting progressively exhausted and stank like a gang of peasants at harvest time. His mind was shot and for all his massive effort, he still hadn't answered any of his burning questions.
Grigor wished their servers were all solid state, with no moving parts and impossible to break, all the data locked into the silicon chips, power on or off. That way outside electrical power, his major weakness, wouldn't matter as much, if at all. It would make his job infinitely easier, but the technology available hadn't reached that level or, he suspected, given his cheap bosses, it was too expensive and worse, used even more electricity to run and cool. The actual technology was beyond his limited knowledge, left to the pale geeks who haunted his building. He suspected critical choices on manning levels and power backup systems were made by a faceless accountant who did as he was told, cutting costs so his bosses could keep the women and caviar flowing – their biggest priorities – the true reason for immensity of his current fiasco.
Grigor had also felt a growing, sickening dread that Jabo was going to attack the building, if only as a way to get at him. His enemy might be seeking revenge for the murders out in West Texas, which Grigor had organized by hiring Vladimir, with his bosses' approval. Grigor occupied their company's most important security position, the data center, their most important repository. Anything that threatened the secrets stored on his machines was his job to neutralize. He wished his authority extended to the central offices and the remote, sterile labs that ran twenty-four / seven, chasing their dream, Project HXX, that had finally yielded magnificent results. That would come later, when he'd proven himself once more, the man who could keep them safe against any threat. He'd get anything he asked for.
This building and its secure severs let him become the point man for all 'special' security matters, including nasty things that needed to be done quietly and efficiently. It had gone well for years, until Vladimir's mess in West Texas. After that fuck-up, it had all started going downhill, then to make it worse, this damned intruder, Jabo, had showed up, raising hell right under his nose.
The debacle out in the desert was senseless. There was no reason for Vladimir to kill so many people outside of his assigned target group, the man and his small family. All he had to do was quietly kill three people, a mother, father and a young girl, then go home, a rich man, but no, he had to get his dick caught up in the wringer and play games with the Missange girl, induling his sexual thrills at the same time. That was the reason no one liked to use him – always a last resort. Their specialist, that Pridurok, Russian for 'asshole', had lost it, killing everyone at a border station to clean up his own mess – all so he could take out the young girl who'd escaped his perverted lust.
Gigor had heard the rumors, involving bondage and nudity of very young girls, shared by his Mafia friends in Moscow, where Vladimir lived in a luxury apartment. Abusing or fucking little girls, were both equally disgusting for a virile man like Grigor who preferred his women young but not little and immature, certainly not tied up and helpless.
This feeling of dread creeping into his mind was why he hated waiting, being on the defensive, what his bosses had mandated after Tagah, his female assassin, had disappeared. Damn this man's luck, sneaking into his building and getting away, then avoiding death at his assassin's hands. Grigor, growing increasingly paranoid from the Meth, was certain this same man was outside, probably marshaling his forces to attack him and Grigor had to sit here, waiting for him to strike!
He was easily the best shot with a pistol among the men he knew in this business, enforcers who worked for the huge, corrupt companies created by the New Russia being built over the last thirty or so years. It was all owned and run by rich Oligarchs who'd seized the prime assets of the country at rock bottom prices, in return for absolute loyalty, expressed by payoffs to those in power – kicking up a large cut of their profits. There were hundreds of them and all the money flowed back to the one man who was the reason for their success, the big boss who liked to flaunt his manhood and acumen, Putin. There were rumors he was the only man on the planet who'd reached the trillion dollar mark, which inspired a perverse pride from the millions of poor and dispossessed who made up his country. Their great leader reportedly had a line of young females at his bedroom door every night of the year, making him the envy of every male in his country, all part of his aura as supreme leader – as sexually insatiable as Genghis Khan. That was Grigor's dream job, the new Czar of Russia.
Gigor's musing after the evening shift had finally been checked inside had ended abruptly with the explosion outside and it's effect on their electricity, everything going dark, then lighting and their precious servers came on seconds later, running on batteries. Full backup power would kick in automatically in a few minutes when the power station on the roof detected the massive electrical failur
e. He had to find out if he was being attacked.
He ran for the front of the building. The meth mixed with his adrenaline, a natural supercharger drug, released from his Adrenal glands high in his back, pumping into his blood seconds after he'd felt the first of two quick explosions shaking the building. A scattering of individual emergency lights that provided minimal light in the hallways. It could be a failed transformer, inside one of the metal boxes beside the building – hopefully just bad luck, nothing more. But it might also be the opening gambit in a large scale assault.
Grigor's natural stimulant, adrenaline, did what the meth had done an hour earlier. It hammered his heart back up to 200 beats a minute and his increased blood pressure gave him a splitting headache as spots that blinked on and off in his visual field. He could handle the side effects but certainly didn't need the distraction. On the positive side, the meth and adrenaline made him feel like a god with electricity running through his arms and legs. He felt invisible lightning bolts bursting out the tips of his fingers. If he couldn't shoot this asshole he'd beat him to death with his huge, meaty fists or chew his head off by biting through his neck like a mad dog.
Running ahead of his two best men flanking his sides, he'd gone outside to inspect the damage. Exposed, he finished his quick tour around the burning transformer, a smoking pile of metal whose acrid fumes might be toxic, making him keep his distance. They all understood it would take days to bring in the proper replacement equipment and install it. Their answer was somewhere else, making him turn to look at the cameras he'd lined along the top edge of the tall concrete walls. None of them pointed in the other direction, at the flat surface of the roof where his backup power plant was situated.
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