by Dave Buschi
Trouble.
He looked around at the humming equipment—coursing with crackling, death-ray voltage enough to raise Frankenstein from the dead. Strangely enough, he didn’t see the humor. That’s because in the back of his mind, independently of his current focus, he was thinking of one thing.
This wasn’t a game.
This was deadly serious. Those men searching for him now did not have his best interests at heart. They had three hundred billion reasons to want to find him.
62
HE was so close. Five more steps to go to finish the sequence. He’d already de-energized the grid. These were the last steps. Necessary to ensure he fully closed the loop.
The backups, all three sets of UPS units, including the APC Megawatt Silicon 500s were already initiating shutdown. In about seven minutes this entire facility would go dark.
Nervously, he looked at the FLIR. He wasn’t going to make it. Those men would be here in moments. They were ignoring the alarms James had triggered. Guess they’d gotten tired of chasing phantoms. They had his number. Knew he was dialing those in to go off remotely.
Maybe Enrique had figured out how to get Phalanx working again. James looked up at one of the cameras. Maybe Enrique was looking at him right now.
He held up his middle finger to the camera.
Strangely, that didn’t make him feel any better. There was acid on his tongue. Tasting like the bitterness of defeat.
Nix the psychobabble, you big baby. He wasn’t done, yet.
This game wasn’t over. He hurried up. Closed the last series of breakers.
The sounds the equipment were making were fueling his focus. He was getting there. This baby was going down.
Like the Titanic.
OOOOmmmmm…
Step 93.
Click, click, click…
Step 94.
His eyes flicked to the FLIR. Oh man, this was going to be close.
The step-down transformers were making a series of sounds. Clicks, whirrs, whumps and stutts…
He closed the last series of relays. The green LEDs blinked off. He was done.
In more ways than one.
He grabbed his laptop and duffel bag and ignoring the fact he had a bad ankle began to run.
63
HE could hear them behind him. That was the thing with metal grate floors. They made a helluva racket.
James ran down the corridor. He kept to the concrete areas, went down one of the aisles, took a left. Twenty yards down, he took a right and beelined for the stairs. They were just up ahead. He could still hear them, but their clanging seemed to be growing fainter. It gave him hope. He made it to the stairs and began to go up. There was a series of cutbacks. Huffing and puffing, he crested the top. Looked down. No sight of ‘em.
He set the duffel bag down and plopped the laptop on top. He bent over and wheezed.
Jesus. He wasn’t cut out for this. He closed his eyes. Took deep breaths. There was a strange sound, almost like a hum, then some rapid clicking.
His eyelids registered the loss of lightness. He opened his eyes.
Pure, absolute blackness. Oh boy.
The Vault had just gone dark.
He couldn’t see a thing. He held up his hand. Waved it in front of his face. There was nothing. Not even a vague outline of his hand.
All light had just winked out.
This is what it must be like in caves. Catacombs hundreds of feet below the earth’s surface. No light. Not even shades of it.
Absolute, complete blackness.
Right now those guys searching for him were probably shitting in their pants. Too bad this couldn’t be drawn out a little longer.
Then again…
It was really friggin’ dark.
James counted in his head. Any second now. The light meters were obviously picking this up. Sending very low-voltage electrical signals to the lamps.
Bingo.
The blackness changed. It was quick and sudden. An eerie blue fluorescence became the new absolute. All thanks to bugeyes with battery packs.
The emergency lights had just taken over. No way to shut those down. There were a few other auxiliary elements that should be functioning just about now, as well.
There were three sets of backups for the grid. He’d taken all of those offline. The fourth failsafe he couldn’t touch. Not without going directly to the sources.
There were battery backups for the lifts, emergency lights, some fan units and certain servers, including those that ran the NAS gateway. Otherwise, this place was dead. The air handlers, chillers, high-density servers, every single piece of equipment in this facility had systematically turned off when he initiated shutdown. That was the reason for the complicated sequence of steps.
You couldn’t just shut this place down with one switch. Too much of the equipment around here was too sensitive and too valuable.
That applied doubly for The Stacks.
He got his breathing under control. Relaxed, normal breaths. He picked up the laptop and checked the FLIR.
Then he began to move.
FIVE minutes later, he was in the place he needed to be.
The Stacks.
The area resembled a library, to the extent of how the servers were lined up akin to book stacks. Rows upon rows of high-density servers, which topped out just above head height, were tightly organized. Each of those servers—“racks”—housed a dozen thin server blades.
The place smelled metallic; that distinct smell of electrical equipment, which moments ago had been humming with all sorts of voltage. He was in an access aisle in-between two rows. The place, if it were able to be seen from an overhead catwalk, would have made an impressive sight. The footprint was about the size of a very large gymnasium.
The Vault contained twenty-eight more rooms just like this. Seven levels. Four quadrants to a floor. Taken together over ten football fields could fit down here. 520,000 square feet.
Daedalus’s labyrinth had nothing on this.
The ceiling was twelve foot high in The Stacks. It still felt claustrophobic. He tried to ignore that feeling. It was distracting him.
He made sure he was in the right area. He checked the number on the rack. This was it. He pulled out the rack. The chassis had a slide-out mechanism that enabled individual server blades to be taken out for servicing or replacement. He found the one he needed and disconnected the blade.
It was a black unit with a circuit board protected by an open frame. The front face of the unit vaguely resembled a stereo amplifier—similar to a receiver, but without knobs or as many buttons. Like they used to have in the 80s and 90s, before things like iPods made stereo gear obsolete.
This little baby was his insurance, if he ever got out of here. Carefully, he stashed it in his duffel bag. It fit easily. Thing was less than a foot wide; about a foot and a half deep, and a little more than an inch in height. It weighed about twelve pounds, mostly because of the weight of the microprocessors and memory components contained inside.
He pushed the server rack back in place. He checked the FLIR again. So far, so good.
He took a seat and leaned his back against a rack. Not exactly comfy, but it would do. Time to check out some of those black holes. He had money to chase.
64
FIVE black holes. Five trails. Not much to follow. But enough…
He concentrated on the first.
The thing about Matryoshka dolls was even though each doll and face were different, they were still variations of the same. Each doll fit in the other. Collectively they were like a string. A sequence.
They weren’t never-ending. Eventually you got to the last doll. It might take a while, but there was a finite element to the story.
That money wasn’t gone. It hadn’t vanished. It had been directed to go somewhere.
James retraced the tracks. The exploited vulnerabilities, the directives of the tertiary code… there were crumbs to follow, in the form of numbers. The internet protocol
addresses couldn’t be hidden. Those 128-bit numbers were telling.
A long, endless string of numbers. There were so many of them. Each a Matryoshka doll. Each with a “tell”. In that number was contained both the location of the source and destination nodes.
Slippery buggers…
He followed the trail of the first. Find the end. Find the money.
The perpetrators controlling this monster may have hidden their exact origins, but their trails, based on their IP addresses and ccTLDs, (otherwise known as ‘country code top-level domains’), could still be sniffed out.
It took a while as he ran it down. It was all over the board it seemed, but he got closer with each tap of a key. He paused for a moment as numbers, letters and symbols scrolled on his screen. And then there it was, near the end, standing out like red neon.
Simple. Unique. Just three characters. The ‘period’ being one of them. The country code.
.cn
China.
Ting.
James looked up from his screen. Had that been a sound? It was indistinct, like something very small and metallic being dropped. Far away. Ting. Again.
The noise stopped. James listened. He waited, but it didn’t come again. He pulled up the FLIR and looked at the heat traces around his area. The servers, though off, were still emitting a good deal of residual heat. On the screen the colors looked like lava flows. He looked for anything else; an amorphous form that would signify a person.
There was nothing. Just the stacks radiating red and orange.
It was just nerves. The ting sound he’d heard was probably the stacks cooling, the metal chassis that housed the server blades contracting with the change in temperature.
James switched back and followed the second trail. Again, he had to dig deep. Past all the circuitous routes, the infinity loops and the never-ending series of numbers, letters and symbols that spilled down his screen.
He reeled it in. Followed it. And then the answer. Two in fact. Both of which meant the same thing.
.uk
.gb
United Kingdom.
This trail wasn’t over. There was more…
He began to follow it. Another sound. Metallic. Ting ting. That was someone walking.
He quickly toggled to look at the FLIR. On the screen was a form. Amorphous. A blob of white, red and orange. And it was coming towards him.
65
JAMES closed his laptop. The amorphous form on the screen was coming down the aisle to his left, several stacks away. He picked up his duffel bag that held the server blade. He moved the opposite way, down the aisle. This was going to be close. He couldn’t go too fast or he’d make noise.
Where had this guy come from? It seemed like he’d only just looked at the FLIR two minutes ago and at the time there was no one else on this level. Two minutes? Or had it been longer? He’d gotten deep into what he was doing. Time might have slipped away. It had a tendency to do that when he got too focused.
James could hear the man’s footfalls. He was off the steel grate now and his boots were smacking. Was he running? Had the man seen him?
James scooted around the end of the stacks. He was in the opposite aisle now. The footfalls were loud. The man was running. His footfalls got louder… louder… then… they plateaued, receded. He must not have turned and come after him. James put down the duffel bag, flipped his laptop open and looked at the FLIR. There was the amorphous form. It confirmed what his ears heard. The man was moving quickly down the opposite aisle, away from him.
That had been close. He sucked in a breath and realized his laptop was shaking. The culprit was his hands—they were trembling.
Get it together.
His eyes went back to the screen. He watched as the guy entered another section. He was moving away.
James flipped to other views, making a quick scan. The man’s compatriots were located in completely different quadrants. Nowhere close.
Okay. He had to be more vigilant. He’d gotten too sucked in. That couldn’t happen again. He needed to make sure he checked the FLIR every minute, like clockwork. He’d use the calendar. Trigger a reminder to pop-up.
James moved into the aisle he’d just been and sat down to work. It took a few seconds to set up the calendar reminder. It seemed ridiculous, but he couldn’t trust himself. He couldn’t allow himself to be swallowed. Disappear down those black holes.
Not that these were proving to be any sort of challenge. There was plenty to follow. He went down after the other three. Soon he was clicking pop-ups like they were happening every second, not every minute.
Numbers, letters and symbols streamed. One at a time he ran them down.
.ch
Switzerland.
.us
United States.
.ru
Russia.
Strange bedfellows. This operation touched the corners of the globe. And they were feasting on ill-gotten spoils like a five-headed hydra.
James backtracked and took it to another level. It was one thing to follow. It was quite another to do what he soon did on his screen. His fingers were almost a blur.
It was all finesse at this point. Very soon the orchestrators of this operation were going to find wrinkles they hadn’t anticipated. These types of games went both ways.
They were about to get a backlash, like water rushing back…
James in his role at ComTek dealt with all sorts of security attacks. He routinely rebuffed probing attempts from hackers, thousands of which came from IP addresses that originated around the world. He’d learned some inventive ways to send greetings back.
He normally went with proportionate responses. Right now five separate camps were getting just a taste. He reminded himself he shouldn’t be enjoying this, but it didn’t really register. It must be a character flaw of his. He needed to work on that.
With a few more clicks he was finished. James put his laptop in one hand and picked up his duffel bag. It was time to get out of here. He checked the FLIR for the hundredth time. The stacks were still radiating their residual heat.
He moved quickly, checking his laptop’s screen every fifteen seconds now. He entered an area that was mostly red and orange. With the grid off the air conditioning had stopped. Even with the servers off, their residual heat had built up and created hot zones. This was one of them. The FLIR was useless in this section.
Based on what he’d seen moments ago, there hadn’t been anyone close to this section. He moved fast, as fast as he could with his bum ankle.
He checked the FLIR. Still just lava flows all over the screen.
He was moving blind now. The next section was worse. The heat in here was intense.
James moved past more stacks. Up ahead was one of the open stairwells. He peeked through an opening. Not seeing anyone, he took a deep breath and stepped out into the main corridor.
He moved quickly, knowing he was exposed. He reached the stairwell. Now was the toughest part. Once he took to the stairs he’d be in plain view from several vantage points. He put his foot on the first step.
“Zhópa!”
The raised voice came from his left. James froze. He slowly turned. There, a few paces away, down a row of server blades, was a man dressed in a gray Security shirt. Whatever language the man had just uttered wasn’t English.
James wasn’t a linguist, but that voice had sounded Russian.
66
NICK Paulson would have made for a good poker player. His ridiculously handsome face had a sardonic grin that completely masked what was going on in his Machiavellian mind.
Some of this was expected.
The virus had migrated, infecting systems they hadn’t planned on infecting. Security systems of correctional facilities, airlines navigational systems… the list went on. Aside from just banking institutions, the virus was causing quite a mess out there. The more the better.
Except it was causing some unexpected complications.
Paulson hadn’t had contact
for forty minutes, which wasn’t good. He didn’t know what was going on with either team. They hadn’t anticipated cell phones not working. Everyone in the country must be trying to make a call. He kept pressing speed dial, but each time a recording just came on that said “no service, we are sorry, we are experiencing rather heavy volume at the moment, please try again…”
He tried again.
“No service, we…”
Click.
Fucking worthless.
Paulson leaned back in his chair and considered his options. This baby was supposed to be on automatic pilot, but until The Vault was taken out there was still one big loose end that could unravel everything. That along with James Kolinsky.
Like it or not, he was critical to their plans. A part of him felt a little sorry for the putz… for about one second. Once he looked at that enormous pile of dough at stake, he didn’t give a rat’s ass what happened to Kolinsky or his pathetic family.
Call it collateral damage… whatever. There were always a few saps that had to take it on the chin so the rest could go home blissfully happy. That was just the breaks.
His idle hands twirled his cell phone. He tapped speed dial again.
“No service…”
Click.
He had to give himself credit. Any other person would be sweating bullets right now wondering what was going on. But that wasn’t the way he operated.
Right now he just wanted to do what came naturally to a good-looking guy like himself that needed some release. Call it an anxiety break… it had been three days that he’d been going nonstop with this deal and he was due.
He eyed Portino’s assistant across the room. Alanna was sitting with her legs crossed demurely. The room they were in was in the south wing of Portino’s estate. It was set up as an office—if a room sixty- by thirty-foot wide could be called that. This is what wealth bought. Ridiculous extravagance. The room was decorated with expensive furnishings. The desk Paulson was using—a glass top on a single-prop chrome engine propeller—was probably as pricey as a sport’s car.