A little tired of taking a pounding, and from a female hacker, no less, Zach took a swing of his own. It landed right on Ronnie’s lip. She stumbled back a few steps.
“Got it! You are good to go,” Quirk said.
Zach rushed forward and caught Ronnie before she pitched backward. He put a tender finger to her lip. “I’m so sorry.”
“Yeah, tell the boys I’m sorry, too. But I had to make it look real. They couldn’t get any preferential treatment.”
Zach grinned. “They forgive you. So how long until the government has eyes on us again?”
“Eighty-six seconds.”
“Well, then, let’s make the most of them,” Zach said, leaning in to kiss her again. Less than a minute and a half was not ideal, but he’d take it. How many months had he been waiting for these eighty-six seconds? He’d fantasized about it over and over again. It was what kept him going all these months. But before their lips touched, the front and rear door burst open and several armed Asian men burst in.
* * *
Really? Now? The Triads, the Chinese equivalent of the mafia, had to burst in now? Right now? Not eighty-seven seconds from now?
They looked all tough and ready for business until the guns in their hands started to rattle. The automatic weapons flew out of their hands and landed on the magnets.
Taking advantage of their shock, Zach sucker-punched one and threw the guard into the other. Ronnie moved into action as well, firing her Taser at the nearest man. She cranked the voltage up, though. No reason to go easy on him. The last man beat a hasty retreat out down the hallway. He was sure to bring some friends back with him, though.
“Quirk!” Ronnie shouted.
“What?”
“We just got attacked by the Triad.”
“Bummer,” Quirk said.
“Quirk!”
“What? You’re the one who wanted the satellite knocked out. Ergo, I can’t see a thing.”
“Only because you assured me that physical security on the premises was light to non-existent.”
“Well, I wasn’t aware at the time that Lee & Ying were hosting a mediation meeting between the Triad and the Yakusa.”
“The Yakusa?” Zach asked.
“Yes, it just came across the CIA’s Far East desk. They are meeting to divvy up territories to end a turf war that’s lasted for seventeen years.”
Great. And they were in the middle of it.
Instead of breaking into an out-of-the-way, low-security facility, they had stumbled onto a summit of two of the largest criminal syndicates in the world.
“I’m bringing the satellite back online so we’re not blind,” Quirk said.
That would be helpful.
“Get out of there!” Quirk yelled. “There are over twenty armed men heading your way!”
Ronnie looked down at her plastic Taser. It was not going to do the trick. She flipped the switch and turned off the magnet. Zach leaned down and grabbed not only his gun back, but the automatic rifle, as well.
They were going to need each and every bullet in those guns.
“Which way?” Ronnie asked.
“Go out the way Zach came in, then take your first right.”
They took off, heading in the direction Quirk had given.
“No!” Quirk yelled. “Your other right!”
Ronnie wasn’t sure what he meant until they ran through the next door to find a dozen men sitting around a table. Half of the men had a dragon tattooed on their neck. The Yakusa. They had stumbled onto the meeting.
Another dozen guards stood guard along the periphery of the room.
“Oh, shi—”
Zach started to curse as Ronnie threw the switch and tossed the magnet onto the middle of the large round table.
Bullets flew but, thank goodness, her magnet bent their trajectory away from Ronnie and Zach and toward their bosses. Screams filled the air as the henchmen mowed down their own employers.
The guards nearest Zach and Ronnie were far enough away from the magnets to be able to turn their sights on the white intruders.
Ronnie pulled a small device from her bag and threw it, hard, at the wall behind the men. It exploded with a loud bang and bright flash. Sparks twinkled in the air.
“That was a pretty weak flash-bang grenade,” Zach noted.
“Oh, it was never meant to deafen or blind,” Ronnie said. “It’s laced with LSD.”
“What?” Zach exclaimed as he stared at the men, who had dropped their weapons and were now taking off their clothes. They certainly did seem to be tripping. So Ronnie had herself an LSD grenade. Good to know.
“You’d better stop lollygagging,” Quirk said. “Those guards are still on their way.”
“Which way?”
“How about you tell Zach the directions this time,” Quirk countered.
Yes, Ronnie was known to confuse her right from her left. “Will do.”
“Take the hall to your left, then your first right.”
Ronnie repeated the instructions.
Zach grabbed her by the elbow and guided her away from the door she wanted to go through. “Left,” he repeated.
Ronnie double-checked by starting the pledge of allegiance. Sure enough, Zach was correct. So left they went, then quickly took a right. The real right.
“Quirk, is this the way to the server room?” Ronnie asked.
* * *
“No,” Quirk said, yelling over the sound of the rotors. “It is the way to the exit.”
“I need to get to the server.”
His boss could be a little tunnel-blind at times.
“No way, no how. We’ve got a couple dozen armed guards from two of the most vicious organized crime organizations. They skin people alive for fun.”
“We need that money,” Ronnie said. “So which way?”
Quirk sighed. There was no reasoning with Ronnie when she was in this mood. The girl seriously liked her hundreds of millions.
“Fine. Take another right. It is one story above you.”
As the helicopter flew over the island, Quirk watched the dots on the screen that represented the hacker and the FBI agent. They moved steadily forward. The guards were all over the building. More guarding against an escape attempt than Ronnie going ahead with the hack. Maybe she was onto something.
“I am going to try to set up a distraction,” Quirk said. “Get ready to brace yourself.”
No answer came. They seemed always ready to brace themselves.
He turned to the pilot. “We need to get over there.”
The man grunted and chewed down hard on his cigar, veering the chopper back toward the industrial section of the city.
Quirk identified the propane tanks used to fuel the machinery. A single missile into those would definitely create a distraction. They arrived at the factory a good two minutes faster than Quirk expected. He sent the coordinates to the pilot.
“Hang on,” Quirk warned as his pilot pressed the firing button.
A missile shot out of the chopper and slammed into the propane tank. The thing blew in a glorious explosion of yellow and orange.
* * *
Zach helped Ronnie up from the floor.
“Quirk, you really need to qualify exactly how much we should brace in the future,” Ronnie said as she dusted herself off.
“Yes, well, you wanted a distraction. Do I ever do anything less than spectacular?”
Ronnie just shook her head. “Did it work?”
“Yes, the workers are fleeing the factory. It’s pandemonium out there. They are assuming you are using the explosion as cover for your escape. All the men are redirected toward the factory.”
Actually, using the explosion as a cover to get the hell out of here did sound like a good idea. “Ronnie, are you sure about this? We could get out of here.”
“A girl’s gotta have goals,” Ronnie said. “But you don’t need to come with me. As a matter of fact,” she said as she pulled a gun and aimed it at him, “You should get going.”
“What are you doing?”
“Creating reasonable doubt that you helped me steal the money,” Ronnie said before she shot at his feet. Zach danced back.
“It doesn’t have to be like this,” Zach pleaded.
“Go, Zach. I’ll fire to make it believable,” Ronnie said, then made good on her word.
Zach set off down the hallway, hating to run off from her. However, she was firing a bit close for comfort.
Would their meetings ever end in anything but tears?
CHAPTER 2
Ronnie watched as Zach turned the corner. Quirk was giving him the directions to get out of the warehouse by avoiding the remaining guards. She shot one last time just for good measure as tears streaked down her cheeks.
How many times would they have to part? What future could their lives hold with him as an FBI agent and her as one of the FBI’s most wanted?
While it pained her to see him go, she had something to do. Make that hundreds of millions of things to do. She sprinted down the hallway to the large thick metal door that marked the server room. The pass card that Quirk had made worked like a charm. The door swung open effortlessly.
The room was awash in blue. Server lights blinked, beaconing Ronnie into their midst. She felt like their goddess. They would open their secrets to her, she was sure of it. She’d spent weeks seducing them, convincing them she meant no harm.
While she was not nearly as melded with the computers as Quirk or Warp were, she did feel certain that these servers did not want to hide their ill-gotten gains. There were times during a hack that a system just seemed to give itself over to you. She was hoping that today would be such a day.
Ronnie entered in a few args to ping the system, see what kind of mood it was in today. The prompts all ran smoothly.
“You need to AOS things up,” Quirk commented. “I can keep them busy, but not forever.”
Per usual, her assistant wanted her fingers to work faster than her flesh would allow.
“Did you upload the dragon?” Quirk asked.
Unlike a worm or virus, a dragon was a program that kept track of all function of a computer. It let her know if anyone else was accessing the system and what exactly they were doing, including each and every key stroke.
“Not my first hack, Quirk.”
“No, but it could be your last if you don’t hurry your butt up.”
Ronnie continued on. “I’ve got DWIM.” Which meant that the computer was doing what she wanted. She was in. Now, just to navigate to the accounts and point the funds in the right direction.
“FROTZ!” Quirk cursed.
“What?”
“You’ve set off some kind of alarm. They’re sending men your way.”
Well, that wasn’t part of the plan. But when was it?
Ronnie kept up. The money was flowing. Could she abandon the station and trust the computer to complete the chore?
“Ronnie, seriously, they’re coming from four different directions.”
She stroked the side of the CPU. “Keep it up, baby.”
With one last command, to start the Gabriel routine as soon as the money was fully transferred. The program would not only wipe the memory of her hack, but make the computer extremely slow to run and put whoever came next through a series of menial tasks to do even the most basic functions.
Ronnie grabbed her pack and took off. “Which way?”
“Pilot wants you to go up, which means heading to the north stairwell.”
“Seriously, Quirk, I don’t know right from left and you expect me to know north?”
“It’s the direction that moss grows on trees.”
“Quirk,” Ronnie groaned.
“Fine. Take a right at the corner. You know, the hand that doesn’t do the pledge of allegiance.”
Ronnie would take task with Quirk’s condescending manner, except he just saved her a wrong turn. Damn him.
“Run,” Quirk said. “And I mean, run!”
She could hear the panic in his voice. Plus no barb about how she might want to increase her time on the Stairmaster, so Ronnie knew this was serious, not just Quirk being Quirk.
“They’re jumping out the windows…” Quirk said, clearly not sure the strategy for the guards.
Then the window near her shattered as men swung in on ropes. They landed and recovered quickly, each of them with a weapon in his hand.
“Um, I think they’re armed with bokkens,” Quirk stated.
Yes, yes, they were armed with bokkens. Obviously, they had eschewed any metal weapons that could be turned against them. The bokken was an ancient Asian martial arts weapon. Bokken meant “wooden sword,” and, in the right hands, could inflict as much damage as an actual sword. Each of the men snapped theirs up, tucking them under their armpit in the pre-attack position. And these bokkens seemed in the best possible hands, the Yakusa.
Ronnie could duke it out with Zach, knowing he would never truly hurt her, her split lip to the contrary. These men? They would kill here where she stood.
She lifted up her hands in surrender. One of the men jerked her pack from her back. Another came from the rear of the group and pulled a gun out, which he pressed to her throat, seeming mightily pleased with himself.
He rattled off a question in Japanese. Unfortunately, she didn’t speak Japanese.
This sucked. How did she get in this situation in the first place? Oh yeah, she was stealing their money, not knowing a major gangster accord was being held here. And where was Zach? Did he really leave her?
The man became even more agitated, digging the metal into her skin.
“I’ve got your money, and if you want it back, take me to your leader.”
She’d always wanted to say those words—of course, under drastically different circumstances. And she had to hope that someone in the group spoke enough English to understand her.
The man removed the weapon from under her chin and shoved it into her back, urging her down the hallway.
“Ronnie?” Quirk said in her ear. “What is going on?”
“We are going to go talk to the nice Yakusa and negotiate my release,” she said in a singsong voice.
“You’re captured?” Quirk asked the question he already knew the answer to.
“Hai,” she answered, since it was only one of the few Japanese words she knew. And even that came from watching Godzilla movies. She was so screwed.
* * *
Ronnie was so screwed. The men were taking her to a large meeting room. A meeting room filled with dozens of armed men. She’d better have one hell of a plan to get of this one.
Quirk had tried to anticipate what she might need. so he’d hacked into the building’s energy grid. Whatever she wanted to do, it was going to require a ton of electricity. That’s just how she rolled, and every toy in her bag was a power hog.