R
eese dreamed she was in the dentist chair. The guy kept drilling in tiny spurts. Drill-drill, pause, drill-drill. She wanted to tell him to get on with it, but she couldn't speak because her mouth was filled with cotton.
Then she woke up and realized it was her cell phone. She fumbled for the light and pushed the phone onto the floor. She leaned her head over the side of the bed. Her eyes would not focus. But the screen illuminated in time to the ring. She aimed for that. Grabbed the thing. Rolled on her back. She needed both hands to connect. “What.”
“This is Jeff. I just got a call from the duty officer. Brett Riffkind just showed up.”
The words simply sank into the drugged sponge of her brain and disappeared. They made no sense. “Hang on a second.”
Reese stumbled into the bathroom and washed her face. Again. She had tossed and turned for hours, then finally taken a sleeping pill. The one the doctor guaranteed would knock her out for eight hours.
Reese seldom allowed herself the indulgence of time off. But she had not been resting well, and her body ached with pent-up fatigue. So she had taken the pill. And now she could not scrub her face hard enough to force the blood into her brain.
She stumbled back into the bedroom. She sank onto the bed and took the phone and said, “Repeat that. Slowly.”
“Brett Riffkind. He's here.”
“Where exactly is here?”
“Are you okay?”
“Tired.” She could not make sense of what the security chief was saying. “Riffkind is in Switzerland.”
“Not anymore. The guy showed up with Elene.”
“Elene Belote? She's back?”
“I'm watching her on the monitor. She's sitting in the atrium with Neil. They're drinking coffee. And chatting. Calm as you please.”
“I'm going online.” She shuffled across the bedroom to her desk. Her computer took forever to boot up. The clock on her desk set read 3:30. She had been out for something under three hours. The sleeping pill clogged her veins. “All right. I'm linked in. Pass me the feed.”
The atrium flashed onto her screen. The camera hung from the ceiling, which was sixty feet up. All she could see were two distant figures in an otherwise empty chamber. “Draw them closer.”
The view made a swooping dive, focused, and Reese stared at Elene cradling a steaming mug. She was talking to Neil Townsend, the team's resident bad-boy hacker. Reese dry-scrubbed her face. She had no idea the two ever even spoke. “Where is Riffkind?”
“Can't find him.”
“What, he's left again?”
“Hold on.” She heard him drop the phone, pick up a mike, ask the duty officer where Brett was. The response was rattled either by static or by her own mental state. Jeff picked up the phone and said, “He's gone off the grid.”
“What is that supposed to mean?”
“I guess he's sacked out in the Barracks.”
They had originally wired the team's bedrooms for light and sound. Even the bathrooms had camera hookups. But the first week Neil had been inside, he had hacked into the building's system and killed all the Barracks feeds. Security had raised a stink, but Reese had backed the kid. Giving them a little private space had seemed like a good idea at the time.
Reese said, “Go back to their arrival and show me Riffkind.”
“We only have real-time feed off-site. We need to be in the duty room to access the tapes.”
Reese could not quite stifle the groan as she rose from her desk. “Have the duty officer find Riffkind.”
“Maybe we should wait. If Riffkind is in the Barracks, our man will wake everybody up at four o'clock in the morning checking the rooms. Riffkind's not going anywhere, and we've only got one guy on dutyâ”
“Do it.” Her bed pulled at her like a magnet. Reese forced herself to turn away. “I'm coming in.”
E
li was right. Neil Townsend's computer was a treasure trove of ill-gotten gains.
Trent only required five minutes to scope the building's entire security system because Neil had it all mapped out. Neil had treated the different departments with their tightly sealed access points as another electronic maze. Each door was coded into his map. All Trent had to do was hit the various points, and his way forward was clear. “This is amazing.”
“He's been bragging about this for weeks. How he can get anywhere he wants.” Eli scoped the screen from his position behind Trent. “He made me promise to fry the system if he ever wound up in one of those beds.”
Trent searched the system and realized, “He's only got the security system here.”
“So?”
“I need access to the system computer.”
Eli shrugged. “If it's not there, it doesn't exist.”
Trent realized the physics research group had to be operating from their own mainframe. Which was both good and bad. Good, because it suggested any preliminary findings would be backed up only within the system itself. That made sense if this group was paranoid about keeping everything hidden away from other intel departments. Bad, because he would have to go down and access the mainframe from inside the division.
“Is anybody working in the physics department?”
“How should I know, man. I've never even spoken to them. They come, they go.” Eli yawned. “I need to crash.”
“Ten minutes.” Trent figured it would be about that long before the kid lost any interest in sleep. “Right now I need you to go tell me when the physics department door opens up.”
“Man, you're gonna set off every alarm in the state. Those security goofs don't mess around.”
“Don't worry,” Trent said. “It's going to be fine.”
The kid cast a doubtful look as he left the room. Trent hit the various buttons by each of the departmental checkpoints, sealing the doors open and memorizing his way into the main lab.
He then went online and drew up a site he had spent hours sneaking around. He had always considered it time wasted and lost forever. Until now.
The latest generation of physicists took quiet pride in their computer prowess. They were all secret hackers at heart. Only their hunger to probe the boundaries of human knowledge kept them legal. But nothing stopped them from fooling around on their time off.
Any late-night gathering of physicists eventually descended to the point of softly whispered abandon. One of the group would cast a quick aside, merely to check the group's tone, make sure they were all on the same wavelength. Then they started talking about
other
boundaries. They snickered like kids and knew the gut-tightening thrill of sliding under the barbed wire of legality.
They loved nothing better than sneaking into supposedly hidden
hacker sites. Looking around. Mostly they left little “Killroy was here” signs and snuck out. But not for the special sites. These they shared over the last pitcher of beer and pretended they weren't just another bunch of lonely nerds. Times like these, they were electronic pirates. Spies making their way through fields buckled by land mines. People of power.
Trent had not shared this particular treasure trove with anyone, for the simple reason that he had not had a chance to do so in person. He had still been working his way through the find when he received the first dream and met Shane and watched his life shoot off on a totally different course. And this site was simply too good to talk about online.
A group of Soviet hackers had built their own version of a safety deposit box, filled with every electronic worm and virus and bomb and spawn they could find. Trent had worked his way through about two dozen of their collection and come upon some real gems.
Eli popped back into the room. “The doors downstairs all just opened up.”
“Great.” Trent searched through Neil Townsend's desk and came up with a memory stick. He jammed it into the laptop's USB port, then selected four truly deadly specimens from the website, viruses that ate away the host system in a matter of nanoseconds. He downloaded three, then fed the fourth into the building's security system. “Okay. I'm all done here.”
K
evin whined, “I still don't understand why Brett Riffkind's name is in our system at all.”
“It makes perfect sense, if you'd stop complaining about getting woken up and think.”
“I'm thinking as hard as I can at four in the morning.” Kevin sounded almost petulant. “And it doesn't make any sense at all.”
“I've told you all this, Kevin. This whole program is based on a system Riffkind helped design, then stole and sent to us. Our agreement was that he would come join us and be given the right to claim any physics-related discoveries as his own.”
“Tell me you weren't actually going to let this guy go public about our work.”
“Kevin, will you please wake up.”
“You're the one who sounds drunk.”
Reese knew she did and there wasn't anything she could do about it. The drug left her feeling like her blood was congealed, her brain still mostly asleep. The road in front of her windscreen swam in and
out of focus. The only reason she had made it this far was because she had the roads to herself. She had the cell phone hooked to her car's Bluetooth. She disliked the way her voice rang in the empty vehicle. “Riffkind wouldn't be allowed to do anything without my approval. Which he wasn't going to get. But we needed him on-site. Who knows how far we can take this thing? If anybody can help us refine the process, it's the guy who made it work in the first place.”
“I still say it was a bad idea.”
“And I'm telling you, it was the only logical course. Riffkind was coming over. We had his room ready, lab space, the works. Then he vanished. Now I'm thinking I shouldn't have called you at all.”
“No, no. I just didn't get much sleep, is all.”
“That makes two of us.”
He made a rustling sound. Reese realized he must have dragged his hand across his unshaven cheek. He asked, “Where are you?”
“Just pulling into the parking garage.” Her phone chimed. She checked the readout and said, “Hang on, I've got a call coming in from Jeff.”
The security chief said, “The building's whole security system has just gone down.”
His laconic tone was the only thing that kept her from flipping out. “That can't happen.”
“I wish. This is the third time in eight months. It's always been some glitch that the techies take hours to find. Which is why they should have stuck to human monitoring.”
She didn't have the time or the mental energy for this. “What do you mean, down?”
“Cameras, monitors, door-locks, the works. Same as before.” The security chief sounded almost satisfied, as though having an electronic error confirmed his own worth. “Always happens in the middle of the night. Which is good, if you think about it. The landline phones are okay. My guy's done a check. Everything is cool. Eli and Neil are still in the atrium talking with Elene.”
Reese stepped from her car. The parking garage was utterly silent. The night air tasted almost sweet. “I thought you said it was just Neil.”
“Eli's been drifting around. I saw him before I left. He never sleeps much. But I've pulled the duty officer off searching the bedrooms. I want him walking the beat. Let Riffkind sleep.”
She took as much comfort from his tone as his words. “I'm parked and going in.”
“Not through the tunnel, you're not. I told you, the doors are out.”
“How do I get inside?”
“Go back to your car and drive to the loading entrance. I'm two minutes out. We'll do it the old-fashioned way. We'll walk around to the front door and I'll use my key.”
T
rent strolled through the building's physics department. The place was drawn from his fantasies of where he'd always wanted to wind up. It was made up of eight large chambers. Everything he saw defined pristine. The eight rooms were linked by glass panels and sliding doors, all open now. The labs were jammed with equipment, a lot of which Trent figured the physicists probably didn't need. It was like somebody had gathered a bunch of geeks together and tossed them a checkbook and said, make a list. Three electron microscopes fed into the largest flat-screen monitors Trent had ever seen. A Cray supercomputer stood in its own room. The iconic tower rose from its cooling unit like a polished black sculpture in a pool of glowing water. They had
everything
.
Trent was jolted to see his formula scrawled across a wall-length greaseboard. He picked up the eraser to wipe it away. But his hand would not obey.
He jerked at a sound drifting in from outside. Somebody might
have laughed. Or perhaps they called his name. He had no idea how long he stood there. Staring at two years of work. Wishing he could do away with the whole nightmarish scenario.
He rubbed the writing so hard he knocked the greaseboard off the wall. He jumped back, then just felt it all come apart. He stabbed the board with his heel. Again. Stomping down over and over, smashing it into a billion pieces. Just like his thesis and his dreams and his life. Gone.
His chest heaving, he walked from room to room, moving farther away from the entrance. His stolen hard drives were in the admin desk's top drawer, just as Elene had seen in her ascent. He used a nickel-plated sampling hammer he found in the same drawer to smash them to a pulp.
Also as Elene had described, he found a computer station by the isolation chamber that was still up and running. The screen was turned away from the front rooms. A weary physicist had obviously neglected to walk back and power down. It happened all the time. Only today it meant that Trent could sidestep the security system and access the mainframe. He found a standard USB port located on the keyboard and uncapped the memory stick containing the viruses he'd downloaded from the Russian website.
It didn't take long. The mainframe gave off a sound that was almost like a human sob. And the screen went blank.
Trent left the rooms without a backward glance. There was nothing for him here.