Insider X (30 page)

58

Red C3, Facility 67096

“WHAT IS THIS?” Hu said.

Out the windows from the sixth floor, he saw soldiers running.  They were heading towards one of the main buildings.  The building with the large columns.  The building called Duty Building.

His aide looked out the window.  “I do not know,” he said.

“Go find out and report back,” Hu said.

“Yes,
Shaoxiao
,
” the man said.  He bowed and left the room.

Hu didn’t correct the man this time.  Hu’s rank officially was an OF-3, which was the equivalent of a Major, but he preferred not to be addressed by that title.  Seemed one time telling his aide about his preference was not enough to get it through the man’s thick skull.

Why they’d assigned him an aide during his short visit here, in the first place, was beyond him.  Well… not true.  Hu knew fully well why they’d assigned him an aide.

The colonel was curious about his two visitors.  Having Supreme Leader here was, no doubt, nerve wracking.  Supreme Leader had the ears of the Politburo.  The colonel had to be concerned about his report.  What was going to be written up?  What was Supreme Leader’s assessment of how he was doing?

There was irony there.

If the colonel only knew who Supreme Leader really was, he might be worried about other things.  He might realize his folly of trying to spy on Supreme Leader.  But the colonel thought his visitor was just a member of the Central Executive Committee.  A lofty title, but hardly the same as Supreme Leader.  Hardly the same as the man who secretly ran the government that the Politburo Standing Committee thought they ran.  Those seven men had no idea that their power, their wealth, was all due to Supreme Leader’s benevolence.

He gave them their power.  And one day, he would taketh it away.  And when that day happened, Hu would be standing beside him.

Hu took his eyes from the scene down below.  There was definitely something going on out there.  He decided not to wait for the aide to come back and report.  He strode from the room.  Better to see himself what was causing the commotion.

59

Facility 67096

AT THE LOADING docks the smell was first noticed by two soldiers.  It was pungent and overwhelming.  The kind of smell that made one gag with just one sniff.

Later, some soldiers would say it smelled like bad eggs.  Others would say it smelled sickly sweet, like a truckload of rancid chicken.  But at the moment, the smell was just in its infancy; blooming into the yard, wafting and filling the air with its invisible nastiness.

One of the soldiers immediately felt lightheaded, and the soldier next to him felt a sharp stinging in his eyes.  They both began to hack and cough uncontrollably.

Unknown to both of them, twenty paces from them, the two 250-liter canisters under a delivery truck were releasing their contents.  The six-minute timer had elapsed, and the pressurized gaseous cocktail was starting to pour out of the canisters’ nozzles.  Except for a hiss sound, indicating some sort of gas release, the airborne particles were silent and invisible.  They poured into the yard, smelly and noxious, portending dire things for Facility 67096.

60

THE ALARM WAS triggered.  It first went off inside Center, and was heard by the two-thousand-strong contingent of young linguists that comprised ‘second shift’, otherwise known as the Eurasian Division.  That particular division of the Online Blue Army was proficient in almost two hundred languages.  Prior to the alarm, they were busy doing their duty in the cavernous room with the vertical banners—the room that was called ‘Center’.

Center held meaning in that it was the node point from which everything radiated from.  Like the vertical banners with the concentric circles: one point, which emanated outwards.  Symbolic.  One point.  One world.

A sphere of influence that was as mighty as The Seven.

Their voice…

Their world.

Everyone else just lived in it.

Such was the master plan, anyway.  Such was the vision.

The Eurasian Division had their duty from 1500 till 0300.  They had been working at their stations for less than an hour when the deep bassoon-like sound of the alarm:
whoomp whoomp… whoomp whoomp…
began to fill the cavernous room.  Almost immediately, red strobe lights on bug-eye packs along the perimeter walls began to pulse and blink, in synch with the alarm.

Elsewhere, the Americas Division, which had been off duty since 1500, also began to hear the low deep bassoon-like sound of the alarm.  That group of young men and women were scattered throughout Facility 67096.  Many were in other buildings or somewhere on the grounds.  For some of them, depending on where they were, the alarm was slightly delayed.

But that was not the case for those in Center.  Those in Center heard the alarm instantly.  They heard it first.

Fitting in a way.

Center.  The node point.  From which everything else radiated outwards.  Like sound waves.

Those sound waves were impossible to miss, because the alarm, in addition to going off in Center, were also resounding in all the auxiliary spaces, such as the corridors, offices, meeting rooms, cafeteria, wash area, kitchen, supply and other areas inside Duty Building.

The soldier named Nuan that was leading Marks, Lip and Mei stopped walking as soon as he heard it.  He stood there, rifle in hand, and looked indecisive.  The alarm was not something that frequently went off.  In fact, for this particular soldier, it was only the second time he’d ever heard the alarm go off.  The first time had been over two years ago.  And it had gone of then because of an electrical fire that had flared up briefly in the supply area.

Nuan was confused.  For a moment he forgot protocol.  For a moment he forgot the evacuation procedures.

Whoomp whoomp… whoomp whoomp…

61

MARKS USED THE distraction of the alarm as an opportunity to set down his wooden box.  The box was not heavy.  And, of course, it didn’t contain just wine.

The corridor they were in was empty, except for them.  He was pretty certain that wouldn’t be the case for long.  In moments, he suspected, the corridor would come alive as occupants spilled from adjoining spaces.  He knew he had to act fast.

He stepped behind the soldier who had been escorting them to the colonel’s special storage area.  He wrapped his powerful right forearm around the man’s throat, and simultaneously using his other arm, locked up a rear choke hold.  His left hand pushed forward on the back of the man’s head, while his right forearm pinched in.  The maneuver was called a sleeper hold, and when used effectively it could render a man unconscious in seconds.  It could also be used to kill a man, if that was the desired intent.

Marks exerted vise-like pressure and squeezed the man’s neck between his biceps and forearm.  The action instantly cut off blood flow in the man’s carotid arteries on the side of the man’s neck.  The man was taken completely by surprise.  His arms flailed for a brief second, but that was it.  No noise escaped his lips.  Seconds later, he was unconscious.  Lip grabbed the man’s rifle before it could fall.  The man was completely limp; dead to the world.  Marks released his sleeper hold, but kept the man from slumping and falling.

Mei stepped forward and deftly inserted a hypodermic needle into the man’s neck.  She plunged the syringe’s contents into the man’s bloodstream.  Nuan wouldn’t be waking any time soon.

“Okay,” Mei said, putting the cap back on the short needle.  “Lip, help me.”

“Looks like Marks has him fine to me,” Lip said.

“No,” Mei said.  “Will look better if we do it.  Marks will carry the canisters.”  Mei quickly unsnapped the man’s identification card from the man’s belt and shoved it in one of her pockets.  She bent and put one of the man’s limp arms around her neck.  Her other arm went around the man’s waist to steady and support him.

“Hurry,” Mei said.

Marks let go of the man so Lip could hook under the man’s other arm.  Lip and Mei began to carry, half drag, the man down the corridor.  Marks picked up the box he’d set down and stacked it on Lip’s.  Bending down, he grabbed both boxes and followed behind.

They reached the end of the corridor.  Another noise besides the
whoomp whoomp
sound of the alarm reached their ears.  As they turned onto another passageway and headed towards their destination, they heard the sound of footsteps, as if many people were running. 

Suddenly a group of men peeled into view.  Armed soldiers; rifles in hand.  They were running right towards them!

62

Luxury Lane

HUILIANG PLACED THE second metal thermos on the ground.  Na didn’t understand what she was doing.

“What are those?” Na said.

Huiliang had gotten it, along with the other one, from inside the same store where she’d gotten the shoes, yesterday.  She’d pulled it from a shoe box that was in the back of the store on one of the shelves.  For a brief moment, Na had been incredulous, thinking Huiliang was actually taking this opportunity to look at shoes.

Na’s incredulity had quickly changed to curiosity and worry.  Looking back now, Na saw that the first metal thermos Huiliang had set down was starting to smoke.  She’d placed it on the tiled esplanade, out in the open.

“Won’t the cameras see?” Na said.

Huiliang nodded.  “Soon… yes.  We need to leave now.”

The second metal thermos, which Huiliang had just set down, began to emit smoke, as well.  Huiliang hurriedly started walking down the esplanade.  Na glanced back at the first thermos again.  It was now pouring out a dense grayish black smoke.  Smoke, which was rising up into the air, expanding and growing exponentially.

Na didn’t dally any longer, but hurried to catch up to Huiliang, who was now way ahead of her, no longer walking, but jogging down the esplanade.  As Na started to run, she heard a sound, the sound of an alarm going off.

Whoomp whoomp… whoomp whoomp…

63

Somewhere in Virginia

LAWRENCE SET DOWN his Styrofoam coffee cup.  His cubicle area was littered with them.  All empty; all with their rims chewed into papery-thin messes.

His eyes were glued to his screen.  He’d lost count of how many hours he’d been sitting here.  Had to be nearing a record for him.  Not that he devoted one ion of bandwidth contemplating that extraneous thought.  He was on task.  Deftly manipulating the data set that was streaming on his screen.  Lives were depending on him to do what he had to do.

He tapped Control-D and inputted code that modified the readings that were being shown.  Half a world away, his keystrokes were impacting an environmental systems network.  Instead of reading what was there, he’d just inserted false positives into the network.  Those false positives would trigger alarms to go off.  Protocol would then dictate what happened next.

His nimble fingers had been busy over the last several hours.  Very busy.  His avatar, his ghost in the wires, his “Shawshank”, his alter ego had infiltrated the impregnable castle that was Facility 67096.  He had Lip and Marks to thank for providing the way in.  They had showed him the “secret passageway” that tunneled under the keep.  What once was hidden and untraceable was now exposed to his eyes.  The integral optical splitter those two had put in place had made the actions of Hive and the Online Blue Army transparent to him.

No longer were those cyber warriors operating in the shadows.  The integral optical splitter was intercepting all their transmissions before they could be cloaked; before their sophisticated low-latency anonymity network could shroud and hide their actions.

Their anonymizer was similar to TOR (another low-latency anonymity network).  Their version, like TOR, made all their actions anonymous on the Web, so that every post, every website they visited, every bit and byte of their online activity was untraceable back to its source.  But that all changed with the integral optical splitter.

That little device was one step ahead of them.  It was tapping into the fiber-optic cables before those near-light-speed transmissions could route through the anonymizer and become untraceable.  By “jumping the line”, Lawrence was able to see all their keystrokes in real time (with a 3.4 second delay, of course; the transmissions were occurring half a world away, after all). 

He was also capturing all the key details for each operator: the operating system type they were using, their IP address, what Internet browser and active programs were on their machines.  Everything he could possibly want to know.  He was the all-seeing eye.  He was detecting their Romulan Bird-of-Prey before it could approach.  Their cloaking technology was worthless.

Fire the photon torpedoes!

Lawrence tittered silently to himself.

He tapped some more keys.  He was so close to being done.  So far he had ticked off all the boxes on his laundry list, except for one.  There was one last thing to do.

Get the cameras in Hive back online. 

He checked his timepiece.  It was synchronized to Lip’s and the others.  It wasn’t quite time, yet.  He had seven minutes.

Seven minutes.  That was just enough time for a bathroom break and another coffee run.  Lawrence stood up.  His body creaked as he did so.  Ouch.  He’d been sitting down way too long.  He waited till blood flow restored to his legs and then walked, make that hobbled, towards the restroom.