Caitlin moved as quickly as she could, wary of raising the alarm via a clumsy footfall that would echo around such an empty building. She had plotted out a course avoiding the front desk, where she knew the two nightwatchmen were now on duty. But, naturally, there was no guarantee the guards weren’t stalking the halls at the same time as her. If they were any good at their job, they’d be doing so at random intervals.
Pushing her senses out ahead of her, reaching for the finely balanced mental state that her teachers in Japan had explained to her as mind-no-mind, Special Agent Caitlin Monroe moved deeper into the heart of Blackstone’s keep.
At one point she halted. The arrhythmic footfall of a man carrying a slight limp was moving towards her. A moment later, a flashlight beam stabbed out and played over a fire extinguisher at the T junction just ahead of her. She did not reach for her weapon, since it was unlikely that the man was aware of her presence. More likely, he was just ticking off a spot check. The flashlight seemed to cut out before she heard the faint click of the guard switching it off. His footsteps shuffled away.
Her heart rate slightly elevated, she waited until she could be certain he was gone before resuming her intrusion.
A simple laser trap guarded the next intersection, but she cleared the single line of light with a leap that mirrored a basic crescent kick with a midair twist. Again, she landed silently.
Flitting past the door to Blackstone’s office, Caitlin catalogued the security fixtures. She had no intention of entering, but her training called forth the Pavlovian reaction.
A few heartbeats later, she stood outside McCutcheon’s office. A small green LED confirmed Vancouver had subverted the PIN lock. Taking the gel-form thumb print, she pressed it against her own digit and laid both on the receiving plate.
Nothing.
She tried again.
Nothing. Not even a red light to indicate a failed match.
Frowning, she stared at the device as if to bid it to her will through sheer force of personality. Then a more rational response kicked in. She licked the gel, feeling the ridge lines of McCutcheon’s thumb print at the tip of her tongue.
This time she was rewarded with a second green light. The thick metallic chunk of steel bolts disengaging sounded as loud as church bells. As she pushed open the door, she pointed her phone at the proximity sensor on his desk and zapped it with the RFID tag. The infra-red sensor flickered a red warning light, but nowhere in Texas. Over in Vancouver, a systems operator would be dunking his cheese cruller in a mocha latte, raising his coffee in salute to the unknown agent who’d just crossed the last threshold.
Even though Caitlin knew the pressure pad just inside the door had been deactivated, she still manoeuvred around it, taking an exaggerated step to the right to avoid tripping the device. She closed the door behind her with one foot, looking for all the world like a ballerina as she did so. Or possibly a ninja who dabbled in ballet as a hobby.
With the door closed, and the last of the sensors disabled, she moved quickly. Before turning on the laptop, she plugged in the unusually heavy Siemens phone and activated the software package she’d pulled down from the satellite before leaving Temple. Agent Monroe had attended a number of Technical Services training seminars over the years, where a number of excellent teachers had attempted to instruct her at a basic level in aggressive ELINT incursion programming. She had failed every course. Caitlin had no more idea of what was happening between the phone and the powered-down laptop than your garden-variety couch potato had of the magic that delivered their favourite cable shows. But she recalled enough of the general principles to know that, somewhere inside her very smart phone, a malign assortment of software sprites were arranging themselves into a formation designed to penetrate the in-depth defences of Tyrone McCutcheon’s ruggedised Toshiba.
Complex multi-level passwords, dual factor authentication, full disk encryption and file protection were subjects she had never really understood. But she did understand that when the progress bar on the phone showed 100%, she was to turn on the laptop. Free-roaming software spiders poured out of the Siemens cell and into the target computer. As it woke up, the Toshiba’s operating system was decapitated and the disk began to boot from her phone. The digital swarm flowed over the machine’s primary defences, shutting them down before they could send out an alert to warn of unauthorised access. Utterly formidable digital ramparts crumbled as the Echelon malware interceded between the hardware’s microprocessors and the operating systems memory management unit, decoupling them, and eroding the fluid architecture before it had a chance to realise it was collapsing.
Another person might have been tempted to go rooting around in the laptop’s directory to hunt for particular documents. Caitlin stood well away from the keyboard and resisted any such urges, however. She’d once turned off Bret’s Xbox while it was doing something not entirely dissimilar to the Siemens phone, dumping its system software and updating from a remote server. Or something.
In the end, it was all about one machine butt-raping another. And she had learned from the unfortunate Xbox episode, if not from her instructors at Tech Services, to keep her fucking hands to herself while the machines got their awesome on.
After seven-and-a-half excruciating minutes, the phone vibrated again. The data had been extracted and uploaded to the satellite. It was already unpacking itself into a dedicated directory on a dark server in Vancouver, where the same systems operator would be scanning it to check for exactly the sort of malevolent digital magic he had just wielded to extract the files. It was safe to disconnect.
Caitlin unhooked her cell and waited until the suicide agents left behind by the phone had shut down McCutcheon’s computer, after obliterating all trace of their passage through its silicon hallways. The Toshiba winked off shortly afterwards.
The room seemed preternaturally still and quiet.
And then the door opened.
51
SEATTLE, WASHINGTON
The drive to Madison Park was too far, even with a government car and driver. Jed called Marilyn and told her he’d be staying in the townhouse for the night. She had a couple of friends over and was already three sheets into the wind, so at least he wasn’t in trouble there. Neither of the kids, Melanie and Roger, could tear themselves away from their games consoles to say goodnight. Jed didn’t much care by that point. He just wanted a shower, something to eat, and sleep. If he could sleep.
It was a calculated gamble, turning somebody like Caitlin Monroe loose on Blackstone. He had no doubt that within a couple of days the impasse would be ancient history. But whether Monroe would deliver to him the information he needed to quietly remove the Governor of Texas, or whether they were hours away from some violent, nightmarish blood swarm, he couldn’t say. And not having control was killing him.
He couldn’t control the fact that Blackstone had sent special operators to Florida and stumbled across an apparent piece of villainy by Roberto down there. Just as he couldn’t control the fact that a certain ‘Colonel Murdoch’ had now loomed into the President’s consideration.
Kip had no idea who Murdoch was, of course. For James Kipper, one more military officer writing one more report was a matter of supreme indifference. For Jed, however, the President’s sudden, inconvenient awareness of the existence of ‘Murdoch’ was a source of diabolical uncertainty. It was just so frustrating having to wait on other people to finish something he had set in train. Especially since the end result could see him remembered as a national hero, or sent to jail.