She reached the wall and crouched down on the opposite side of the loading bay doors. There were four big roll-down doors and one smaller service entrance. Top gave her the nod and she slung her rifle and dug out the high-tech equipment that allowed her to bypass the locks. A device the size and shape of a nickel was pressed to the underside of the keycard reader and gave her a soft go-ahead ping in her earbud. Cole swiped a blank card through the slot once, waited for two seconds, and then again. The second time the red light on the security card reader flicked from red to green. It took MindReader only two seconds to hack the system, own it, and add the right code to the blank card. The same codes would be sent to identical cards carried by everyone. Each time they encountered a similar lock, two swipes would share the right codes with everyone. Smooth. Almost scary, but comforting, too.
“Go,” murmured Top, and Cole pulled the door open. He rose and moved past her as she covered, and then he faded to one side and covered for her as she followed.
The loading bay was huge, with mountains of crates stacked nearly to the ceiling. Hundreds, perhaps thousands of them, each coded with different symbols. They moved together to clear the room first, making sure there were no guards. When it was clear they were alone, they went along the fronts of several rows, making sure their bodycams recorded the data stenciled on each. Bug was Captain Ledger’s live intel guy, so they had Zero, one of the other field support specialists.
“Are those bar codes?” asked Zero. “Scan one for me.”
Each crate had a lot of numerical codes written either in black, red, or green ink, but every crate had a similar black bar code on the bottom front. Cole slipped a hand scanner over her glove. It was about as thick as a pencil though half as long, and fitted over the glove with an elastic band. Ultra-high-res lasers scanned the data and her combat suit’s telemetry uploaded it to the drones, which in turn relayed it to a MindReader burst-transfer substation in the car they’d come in. All of that happened in a microsecond as Cole waved her hand over a dozen different crates, making sure to get some of each of the three color codes.
“These are destination codes,” said Zero.
“Where are they going?” asked Cole, and Top nodded his approval.
“A lot of places. Scan more of them.”
As Cole did that, Zero began reading off the destinations. The crates marked in red seemed to be going to cities all over the world, without any immediate pattern.
“Got to be something in common,” said Top.
“I’ll find it,” promised Zero. Prior to becoming a field support specialist, he’d worked for two years with Nikki’s pattern recognition group.
“What about the others?”
“All the green boxes so far seem to be addressed to Ukraine — that’s weird. Since when are they engaging in friendly commerce? And Lithuania, Bulgaria, Croatia…”
“All Europe?” asked Cole.
Zero took a moment on that. “No. Those last two you did, do more in that stack. Yeah… looks like they’re all for China. No, I’m wrong. There’s a couple for… hey, that’s really weird. North Korea?”
Another voice came on the line. The stern voice of Doc Holliday. “When y’all are done pulling your puds, maybe you could open some of those darn crates.”
Top and Cole removed small pry bars from their packs and jimmied open a lid, then sifted through foam popcorn. Top lifted out two identical parcels, set one down, and removed plastic wrapping from the other.
“Some kind of machine part,” he said, turning it over in his hands. The object was lightweight, silver in color, and wrapped with coils of copper wire. “Think it’s aluminum or magnesium. Weighs hardly anything.”
Cole went fishing through the crate. “All the same thing. Identical. But what is it?”
“Don’t know,” said Zero. “We need to find a shipping manifest.”
“Open some of the other boxes,” directed Doc.
They did, moving quickly from one stack to another. It soon became apparent that there were forty different pieces in the various crates on each stack. The same forty pieces in each stack.
“Okay,” said Cole, “but what do these things assemble into?”
Zero said, “I got a bad feeling we already know the answer to that, guys.”
CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED FOUR
The new schematics Bug pulled from the hard drives gave me a clear route to a concealed set of stairs leading down into the basement. The entrance was behind a large set of double file drawers that slid sideways on concealed tracks. Behind that was a handprint and retina scanner, but Bug owned the system now, so he accessed the records tied to the security office and transferred a high-density overlay to my right contact lens and a pattern to the pads of my gloves. Suddenly I was Sergei Alexandrovich, deputy director of research. The door opened as if happy to see me.
Ghost and I crept inside. I had an Anteater bug detector attached to each sleeve, so as I stepped inside I gave it time to search for secondary security. All clean. Stairs zigzagged down, so down we went. There was an elevator, too, but they come with all sorts of possible complications, and there are plenty of very nasty security systems that can turn an elevator car into a temporary prison or a gas chamber. No thanks.
Down and down we went, passing through more security. Apparently Dr. Alexandrovich had a free pass everywhere. Nice. With each flight downward, though, I could tell that Ghost was becoming more uneasy. His fur rippled with tension and he often paused to bare his teeth at empty corners. I didn’t scold him or tell him that there was nothing to be afraid of. He had sharper senses than I did, and I’ve learned from experience that electronics aren’t always superior to a dog’s perceptions. When Ghost reacted to something, I respected that, and made sure I always looked, my hand ready on my weapon.
Always.
The schematics indicated that the subbasements had high ceilings, and from the number of flights of stairs that was true enough. It felt like we were descending into the underworld.
Ghost stopped again at the bottom of the second-to-last landing and he stood with tail straight out behind him and head lowered, the way he does when he perceives a human presence. I took a horsefly from my pocket and sent it buzzing. It landed on the wall and crawled the rest of the way as I watched its video feed on my wrist computer. There was a last — and damned impressive — airlock, guarded by two sentries who looked tough, fit, and competent. These men were not dressed in the same security company uniform as the one upstairs; they were actual soldiers. However, they wore no unit insignia or rank, but they were in steel gray and mist white fatigues and gear. They were armed with SR-2 Veresk submachine guns. Very nasty guns that fired proprietary 9 ×21mm SP-10 rounds designed to penetrate most body armor. Maybe even the spider-silk-and-carbon-fiber stuff I was wearing. I wasn’t sure, and didn’t want to find out.
My Anteater flashed at me, and when I checked the screen it told me that the bottom six steps had all kinds of motion and pressure sensors. No way I could sneak close enough to fire the Snellig.
It was a crisis moment. If I did nothing and just spooked my way out of there, then the mystery of the earthquake and the suicides might never be solved. If I moved forward there was no way to do it without killing them. The gas dart gun just wasn’t reliable enough if I had to move fast. If the arms race shifted to weapons that could drive people crazy and induce earthquakes, how could we compete? We’d either have to throw nukes at Russia to make a statement, or get shaken and stirred into rubble.