“Okay,” he said. “I…I’ll do it.”
He started toward the control panel.
“Mr. Heath,” Olivia said.
He looked back.
“I know there are two different codes you can use to get the door open. If you use the one that will activate the vault self-destruct, your family will die.”
He shook his head. “I won’t.”
The control software was set up so that it needed not only the code, but also scans of the authorized person’s eye and left hand. It could detect blood flow in the eye’s capillaries, and the body heat in the hand.
Olivia watched him as he punched in the code, then scanned his eye and his hand. Once that was done, the code had to be input once more.
When he finished, there was a second of silence. Then she heard the locks pulling open.
As the door swung out, Olivia looked at the guard. “Thank you.”
She nodded at Gleason, who raised his gun and shot the guard in the head.
The private jet carrying Perez from South America touched down in San Jose, Costa Rica, at 10:04 a.m. Thirty-seven minutes later, he pulled his car off the road, about half a mile from NB328, and covered the remaining distance on foot.
Judging by the exterior of the building, nothing looked amiss. That, of course, meant nothing. When he’d checked in with Bluebird upon arrival, they told him they still hadn’t been able to reach anyone inside the facility.
Staying at least a hundred yards away, he made two complete circuits of the building, but saw nothing unusual. Even the three satellite dishes on the roof that kept NB328 in contact with Bluebird looked untouched.
About the only thing he could say was that the place seemed to be too quiet. He knew that was his own bias, though, having spent much of the last several weeks in crowded, South American cities. Unless a depot was receiving a shipment, there was no reason for anyone to be outside.
The main door was in the middle of what was considered the front of the building. Perez watched it for several minutes, but decided not to approach it. If there were hostiles still around, they’d no doubt have someone posted just inside. The better bet was to use the emergency entrance. After all, it had been built for circumstances such as these.
He headed northeast to a point five hundred feet away from the building. The emergency entrances were all the same, designed to look like an abandoned concrete slab. He found it easily, but someone had released the locks that held it in place, and had slid it to the side, exposing the entrance to the tunnel.
He slipped his gun out from the holster, and pointed it at the opening. He couldn’t see far. At this angle, the sunlight went down only ten feet. Beyond that was darkness.
He circled around the hole, checking the ground for footprints. He needed to determine if it had been opened from the inside by people trying to leave, or from the outside by someone trying to get in. If it had been the latter, that would definitely be troubling, because that meant the attackers knew ahead of time about the emergency entrance, and how to open it, which meant they knew about the Project, too.
Footprints. Leading to the slab.
So these weren’t just some random thieves.
Perez looked at his watch. The team flying in from Mexico was not due to arrive for another hour and a half. Under normal circumstances, he would have waited, but nothing was normal anymore. He pulled out the small flashlight he carried in his pocket, and descended the steps.
“It’s Perez, sir,” Ross said over the speakerphone.
The DOP snapped up the receiver. “Transfer him to me.”
There was a click.
“Perez?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Where are you?”
“I’m inside NB328.”
“And?”
There was a pause. “Everyone’s dead, sir.”
The DOP didn’t move for a full second. “Everyone?”
“Yes, sir. The entire security team.”
“And the people who did this?”
“Gone, sir.”
“What about bodies? Surely a couple of them must have been hit.”
“If they were, they’re not here now.”
The DOP was stunned. A whole security team wiped out by a local gang? How in the hell did that happen?
“Figure out what they took,” he said. “If any of it shows up somewhere, we can trace it back and deal with them.”
Perez took a moment before he replied. “This wasn’t a random robbery, sir.”
“What do you mean?”
“None of the supplies are missing.”
“That can’t be right.”
“I could be mistaken. I only did a quick look-through, but…well, sir, whoever it was entered through the emergency entrance using the code.”
“The what?”
“It was open when I got here, so I checked the surveillance footage and the sensor logs, knowing there should be a record of the break-in. Whoever they were, apparently they were able to hack into the system before they came in, and turned off all the surveillance.”
If the DOP wasn’t stunned before, he was now. The emergency entrance? Knowing the code and hacking into the security system? What the hell was going on?
“And something was taken.”
“What?”
“The vault was open. Two of the numbered boxes are missing.”
The boxes were similar to deposit boxes in a bank. Each contained printed-out, detailed instructions to be used in specific situations. They were the hardcopy backups in case something happened to the computer system after Implementation Day. Another redundancy in the Project’s desire to make sure nothing went off track when they set about rebuilding the world in the way they knew it should be. Every depot had a set of the boxes in its vault.
That someone had purposely broken into NB328 to get to them was unbelievable. The only people who knew about the boxes or the vaults were members of the Project, or at least that’s what he had thought.
This was a serious breach. They had to find out who had done this and why.
“Which boxes were taken?” the DOP asked.
“J923 and T121.”
The DOP brought up the vault database and typed both numbers in. J923 contained the list of all the other depots, and T121 a list of all the primary members of the Project. Both were disturbing, the second considerably more than the first.
“Go over every square inch of that facility,” he ordered. “There has got to be some clue as to who these people are.”
“Yes, sir.”
“And make it quick. I don’t want this becoming a problem.”
For several seconds, the DOP stared out the windowed wall into the Cradle.
It’s them, he thought. The ones who had been an annoyance to the Project for years.
Somehow they had found out about the vaults and the information they contained. He knew they’d been in one of the facilities before-NB7 in eastern Oregon. But every piece of security footage from that night had been reviewed, and neither Captain Ash nor the woman who’d been with him when he rescued his kids had gone anywhere near NB7’s vault.
He picked up the phone again and called Ross. His first instructions were to assign extra protection to people on the list from box T121, and to put the depot security teams on high alert. Then he said, “Operation Pest Control is a go.”
There was a pause, then, “Yes, sir. But…”
“But what, Major?”
“These added measures are going to stretch us pretty thin. If you want Operation Pest Control to happen right away also, we’ll need to sacrifice in other areas.”
The DOP closed his eyes and stifled a groan of frustration. “As soon as feasible, then,” he ordered, and slammed the phone down.
Perez had been in error. Boxes J923 and T121 were not the only two that had been removed. In fact, the two boxes were of no importance at all to Olivia.
“These are the two we want to break into,” Olivia had instructed, indicating boxes J923 and T121. They would be the smokescreen, specifically chosen to throw her former employers off and force them to allot manpower away from what she was focused on. She then pointed at a box near the bottom: G306. “This one we use the master key on.”