“Whatever. Just call them in before I get my ass shot or garroted or whatever it is super-spies do these days.”
“Who do you want me to call?”
Nathan smiled, but failed to keep the nervousness from his eyes. “Everybody.”
Kristene smiled back, then darted in before he could turn away, kissing him.
Surprise and his own rationalized objections aside, he found himself kissing her back, a hand on the back of her head, his fingers tangled in her brightly colored hair. Eventually, his misgivings and the mission at hand reasserted themselves, and he pulled away with a flash of guilt.
Before he could say anything, she turned away and crawled to the door, favoring him with a suddenly more enticing view. Kristene slowly swung the glass door inward, then crawled out and to the right, headed for the distant stairwell exit.
Nathan followed along behind, but turned to the left instead, heading toward the mid-platform stairwell, the shortest route to Kristene’s office and whatever fate awaited him.
He rose from a crawl as soon as his knees hit the diamond grating of the industrial walkway, his joints crying in protest. Crouching low and keeping close to the shadowy wall, Nathan made his way to the stairs, cursing the sound of his footsteps, but utterly unable to make them any quieter. He tiptoed down the stairwell, splitting his attention between Kristene’s partly lit office and the darkened stairwell he was trying to negotiate. To his credit, he made it all the way down with barely a misstep, except for when he misjudged the distance down from the last step and slammed his foot on the grating with too loud of a footfall.
To Nathan’s ears, the sound of his shoe on the metal walkway reverberated through the building, ringing and clanging on and on like church bells at noon, but he convinced himself a moment later that most of the sound was only in his worried head. Whether it was or not, no one emerged from Kristene’s office, ready to deliver the same unknown fate to Nathan as he had to all the facility’s guards.
Now moving even slower, he crept up to her office, approaching low and close to that level’s wall. He stopped immediately before the glass-fronted face of her office, close enough to hear the clicking of keys and a mouse, but unable to see the intruder directly without giving himself away.
Nathan crouched, slowly beginning to fume with doubt and self-recrimination. Here he was, mere feet from the possibly murderous thief who threatened to steal all the research they had devoted themselves to, who would undoubtedly release it to a known enemy, giving them a capability even the US did not enjoy, and he could not see a damned thing. He now knew less about what was actually going on than he had from cowering in his own office across the way. The impotency built and built until he gave a silent curse and allowed himself to peek around to peer into the glass front of the office.
Seated in front of Kris’s desktop, a man in a Windward security uniform typed a few letters, grimaced, clicked upon a mouse and shook his own head with frustration. The thief looked disconcertingly bland: Caucasian, slightly out of shape, brown hair and eyes, with soft features and a not-too-intelligent look about him. Nathan winced. He could describe this man exactly and still have trouble distinguishing him from a host of others. In fact, from a distance, he would look like their own usual night security guard.
Arrayed in front of the fake guard, alongside the keyboard and mouse were a number of things that were forbidden from the building because their very nature was counter to ensuring security. There was a high volume flash deck, probably upwards of a 100 terabytes of storage, but only the size of a pack of cigarettes. Beside it was something that appeared to be a standard cell suite, but was undoubtedly not, judging from the wisps of vapor streaming off it and the tiny steel gas vial plugged into its side. Only one kind of computer would need active cooling, one that was infinitely more powerful than a suite, or even the desktop the device was plugged in to.
Nathan panicked, but also felt a rush of geeky envy. The thief had his own “quacker.” A quantum code-breaker, it could make short work of any encryption system or security algorithm, pitting its super-cooled qubits against a normal computer’s registers of logical ones and zeroes. It essentially performed in seconds the same code-breaking feats that would tie up a near-AI level supercomputer for months or years. It was only due to Gordon Lee’s infuriating insistence on multiple layers of encryption (despite the way they slowed going from one file to the next) that the thief had not already absconded with everything on the entire server. It was just a matter of time, though.
Only one thing kept Nathan from charging the false guard immediately. Next to the linked flash deck, quacker, and desktop was a slender, lethal, semiautomatic pistol. Before he could even make it through the door, Nathan was sure he would find out just how destructible he was. The fate he had narrowly avoided twelve years before would be all too ready to catch up with him, at least with this guy’s able assistance.
He could hardly allow the man to continue using the quacker with impunity, nor could he stop him directly. And there was no way to tell how long it would take Kris to alert the authorities, or how long it would take them to get here. By that time, the thief might well have enough time to decrypt all of their research and designs and get away clean. Once again, no help would arrive in time. It was up to Nathan.
There was no reason for the grin that began to spread across his face, but it appeared nonetheless, unbidden.
Abandoning any semblance of cover, Nathan jumped to his feet and pounded loudly on the glass partition, over and over again, yelling as loud as he could. The doughy man in the security outfit almost fell from his chair, his arms flailing in shock. He succeeded in knocking the keyboard, quacker, and pistol from the desk, leaving only the mouse and the flash deck hanging from their cables.
For the briefest instant, Nathan considered trying for the door and entering the office, to search for the gun before the thief could recover it. Before he could complete the thought, however, the man reached down and pulled the pistol up from the floor. Nathan grimaced. Doughy and surprised though he might be, the man was no amateur. Seeing the gun come up, Nathan dove to the left, landing hard on his back upon the diamond steel grating. He looked up to see spider-web cracks blossom from two points of impact in the glass office front, along with a blue flash and a shower of sparks.
Sparks. Nathan groaned and rolled over, coming to his feet. He now felt the grin fully upon his face. Their thief had all the latest gadgets: high capacity flash decks, quackers, and even capacitor stun rounds for his weapons. Whoever the man worked for, murder had not been high on their agenda. The capacitor rounds, plastic bullets which carried enough piezoelectric-induced charge to knock a man unconscious, were the ultimate fusion of gun and stun-gun. Nathan’s prospects were not much improved, but it did mean he would probably survive the night – which opened up all sorts of new possibilities.
The door opened and Nathan ran, weaving from side to side unevenly along the walkway. Two capacitors exploded on the railing and stanchion next to him as Nathan darted down the path, leaving his left side tingling from a brushing of the charge they carried. He cried out and dodged again as a capacitor round hit the opposite wall, even closer this time.
But that was enough. Nathan’s brief stint as an action hero was over. He stumbled and rolled, passing right beneath the lower railing on the open side of the walkway, and fell. His hand lashed out and grabbed, clutching for a moment on the diamond grating, but his fingers slipped. They held him just long enough to check his headlong dive into open space, and he swung back toward the catwalk below.