Our people worked on this until the DMS found out about it and shut the facility down.
Now someone else was screwing with it.
Which is why I was hanging from wires ninety yards down an airshaft, wrapped in a nonconductive and nonreflective Hammer suit, armed to the teeth, and scared out of my mind.
Oh yeah…and cranky.
This one was making me very, very cranky.
Chap. 2
I had a handheld BAMS unit that I used to check the viral load in the air around me. These units were portable bio-aerosol mass spectrometers that were used for real-time detection and identification of biological aerosols. They have a vacuum function that draws in ambient air and hits it with continuous wave lasers to fluoresce individual particles. Key particles like bacillus spores, dangerous viruses, and certain vegetative cells are identified and assigned color codes. As I passed it in a slow circle all the little lights stayed resolutely green. Nice.
I unfastened the airtight bioseal, peeled back the flexible hood of the modified Hammer suit I wore, and tapped my earbud to open the channel to Bug, our computer guy. He provides real time intel for gigs like this.
“Talk to me,” I said quietly. “You crack their encryption yet, or am I hanging here just for shits and giggles?”
“Yeah, Cowboy,” he said. “We’re in. Downloading a set of revised building schematics to you now.”
I wore a pair of what looked like Wayfarers with slightly heavier frames. The frames contained micro-hardware that allowed the lenses to flash images invisible to anyone else but which displayed in detailed 3D to me. Suddenly I had an entire office building around me, floating in virtual space. A tiny mouse was built into my right glove, and I used the tip of my index finger against the ball of my thumb to scroll through the schematics.
First thing was to orient myself. We’d pulled the building plans they’d filed with the proper agencies, but now that Bug used MindReader to hack the facility’s computers, we had the actual plans. The aboveground building was the same, but down where I was, four stories below street level, nothing looked the same. The ‘basement’ in the original plans was on the first of twelve sub-floors built into the bedrock of Blue Bell, Pennsylvania.
“Tell me about the floor,” I said.
“It’s wired nine ways from Sunday,” said Bug, “but that’s not the bad news.”
“It’s not? Then have MindReader go in there and kick over some furniture.”
MindReader was the supercomputer around which the Department of Military Sciences was built. It was a freak of a computer, the only one of its kind, and it had a super-intrusion software package that allowed it to do a couple of spiffy things. One was to look for patterns by drawing information from an enormous number of sources, many of which it was not officially allowed to access. Which was the second thing: MindReader could intrude into any known computer system, poke around as much as it wanted, and withdraw without a trace. Most systems leave some kind of scar on the target computer’s memory, but MindReader rewrote the target’s software to erase all traces of its presence.
“Can’t—” began Bug, but I cut him off.
“Don’t tell me ‘can’t.’”
“Cowboy, listen to me. Their security runs out of a dedicated server that isn’t wired into their main computers. Not in, anyway — no WIFI, no hard lines. Nothing. You’re going to need to find it and plug a router cable into a USB port so MindReader can access it.”
“Ah,” I said.
There were no computers visible in the room.
Not one. I wore a high-definition lapel cam, so he could see that, too.
“I’m open to suggestions,” I said.
That’s when another voice said, “I got this.”
It should have been Top’s voice. He was suited up to follow me down. Or, if not him, then Bunny. We were the only three agents authorized to be here.
It wasn’t them.
It was a woman who dropped down on a second set of wires. Slim, gorgeous, with dark hair pulled back into a tight ponytail. No hazmat suit. She used the hand brake on the drop wire and stopped exactly level with me.
She smiled.
It was a big smile, full of white teeth and mischief.
“Hello, Joseph,” she said.
“Hello, Violin,” I said. “What in the wide blue fuck are you doing here?”
Chap. 3
Her smile didn’t waver.
“I’m on a case,” she said.
“You’re not supposed to be on this case,” I fired back.
“You’re intruding into my case.”
“Sorry, babe, this is U.S. soil, and I’m the one with official sanction.”
“Really?” She pretended to pout. “You’re going to throw proper procedure at me? After all we’ve—”
I cut her off. “Uh-uh. Don’t you dare give me the ‘after all we’ve been through’ speech. You’ve used that too many times.”
“I have not.”
“Excuse me? Paris? Cairo? Rio? Any of that ring a bell?”
She dismissed it all with a wave of her hand. “You sound like a shrewish old woman, Joseph. It’s really unattractive.”
“And you’re wanted on four continents, including this one, darlin’. So how much do you want to push this?”
We had to keep our voices to whispers, so there was an unintentional hushed comedy to the exchange.
She started grinning right around the time I did.
We hung there for a moment, smiling.
I wanted to kiss her. She wasn’t my girlfriend, and I’m not sure the term ‘lover’ fit, either. We’d been through some terrible stuff together, and we’d both nearly died. Friends of ours did die. And, no joke, we saved the world. The actual world. So, every now and then, when we found ourselves in the same part of the world at the same time, and providing neither of us had any serious emotional commitments elsewhere, Violin and I celebrated our survival, celebrated the fact of being alive. When you’ve taken the kind of fire we have, you definitely take time for that. Some soldiers go to the Wall in D.C. and trace names. Some visit Ground Zero or sit in a church — any church that’s handy — and they thank their higher power for us being on the good side of the dirt.
Violin and I? We celebrated it in a very primal, very steamy way. Clothes were torn. Furniture was broken. Cops were called more than once.
There was never any attempt at a relationship. Not for us. We were still at war. When our time was over, we — by mutual consent — walked away and went back to the killing.
But, as much as it lifted my heart to see her alive and well and smoking hot, she was not supposed to be here. This was a covert op. It wasn’t an invitational.
I tapped my earbud. “Cowboy to Sergeant Rock.”
“Go for Rock,” said the deep voice of my second-in-command, First Sergeant Top Sims.
“Why am I talking to you on the radio instead of face to face?” I demanded in a tone that could burn the paint off an oil drum. “Why, instead, am I down here with a civilian?”
I leaned on the word to piss off Violin.
“Bastard,” she hissed. She stuck her tongue out at me, so I stuck my tongue out at her.