Blades of Winter (30 page)

Patrick, without missing a beat, speaks to the guard in Arabic. I have no idea what he says, but his tone is quiet and polite. The guard grunts and gestures for us to follow him down the hallway, toward the warehouse we originally entered. Trick follows, and I tag along. The guard opens the last door on the right for us.

We walk into an office. Three big desks, each holding a computer terminal, fill the room. No one is in there. The guard gestures to the computers, chuckles to himself, and leaves us alone.

I comm to Trick, “What did you tell him?”

Patrick is already at the first terminal. “I said my lazy, overpaid, bourgeois boss wants me to run some calculations for him.” He cracks his way past the security screen and accesses a long list of data that scrolls up the display. He sits still and memorizes the information as it zips by. A series of engineering drawings flash up the screen. One of them catches my eye.

“Well,
that’s
suspicious-looking,” I comm.

“What?” Trick asks.

“That schematic. It’s for a device the size of a briefcase.”

“Yeah, I noticed that, too.” Trick types some more, and a long series of chemical formulas fills the screen.

“Huh,” my partner mutters. I wait. He continues. “They’re developing some kind of organic compound and a device for transporting it. But … the compound isn’t an explosive.” He reads some more. “Christ, I think it’s alive.”

I tiptoe to the doorway and peek up and down the hallway. Empty. I return to my partner.

“Okay,” he whispers. “I’ve got all this.” His fingers rattle across the keyboard. The screen flashes like a strobe light for a second and then pops up with a normal screen saver. He’s erased his activity.

He stands up from the terminal. “I’ll take a better look at this stuff later. For now let’s see if we can find more about whatever it is they’re making here.”

We walk back toward the garage and try to look like we belong here as we pass through the big double doors.

Trick whispers from the corner of his mouth, “Let’s get near those labs.”

“Okay.”

We stroll across the garage. Trick hisses, “We should have an argument.”

“Huh?”

“Look around. If we walk along quietly, we’ll stand out.”

Trick’s right. All the guys we’ve seen have been practically screaming at one another. I see a couple of arguments right now. Hairy Guy hollers at the guards, who laugh. He must be funny. In one of the labs, several white coats gesticulate while their mouths move. The European-looking white coats aren’t as furiously animated as their Middle Eastern counterparts, but they seem to be catching on.

Trick comms, “It’ll be best if the guards can understand us.”

“I don’t speak any Arabic,” I comm back, “but they probably know some German.”

“You’re right. At the very least they probably know German words like this.” Trick takes a deep breath and calls me a shithead by shouting
“Scheisskopf!”

I try not to laugh as I holler
“Halts Maul, du Affe!”
Shut up, you ape!

Trick suppresses a grin and leads us out into the open as he launches into a percussive tirade. Every few seconds I punctuate his filibuster with
“Nein!”
or
“Idiot!”
When he pauses for breath, I blast out a good one like
“Du bist ja ein Schlappschwanz!”
You’re such a limp dick!

The guards and Hairy Guy look in our direction. Trick stamps his foot in time with the rhythm of his harangue. I wave my hands around and shout
“Schwein!”
four or five times in a row. Trick crosses his arms, then turns his back on me and pretends to ignore me. I smack him in the back of the head. He spins around and bellows so loudly that I have to turn my hearing down. The guards laugh and point at us. Then, already bored with the common everyday spectacle we present, they return
to their exchange with the truck driver. Times like this are why Trick is so much fun to work with.

We argue our way toward the laboratory and stand in front of one of the big windows. Patrick slowly passes his gaze across the entire lab. He’s stopped talking while he memorizes what he sees for his Info Coordinator. To pick up the slack, I yell
“Scheiss!”
and
“Fick!”
I throw in a bunch of French curse words like
Encullez
along with some grunts and shrieks, all accompanied by a whirlwind of hand waving and foot stamping. Anyone watching us will focus on me instead of Patrick as he carefully studies the lab.

Meanwhile, across the room, Hairy Truck Driver Guy disconnects his truck’s hose from the lab’s plumbing. As he coils it onto a big spool on his tanker, the hose drips a thin stream of brown liquid on the concrete floor.

Finally Trick finishes his scan and resumes our verbal brouhaha. Thank God, I’d run out of breath. While my partner rages, he notices the dark liquid on the floor.

He comms, “Let’s get a sample of that glop.”

I loudly question Patrick’s intellect, calling him
“Dumkopf!”
while I comm, “Time for the ol’ razzle-dazzle?”

“Yah,” he comms back, “I’ll be razzle, you be dazzle.”

Still shouting in German, my partner leads me across the garage. Hairy Guy stops his argument with the guards to watch our performance.

Trick lines himself up so he’s in front of the small puddle of brown liquid on the floor. He yells his way to an earsplitting Teutonic crescendo, then comms, “Now, knock me over.”

I tell my partner he’s as stupid as they come by screeching,
“Du dümmer als die Polizei erlaubt!”
and shove his chest. He falls over backward, howls in indignation, and rubs his coat into the puddle as much as possible. The guards laugh hysterically while the truck driver helps my partner up. Hairy Guy is even hairier-looking up close, and do I detect a hint of last week’s cabbage on his breath?

Trick grabs me, and we start to wrestle with each other. After a few moments of grapples and curses, Trick comms, “Now, run away from me.” I break his wrestling hold and slap his face. We dash around the room, scamper back through the double doors, and run to the locker room where we found the lab coats. I swear I heard a round of applause from the garage as we left.

I laugh. “That was awesome!” I shuck out of my coat and put it back in the locker where I found it.

“Yeah, great job.” Trick grabs his doctor’s bag. “Everyone thinks we’re just a pair of pissed-off research assistants working for one of the European scientists.” He reaches into his bag and pulls out a pocketknife and a small, clear plastic Baggie. Patrick takes off his lab coat and spreads it across a bench so he can see the big blotch from the stain on the garage floor. He scrapes the goop with his knife and then rubs the knife inside the Baggie. After he repeats this several times, a small pool of brown glop collects in the little plastic bag.

I ask, “Any idea what that shit is?”

“I think it’s the runoff of whatever those scientists are trying to invent.” Trick stuffs his stained lab coat in a laundry hamper in the corner. “This sample and the data we’ve got should help us figure out what this place is really for.” He puts his knife and the Baggie back in his bag of tricks. “Let’s get out of here.”

We’re about to sneak out when we hear footsteps in the hallway. We lurk behind the door and watch a heavyset, dark-skinned man walk past our locker room, open a door across the hall, and step inside. He turns to shut the door behind him. I catch a sliver of his face just before the door closes.

Trick looks at me and raises his eyebrows a couple of times.

I comm, “That who I think it was?”

“Yep,” Trick comms back. “That was White Stone Research Institute’s founder, formerly known as XSUS Two.”

I access my Bio-Drive and rifle through my mission files until I find the image we got from Pavel Tarasov back in Paris. I look at the picture of Kazim in my Eyes-Up display. It’s him.

I’ve finally laid eyes on Kazim Nazari. This is one of the last people who saw my father before he got captured. In fact, he was almost certainly in on it. My pulse speeds up and my breath gets shallow and faster as a wave of blood-warm anger washes over me.
That door looks like I could break it down no problem. Then I’ll grab that motherfucker and—

Trick shakes my arm and hisses, “Scarlet, we’ll deal with him later, okay? We’ve got what we came for, and we need to see what Cyrus wants us to do next.”

I can’t speak for a moment. Finally I grumble, “Fine, later. But not too much later.” My hands shake, and I have to grit my teeth to keep them from chattering. I have my Nerve Jet hit me with some Kalmers.

Trick lets me pull myself together and whispers, “Let’s go.”

Every digital equipment manufacturer leaves a back door access code hidden in its devices’ ROM chips. This code is initialized to grant engineers root-level access to its prototypes for testing and tuning. During production, the device’s back door is preserved to permit firmware updates and emergency access on installed units.

The existence of these access codes is not made public, and the codes themselves are a tightly guarded secret. The back door codes are typically held by the organization’s chief technology officer. This individual is not permitted
to reveal the codes to anyone—not the company’s president, not the board of directors, not even law enforcement officers.

Through the painstaking work and the fine tradecraft of our Infiltrators, ExOps acquires these codes and maintains the Rapid Access Database. This priceless asset allows us to rapidly crack almost any digital device and represents one of our largest advantages over our competitors.

Carrying RAD into the field presents a significant security risk. Thus, RAD is placed on the lowest sector of an agent’s Bio-Drive, which falls behind the device’s Direwall. All data within the Direwall is automatically erased in the event of unauthorized access or upon the agent’s demise.

We’re back in Riyadh at ExOps’ local safe house. It’s a refreshing change from the ancient reeking cellar full of poorly lit spy stuff we visited in Paris. Here in Riyadh we have space in a new and well-lit three-story office building that’s the same beige color as every other structure in this neighborhood of tinted-window office parks, apartment buildings, and covered parking lots. I was surprised at first by all the green grass, plants, and trees I see here, considering that we’re in a desert. Then I realized that the lawn spritzers spray water on the manicured landscaping all day long. It must cost them half their water to have so many shrubs and trees here.

Patrick and I are in the vault, meeting with Info Coordinator Harbaugh. All of our safe houses have secure conference rooms equipped with long-range communication gear and jackframe uplinks. This vault has a new blabscreen and a top-notch satellite feed. We can’t use them, though, because this whole mission is still under the table. Chanez sent Harbaugh here on some false pretense so he can debrief us in person.

Harbaugh’s expression and demeanor do not exude happiness. He’s not angry, either. He’s just very, very tense. He and Trick review the intelligence we collected. After a few minutes, he’s got a question for me.

“How did you withdraw from the compound?”

“The same way we got in. I carried Solomon and jumped the fence.”

“Sounds like quite a jump,” he says. “How did your Mods and Enhances handle it?”

“Fine, sir, although I may have strained my left knee.” This is not a lie so much as a modified truth. My knee hurts like crazy, but I don’t want to be pulled off this Job Number.

Harbaugh says, “Okay, Scarlet, very good. I want you to get that knee checked out right away. Solomon, you stay here and we’ll examine your intel in more detail.”

“Yes, sir.” I stand up to leave.

Trick hands me a data pod. “This has all the files I got from White Stone. You can rummage through them while you have your knee looked at.”

I tug the waist of my pants down a little, plug the pod into the port on my hip, and copy the files to my Bio-Drive. It’s a lot of stuff. When it’s done copying, I give the pod back to Patrick and leave the two brainiacs to their data banquet.

I walk down the hall and up a flight of stairs to the medical ward. The ward has the usual herd of highly polished roll-cart-mounted gadgets that go ping when they’re happy and honk when they’re sad. In a small office behind all the pinging and honking doodads, I find a Med-Tech hunched over her desk, filling out some paperwork. The only furniture aside from her desk is an examination table and the chair her butt is in.

“What’s up, Doc?” I joke. She’s an older woman I haven’t worked with before.

“Good morning, Scarlet. What can I do for you?” Med-Techs always refer to Levels by their field names.