Insider X (32 page)

68

Duty Building

THE SERVER ROOM was located directly under Center.  Just one floor above them was the enormous room where the Online Blue Army did their fake crap.  Center.  That was the name of that part of the building.  Also contained in this building (or complex)—place was too big to be called a building—was the room they called Hive.

“You sure it’s this way?” Mei said.  “I thought it was closer to the air handling equipment.”

“We’re good,” Marks said.

They had passed more personnel running for the exits than they could count.  People were taking the alarm seriously.  Might help that the nastiness was beginning to migrate out of the ducts.  Place smelled worse than the New Jersey Turnpike and it was just going to get worse.

“How long we gotta wait to put these things on?” Lip said, meaning his mask.  “I’m about to puke.”

“Just wait a little more,” Mei said.  “Until we’re in the room.”

They had a plan.  Wanted it to look good.  It was all about pulling off the ruse.

Stuff coming from the ducts was harmless.  Might make you gag, possibly puke, but that was it.  Wasn’t toxic.  Just a good dose of nastiness.  Like sniffing Newark in a can.  Or putting your head in a toilet bowl after Lip did his business.

Not that he would know what that smelled like personally.  But he could extrapolate.  Smell now was about as bad as he imagined that might be.

Mei’s team had gotten the canisters from some chemical factory.  Special order.  The contents were what happened when perfume went bad.  Instead of just a gentle whiff of gardenias, it was a full on frontal assault, with the smell of turds and rotten garbage thrown in for “highlights”.  The scent was created by combining several aroma compounds.  Basically taking certain fragrances, which had no business being mixed together to create the most disgusting stench that could be dreamed up by a chemist.  Even Lip on a bad day, after eating ten bowls of chili, probably couldn’t top this.

“You guys don’t need me to wait, do you?” Marks said, looking back, about to spew his lunch.

Mei shook her head.  She was beginning to look sick too.  Marks put his respro mask on.  A person could talk with it on, but whether someone could understand what you were saying was another story.  Mei and Lip had to wait, because they might need their persuasion talents in the next second or so.

“There are the doors,” Marks said.  To his ears it sounded more like “
therm daoooors
”
.  Somehow Mei understood him.  She hurried up and reached the doors.  She swiped the keycard on the security reader that was on the wall.  The green LED lit.  Mei pulled the handle and the three of them went inside.

Next to the server room was a suite of cubicles.  There were still some people sitting at their workstations.  IT personnel.  Gotta be kidding me?  What were these guys doing here?

69

Server Room

LIP DECIDED TO take the lead.  Time like this was no time to use English, Lip figured.  Forget the rules.  He knew how people’s minds operated under stress.  Under pressure they slipped up.  They panicked.  They resorted to old ways.

So time to put the act on.  Time to pull out the crazy.

“What are you doing here?” Lip said, speaking in Mandarin.  He switched to the local native Chengdu-Chongqing dialect.  “Are you crazy?  We must evacuate!  Now!  Poison gas is seeping into the building.”

There was something great about the Chengdu-Chongqing dialect, Lip thought.  It always sounded like fighting to him.  The words were so harsh.  Loud.  Brash.

A passionate language.  Reminded him in an oblique way of certain languages spoken in India.  Just like those.  So hot tempered.  So like fighting.

Ironic.  Chengdu was known as a pretty chill place.  Had great people.  Laid back.  Cool.  Not these guys, though.

These guys sucked.

“Get out now,” Lip yelled.  “Do you want to die!  Sarin gas has been detected!  We must evacuate.  Now!!!”

That got the dudes hopping.  They about shit in their pants.

“It liquefies your insides.  Makes you crap in your pants!  Makes your dicks fall off!” Lip yelled.

Maybe he was overdoing it.  Mei gave him a look.

Ten seconds.

That was all it took to clear the room.  No more dudes.  They’d skipped on out without even turning off their stations.

70

“DICKS FALL OFF?” Mei said, tilting her head.

“Yeah, you like that?” Lip said.  “Worked, didn’t it?”

Mei shook her head.  Lip was sometimes just too silly.

“Don’t you know that PLA have no dicks?” Mei said.

Lip gave her a high five.

“What are you two talking about?” Marks said, taking off his respro mask.

Mei switched back to talking English.  “Hmm.  Smell isn’t so bad in here.”

“That’s what you guys were talking about?” Marks said.

“No,” Mei said.  “We were talking about dicks.”

“Dicks?” Marks said.

“Yes, you know, Johnsons,” Mei said.

Marks looked at Lip.  Lip just shrugged.  Mei looked at her watch.

“Okay.  No more silliness,” Mei said.  “We have work to do.”

71

THEY SECURED THE doors.  Didn’t want any visitors.  Some of those IT personnel might be dumber than they looked.  Might come back to get their clipboard.  Or their wallet.  Or their dick.

Yes, Lip had just told him what he’d said. 
Makes your dicks fall off.

Unbelievable, Marks thought.  Someday Lip was going to have to write a book about some of the shit they’d done.  No one would believe this story, if you told ‘em.  He’d have to label it fiction.

Not that Marks would read the book.  Lip would probably overdo the Big Johnson humor.  Call the book something like ‘Moby Dick’.  Use a pen name like ‘Harry Balz’.  And have all the main characters given code names.  Names like Anita Johnson, Ben Jackinoff, and Harry Dong.  And they’d be fighting bad guys with names like HO LEE FUK, Hugh Jorgan, and the beautiful but evil Nida Pee.

In the end, of course, the good guys would win when Stella Virgin saved the day by telling Otto B. Astripper that she was really Harry Dong in disguise.

Masks would come off and that was when everyone realized that Nida Pee was really Helda Dick (not Harry Dong), and HO LEE FUK was actually Hugh Jundys with the big undies, and Hugh Jorgan was not huge, but was the infamous Dick Less who was married to Betty Humpter.

Marks could practically write the book himself.  That was the one thing about hanging with Lip and Mei.  Sometimes this job was just too much friggin’ fun.

Time to get serious, though.

They still had shit to do.

The room they were in led to an adjoining room that had the “fish bowl”.  The air-gap room.  The room with the three servers that weren’t connected to the grid.

They didn’t need to bother with all the rows of cabinets, lined up like rows of bookshelves, in this room.  Those servers were already compromised.  Lawrence and Johnny Two-cakes would have seen to that.

But those three servers in that little glass room were another story. 

They breached the bullet-resistant door with a small charge, which obliterated the door’s locking mechanism.  Security setup in here was piss-poor sorry.  Once Lip got in, he got down to business.  He used a diagnostic hub to access the main system.  He inserted a stick and pulled off what he needed.  He used another stick.  That would be the stick with the package.  He downloaded “the nasty”.  That would corrupt everything on those servers.  Goodbye ‘master list’.

Twenty seconds later, he was out.

“Done,” Lip said.  “How long did it take?”

Marks looked up from his timepiece.  “That’d be a record, I think.”

“No shit?” Lip beamed.

Mei smiled.  “Nice work, Lipster.  Time for us to do number two.”  She caught Lip’s smirk.  “I mean objective number two.”

“Masks on,” Marks said.

“Masks on,” Mei said.

They all put their respro masks on and got the hell out of Dodge.

72

Facility 67096

THE MAN WITH the mask was quickly ushered to his black sedan limousine.  All around him the place was coming apart at its seams.  Soldiers looked to be in full-on panic.  Two of them were carrying a comrade who seemed to have collapsed.

Sarin gas!

He knew how deadly it was.  It was a very effective weapon.  He had used it himself on occasion.  Once in Afghanistan.  Another time in Iraq.

Almost another lifetime ago.  Well before he’d set up his operation here.  Well before he had taken over the role of SUPREME LEADER.

Hu was beside him.  His loyal servant.  He had a cloth respiratory mask over his face.  Worthless, of course, against Sarin gas.  As for himself, he had on a Type V gas mask.  At least he would survive, if they were exposed.  Hu would die horribly.

A pity.

The man had served him well.

A soldier that wasn’t wearing a gas mask opened the door to the limousine.  The man’s eyes were red and tearing.  He’d obviously been exposed to the gas.  But he wasn’t hacking, yet.  He wasn’t hacking up his life.

A minute from now he would.  The man in the mask knew Sarin gas.  It wasn’t pretty.  He quickly got in the limo.  He didn’t move over for Hu to get in, as well.  He looked up at Hu, and lifted his gas mask to speak.

“I need you here.  Make sure the facility is secured before everyone is evacuated,” the man in the mask said.

“But Supreme Leader my place is by your side,” Hu said.

“Join me later,” the man in the mask said.  He quickly shut the door.

“Drive!” he told the driver.

He noticed the driver had a gas mask on.  Good.  He almost felt bad leaving Hu, but he certainly didn’t want to see the man vomit and bleed out.  Not that they had been exposed.  But if they were to be, the man in the mask wanted no part of seeing such a disgusting display.

He’d seen it before.  Truly messy and gross.  All that bloody mucous coming out of eyes, ears, mouth and nose.

The driver used a lead foot.  As they tore down the lane towards the gates, the man in the mask saw three soldiers running.  They were all wearing unusual masks.  One was a petite woman, another was a tall soldier, and the third, pulling up the rear, was a shorter heavyset soldier.

He didn’t pay them any attention, but leaned back and closed his eyes.  Sarin gas?  Who would think that stuff would accidentally get loose?  This facility was definitely not getting a passing grade.

But it had shown promise.  The concept behind this place was brilliant.  So simple.  So devious.

He wished he’d thought of it himself.

73

NA AND HUILIANG hurried up the steps.  As they’d made their way towards Duty Building, Huiliang had handed Na a pill.  She’d told her to take it, if it looked like they were going to be stopped.

She’d explained what it was.  It was a pill to make her look sick.  It would cause her mouth to foam and for her to drool.  She was to act out the rest.  Cough and pretend to hack.  Hold her chest.  Say that she couldn’t breathe.

“Those others?” Na had asked.

Huiliang nodded.  Some took the pills, Huiliang had said, others were using different methods.  Na asked about those vomiting.  Not hard to do, Huiliang had said.  That was all staged too.

“But it looked so real,” Na had said.

Huiliang had smiled grimly.  “We are very good at making things appear real.”

They reached the top of the steps.  The doors into Duty Building were wide open.

“I think I know where they would have taken him,” Huiliang said.

Na hoped she was right.  They went through the doors.  There was no one manning the security station.  They hopped the turnstile and Huiliang and Na ran towards the administrative offices.

THEY FOUND HIM in an empty room.  The door was unlocked.  He was bound to a chair.  There was blood on his shirt and his face was badly bruised.  Both his eyes were shut and his head hung limp.

“No,” Na said, with a gasp.

Huiliang began to cry.

Crush lifted his head.  He looked up and opened one eye.

Huiliang yelped.  Na went to his constraints.

“Are you okay?” Na said, as tears went down her face.

Crush looked at them both.  “I am now.”