Bypass Gemini (36 page)

When the young lady on duty failed to notice him just as all of the others had, he slipped through the detector... and promptly heard a terrifying sound. The display screen beside the detector blipped and explained that a wireless signature had been detected. He dug frantically through his equipment, ensuring his slidepad was powered off and that he hadn’t mistakenly brought anything else with a transmitter, but still the warning flashed and a count down to a “general alert” had begun. The guard had taken notice, and sighed in irritation before checking her own slidepad and radio, only to find that they too were deactivated. She began to look around curiously, tapping the screen. There were seventeen seconds left. Slowly she raised her stun rod and clicked it on.

Lex patted every pocket, feeling for anything he might have overlooked, but it wasn’t until his hand brushed the antenna of the backpack that he realized the truth. The mental cloak! Karter had said something about it transmitting on... psychic wavelengths or some such. It must be visible to the detector. He sprinted deeper into the complex, turned a corner and, with a handful of seconds left, desperately clicked it off. He held perfectly still, eyes shut and teeth clinched. Enough time had passed with no alarm. It had worked. A shaky sigh of relief escaped his lips and he moved carefully onward. The cameras were all off. He just had to avoid being seen the old fashioned way, that was all. A quick dig through one of his multitude of pockets unearthed a thin balaclava, the good old fashioned ski mask, staple of infiltrators and bank robbers everywhere. Ma had insisted that the face paint was all that was needed to disguise him, and that a full face mask could draw more attention, but Lex was occasionally a sucker for a cliche.

Behind him, the guard looked at the screen, now reading an all clear message. She’d been told there had been an incident in orbit. After that there had been a report of an intruder in the courtyard that no one had been able to spot. Then there was the unannounced admin override of the security in this very hallway, yet no admins had come through yet. Now this sensor malfunction. It all seemed a bit much for a series of coincidences. For the life of her she couldn’t figure out what it could mean, but she didn’t have to figure it out. That was above her pay grade. All she had to do was call it in. She pressed a button on the hardwired intercom.

“
Dispatch? Do me a favor and shoot a message up to level 2. We might have a situation...”

Lex had made his way forward, trying his best to tiptoe in boots while lugging a flight suit full of equipment and a now useless backpack. The hallway before the sensor gate had been dead quiet, but now there was conversation behind every door, and too often people paced down the hallway. A big event like this would probably have had the security area buzzing like a hive regardless, but from the snippets of conversation he was able to make out, his presence was shaking things up considerably. Ironically, the disturbance caused by the heightened alert level was keeping everyone too distracted to notice the source of the breech slipping by their doors.

“
I’m telling you. They’ve got Mr. Trent on his way over here,” fretted one security agent. From the anxiety in his voice, you would think that the devil himself was coming to visit.

It was slow going, so much so that he didn’t even want to think about how far into his speech the CEO must be by now. He’d had to make a panicked leap for an alcove or side hallway more than once, but he managed to make it to the elevator indicated by the schematics without being seen. He reached for the button, but the elevator was already on the way, coming down from level seventy, according the panel. There wasn’t a decent hiding spot to be had, and someone WOULD be getting off of this elevator.

What followed were simultaneously the longest and shortest fifteen seconds of Lex’s life. He looked desperately for a handy crate to hide inside, or maybe one of the ubiquitous man-sized ventilation ducts that always seemed to show up in the movies. No such luck. He was forced to press himself against the recessed wall and hope for the best.

There was a tone, and the elevator doors slid open. Out stepped a man in his early fifties, hair graying at the temples, in a standard business suit, sans jacket. His tie was loosened, and his cuffs and top button undone. He had the same sort of generic businessman look as the cookie cutter CEOs, but there was a flustered and stressed look about him. Rather than marching down the hall, he stopped just outside the elevator door, blocking the way inside. Lex wasn’t more than two feet away, flattened against the wall and plainly visible. At the moment, he seemed distracted by a datapad in hand.

“
Agent Anders!” he called out.

“
Yes sir, Mr. Trent!” called out the nervous voice from earlier, as footsteps began quickly marching down the hall toward the elevator.

The underling arrived to find his superior, Mr. Trent, alone in front of the elevator.

“
Do you know anything about this admin override?” he growled, stabbing a finger at the datapad.

“
It came in a few minutes ago. It looks like it was entered via an exterior access panel, under fingerprint authentication from Agent Fisk, sir.”

“
Fisk is back? Has anyone seen him?”

“
Not yet, sir.”

A bleeping sound drew their attention to the datapad. It was announcing that a wireless signature had been detected.

“
That’s the second time we’ve gotten that warning,” Trent grimaced.

“
Yes sir. I think there may be a problem with the monitoring systems. Our men in the surveillance room were reporting an intruder that the deployed agents could not locate.”

“
Do we have video?”

“
Of course, sir.”

“
Show me. And run diagnostics. I can’t be dealing with this right now. There is something very important I need to oversee,” he said, striding toward a nearby door.

Behind him, the elevator door slid shut. He turned, glancing at it suspiciously.

Inside the elevator, Lex switched the mental cloak back off and slid down the wall to the ground. His heart was pounding out of his chest, sweat was beginning to soak his mask, and there was a nasty acidic taste in his mouth that didn’t bode well for his gastrointestinal health. Fisk’s office was on floor seventy. That should have translated into a long ride during which he could recover, but the elevator was modern enough to have a serious motor driving it, so the numbers rocketed by. It was not, however, modern enough to have an inertial inhibitor, so the acceleration kept Lex on the floor despite a few half-hearted attempts to stand. As it neared the floor it slowed, decelerating nearly quickly enough to make him leave the ground. He staggered to his feet, activated the mental cloak, and started the count to thirty in his head.

The doors slid open to a floor very different from the one he’d left behind. The institutional hallway was replaced with something that one would expect to see in an upscale law firm. Black marble floors, modern filing cabinets, and, unfortunately, a secretary behind a clerical desk. Lex rushed quickly to the hallway behind her, noting as he passed numerous rooms that looked like fancier versions of “waiting room six” back on Operlo. With about ten seconds to go, he turned a corner to a smaller hallway, out of the view of the secretary. With the exception of a pair of potted ferns there wasn’t a living thing to be seen, so he deactivated the cloak.

Running parallel with the main hall, this smaller area had only three doors. One was facing the primary hall and elevator, and had the name plate
Security Chief William Trent
. At a dead end on the right was the
Secondary Records Room
, and at the end of the dead end to the left was his destination, a door label
Senior Agent Emanuel Fisk: Asset Protection and Loss Prevention Specialist.
He swiped the finger across the door and slipped inside.

The office wasn’t precisely what he’d expected from the dead man, but it was close. There were guns of various sorts mounted on the walls, ranging from top of the line energy weapons to what looked to be a wood and steel lever-action rifle that must have cost a bundle. There was a monitor showing muted video of the still in progress speech from the CEO, probably via an intraoffice feed. He had pictures of himself being decorated for various achievements, a disturbing number of pictures of horses, and a glass bowl filled with taffy. It made Lex slightly uncomfortable to see the human side of the man whom he’d been so relieved to see killed. The compassion was wiped away when he noticed eleven very conspicuous notches carved into the edge of the wood trim of his desk. This was a man who had not only killed people, but was proud of it.

He couldn’t afford to delay any longer. In the center of the desk was a cutting edge datapad, a touch surface inset into the surface of the desk in place of what in days of old would have been a mouse and keyboard. Lex swiped the finger across the surface, activating the terminal, and began to enter in the commands that Ma had listed for him. At least, he tried to. Three attempted gestures were met with disappointing beeps before he noticed that it was informing him of “unauthorized access attempts.”

“
What the hell?” He groaned.

A swipe of the finger he’d used to log in, however, was accepted as input.

“
It reads his prints for every input?!” Lex hissed under his breath.

The freelancer’s already slow data entry skills were reduced to a snail’s pace as he was forced to drag and tap with the purloined print, but one by one the commands were entered. A full graphical environment gave way to a white letters on a black screen. Drives were located and mounted. Directories were listed and navigated, and finally, a deep file search for the word “Gemini” was initiated. Three dots began to flick on and off in sequence as the search dug through exabytes of data. At irregular intervals a file name would pop up, but invariably it dealt with the astrological sign, or a model of car, or the constellation and the planets surrounding its stars. Fear-sweat trickled down from beneath Lex’s mask, trickling along his eyelids and dripping from his lashes.

Many floors below, in the main surveillance room, Chief Trent gazed furiously at footage of his men failing to see a strangely dressed man with his face painted like a rock star that was standing right in front of them. In a tribute to Ma’s foresight and Karter’s resourcefulness, an IR scattering substance had been mixed into the paint as well, reflecting light into the lens and making him look like his face had been replaced with a sparkler. Identification was impossible.

“
Explain to me...” he began, quietly, before raising his voice to a scream, “EXPLAIN TO ME! What you are showing me simply isn’t possible. There is no way that a single one of my security agents could be so incompetent as to miss this man, let alone an entire squad. And where the hell is Fisk!? He is supposed to report directly to me when he returns from assignment!”

“
He may be in his office, sir,” shakily offered Anders, one of the unlucky men who had never had any aspirations of leadership or power, yet had ended up as one of Trent’s go-to answer men thanks to the horrible mistake of doing his job well, “There have been a large number of file accesses from his terminal.”

“
Bring up the cameras in his office.”

“
I can’t sir. He disabled them and I don’t have access.”

Trent growled, shoving the lower level agent out of the way and logging in with his own credentials - that is to say, with his fingers. The cameras and other low level scanners were reactivated, but the alarms were suppressed. In the office was a man in a mask staring anxiously at the datapad screen. Lex, who was about four inches shorter and thirty pounds of muscle lighter than Fisk, could in no way be confused for the owner of the office.

“
I’ll raise the alarm!” Anders piped, reaching for a second console.

“
No, you idiot,” scolded his superior, “Not with those news crews outside. And that man is in a very sensitive area. If he gets desperate, he could cause serious damage. We are keeping this quiet.”

He tapped at the console, a screen with his secretary’s face popping up a moment later.

“
Yes, Mr. Trent?” she replied.

“
Did you see anyone come through and enter Agent Fisk’s office?” he asked sternly.

“
No, sir.”

He pounded the desk with his fist, then forced himself to calm.

“
Listen carefully. I want you to stand up, get onto the elevator, and go to floor sixty-five or lower. I am locking down our offices and everything else for five floors in either direction for a high level security exercise that you are not cleared to witness.”

“
Yes sir, Mr. Trent.”

He ended the call and turned to Anders.

“
I want six men, armed, at the service elevator in thirty seconds. As soon as my secretary is out of range, do a 10 floor lockdown on all doors and windows, centered on Fisk’s office. No one but me gets access. Understand?” dictated the security chief.

“
Yes sir,” Anders quickly answered, tapping at the console and shouting orders of his own as Trent marched toward the elevator.

Back in Fisk’s office, the search was far from over, but it had turned up as near to a hit as Lex was likely to get, a protected directory labeled “Bypass Gemini.” He issued a few commands intended to alter permissions and give him access, but it was locked by the Chief of Security himself. If he wanted to read the contents, he would need to do it with Trent’s credentials. Since he didn’t have Trent’s credentials, the only outside chance he had was if Fisk’s prints would work on Trent’s door, and his console. Ma had indicated that permissions could be associated with certain machines, so logging in on Trent’s machine might be enough to read the file.