Masterminds (36 page)

Then he remembered: he had set up the emergency access outside of the security program. It had been an add-on that he had designed, with only a few people who knew how to run it.

He just hadn’t trusted the security system DeRicci had. He had also figured he would be trying to dismantle any outside hack, and he wouldn’t be in the office when he did it.

He was glad for that; it would probably give him a way in.

He hoped.

He sent a message to Nyquist,
Have you found me someone from the United Domes government yet?

They’re scattered to the winds
, Nyquist sent back.
The nearest I can find is in Littrow, and he doesn’t want to come here. Says we can solve it ourselves.

Flint cursed.
Get him here or have the Littrow Police arrest him and bring him here. Right now
.

You say that like there is a Littrow Police
, Nyquist sent. He had a point. The Littrow Police Department was small and mostly useless.

Do what you have to,
Flint sent.

The easy way into the system wasn’t going to work. With what he was learning, his back-door might not work either. He was going to have to hack his own system.

“Do you think that whoever did these changes also altered some of the internal security protections?” Flint asked.

“Of course they did,” Issassi said. “That’s what I’m running into.”

“No,” Flint said. “This system has redundancies upon redundancies upon redundancies. Do you think whoever altered this knew about all of the redundancies?”

She grinned at him, then turned back to the virtual screen.

“There’s only one way to find out,” she said.

FIFTY-THREE

THE CURRENT NEWS
from Hétique City conflicted with the initial assumptions. DeRicci frowned at the images of the ships that had attacked the city from orbit. Some of them seemed familiar.

Ostaka worked on the minimally networked computer that DeRicci had had in her office for the past several weeks. DeRicci had checked the security on that particular machine before giving it over to Ostaka. He had worked hard on it ever since.

When she asked him what he was finding, he would say “Not much,” and continue working. When she had pressed him about five minutes before, he confirmed what she had already found: that the information coming out of Hétique City was contradictory.

Then he swore.

The word seemed like an unconscious utterance. His fingers were flying over the keys, and he was leaning toward a virtual screen as people did when they used their own links to interface with the system—something she had not approved.

Clearly Ostaka was one of those people who, when given permission to do one thing, thought it was permission to do a dozen things.

“Hey,” DeRicci said. “I didn’t—”

The door burst open, and Popova pushed her way in. She looked terrified.

“Chief, all our links are down and I have to tell you—” She glanced sideways at Ostaka as she spoke, and then choked.

DeRicci looked in the same direction. He was reaching for something inside his shirt.

Popova walked farther into the large room.

“You have to leave,” she said to DeRicci.
“Right now
.”

DeRicci wasn’t going to leave Ostaka alone in here. “Why are our links down?”

“I don’t know. We just found out, but
please
, come with me.
Please
.” Popova gave Ostaka another terrified look. He kept one hand on the computer he was working on.

DeRicci sighed. She had seen Popova panic before, and it wasn’t pretty. There was probably a glitch in the security system, and one of the techs could fix it. But Popova without links was like most people losing their hands.

DeRicci walked toward the door. “Come on, Lawrence,” she said. “Let’s see if we can solve this.”

He grabbed her and pulled her toward him. He had a laser pistol in his left hand and he put it to her temple.

“We don’t have to solve anything,” he said. “You’re either going to wait until I’m done, or I’m going to kill you.”

Popova screamed and put her hands to her mouth. No help from that quarter.

DeRicci had to mentally switch gears. Ostaka was trying to hold her hostage? Really?

He was out of shape, and the hand holding the laser pistol trembled. His arm, pulling her tight against him, was trembling as well.

It was all DeRicci could do to keep from shaking her head in disgust.

She elbowed him in the gut while raising her other hand to grab his gun wrist. She pulled him forward, over her shoulder, slamming him against the floor.

He let out a cry of pain as the breath left his body. Somehow he managed to hold onto the pistol.

She put a foot on his wrist.

“Get me some cuffs,” she said to Popova.

Popova hadn’t moved.

“Rudra,” DeRicci said. “Get me some cuffs.”

“Where? I….”

DeRicci would have sent the location across her links, but Popova had been right: the links weren’t working. “Weapons cabinet near the east window.”

She hadn’t opened that cabinet in months, maybe years, so she hoped there were cuffs in it. Popova glanced at the cabinet as if it were miles from her.

Ostaka moaned. He rolled over and tried to grab DeRicci’s ankle. She bent over and smacked him in the face so hard that his nose gushed blood, ruining her only pair of shoes that hadn’t fallen apart in this crisis.

“Rudra,” DeRicci said. “Hurry.”

Popova looked at Ostaka as if he were coming after her. She sidled to the cabinet, pulled it open, and grabbed cuffs.

Then she scurried toward DeRicci, handing them to her.

Ostaka wasn’t fighting any more. He was choking on his own blood and whimpering.

DeRicci slammed her heel on his wrist, breaking it. His hand opened involuntarily, and she kicked the gun away.

“Take the pistol,” she said to Popova.

Popova looked horrified.

“For godssake, Rudra, you’re all I’ve got here. Take the damn pistol.” DeRicci didn’t watch to see if Popova followed her command.

DeRicci bent over and grabbed Ostaka by his broken wrist. He screamed. DeRicci pulled him upright, then yanked his arm behind his back. He screamed again. She flicked on the cuffs and attached one above his broken wrist.

Then she pulled his other arm back, and attached the other cuff to his wrist, making him lean sideways. His nose still dripped blood, and he was sobbing.

DeRicci cursed him.

She looked up at Popova, who was holding the laser pistol properly—thank heavens DeRicci had insisted on weapons training for the entire staff—pointing it at Ostaka.

“You stay there,” she said to Popova, and then went to the weapons cabinet herself.

DeRicci pushed the door aside, leaving a bloody handprint on the fake wood. She grabbed more cuffs and two laser pistols. Then she considered before pulling two more out of the cabinet.

Popova would be her weapons’ bearer until DeRicci figured out exactly what was going on.

DeRicci returned to Ostaka, cuffed him at the ankles as well, and pulled him against the mound of trash.

“All right, you bastard,” DeRicci said to him. “Tell me who you really are and what the hell you’ve been doing.”

He looked up at her, his swollen nose beginning to bruise. He spit out some blood.

He was probably in shock. DeRicci wasn’t even sure he had understood her.

So she leaned toward him.

“Talk now, asshole,” she said. “Or I’m going to make sure you learn what pain really is.”

He blinked at her and let out a frightened sob.

And then he started to speak.

FIFTY-FOUR

ANDRE HAD LOCKED
everyone out of her office as she tried to find whoever it was who had found Mavis Zorn. Andre had to be careful with her searches. She didn’t want to seem interested, particularly since the person searching Mavis Zorn’s name had already attached it to Andre’s.

Andre’s office was the largest in this building, maybe even the largest in this part of the division. She had a couch and three chairs, all Earth antiques—built for humans back when humans thought they owned the galaxy. She had imported her desk at great cost from an antique dealer on Earth, and had had to struggle to find the matching chair.

The chair, unfortunately, was uncomfortable, and the desk was so old it couldn’t be networked without destroying its value, so Andre did much of her work standing up, working off a virtual screen.

This time, however, she had hauled out an actual computer, one that she had brought into this section herself, and she was researching on a network normally assigned only to undercover operatives. That way, no one would question the searches she ran. Undercovers did all kinds of crazy things all the time.

She was deep in the system, tracing the pings, following the signatures, when a red light flashed across her eyes.

She felt a surge of irritation. If this was Stott again, she would cut him off. She had no idea how she was going to do it, but she would. She would absolutely destroy him.

She didn’t want to see who had sent the alert—hell, she didn’t even want to see what the alert was. She had already calmed Stott, and even if it wasn’t him, it was probably some other idiot panicking at the wrong time.

The alert brightened, taking over her vision, and she cursed. If she didn’t do something with the damn alert, it would probably start making siren noises or activating one of the nerves in her face.

So she opened the alert, and frowned.

She didn’t recognize the name of the sender, Lawrence Ostaka, but she recognized his face. He was one of the hundreds of clones who was taking part in the third attack. She had chosen the originals for that third attack herself, and she knew the names of each of the one-hundred originals in the procedure.

Ostaka’s name came with an Earth Alliance Security clearance, as an investigator, and she opened a separate screen and accessed his information. He was originally off-Moon, but had managed to get himself assigned to the Moon right after Anniversary Day. It had taken some finagling on his part, but he had ended up in the office of security for the United Domes of the Moon.

Andre let out a
hunh
of appreciation. The man had ended up in the very office that had given Andre fits for the past six months. The only people with brains on the Moon, she had privately called them.

They had thwarted parts of the first attack, and nearly aborted
all
of the second. They wouldn’t be able to stop the third—it was too massive—but if they knew what was ahead—

She made herself focus on his message. It was panicked, sent from the Office of Security for the United Domes of the Moon.
Found me. Can’t finish lock-out. They have the names of Andre, Starbase Human—

And that was where it ended, as if he were interrupted mid-send. She frowned at it, heart pounding, knowing the message for what it was—a get-out warning. She had made certain the upper-level team managers knew how to warn most of the important staff in the group when it was time to get out.

She had been warned.

She played the message again, saw his terrified features, saw him reach into his shirt, saw him glance over his shoulder before the message stopped.

Then she deleted the message, scrubbing it off her system.

She almost walked away, but she paused for one moment. He wasn’t supposed to send messages to her. The only reason this one came through was because it was on the alert network.

But she had access to everything her people did—at least in theory. So she went back to the system she’d been using, and looked to see if there were more messages from Ostaka.

There were dozens, going all the way back to his posting in the Moon’s security office. The most recent came shortly before the alert.

I’ve altered everything in the system here
, he had sent to his handler. Andre assumed that “here” meant the security office.
I’m activating the protection protocols now. It should be impossible for anything to get in or out of their system. I’ll keep my connection to you open, just in case, but I’m not anticipating problems. In fact, DeRicci just invited me to her office, so everything just got easier.

And then, apparently, it broke down.

Andre shut down his message and scrubbed it, as well. She had seen that name—DeRicci—so many times since the first attack that she wanted to meet the woman. One of the brains on the Moon. Either that, or one of the luckiest people in the history of the human race.

Too bad Andre hadn’t met DeRicci before the Moon attacks. A person like that would have been valuable. Andre wondered if DeRicci were corruptible—or had been. She certainly wouldn’t be now.