The Dragon Factory (21 page)

“It’s like Christmas, isn’t it?” said Bunny.

A FEW MINUTES
later we were cruising down an industrial side road that curved toward the snowcapped Rockies. Along the way we read and discussed the facility. Deep Iron was tucked away in the foothills of the Rockies southwest of Denver, built into a vast series of limestone caverns that honeycombed the region. Records were stored in various natural “floors” of the cavern system, and the highest security materials—meaning the stuff people were willing to pay the highest fees to squirrel away—were in the lowest levels, nearly a mile underground. I punched in the secure number for the DMS Warehouse back in Baltimore and asked to speak to the head of the computer division—Bug.

He was born as Jerome Taylor but he’d been a computer geek so long even his family called him Bug. His understanding of anything with circuits and microchips bordered on the empathic.

“Hey, Cap,” he said brightly, as if none of what was happening was any more real to him than the events in a video game. “What’s the haps?”

“Bug, listen—Top, Bunny, and I are in Denver at a place called Deep Iron and—”

“Oh, sure. Big storage facility. They filmed a couple of sci-fi movies there back in—”

“That’s great,” I said, cutting him off before he could tell me details of everything from the source material of the films down to the Best Boy’s shoe size. He really was a geek’s geek and could probably give Hu a run for his money. “See if you can hack their computer system.”

He snorted. “Don’t insult me.”

I laughed. “What I need are floor plans for the whole place. And I need an exact location for anything related to Haeckel. Dr. Hu has the basic info, but I want you to go deeper and download everything to my PDA.”

“How soon?”

“An hour ago.”

“Give me ten minutes.”

It took nine.

When he called back he said, “Okay, you have the floor plans and a searchable database of all clients. There’s only one Haeckel in their directory. First name Heinrich. It’s an oversized bin, thirty by forty feet, located on J-level.”

I pulled up the schematic on my PDA and cursed silently. J-level was all the way at the bottom, a mile straight down.

“What can you get me about what’s stored there?”

“Minute,” he said, and I could hear him tapping keys. “Okay, the main hard drive says ‘records,’ but there’s a separate database for inspections and that specifies the contents as file boxes times three hundred fifty-one. The bin has two doors—both locked by the estate attorneys. Contents are listed as mixed paper records. One box is listed as MF. My guess is that’s microfiche or microfilm.”

“Any idea what they’re records of?”

“Nope. It says the boxes were sealed by Haeckel prior to his death and there was a provision in his will that they not be opened except by a proven family member. No living family is listed, though. His estate provides for storage and oversight of the whole thing by a law firm. An inspection of the seals is required every year. Looks like it’s an attorney who checks the seals. Several attorneys over the years, all from the same firm. Birkhauser and Bernhardt of Denver. The seals are also witnessed by a representative of Deep Iron. Looks like it’s still there because they haven’t found an heir. I’ll hack the law firm and see if they have anything.”

I thanked him and brought Top and Bunny up to speed.

“No heir,” mused Top, “except for Gunnar Haeckel, who is apparently
back from the dead and hunting unicorns in South America. Funny old world.”

Bunny grinned. “I wouldn’t give this job up for anything.”

“We’re here,” said Brick.

Centers for Disease Control, Atlanta, Georgia

Saturday, August 28, 2:31
P.M.

Time Remaining on the Extinction Clock: 93 hours, 29 minutes

“Hey, Jude,” said Tom Ito, “remember that virus you were asking about before? The one that was there and then up and vanished?”

“Sure, what about it?”

“It’s back. Log onto the e-mail screens.”

Judah swiveled in his chair and began hammering keys on his laptop. The set of screens used by the secretaries for handling e-mail, newsletters, and alerts popped us as cascading windows.

Ito leaned over his shoulder. “Look for auto-response e-mails. See, there’s eight of them. The virus is in there.”

Judah quarantined the e-mails and ran virus detection software. A pop-up screen flashed a warning. Judah loaded an isolation program and used it to open one of the infected e-mails. The software allowed them to view the content and its code with a heavy firewall to prevent data spillover into the main system.

The e-mail content said that the outgoing CDC Alert e-mail was undeliverable because the recipient e-mail box was full. That happened a lot. However, the software detected Trojan horse—a form of mal-ware that appeared to perform a desirable function in the target operating system but which actually served other agendas, ranging from collecting information such as credit card numbers and keystrokes to outright damage to the computer. A lot of “free” software and goodies on the Internet, including many screen savers, casino betting sites, porn, and offers for coupon printouts uploaded Trojan horses to users. On the business and government level they were common.

“Trojan?” asked Ito.

“Looks like. Can’t block the sender, though, because it’s really using replies to our own mailing list to send it.”

“Maybe someone hijacked some of our subscribers and is using their addresses.”

“Probably.” Judah frowned. “Okay, we’re going to have to identify the bounce-back e-mails and then block those subscribers. Send a message to everyone.”

Ito headed back to his cubicle to work on it while Judah uploaded info on the virus to US-CERT—the United States Computer Emergency Readiness Team, part of Homeland Security. The CDC was a government organization, and though this was very low-level stuff, it was technically a cyberattack. Someone over at CERT would take any warnings of a new virus and add it to the database. If a trend was found an alert would be sent, and very often CERT would provide updates to various operating systems that would protect against further incidents. It was routine and Judah had sent a hundred similar e-mails over the last few years.

That should have done it.

It didn’t.

There were no additional e-mail bounce-backs that day. None the next. Had Judah been able to match the current e-mail with the ones that had appeared—and then vanished—from the computers earlier he would have seen that the bounce-back e-mail addresses were not the same. Nor was the content, nor the Trojan horse. The senders of the e-mails were cautious.

When similar e-mail problems occurred at offices of the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, the main office and many regional offices of the World Health Organization, the Coordinating Center for Health Information and Service, the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry, the Coordinating Center for Infectious Diseases, and the Coordinating Office for Terrorism Preparedness and Emergency Response and a dozen other health crisis management organizations, there were no alarms rung. Each group received a
completely different kind of e-mail from all the others. There was no actual damage done, and other than minor irritation there was no real reaction. Viruses and spam e-mails are too common.

The real threats had not yet been sent.

The Extinction Clock still had ninety-three hours and twenty-nine minutes to go.

Deep Iron Storage Facility, Colorado

Saturday, August 28, 3:11
P.M.

Time Remaining on the Extinction Clock: 92 hours, 49 minutes E.S.T.

Deep Iron looks like a water treatment plant. From outside the gate all we could see were a few medium-sized buildings and miles of electrified security fence. According to the info Bug had sent me, the surface buildings were mostly used for equipment storage and garages. The main building had a few offices, but mostly it’s a big box around a set of six industrial elevators, two of which were big enough to fit a dozen SUVs. The real Deep Iron is way underground. The upper tiers of storage start one hundred yards down and the rest are far below that.

Brick drove us to the front gate. There was no guard. We exchanged a look and Bunny opened the door and stepped out. He checked the guard shack and leaned close to the fence for a moment and then came back, a frown etched into his face.

“Guard shack is empty, no sign of struggle. The fences are electrified but the juice is off,” he said.

Top pointed to my PDA. “Stuff Bug sent says Deep Iron has its own power plant.”

I took out my cell and dialed the contact number for Daniel Sloane, the sales manager, but it rang through to voice mail. I called the main office number, same thing. “Okay, we’re playing this like we’re on enemy territory. Lock and load. Bunny, open the gate.”

Bunny pulled the gate open and then jumped onto the back step-bumper of the truck as we rolled into the compound. Brick did a fast
circuit inside the fence. There were eleven cars parked in the employee lot. None of them was a DMS vehicle. We paused at the rear guard shack, but it was also empty. I told Brick to head to the main office and we parked outside, the vehicle angled to keep its reinforced corner toward the building’s windows. We were already kitted out with Kevlar and we used the truck’s steel door to shield us as we stuffed extra magazines into pockets and clipped night vision onto our steel pots. None of us said it aloud, but we were all thinking about Jigsaw Team. A dozen of them had come out here this morning, and now they were missing. Were they in hiding? Was there still that chance? Or were they truly MIA?

Now three of us were going down into an unfamiliar vast cavern system that may have swallowed all of Jigsaw. No backup except Brick, and he had one leg. We couldn’t even call the State Police or the National Guard.

I caught the looks Top and Bunny were shooting back and forth and made sure my own eyes were poker neutral as I began stuffing flash bangs into a bag.

I glanced at Brick. “Don’t take offense at this, Gunny, but are you able to provide cover fire if we need it?”

He grinned. “Don’t need two legs to pull a trigger, Captain. Little Softee here,” he patted the side of the truck, “has a few James Bond tricks built in to her.”

Brick clambered into the back of the truck, folded down a small seat by the wall closest to the building, and fiddled with some equipment on rails. There was a hydraulic hiss and a metal case on the floor opened to allow a six-barreled, air-cooled minigun to rise and lock into place. Brick reached across it and slid open a metal vent on the side of the truck, then turned back to us, beaming.

“The whole floor has rails on it so the gun can be maneuvered to either side and down to cover the rear. I have grenade launchers fore and aft, and the truck body is half-inch steel with a ceramic liner. I’ve got enough rounds to start a war, and probably enough to end it.”

“Fuck me,” said Top.

“Hey, boss,” said Bunny, “can we send him in and wait here?”

Brick chuckled. “Five years ago, kid, I’d have taken you up on that.”

“Outstanding,” I said. “Okay, Gunny, if the power’s off in there we may not be able to use landlines, and once we’re down deep we’ll lose cell and sat phone communication. I don’t even know how to estimate how much time this is going to take, but if Church can get the NSA to back off then I’d very much appreciate you calling in every U.S. agent with a gun and send them down after us.”

“You got a bad feeling about this, Captain?” he asked.

“Don’t you?”

“Shit . . . I’ve had an itch between my shoulder blades since I got up this morning.”

“Keep one eye on the sky, too,” said Top. “We didn’t see any vehicles that don’t belong here. These jokers may have come by chopper.”

“I got me some SAMs if I need ’em,” Brick said. I really wished he had two good legs.

I said, “If you send anyone down after us, give ’em today’s recognition code.”

The day code was “bluebird” for challenge and “canary” for response. Anyone in DMS tactical who logged in after 2:00
A.M.
would know it. Anyone we met down there who didn’t know it was likely to have a worse day than we were having.

We synched our watches and checked our gear. I gave them the nod.

Even with all the unknown waiting for us, it felt good to stop running and start hunting.

BUNNY TOOK POINT
and he ran low and fast from the corner of the truck to the corner of the building while we covered him. Except for the whisper of his gum-rubber soles on the asphalt of the parking lot there was no sound. There was no wind at all, and the sun was behind us. Bunny hit the wall and crouched to cover Top as he ran in, and they covered front and back as I joined them. We couldn’t see Brick, but knowing that the cold black eye of the minigun was following us was a great comfort. Brick had the look of the kind of soldier who generally hit what he aimed at, and I doubt anyone ever caught him napping.