Benito Montoya wore his lab coat over a white business shirt. Pinstriped lavender; clearly a special occasion. But not special enough for him to bother shaving, Sophia noticed. He looked more stressed than she felt. And she was feeling a metric ton of stress right now.

She approached the vending machine casually. When he saw her, there was a flicker of surprise, covered by his best attempt at boredom. As she closed on him, he greeted her as nonchalantly as he could manage, but his unease was hard to ignore.

She shook his hand. When he took it away, he noticed the double-sided sticky tape stuck to the bottom of her palm. She tore it off and folded it over itself to avoid smudging.

‘Oh, right,’ she said. ‘I’ll be needing your fingerprints.’

‘Denton will be expecting you to sneak into the facility.’

‘He’ll be doing more than just expecting me,’ she said. ‘He’ll let me in, let me retrieve the Chimera vector code, then capture me. I wouldn’t expect any less. In ten minutes, meet us at the BlueGene lab.’

‘Right. And then what?’

‘If we’re the only ones standing, come on in.’

‘And if the Blue Berets are still awake?’

She winked at him. ‘If you did your job properly, they won’t be.’

***

The ceiling, walls and floor of the BlueGene lab were a bland white. Grids of fluorescent lights stung Sophia’s eyes. A Blue Beret lay sprawled before her, unmoving. She sniffed the air, then stepped over him. With Nasira covering everything outside her field of vision, she continued further into the lab, to find more than two dozen Blue Berets lying around in calm, relaxed positions. She counted them. Thirty to be exact. Benito had used the correct amount of nitrous oxide. As instructed. It was better than she’d hoped for. They were completely sedated.

She checked on her team: Nasira, Lucia, and her more recent additions, Cassandra and Renée. Everyone was accounted for. Like her, they were wearing matching lab coats with chemical splash goggles and half-face respirators that, until now, they’d concealed in their lab coat pockets. Each had two cartridges fitted to her respirator for protection from the gas. Cassandra and Renée carried high-energy degaussers concealed in nondescript briefcases. They would come in handy soon enough.

Security cameras had the lab completely covered. But the computer virus Cecilia had given Jay and Damien in Paris would’ve worked its magic a good fifty minutes ago. Sophia already had confirmation that the virus was slowing down all security footage playback from thirty to twenty frames per second. Just enough so the staff’s movements looked natural, if a bit more relaxed, and Denton, watching the camera feeds from the security control center, would have no clue he was seeing footage that was twenty minutes old.

What Sophia’s team were about to do they’d rehearsed in eleven minutes. Not bad, considering she was giving them fifteen minutes—no exceptions. By the time Denton saw the Blue Berets collapsing from the nitrous oxide, they’d be long gone. She allowed herself a tiny smile as she entered the lab proper.

She counted twelve aisles of black steel, the end of each aisle sloping down at a forty-five degree angle. Underneath the black steel, hundreds of fridge-sized cabinets purred like jaguars. LED lights flashed emerald, showing the error-free function of the thirty-two BlueGene node boards that bristled inside every cabinet. The supercomputer itself was one of several the Fifth Column had installed in 2004 to crunch numbers on behalf of Project GATE and many other black projects.

Cassandra drummed her fingers on the briefcase she carried. ‘What about the Blue Berets?’

‘Tape their mouths shut and use their plasticuffs to tie them up. Don’t waste our own.’ Sophia’s voice was slightly muffled through the respirator, but clear enough for them to understand her.

Nasira hesitated. ‘You don’t want us to just shoot the motherfuckers?’

Sophia shook her head. ‘Just take all their rounds.’

The BlueGene lab’s walls were embedded with Faraday cages to shield the room from external electric and electromagnetic fields. That meant no radio or cell phone communication, which worked in Sophia’s favor. The Blue Berets wouldn’t be able to radio anyone and give the game away. And the rapidity of the nitrous oxide’s effects would have prevented anyone getting out of the lab to radio for help. Sophia wasn’t surprised that only one Blue Beret had made it halfway across the lab before collapsing. Of course, once the nitrous oxide had finished pumping through the BlueGene lab’s HVAC system, fresh oxygen would cycle through soon after to replace it. So the Blue Berets needed to be tied up before they could regain their senses.

Sophia called out to Nasira, ‘Take one of their radios too.’

Benito entered the lab, wearing a pair of goggles and a respirator of his own. He walked towards her and she fell in beside him, matching his pace.

‘How long did you have the nitrous oxide going for?’ she asked.

‘I placed the cylinder in the supply duct ten minutes ago.’

‘Nice one.’

‘Won’t security control notice the soldiers dropping like flies?’

Sophia smiled. ‘Not until we’re out of here.’

‘Right.’

Benito approached a cabinet and pushed at it with his thumb. A tray slid out with an ordinary laptop inside. He opened it and logged in.

DesBlueGene login: bmontoya

Password: **********

Ephoros Enterprise Server 10 Mon 29 May 03:36:31 UTC-4

bmontoya@DesBlueGene:~$ _

‘I’ll take it from here,’ Sophia said.

Benito stepped back. ‘I don’t see how. You need to be logged in as root. The system administrator.’

Sophia ignored him and focused on the cursor blinking beside the dollar sign.

‘It’s a closed system,’ he went on. ‘There’s not much you can do.’

‘Unless it’s already been done for me.’

She smiled, then typed a forward slash, full stop and the name of the script she wanted to execute.

BMontoya@DesBlueGene:~$ /.violet.sh

[+] page array prepared

[+] compound page faked

[+] splicing to pipe . . .

[+] struct page pointers stored in pipe

[+] buffer overflow

[+] destructor controlled by violet

[+] ring 0 code execution of exploit

[+] getting root shell

[+] privileges successfully escalated

Violet@DesBlueGene:~$ _

Sophia typed in “id” to check Benito’s access privileges.

Violet@DesBlueGene:~$ id

Uid=1082(bmontoya) gid=1082(bmontoya) euid=0(root)groups=1082(bmontoya)

Violet@DesBlueGene:~$ _

She watched Benito’s eyebrows press together when he saw his Effective User ID listed as “root”.

‘Right.’ He tried to laugh but didn’t quite get there. ‘That was interesting.’

‘Violet is a local user exploit. Cecilia McLoughlin programmed it so I could elevate your account to a superuser.’

He stared at the access privileges in disbelief. ‘That woman is full of surprises. How could she do that?’

‘Using the same node I’m accessing right now,’ Sophia said, removing her fingerless gloves. It was easier to type without them. ‘Only Cecilia’s a lot better than me. And probably most people on the planet, for that matter.’ Her fingers raced across the keyboard as she accessed the BlueGene file server. ‘Long live cargo-cult security.’

It didn’t take long for her to locate the Chimera vector codes, wrapped up in a nice little encryption; Cecilia had made her memorize where they were. She removed the pen-shaped instrument from beside the keyboard and pressed the pad of her forefinger alongside the end of it. With her other hand, she pressed the button on the instrument’s side. A fine needle pricked her forefinger with such speed she almost missed it. That was the sample of blood taken care of.

Onscreen, the shell told her to please wait while it processed the sample. She held her breath.

Benito shrugged. ‘If this fails . . . well, the code will destroy itself.’

‘Yeah. I’m aware of that.’ She didn’t look away from the screen.

Cecilia had made the self-destruct obvious enough so that Benito, under Denton’s orders, would realize they only had one shot at decrypting it. It had to be that obvious; she didn’t want Denton destroying it by accident. The screen told her the results of the decryption. Successful. She exhaled slowly, ignoring the sweat that itched the corners of her eyes. Code filled the screen. The Chimera vector codes.

Benito folded his arms, probably to cover his edginess. ‘I can only assume you have a way of getting the code off the server?’

‘I’m not moving the code at all.’

Sophia reached for her com, and produced a small flexible tripod for it, with three bendable legs made of two-dozen rotating joints. She holstered her com on the tiny tripod and adjusted the legs until she was happy with the framing. Then she took her first picture with the com’s camera. The picture displayed on the com screen for two seconds, giving her a chance to check it before it was saved to the camera’s memory stick with on-the-fly encryption. The key for this on-the-fly encryption was a different segment of Cecilia’s DNA altogether, one that even Sophia’s blood could not decrypt. It was a nice failsafe measure. If her team were somehow captured, the Chimera vector codes would remain uncompromised.

She set her com to take a photograph automatically every three seconds.

‘Every time the com takes a picture,’ she told Benito, ‘hit the “page down” key. Don’t let it miss a page.’

Montoya nodded and touched the “page down” key. A new screen of code appeared. She left him to it as she noticed Jay’s arrival.

He was talking to Nasira as Sophia approached. His milk chocolate skin, despite the little she could see of it behind his XM20 protective mask, was almost a dead match for Nasira’s.

‘How’s tricks?’ he asked Nasira.

‘Tricks are for kids, Darth Vader,’ Nasira said.

‘Who?’ Jay’s voice was tinny through the mask’s voicemitters.

‘A half-face respirator would’ve been fine, Jay,’ Sophia said.

Jay shrugged. ‘This is what we’re issued with. The facility’s being evacuated.’

‘Security?’ Sophia asked.

‘Sweeping sector by sector.’ He counted on his fingers. ‘Groups of six and twelve.’

‘Blue Berets? Shocktroopers?’

‘Six shocktroopers on standby; one troop of Blue Berets with Denton and his right-hand man, Major Novak,’ Jay said. ‘The other thirty-six Blue Berets are coordinating the evacuation at the aircraft hangar under Komarov’s orders. All civilian personnel are being airlifted by Chinook as we speak.’

Sophia realized her hand was hovering over her lab coat, right where her FN P90 submachine gun was concealed. Even with the attached sound suppressor, the Belgian-made P90 was still shorter than her forearm. Whisper-quiet and easy to conceal. Especially under lab coats.

She lowered her hand. ‘How long?’

‘Two minutes, if they’re quick.’

‘Which they will be,’ she said. ‘Tell the Blue Berets this area is clear.’

‘Damien already took care of that.’

‘Did they believe him?’

Jay frowned. ‘We’ll find out soon enough, yeah?’

Sophia put her hands on her hips. ‘And your orders?’

‘I told you before.’

She glared. ‘Repeat it.’

‘Don’t want to repeat myself,’ Jay said. ‘Everyone will think I’m formulaic.’

She took a step towards him, and watched him bristle. He didn’t like her ordering him around. But she did. ‘If your vocabulary is up to the task, I’d like word for word.’

Jay glanced away, pretending to be bored with the conversation. ‘To observe you without being detected.’ He nodded in the direction of Benito, who was saying ‘Hi’ to every screen of code. ‘And report in when you have the code.’

‘Well, that’s new.’

She left Jay and Nasira to check on the rest of her team. They’d just finished tying up the Blue Berets.

‘If security move through, notify me and then dispose of them as quickly as possible,’ she said. ‘If we’re compromised, we have to move before Denton coordinates an ambush.’

She singled out Cassandra and Renée with her finger. ‘As soon as Benito is done with the photos, I need you to degauss the blade servers. I want the Chimera vector codes erased and unrecoverable the moment we’re foxtrot.’ She checked her watch. ‘We’ve been here for just under six minutes. We need another seven minutes to degauss. We’re cutting this too close as it is.’

Cassandra was tapping her foot. ‘Do we need to degauss? Somehow I doubt Denton has a magnetic force microscope on hand.’

Sophia smiled. Degaussing the hard drives—destroying all data—was a necessary precaution. ‘Knowing him,’ she said, ‘he’d have one in every lab, just in case.’

She watched Cassandra and Renée move to a specific node cabinet, each of them carrying briefcases. They opened the cabinet to reveal a blade enclosure that housed seven racks of twelve: eighty-four blade servers.

Sophia waited for Benito to say ‘Hi’ to his last screen of code, then dismantled her com and the tripod. He logged off, and Renée immediately began pulling out the servers one by one and handing them to Cassandra. Cassandra degaussed blade after blade, six at a time on two flatbed high-energy degaussers from the briefcases. Their rehearsed movements were fast. Each blade server took twenty seconds. Sophia insisted they degauss for thirty. Just to be sure.

She turned back to Jay, who stood with his arms folded, waiting.

‘There’s a railcar platform three levels down,’ she said. ‘In the interests of expediting the process you can have Damien prepare one for us. Once we’re in the railcar, you’ll check the security camera footage on my com, wait for the delayed footage to show us entering the BlueGene lab, then report precisely that to Denton. Chances are he’ll be watching the same footage at the same time.’

Jay grinned. ‘You’re not seriously going to try to slip out with the evacuation, are you?’

Her lips straightened into a thin line. ‘Yes, actually. And you’re welcome to join us.’