CHAPTER 1
FIRE AND FLOOD
CHARLIE
Iam on fire!
Not literally, of course. But right now, my brother, Jace, is on a critical mission, and it’s the final task in what has been a very long operation to take down an evil mastermind, Callid Aragundi, along with his entire network. So many of us here at the Clandestine Services Agency have been working for months to get to this point, so everyone in this room is holding their breath and watching the big screens as I support Jace in the field.
Or, in this case, a super yacht docked in Monaco.
“You’ve got about ten seconds before that camera resets,” I say through my headset to Jace. “So unless you want the ship’s security to catch you in that two-sizes-too-small uniform, you might want to?—”
“Got it,” Jace says as he gets the door open and slips inside.
The urgency in this room is thick as everyone’s eyes flick between the big screens at the front and analysts and operatives murmur updates.
So, I’m on fire, and all eyes arenoton me. Which is exactly how I like it.
But, I guess that means I’m not figuratively on fire, either, or all eyes would definitely be on me. It’s more that I’m in my element. Maybe my element is fire.
This is the final phase of the operation, and somehow, I’m the calmest person in the room. I don’t look around because I’ve got everything I need on the three screens at my workstation and in the data coming from the comms. One shows Jace’s glasses cam, one has both the yacht’s heat signature map and a live feed of every hallway camera I’ve overridden in the last six minutes, and the third has my screen where I make all the magic happen.
“Take your next left,” I tell Jace. “The guard on your right just broke pattern. You’ve got maybe fifteen seconds before he comes back around.”
He moves silently through corridors as I scan my screen for potential problems while getting everything we need for the break-in. I glance at the screen that shows Jace’s glasses cam and the heat map.
“You’re two doors away from the brain ofAragundi’s criminal empire. Maybe even the key to unlocking who’s behind the smuggled artifacts.”
“Glove on,” Jace says as he finishes tugging it into place.
Seven weeks ago, when we first found this super yacht but Aragundi wasn’t on it, my brother, Miles, snuck in and placed a relay node into the ship’s network junction at a maintenance panel, cleverly disguising it. A little ghostie in the wires. It’s been quietly collecting biometric traffic and system behavior information ever since.
Now it’s going to do exactly what we created it to do—make Jace look like a trusted associate of Aragundi’s, so we can get past security. I scan the heat map once more as Jace flips open the cover for the fingerprint scanner. I’ve already loaded Aragundi’s print to the reader using the spoof relay, and my finger hovers over the enter key as Jace’s gloved hand nears the fingerprint scanner.
The moment Jace touches his finger to it, I press Enter to accept the fingerprint as valid. I think everyone in the room is holding their breath just like Jace and I are. The moment the fingerprint scanner lights up green, we let out a collective breath.
“Okay,” I say through my comms, bringing up the retina spoof, “time to dazzle the scanner with your windows to the soul.” Timing on these is everything. If I’m off by even a half-second, the systemwill flag it as a breach. I watch Jace’s glasses cam as the scanner does its thing, and I press Enter the same moment it finishes.
A second green light appears, and I can feel the adrenaline coursing through me, clarifying my focus as Jace brushes the ring that’s been spoofed to mimic Aragundi’s against the proximity sensor on the side of the door frame. The door unlocks with a hiss.
“Boom!” I say as Jace walks in, closing the door behind him. We made it in, but there is no time to celebrate. We’ve got work to do. “Head to the center rack—row three, second bay. That’s the control core. No sudden movements or the temperature sensors might flag you as a ‘non-whitelisted presence.’”
Aragundi is an important take-down because he’s got his fingers in so many pies. And one of them deals with the fencing of priceless artifacts and aiding in antiquities trafficking. Ancient objects have been getting stolen in large numbers while being transported, usually from archaeological sites to museums or from one museum to another. We’ve found a few buyers of individual pieces and a few of the couriers, but we haven’t been able to find the person behind it all. We haven’t even figured out who it is.
But we think that among the information about Aragundi’s criminal empire, we’ll find more information about the thefts and smuggling. Possibly even the identity of the person orchestrating it all.
When Jace gets to the core, I say, “Okay, insert the jammer first. Move to the left a bit…” I’m squinting to find what I’m looking for. “There! That green port on the far left.”
Jace inserts the signal jammer, and I say, “That buys us twelve minutes of blackout.” Now, if anyone off-site tries to ping the system, they’ll think the yacht hit a dead zone. Which is super important when you know the bad guys will just shut down the system remotely if they catch wind of you tampering with it.
And that would be bad. First, because Interpol is moments away from a raid to capture Aragundi, and we don’t want him getting any advance warning. And second, because before he’s captured, we want to get that information about the antiquities smuggling, the buyers, and the guy at the top, and we want to take down Aragundi’s entire network so it won’t live on even without him. And taking it down will surely alert his off-site computer geeks, so we have to get this timing perfect.
Things are getting intense. I feel it. Everyone in this room feels it. Based on Jace’s heart rate, he’s feeling it, too.
“Okay, the jammer is live. Drop the download drive in that port to the right.” This sucker’s pulling everything—contacts, transfers, asset routing, call logs, shipment manifests, museum transport schedules, even grocery lists if they’re intheir system.
A progress bar lights up.12%, 29%, 41%…
