Page 77 of Heart of Danger
“Do you know where the C & C is?” Nick asked.
Catherine frowned, confused. She shook her head.
“Command and control,” Mac said. “Where they give the orders and check that they’re carried out.”
“Oh. No, I’m sorry, I have no idea. There is a security module on the first floor in the lab part of the facility and in the wing where the patients are kept. But I have no idea whether the microwave fence is controlled from there. It could also be controlled from the security module in the entrance.”
Mac nodded. “Okay, we need to know whether their security perimeter stretches out past that. I’d be surprised if it didn’t. Jon?”
From his tablet, Jon projected another holo. A bird’s eye view of the Millon facility only with a much larger footprint, and at night. At a guess, Catherine would say that the footprint was five miles on a side. As she watched, lights flashed by almost faster than her eyes could perceive and the image changed from black to light gray then back again. About ten red points moved back and forth in a short arc.
She looked over at Jon. “What am I seeing?”
His jaws bunched. “I went back in time. You’re seeing about a week’s worth of night shots from a Bright Eye satellite. It can see the balls on a mosquito so I enlarged the scope of it and created a bot that blanked out random events, otherwise the detail would overwhelm us.”
“Wow,” she breathed. She had a low level government security clearance linked to her job at Millon but it didn’t cover anything like this. The Bright Eye series of orbiting satellites were a rumor that often showed up in novels and tabloids, capable of amazing detail. Privacy activists often marched against them, though the government blandly denied Bright Eye existed. “Please don’t tell me how you got that. I could probably go to jail for seeing this.”
She got three hard, blank stares and suppressed a grin. She could go to jail for knowingthem. “But if I have to go to jail, at least let me know what I’m looking at.”
The holo kept flashing, black to gray and back again.
“What you’re seeing is a recording from last light to first of that area. We’re now going back to a month ago.” With a flick of his finger, Jon stopped the flicking images. “Here’s what we need to know. Screening out random events—events that are not repeated at least three times in one month—we have vehicles patrolling this area on a regular round.” His finger sketched a perimeter a mile out surrounding the facility. “They mainly use night lights but I used an algorithm and enhanced the light so we could see them. I’d estimate these are people carriers—roofless, all terrain vehicles, carrying five soldiers plus one manning what looks like a 50 cal.” The image zoomed and zoomed again until four shapes inside the vehicle were visible, with one man sitting on a sort of raised platform on the back manning a long cylinder.
Catherine stared. This was far beyond the level of security that she was aware of.
Mac was tapping on a handheld. “I’ve got their routines and I’ll get the security holes. Go on.”
Jon pointed with a pen to the red lights moving back and forth quickly in short arcs further in near the facility. “And that’s patrols. There are ten of them covering an arc of about a mile, hourly patrol. They are backup to the wheeled patrols.”
“Wait.” Nick leaned forward, his hard dark face intent. “Run those through again.”
The holo showed the series of vehicle and foot patrols, gray to black and back. He studied them, eyes tracking back and forth for several minutes. Mac and Jon gave him the time. Mac continued tapping into his handheld and Jon was using another computer, doing some complicated research. She could see screens flash by, too quickly for her to understand what it was he was looking for.
She could do nothing but wait. Once she’d given them the security protocol that had been in her initial briefing, she had nothing else to offer.
“Security is aimed inward,” Nick said finally, sitting back.
Mac stopped tapping on his handheld and Jon’s hands lifted from the keyboard.
“Look.” Nick pointed at the red dots, freezing the faint images of the vehicles, tilting the Arka holo. “Every weapon is aimed inward. The path the patrols take, the direction of the 50 cal, it all makes sense if you are directing your security to keeping things in instead of out.”
“Jesus,” Mac breathed.
“Does that make sense?” Catherine asked. “I mean, surely Arka is guarding against intruders. This lab alone must have a billion dollars’ worth of industrial secrets to steal. Surely they must be scared of someone coming along and stealing them?”
“Nick’s right,” Mac growled. “They have plenty of internal security. What you showed us is already top of the line. These outer perimeter tripwires—they are expensive and labor-intensive. They make sense if they are there in case someone from inside escapes and the alarm is sounded. That security is definitely aimed at keeping whatever is in there from getting out.”
“Well,” Catherine said, considering. “Maybe that makes our task that much easier. Maybe we can get in.”
“Yeah.” Mac sighed. “The trick will be getting back out alive.”
Fifty minutes later,Mac tapped his ear. Or rather, tapped a spot on the lightweight helmet.
Catherine obediently tapped the same spot on her own helmet. It was the spot that connected her to the team leader, Mac. A spot an inch to the left hooked her comms system into the entire team’s system.
“You okay, honey?” Mac’s deep voice sounded in her ear. The sound was so good, so deep and calm, so all enveloping it was as if he were talking inside her head. “You remember the drills?”
A huge amount of information had been fed into her earpiece from him as she was being dressed by Nick and Jon in an amazing lightweight, flexible suit she was assured would stop bullets. On top of the suit, though, she was the only one wearing another layer of protection, a light plate covering her chest and back which Mac said would stop a missile. Then Nick winked at her. Nick! Cold, remote Nick. Maybe she imagined it because when she looked at him again, his face was as frozen as ever.
