Made of Fire

3. Data Cleanse

3

Data Cleanse

I smacked the butts of both guns hard on the flimsy mesh panel beneath me and dropped upside down through the hole in the ceiling. Wedging both thighs against the walls of the vent, I held a gun out left and right, firing in either direction. I hit both guards with shots to various body parts I thought might wound and preoccupy, rather than kill.

Philippe re-loaded and looked at his watch.

“I’m on time-ish,” I said, hanging upside down, kind of enjoying it.

It was a cool as s**t move if I did think so myself.

Philippe waved a hand at me. “What’s all this?”

“This is called saving your arse.”

“A bit flashy, don’t you think?” he asked.

“What’s wrong with flashy?”

“You’ll find out in around five seconds,” he said unzipping a pocket on his rucksack.

As I hung there, wondering what the hell he was talking about, he counted the rest out. “Four … three … two …”

Suddenly, I felt my thighs cave in. I fell to the floor, landing in a heap and making an unladylike burgh sound on the way down.

I picked myself up and looked over the bodies strewn across the floor. “You promised not to try and kill as many people.”

“I know,” he said, taking a small, sticky bomb with a digital countdown from his rucksack. “I tried.”

Philippe threw the explosive hard at a glass door and the pair of us turned our backs to the device. The charge hit zero and blew the door outwards in a controlled explosion; a sideways shower of glass blasting into the corridor.

Philippe glanced at his watch again. “We’re a fifty-seven seconds behind schedule,” he said. “Better make this quick.”

Clearly, that was a dig at me.

“It’s okay for you,” I said, as we crunched over broken glass into the humongous data hub. “You didn’t have to take the super happy fun slide.”

With wire floors and hard drive stacks stripped to their bones, it was obvious the plan here was to keep everything as chilled as possible. And I had the goose bumps to prove it, thanks to a whopping great draft created by those fans above. They were noisy as hell too, casting a strobing shadow over the entire hub.

“Remind me again,” I said. “Which bank are we looking for?”

“Bank 4.6.5. Row G. Stack 5,” Giles said.

It was a confusing mess of numbers and letters and flashing green lights. We moved between stacks, looking for the data bank in question.

“Here,” Philippe said, as we stopped in front of a touchscreen monitor.

He tapped his way through a series of options and found the bank we were looking for.

“How do you know how any of this stuff works?” I asked.

“Years of practice,” Philippe said, hitting a button on the screen. A few feet away from us, a panel opened up on a stack, around waist-height. “You get the flash drive,” he said. “I’ll set up Eddie.”

Eddie was the name we’d given to the electronic pulse weapon Philippe had used to get us both into the building. It was a metal object the shape and size of a small cake tin, with hundreds of tiny holes punched in the side.

For his next trick, Eddie would be wiping every last scrap of data from JPAC’s secret storage sites.

Most of the data was little use to us. But we knew from our JPAC whistleblower, codename Quarter Horse, that bank 4.6.5. Row G, stack 5, contained something very special. We just didn’t know what. And neither did he.

But where there was smoke …

With each stack carrying a backup flash-drive, it was a simple case of grab the stick and leave Eddie to do his stuff. In the meantime, we’d be out of the door with another juicy morsel of secret intel and another notch on our JPAC-punking bedpost.

I skipped over to the open panel, eager to get out of the world’s biggest fridge-freezer. “Um, we might have a problem here,” I said.

“What do you mean?” Philippe asked.

“No flash drive,” Giles said.

“You sure this is the right one?” I asked.

“Yes,” Giles said. “Are you sure your contact gave you the right number? Maybe you made a mistake writing it down-“

“I don’t make mistakes,” Philippe said.

“He’s right, he doesn’t,” I said. “It’s really annoying.”

Philippe hopped back on the touchscreen. “Someone got here before us. They removed the flash drive a few minutes ago.”

We spun around, checking up, down, left and right. I leaned over the gantry rail behind me and saw a man on the ground floor, leaving the place in a hurry. I took out my binoculars and got a better look. He was young, dark and athletic. Dressed like an IT nerd in thick-rim glasses and a short-sleeved white shirt, with a lanyard hung around his neck.

“Got a guy on the second floor,” I said. “Looks shifty.”

“Philippe ducked his head out from behind a stack and took my binoculars. “That’s our man.” He handed me back the binoculars. “Get ready to run,” he said, packing up Eddie and slinging the rucksack over his shoulders.

“Why?”

“Just do it,” Philippe said.

“Aren’t we gonna wipe the stacks?”

“No time,” Philippe said, as he pulled a zip wire from his belt.

I followed his lead instinctively, hooking the end of my own cord around the nearest gantry railing and climbing over the side. We abseiled in tandem and landed on the ground floor of the data hub. We left the cord winders hanging and ran through an exit door into a long corridor that led us all the way out through a deserted reception area.

We sprinted across the car park towards the front gate, jumping over the bodies of more security guards, to where Philippe had left the van. He opened the back doors and hopped in. He climbed on the spare dirt bike we’d brought along for our little Uzbek break. He revved the engine and jumped it out onto the tarmac

I got on the back as the ground beneath us rocked, like an earthquake tremor.

“That can’t be good,” I said, grabbing Philippe’s waist.

He lifted both feet and steered us out of there just in time.

The entire complex exploded with an almighty bang behind us. And I could still feel the heat of the blast on my back as we stopped at a safe distance.

We watched the complex burn. Smoke spiralling into the air; one of those huge fans rolling to a cindering stop and flattening the van.

“You didn’t think it was important to tell me there was a bomb?” I asked.

“Didn’t want you to overreact,” Philippe said.

“How can you overreact to a bomb? Blind panic is the universally accepted response.”

Up, over our heads, a helicopter flashed by, carrying the bomber on the end of a rope ladder. He threw us a mocking salute as the chopper whirled overhead.

“Can’t believe we got out-missioned,” I said.

“Can’t believe we didn’t see it coming,” said Philippe.

We zoomed off up the ravine, so steep I thought I was going to fall off the end of the bike.

We flew into the air, over the ridge and landed with a hefty bump.

Riding back the way I’d come in, Philippe hit the brakes as we reached the first of the perimeter patrols.

The guy was still zonked.

“He slept through all that?” I said.

Philippe lined the bike up alongside the open window of the four-by-four and reached inside. He pushed a hand against the guy’s head. He flopped over. Dead.

On second glance, his neck was clearly broken.

Philippe turned to me and burned disappointment-shaped holes in my eyes. “Asleep?” he asked.

“Death is a kind of sleep,” I said.

“What do I always say?” Philippe asked.

“Be certain before you’re sure,” we both said, as Philippe revved the engine and scooted us out of there, another JPAC facility ticked off the list. Even if it wasn’t us doing the ticking.