Sequence Page 6

  “What do you really want? You wouldn’t have come here just to ask a couple of questions.”

  “We take our staff care very seriously at XNA Industries. Your feedback will be crucial in terms of our future employees’ experiences. I was on my way home so thought I’d stop by to get this over with. Now open the damned door.”

  “With Murphy with you? No chance.”

  “Like he said, I’m just here to return your things and cover a few issues you raised in your resignation letter. You owe us at least a few minutes of your time seeing as you’ve left us so suddenly.”

  “Okay, you can have two minutes, but you’re staying in the hall.”

  Gray smiled. “Thank you, Mr. Tucker. We’ll make this as harmless as humanly possible.”

  The door closed, followed by the faint noise of a latch being slid along its rail and released. As the door fully reopened, Gray quickly entered, followed by Michael, who slammed the door shut behind him with a clatter.

  Tucker, holding a pitching wedge, took a couple of paces back. “You come any closer or try anything stupid, and I’ll use this.”

  The first things Gray noticed were the stench and the state of the ramshackle room.

  “Nice place,” Gray said.

  “Start speaking before I call the cops.”

  “You left work early today. Is this true?” Gray said.

  “I might have done, but I’ve left for good. It’s all in my letter of resignation. You can dock me an hour’s pay if it’s that important to you.”

  “Did you see anything suspicious before you left the facility? Anything at all? Have a good think before answering,” Gray said.

  “I didn’t see a thing,” Tucker snapped.

  “You didn’t see a thing?”

  Tucker shook his head, tightening his grip around the club.

  “You’re lying, Tucker,” Michael said. “We know about your friend.”

  “Talk to us. You’ve got nothing to fear,” Gray said.

  Tucker raised the club over his shoulder. “I want you out, now. Get off my property.”

  “I’d seriously advise against threatening us,” Michael said.

  “Please, we’re all friends here,” Gray said, keeping his voice calm. “All you have to do to get your last paycheck is give us the name of your friend,” Gray said. “Everyone makes mistakes, Mr. Tucker, but this is your opportunity to fix yours.”

  “And tell us why he was at the facility,” Michael added.

  “I told you, I didn’t see nothing.”

  “Do you take me for a fool, Mr. Tucker?” Gray said.

  “No. Do you think I am?”

  “I will if you don’t answer my next question honestly.”

  Tucker reached for his back pocket.

  “Keep your hands out in front,” Michael said.

  “Hey, you’re not the police, get the hell—”

  “I’ll ask you one more time. Don’t try my patience,” Gray said. “Who did you let into the facility?”

  “Do you not understand English? No one!” Tucker said.

  “I’m bored of this,” Gray said with a sigh, feeling his skin prickle with frustration.

  “That makes two of us.” Tucker’s brow gleamed with sweat. The club shook in his hands. “Now, I’m asking you both to leave, right now.”

  “Fine. I’ll leave, but you can answer to Mr. Murphy. Michael, take over, please. I’m getting nowhere fast.”

  “Yes, Dr. Gray. Leave it with me.”

  Tucker’s eyes darted between the pair. “Don’t leave me with this psycho. I’m calling the cops.”

  Gray turned on his heels and went to open the front door. “Oh, before I leave, you might want this back.”

  He threw a small piece of plastic in Tucker’s direction. Tucker dropped the pitching wedge and caught it. He looked down at a memory stick.

  “What’s this?”

  “It’s the loop you loaded onto our security system,” Gray said. “I thought you might want it back. I’m going to leave Michael to conduct your exit interview. Thank you for your time—and loyal service, Mr. Tucker.”

  As Tucker stuttered to get his words out, Gray left the house and pulled the door closed, leaving Michael inside.

  He’d no desire to stand in the cold again, so jogged to the Lincoln, started the engine, and turned up the heater. After a quick glance at his watch, he turned on the radio. Gray cringed as Meatloaf’s “Bat out of Hell” pumped from the speakers.

  He drummed his fingers on the steering wheel as he waited.

  After a couple of minutes, light shot from the house entrance. Michael stood in the doorway, straightened his tie, then walked over to the car and got into the passenger seat.

  “How did the interview go?” Gray asked.

  “Good. We’ve got a name: Jacob Miller.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “It was very clear,” Michael said as he put on his seatbelt.

  Gray struck out at the steering wheel. “That little bastard. I thought I’d seen the last of him years ago. You got an address?”

  “I did. You know him?”

  “Let’s say Jacob and I have history. A history I’m not willing to repeat.”

  “Are we going now? It’s not far from here.”

  “No. It’s getting late. I have a few results waiting for me at the facility. Besides we’ve got that NSA trial meeting to prepare for. We’ll drop in on him first thing in the morning. When I’m thinking more clearly.”

  Michael went quiet for a moment, staring out the windshield, his jawbone flexing. “I’ve got a better idea. This would be a perfect time to assess the field capabilities of Unit B, would it not?”

  Gray tapped his fingers on his chin, picturing Unit B in her early state within the cryo-chamber. That model represented some of his best research and tech. Turning to Michael, Gray nodded. “I think you’re right. I’ll leave the deployment to you. It’ll be interesting to see how it goes.”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  2 p.m., Day 2, Alaska

  Jacob woke up with a fog shrouding his head.

  The taste of stale beer stuck thickly to his throat. His teeth felt like they were covered in fur. Weak light drooped through his thin curtains, lending the bedroom of his trailer an orange tone, trapping him in an amber cocoon like some ancient mosquito.

  He reluctantly pulled the comforter off his body. His skin goose-bumped with the chill. Swinging his legs off the bed, he slipped on a pile of papers and fell back to the mattress.

  His room was covered in printed pages, newspapers, clippings, magazines, and any piece of ephemera he could find relating to Gray and XNA research. They covered the floor, a desk that leaned alarmingly to one side, and a small cabinet with drawers hanging out, weighed down by yet more files.

  All that was unnecessary now with what he had stolen from the facility. That thought woke him up in an instant. The flash drive! He jumped from the bed and waded through the sea of paper¸ all the while trying to remember where his jeans were.

  “Damn it!” he said as he searched through a pile of dirty laundry at least two weeks old. He must have been hammered the night before, as he couldn’t even remember getting into bed, let alone where he got undressed.

  No, don’t go there, he thought, avoiding any thoughts that he’d been drugged and the evidence recovered. He lurched out of the bedroom, stubbing his toe on the sliding door as he went. “Argh!” He clenched his jaw and waited for the pain to pass before hobbling out of the room.

  The living area was in no better state, and as for the adjoining open-plan kitchen, that was a brutal disaster of dish management.

  As he scanned the area, he received brief flashes of recollection from the night before. He saw himself stumbling through the front door and face-planting against the coffee table. The contents of which—beer cans, more papers and magazines—now lay in a mess on the carpet.

  Among the debris he found his backpack.

  He rushed over and rifled
through the compartments. He found his camera and checked that the card hadn’t been wiped: it was untouched. He sat down and leaned against the tatty sofa, sighing with relief.

  It took a further twenty minutes to recover the jeans. The drive was not in the pocket as he’d thought. Having given up the search, he went to the fridge to find something to burn the fur from his gums and teeth. As always, it was almost empty. He picked up a milk carton and went to take a gulp, but the rancid stench made him tip it away before he could consume the foul, curdled liquid.

  The only other item in the fridge was a brown beer bottle.

  As he picked up the bottle, he heard something rattle inside.

  “No way.”

  Holding the bottle up to the light, he saw the flash drive inside. So this was the ‘safe place’ he had determined in his booze-fugue.

  Dumb ass.

  He’d have to get his act together if he was going to take Gray down. He couldn’t afford to be doing stupid shit anymore. Gray and his associates were too damned dangerous.

  Using a pencil, he attempted to fish out the drive, but it wasn’t coming out. How the hell had he even got it in there in the first place?

  With a quick smash against the sink edge, the bottle broke, dropping the flash drive out. Fragments of glass trickled down through the pyramid of plates and dishes stacked precariously in the sink.

  He moved back to the living area and sat down on a rickety stool in front of his computer. It sat on a homemade shelf within a niche next to the hearth.

  Jacob woke his iMac up and entered his password, smiling at the desktop picture he’d set when he came home last night. It was a picture of Emma and him dancing to Bon Jovi, both with bottles of beer in each hand. His body was contorted into a bizarre shape. Emma stared at him intently.

  The finder window popped up when he plugged in his flash drive. He navigated to it and started scrolling the files. “What the hell?” Each file was locked, encrypted. When he double-clicked on one, it just showed him a text file full of incoherent code and symbols.

  His computer started to churn as though the hard drive was struggling to access files. The spinning beach ball of doom appeared on the screen, locking everything out.

  Was it a virus? Something on the flash drive? He thought there might have been a countermeasure placed on the XNA Industries’ servers.

  A cold dread prickled down his spine. He couldn’t think straight, his brain slow to consider the ramifications. He unplugged the flash drive and powered down the iMac.

  He needed clarity. Emma could provide that.

  He got dressed, putting on a T-shirt and jeans from the top of the laundry pile. A spray of deodorant and he was good to go. Grabbing his pack and the flash drive, he locked up behind him, jumped on his bike and rode across the trailer park to Emma’s place.

  ***

  He stopped in at a small grocery store on the edge of the park first, getting some chewing gum, Coke, and chips.

  He didn’t remember a great deal about the night before and thought if he’d done or said anything stupid, it would make sense to arrive bearing gifts.

  During the five-minute ride to Emma’s, he noticed the trailer park was deserted, most people working in town or at the oil plant.

  A few old-timers sat out on their porches, smoking and chatting away the day. They looked at him suspiciously as he rode by. They probably still thought of him as an outsider; he’d only been there three years.

  The suspicion wasn’t such a bad thing, though. It was one of the reasons why he had come here. A suspicious neighborhood was often a secure place to live, especially if you were investigating dangerous people.

  He pulled up to Emma’s trailer and locked his bike to the metal fence.

  Before he could even get to the door, it opened. Emma stood in the doorway, holding a hand over her eyes. Her hair resembled one of the bushes in the garden and she still wore her tartan skirt and Rammstein T-shirt. At least he wasn’t the only one suffering from the drinking of the night before.

  “I tried to call you,” Emma said. Her voice croaked and she winced with pain as if the effort of talking was still too much. “You asked me to remind you of your safe place.”

  “Go inside, Em. We need to talk.”

  He took his cell out of his jeans and looked at the screen: two missed calls, both from Emma. If he’d bothered to check first thing, that would have saved him the near coronary earlier.

  “Thanks. You’re looking… tired,” he said diplomatically.

  “Tired? Nah, hungover. Shit, we drank too much last night. Did I do anything stupid?”

  “No more than usual. Although to be honest, I don’t remember much. I thought you might have put something in my drink. I don’t even remember how I got home.”

  “Mex came back, gave us a ride,” she said. “Come in. It’s too bright out here.”

  The smell of bacon and sausages inside made his stomach rumble. Emma closed the door behind him. The curtains were still drawn. The TV was on, but silent. The flickering light gave the trailer a dive-bar feel. Made him think of the Frontier.

  Another memory came back then. One that made him blush. At some point during the night they were doing shots, and he shared one with Emma, sneaking in a kiss as they both took the lemon slice.

  “Mex came back?” Jacob said as vague memories continued to form in his mind. “Why?”

  Emma gestured for him to sit at the kitchen table and scraped food out of the sizzling pan with a wooden spoon.

  She put a plate in front of him and brought over a pot of coffee. She sat opposite and bit into a sausage. With one cheek bulging, she said, “He felt bad about how you two left things. He came back for happy hour and bought us tequila shots. He drove us both back.”

  “Uh-huh, that rings a bell.” He didn’t want to go too far into what happened in case he reminded her of that drunken kiss.

  “So, anyways, I tried to access the…” Jacob stopped and looked round the trailer. “Is your mom home?” He didn’t want to start going into his break-in and theft if she were around listening in.

  Emma shook her head as she bit into a slice of bacon dripping with the yoke of an egg. Jacob’s stomach turned a little. He never was a fan of fried-food-as-hangover-cure, but he didn’t want to offend Emma so nibbled at his own.

  “Mom’s away with family for the week. We’ve got the place to ourselves.”

  “Okay, cool. So this drive… well, I tried to look at the files, but they seem encrypted. They use a file extension I’ve never seen before. Even with a text editor it’s all just code and symbols and stuff. The files are big, so there’s definitely data there. They’re just obfuscated. I was hoping you could crack into them.”

  “My head feels like a lumberjack is trying to break out, so I don’t know how useful I’ll be, Jakey. I’ll try, though, as soon as I’ve consumed ten gallons of coffee.”

  “There’s another thing… my Mac’s screwed. I think it might be them.”

  Emma dropped the fork; a bit of bacon hung from her lip piercing. “For serious?”

  “Yup.”

  “That can’t be good news. You check your machine to see if it’s been hacked?”

  “Well, I kinda panicked and switched off before coming here. It could be, I don’t know. I’m not sure what to think right now. The main focus is to expose Gray and get some proper evidence to take to the police.”

  Emma nodded, wiped the bacon from her face, and reached for the coffee pot. She filled her mug and downed it before filling it again and repeating the procedure. “Right, then, let’s see what tasty morsel you’ve fished from their servers.”

  ***

  Jacob sat on the sofa next to Emma. She had her notebook computer open on her lap and the drive connected to its port. She opened a couple of the folders and copied the files into what she called a secure file vault on a virtual OS.

  She ran a set of diagnostic programs to analyze the file.

  “This ain’t the
work of an amateur,” she said. “These guys have got some seriously good IT guys managing their data.”

  “So it is encrypted, then? What kind?”

  “That’s the million-dollar question. I should know shortly. Whether we’ll be able to decrypt it even if we know the encryption is a different matter. We won’t have access to their keys, so we’ll have to try to break it in other ways.”

  “What kind of ways?”

  “Computing brute force power. Something I don’t have with this ol’ notebook. It can just about run this analysis. It won’t have the horsepower to break a strong encryption in any reasonable length of time.”

  Jacob sighed. He should have known it wouldn’t be so easy.

  Twenty minutes passed as the diagnostic program concluded. During that time, they watched some program about Nazi aliens on the History channel. At one time he’d found this kind of thing entertaining, and intriguing enough to believe that there was a small chance of what they were saying was true. ‘No smoke without fire,’ Brian would often say about these kinds of theories.

  No one really had the heart to tell Brian that they were all bullshit regardless of any fire or smoke.

  Emma’s notebook finished running the diagnostic and bleeped a notification.

  “How’d it do?” Jacob asked, hoping it would be something that Emma would know how to crack.

  “You want the good news or bad?”

  “Go with the good.”

  “It’s definitely ciphertext and I know the encryption used.”

  “And the bad?”

  Emma sucked in her breath and let it out in a long, slow sigh. “Imagine you had a billion supercomputers at your disposal. Then imagine you had numerous billions of years handy—that’s how long it’d take to crack the encryption. It’s 256-bit AES, which as far as I know, no one has cracked yet. There were rumors from that whistleblower guy that the NSA have managed it, but as they use it for their own top-secret information, I doubt it.”

  “Well, that’s just great. So that’s it, then, the end of the line? I broke in for nothing? No one’s going to believe a blurred photo. We need hard evidence.”