“You were asking for it.” I ease the door open and slip inside, letting my eyes adjust to the darkness. Everything is bathed in a dim red glow, thanks to emergency lighting, with corridors stretching left and right, filled with the faint hum of climate control and the distant beep of machinery.
“According to the building plans Kat pulled, the server room should be on sublevel two,” Bayo says. “Take the corridor on your left, then the service stairs at the end.”
I move quickly, footsteps silent on the concrete floor. The facility has the sterile, empty feel of a place that exists only on paper, with no personal touches or signs of daily use. Whatever Global Dynamix is doing here, they don’t want anyone to know about it.
Which means it’s exactly where I need to be.
The service stairs are narrow and poorly lit. I descend two flights, pausing at each landing to listen. Nothing. Either this place is deserted, or the night shift is skeleton crew. I’m betting on the latter.
“Sublevel two,” Bayo confirms as I reach the bottom. “Server room should be through the double doors at the end of the hall.But I’m picking up heat signatures. Two, maybe three bodies. Stationary. Could be techs, could be security.”
“Could be both,” I muse.
“Aye,” he agrees. “How do you want to play it, Miss Mia?”
I consider my options. Going loud would be faster, but it would also trigger alarms, and the last thing I need is Vanguard swooping in to investigate a break-in at one of his employer’s facilities. The irony would kill.
You’d have to explain why you were there. And he’d look at you with those baby blue eyes of his and know you’d been lying to him the whole time.
I shove the thought away.
“Quiet approach,” I say. “I’ll assess when I get there.”
The corridor is long and featureless, broken only by a series of numbered doors. I press myself against the wall as I near the double doors, risking a glance through the reinforced glass window.
Three people inside: two techs in lab coats, hunched over workstations, one security guard, armed, standing by the far wall with the glazed expression of someone who’s been on shift too long and the coffee’s wearing off.
The server racks line the back wall—rows of blinking lights and humming processors. That’s my target.
“I need a distraction,” I murmur.
“Way ahead of you. Fire suppression system is networked. Give me thirty seconds, and I can trigger a localized alarm in the east wing. Should pull at least the guard.”
“Do it.”
I count the seconds, watching through the glass. At twenty-eight, a distant alarm blares—shrill and insistent. The guard straightens, speaks into his radio, then heads for the door. I flatten myself against the wall as he passes, close enough to smell his aftershave.
He doesn’t see me. They never do.
The moment he’s gone, I slip through the doors. The two techs are still focused on their screens, headphones in, oblivious. I move along the wall, keeping to the shadows, until I reach the server racks.
The device Bayo gave me is the size of a USB stick, a data siphon that can clone terabytes in minutes. I plug it into the nearest port and watch the indicator light blink from red to amber.
“Connection established,” Bayo says. “Downloading now. You’ve got about four minutes before the guard realizes the alarm was a false positive.”
Four minutes. No problem. I can work with that.
While the siphon does its job, I pull out my phone and start photographing—the server configuration, the cable routing, the labels on the equipment, every image automatically sent to Bayo. Most of it is standard corporate infrastructure, but a few things catch my eye, like a separate rack isolated from the others, cables running through a reinforced conduit in the floor. Whatever’s on those servers, it’s not connected to the main network.
“Bayo, I’ve got an air-gapped system here, separate from everything else. Do you see it?”
“Can you get physical access?”
I study the rack. Locked cabinet, biometric scanner. “Not without probably triggering something. But I can photograph the setup, maybe give the analysts something to work with?”
“Do it, but watch your time.”
I snap a series of images then notice a label on the cabinet door. Small, easy to miss. Three words that make my stomach clench even as I snap a picture:
