Perfect Dark: Second Front Page 17

  “Not Core-Mantis,” Carrington whispered, and it was clear that he was talking more to himself than to Steinberg or Grimshaw, that he was thinking aloud. “Not Core-Mantis, and there’s no gain for dataDyne, either. Yet Core-Mantis benefits. Who’s backing them? Who’s responsible?”

  Grimshaw spoke, without looking up, blurting, “Continuity.”

  The word had an immediate and electrifying effect on Carrington, made him sit bolt upright in his chair and come forward in his seat all at once. To Steinberg, who had heard Iseli mention it, the reaction was bewildering. It was as if Grimshaw had said “trout” or “mauve” or something equally nonsensical.

  “Are you sure?” Carrington said.

  Grimshaw wiped at his nose, forced himself to look up and meet his employer’s eyes, and Steinberg, out of his own periphery, saw that the fear Grimshaw had been carrying earlier now bore a striking resemblance to outright panic. The hacker nodded, then nodded again, more vigorously.

  “We recorded the conversation, we have it, I can play it for you,” Grimshaw said, and then the words started tumbling out of him in a rush. “Jo asked her who was behind it, who was doing it, and Iseli, she said ‘The Continuity’ and then we lost the rest of it, because there was an incoming transmission from CMO direct to Iseli, they were warning her that dataDyne was on the ground and Iseli responded but we heard it, boss, we—”

  “Play it for me,” Carrington snapped, pulling himself from his seat by the edge of his desk, grabbing his walking stick once more.

  Grimshaw balked, then lurched forward, taking the vacated seat. He searched for a moment for a means to switch on the interface projector, then realized that Carrington was old-fashioned enough to still be using a standard computer keyboard.

  The sounds of the café in Veracruz filtered into the room, surrounding Steinberg, the audio fully three-dimensional and immersive, even with the static and distortion from the hacked feed. Murmured voices speaking in Spanish, barely audible, and the sound of crockery clinking together.

  Then Joanna’s voice, as if she were standing just within Steinberg’s reach, her peculiar mutt of an accent gentle, even if her tone was insistent.

  “You know who it was, though. Don’t you?”

  Iseli’s answer came as if she was standing behind him. “I have a very strong suspicion, yes.”

  “Tell me.”

  There was a pause, a rise in the ambient noise before it fell away again as the audio stream in the ThroatLink compensated for Iseli’s voice.

  “The Continuity.”

  Grimshaw was staring at Carrington, where the big man now stood beside his desk, leaning on his walking stick, his eyes closed. If he had a reaction to the words, Steinberg missed it.

  “The who?”

  “The Continuity, Joanna …”

  A new voice broke in, another woman’s, the sound fully immersive, surrounding Steinberg but oddly modulated, as if layering itself between the ambient sound of the café and Iseli’s voice.

  “Xiphos Command, Molpadia Alpha, confirm,” the woman said.

  “Alpha, I’ve asked not to be interrupt—”

  “Molpadia Alpha, be advised, dataDyne assassination forces confirmed converging on your location. We are en route, ETA two m—”

  “That’s enough,” Carrington said, and the sounds surrounding them disappeared, and the office fell into silence once more. Carrington planted his stick, then used it to help him make his way to the windows at the wall opposite his desk. The glass registered his approach, shifted from translucent to opaque. Outside, the lights on the Institute remained predominantly dark, and the light dome thrown into the sky by London was all the more vibrant as a result. Steinberg had to resist the urge to tell the Old Man that maybe standing that close to a window wasn’t a good idea, given the circumstances. Then again, if the Continuity—whoever the hell they were—were to attack them with something that could penetrate the reinforced concrete and ballistic multilayered glass, where any of them stood in the room wouldn’t much matter.

  Still seated at Carrington’s desk, Grimshaw spoke, his voice subdued. “It makes sense, now. Doesn’t it? If it’s the Continuity, if they … if they’re real, then it all makes sense.”

  “They’re real, Grim,” Carrington said. “They’ve always been real.”

  Steinberg watched as Grimshaw visibly shivered.

  “What the hell is the Continuity?” Steinberg asked.

  Neither Grimshaw nor Carrington immediately answered. Standing at the window, the Old Man closed his eyes, his brow furrowing, and for several moments remained that way, long enough that Steinberg began to wonder if he’d even been heard. But before he could ask his question again, Carrington spoke up.

  “We’re going offline,” he declared. “The whole of the Institute, every campus.”

  Technophobe though he was, Steinberg found himself stunned with the enormity of the declaration. “You can’t be serious.”

  “No, it’s the only choice we have.” Carrington pivoted on his stick, turning to back to them. “If the system’s been compromised, we must take steps.”

  “I’m not the tech guy, I know that, but I also know that taking the whole network offline while we’re under siege is pretty much handing the keys over to dataDyne or whoever it is we’re facing.”

  “Then console yourself with the fact that it isn’t, at least for the moment, dataDyne that is our problem.” Carrington moved to the desk, putting his attention on Grimshaw. “Get to the Ops Center, have Communications send a flash signal to all campuses, director eyes only, most secret and immediate precedence, on my authorization, understood? You’re going to need to coordinate with all of them, Grim, every campus, every machine. I want then all offline, and then I want them purged.”

  Grimshaw looked like he was going to be ill. “Even the optical?”

  “Especially the optical, Grim. Then find yourself a clean machine—and I mean a clean one—and start coding. We need a bot and we need it fast, something we can get to every campus that they can introduce into their systems to sniff out any unauthorized codes, snappers, traps, or bombs. It has to be a damn good one, you understand me, lad? It has to be the best bot you’ve ever coded, because if just one line of Continuity survives this and we reinitialize the network, we’ll be even worse off than we are now.”

  “We take the network down, how are we going to distribute the ’bot?” Grimshaw asked.

  Carrington motioned with his head toward Steinberg. “Hand delivery. Now go. I’ll want to see your work in three hours.”

  Grimshaw nodded, rising hastily, and literally ran from the room.

  Carrington was looking at Steinberg, his expression unreadable.

  “What’s the Continuity? What the hell is going on?”

  Carrington moved away from the desk, settled himself heavily onto one of the couches in his office. He shifted the stick from his left to his right hand, set it to lean beside him.

  “Is Joanna alive?” he asked.

  “My gut says yes, absolutely,” Steinberg answered without hesitating. “You want facts, I’ve got none for you, and with the network going down, I’m not going to be able to get you any without heading to Mexico myself.”

  “You’re staying here.”

  “If she’s hurt—”

  “Then she’ll have to deal with it herself. We have other problems, Jon, and on a much grander scale.”

  “I understand that, I’ve got that, even if I don’t know the how or the why of it. Are you going to tell me what the Continuity is, Daniel, or do I have to chase down Grim and beat it out of him?”

  The Old Man ran a hand over his beard, scratched at his chin. “Information warfare isn’t nearly as new a concept as many people would like to believe, Jonathan. While people like yourself go out and pound the ground, as you’re so fond of saying, there have always been others seeking to intercept, corrupt, and destroy the flow of information on a battlefield.”

  “Yes, it’s called
espionage.”

  “No,” Carrington raised a finger, admonishing. “Not like this. This is more than that, Jonathan. As our world has become more networked, more dependent on machines and computers to relay commands, so to has the art of war. DataDyne’s playbook doesn’t begin with an information attack because it’s easy or because it’s convenient. It begins with one because it’s necessary for anything else to follow. You strike the brain, and thus leave the heart exposed and unable to defend itself.”

  “They’re hackers.”

  “Of a sort, but the word in this case is misleading, because it implies a dilettante’s devotion to the art that fails to recognize the true threat, and because it implies an amateurish status. The Continuity, as I understand it, grows out of a Chinese military defense strategy established about twenty years ago, a team of experts who were devoted to information disruption and system corruption. They were called Titan Rain, amongst other things.”

  “Never heard of them.”

  “Few people did, much more’s the pity. The Continuity arises out of them, but not from them, because unlike Titan Rain, the Continuity is a dataDyne product, in the same way that, say, Mai Hem and Friedrich Murray were dataDyne products. What little is known—and very little is known, Jon, the information I have is more supposition and rumor than fact—is that during the early teens, Zhang Li made a concerted effort to seek out and recruit the best and brightest of the new wave of hackers.”

  “Hackers? Not programmers?”

  Carrington nodded slightly in approval. “Yes, it’s a significant distinction. Hackers are, for the most part, a young group, they’re not tempered by the social restraint and mores that maturity brings to bear. A programmer, you put up a sign reading ‘do not enter,’ they’ll abide by it; a hacker will look for the quickest way inside. Grim’s the same, and I believe it’s a result of his age as much as his intellect.

  “Zhang Li, reportedly, believed it as well. He went young. He went as young as he could. In many cases he purchased children outright from their families, or acquired them in other ways, and he secreted them away somewhere—no one knows where—and indulged them. Created a fantasy world for these children where their every desire was fulfilled, where their whims were answered without pause, hesitation, or reproach. The only discipline was the one he imposed, as was the only praise. He was their Santa Claus, and he was their Fagin.

  “And in exchange for this, they were his Titan Rain. You remember the Karatakus tanker disaster in Singapore, back in 2012?”

  Steinberg nodded. “Liquid natural-gas tanker smashed into the harbor and exploded.”

  “Nearly a quarter of a million people dead,” Carrington said. “That was the Continuity, Jon. They took control not only of the tanker’s guidance system, but also the port and emergency response networks. They piloted the ship in at thirty-three knots.”

  “Why?”

  “Two reasons, as I understand it. The Karatakus was owned by Gardener-Jordan LNG, and dataDyne had been looking to acquire the concern for quite some time, at that point, to no avail. That quickly changed in the wake of the crash.”

  “And the second reason?” Steinberg asked, even though he had a sickening feeling he already knew the answer.

  “Because they could, Jon.”

  “I was afraid you’d say that.”

  Carrington looked to the door, the way Grimshaw had gone minutes earlier. “Grim’s one of the best I’ve ever encountered. He’s better than me, an accolade I do not hand out lightly, and he’s almost as good as Cassandra DeVries, who is, without a doubt, the most gifted programmer I have ever met in a very long life with computers.”

  The Old Man settled his gaze back on Steinberg.

  “Believe me when I say they make all three of us together look like children playing with counting sticks, Jon. If the system can be accessed, they can access it, it’s honestly as simple as that. We’ve been wondering how Zentek fell so quickly, how it is that Beck-Yama is only hours away from becoming another subsidiary of CMO, this is how. The Continuity, Jon. They got inside each, they’ve been feeding information to CMO.”

  “But they’re dataDyne’s—”

  Carrington shook his head, almost angrily. “No, no they’re not, Jon, you’re not listening to me. If what I’ve heard is true, they’re Zhang Li’s, and that’s very different, because Zhang Li is dead, and they know that. Their loyalty was to him and only him. While they still may serve dataDyne, it’s only due to deference to Zhang Li’s memory, no other reason.”

  “Iseli said the Continuity was responsible for impersonating Jo. That doesn’t sound like the group you’re describing.”

  “Perhaps.” Carrington frowned, then used his stick to get to his feet. “It doesn’t matter. Joanna’s problems are separate from our own. She did her job.”

  “Meaning she did exactly what you wanted her to do.”

  “I sense the note of disapproval in your voice.” Carrington stopped by the door, waiting for Steinberg to join him. “Let’s get moving. When the network goes down we’re going to be like a baby in a crib, and I want to make certain no wolf comes knocking at the gate. Double the perimeter guard, and get one of the dropships up for overflight, with the others on standby.”

  “Why do you manipulate her like this?” Steinberg asked. “When you could have simply told her what it is you wanted her to do? You know she would have done it, she would have done it without hesitating.”

  “Do you truly think so?” Carrington asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Then you’ll forgive me for saying this, Jonathan, but you don’t know Joanna as well as you think.”

  “Or maybe you don’t.”

  That gave Carrington pause, but only for a moment.

  “Assuming she gets back alive,” he said, “one of us can ask her.”

  dataDyne Executive Safehouse

  37km ENE of Nelson, New Zealand

  January 25th, 2021

  “Entirely unacceptable,” Cassandra told Anita Velez, furiously. “Entirely and absolutely unacceptable.”

  Velez didn’t speak, the line of her mouth so tight that she’d driven the blood from her already pale lips.

  “Twelve of our people—of my people—dead,” Cassandra said, coming around the desk in her temporary office. She could feel herself shaking even as she moved, as if the fury she was feeling had invested every cell of her body.

  Velez didn’t move, not even to track her approach.

  “Twelve more dataDyne employees,” Cassandra said, moving in front of her, lowering her voice. “With mothers and fathers and sons and daughters and lovers and friends, and they’re dead, Anita. Lying on rooftops and in alleyways in Veracruz, Mexico. Lying with bullet holes through their chests and shrapnel through their brains and their limbs broken and their blood shed. Lying in Core-Mantis OmniGlobal–controlled territory, so we can’t even get their bodies back.”

  She fell silent for a moment, feeling her heart pounding in her chest.

  “And for what?” Cassandra added, quietly. “For nothing, Anita. For nothing at all.”

  Velez stayed silent.

  “You may speak.”

  Velez glanced from the middle-distance, met Cassandra’s eyes, then looked away again. “I accept full responsibility for the failure of the operation, Madame Director.”

  “You bloody well should. How could it have gone so wrong, Anita? How in the world did this happen?”

  “We made a tactical error.”

  “ ‘We’?”

  “Director Mack and myself,” Velez said. “We correctly identified the CMO response team’s point of origin, but not its approach vector. As a result, the extraction vehicle for the dataDyne team was not properly staged to provide stand-off cover.”

  “Where is Director Mack now?”

  “I believe he is preparing his resignation, Madame Director.”

  Cassandra turned away from Velez, back toward her desk. Message indicators blinked on her screen, thre
e of them already marked as urgent, another six upgrading to immediate. She put a hand to her forehead, tried to massage out the tension headache that was squeezing her temples as if they were held in a set of oversized pliers.

  “Who will you replace him with?” Cassandra asked.

  “Madame Director?”

  She turned back to look at Velez, saw that the woman still hadn’t moved, and waved a hand at her, dismissing the pose. Velez relaxed almost reluctantly. “Who are you replacing Mack with?” Cassandra repeated.

  “That will be your decision, Madame Director, not mine.”

  “It’s your division, it’s CORPSEC.”

  “The director of counterintelligence operations must be appointed by the CEO, Madame Director.”

  “As if I don’t have enough to do? Who came up with that damn rule?”

  “Master Li, Madame Director.”

  “Why the hell did he do that?”

  “To prevent CORPSEC from gaining power to such an extent that the division might subvert or otherwise take over the corporation.”

  Cassandra stared at Velez, blinked. “He was afraid of a coup?”

  “Master Li was … a cautious man.”

  He was a bloody loon, Cassandra DeVries thought.

  “Fine, wonderful. And I suppose under that logic it would make no sense at all for me to consult you regarding the filling of the position, correct? Even though it’s your area of expertise and not my own.”

  “That is correct, Madame Director.”

  “Fine.” Cassandra took her chair, reached for her mug of coffee, and found the contents cold. She set the mug back down. “And in the meantime, Joanna Dark and her friends at CMO are still out there, still determining how best to murder me.”

  “We will reacquire the target, Madame Director, I assure you.” Velez spoke with almost uncharacteristic softness. “We will reacquire the target, and I will personally make certain that neither she, nor anyone else, poses a threat to you or dataDyne.”

  “You’re going to do it yourself, is that it, Anita?”

  Velez met her eyes again, this time holding the look. “If you will permit me to continue as your director of corporate security, Madame Director, I swear I will.”