Douglas Preston - Mount Dragon

No response.

“Otherwise, we’re going to have to pull those circuits manually, from the external junction. And they won’t be there when you go live again.”

A sound like a sigh came through the small speaker beside the buzzer. “Let’s see some ID.” Levine looked around, spotted a camera lens set inconspicuously above one edge of the doorframe, and angled the badge hanging from his breast pocket in its direction. As he waited, Levine wondered idly why he’d been given the name O’Roarke. He hoped to hell that a Jewish professor from Brookline could imitate a Boston Irish drawl.

There was a loud click, followed by the sound of something heavy being rolled back. The door opened and a tall man peered out, long blond curls falling onto the collar of his gray-and-blue GeneDyne uniform.

“This way,” the man said, nodding Levine inside.

Cradling his laptop carefully, Levine followed the guard down a long flight of corrugated iron stairs. From below his feet came the throaty hum of a huge generator. The concrete walls sweated in the humid air.

The guard opened a door marked AUTHORIZED ACCESS ONLY, then stood back, letting Levine enter first. Levine walked into a room crammed floor to ceiling with what he assumed to be digital switches and network relays. Banks of MAUs were arrayed in countless rows on metal racks. Although he knew that the real brain of GeneDyne—the massively-parallel supercomputer that fed the monstrous global network—was housed elsewhere, this room held the guts of the system, the Ethernet cables that allowed the building’s occupants to interconnect in one vast electronic nervous system.

Up ahead, he saw the outlines of the central relay console. Another guard was sitting at one end of the console, staring at a monitor built into its frame. He turned as Levine stepped in. “Who’s this?” he asked, frowning and looking from Levine to Weiskamp.

“Who do you think, fuckin’ Tinkerbell?” Weiskamp replied. “He’s here about the leased lines.”

“I’ve got to put a temporary terminator on them,” Levine said, placing his laptop on the terminal and scanning the complex controls for the jack Mime had told him was sure to be there.

“I never heard nothing about that,” the guard said.

“You’ve never cut them off before,” Levine retorted.

The guard mumbled something threatening about “cutting them off,” but made no move to stop him. Levine continued to scan the controls, a small warning tone sounding in his head as he did so. This second guard was trouble.

There it was: the network access port. Mime had told him the GeneDyne headquarters was so heavily networked that even the bathroom stalls sported outlet jacks for busy executives to use. Quickly, Levine turned on his laptop and connected it to the access port.

“What are you doing?” the guard at the terminal said suspiciously. He stood up and began to walk toward the laptop.

“Running the termination program,” Levine replied.

“Never seen one of you guys use a computer before,” the guard said.

Levine shrugged. “You change with the times. Now, you can just send a termination signal down the line to the control unit. Completely automatic.”

A phone-company logo popped up on the laptop screen, followed by scrolling lines of data. Despite his nervousness, Levine suppressed a smile. Mime had thought of everything. While the screen was busy displaying complicated nonsense to entertain the guards, a program of Mime’s own design was being inserted into the GeneDyne network.

“I think we’d better tell Endicott about this,” the suspicious guard said.

The alarm began to ring louder in Levine’s head.

“Put a sock in it, will you?” Weiskamp said irritably. “I’ve heard enough of your noise.”

“You know the drill, pal. Endicott is supposed to okay any maintenance work being done on the system from outside.”

The laptop chirped, and the phone company logo reappeared. Levine quickly yanked the cable out of the network jack.

“See?” Weiskamp said. “He’s done.”

“I’ll see myself out,” Levine said as the other guard reached for an internal phone. “Accounting will send a completed work order once you go back on-line.”

Levine returned to the hallway. Weiskamp had not followed him. That was good; one less role he’d have to play later on.

But that other guard, the suspicious one, was probably calling Endicott. And that was bad. If Endicott—whoever he was—decided to call the phone company and check out an employee named O’Roarke ...

At the top of the stairs, Levine turned right, then moved down a short hallway. The bank of service elevators lay directly ahead, just as Mime had assured him they would.

He entered the nearest service elevator and took it to the second floor. The door whisked open onto an entirely different world. Gone were the drab concrete spaces, the four-foot lengths of fluorescent tubes suspended from the ceilings. Instead, a plush indigo carpet rolled back from the elevator doors and along an elegant corridor. Small violet lights in the ceiling threw colored circles on the thick nap. Levine noticed large black squares lining the walls at regular intervals. He was puzzled until he realized the black squares were actually flat-panel displays, currently dark. During the day, the panels no doubt displayed digitized works of art, floor directories, stock-market quotations—almost anything imaginable.

He stepped out of the elevator, down a deserted corridor, and around another corner to the public elevators. As he pressed the Up button, a chime sounded and one of the bank of black elevator doors whispered open. Looking around one last time, he stepped in. The elevator was carpeted in the same lustrous indigo as the hallway. The side walls were lined in a light, dense wood Levine assumed was teak. The rear wall was glass, affording a spectacular pre-dawn view of Boston Harbor. Countless lights shimmered far below his feet.

Floor , please , said the elevator.

He had to work quickly now. Locating the network hub beneath the emergency telephone, he plugged his laptop into the metal receptacle. Quickly, he turned on the computer’s power and typed a short command: curtain.

He waited as Mime’s program disconnected the video feed for his elevator’s security camera, recorded ten seconds of the adjoining car’s video, and patched it in as a loop. Now the security camera would show an empty elevator: appropriate for one that was about to be placed out of service.

Floor , please , said the elevator.

Levine typed another command: cripple.

The elevator lights dimmed, then brightened again. The doors hissed shut. Levine watched the passing floors light up above the door. As the seventh floor slid by, the elevator coasted to a stop.

Attention , please , the voice announced smoothly. This elevator is out of service.

Unclipping the portable orange phone from his belt, Levine sat down, his back against the elevator door, the laptop balanced on his knees. Reaching into a pocket, he brought out the odd-looking device the hacker had given him earlier in the evening and attached it to the serial port of the computer. From one end of the device, he untelescoped a short antenna. Then he typed another command: sniff.

The screen cleared, and the response came almost immediately. My main man! I assume that all has gone well and you are now safe in the elevator, between floors seven and eight.

I’m between floors seven and eight,Levine typed back, but I’m not sure all has gone well. Somebody named Endicott may have been alerted to my presence.