Chapter 18 Jackson
EIGHTEEN
Jackson
THE ARCHITECT
“We can’t hold this,” I say. “If they send a squad down that corridor, we have no cover.”
“We need time,” Talia says, moving toward the central terminal. “The upload isn’t instant. The Root Seed needs to handshake with the kernel.”
I pull a block of C4 from my vest. “I can buy time.”
“You’re going to blow it?” She looks back, eyes wide.
“Contingencies.” I start jamming the putty into the locking mechanism and the heavy hinges. “I’m prepping it. If we get overrun, I fuse the door. Seal us in.”
“That traps us.”
“It keeps them out. It buys you the minutes you need.” I look at her. “Once this door is rigged, it’s your game. I defend. You hunt.”
She holds my gaze for a second, then nods. A sharp, decisive movement.
“Understood.”
I finish setting the charge and turn to watch her.
She drops her bag at the terminal. It’s a fortress of a computer—no USB ports, no external drives. Just a biometric scanner glowing red.
“Obstacle one,” she mutters. “Air-gapped. Halo,” she says into the comms. “I need a physical tap. I’m using your kit.”
“Roger that, Singh,” Halo says. “You need the bypass module. It looks like a black deck of cards with alligator clips. Hook it to the data bus behind the maintenance panel.”
I watch her work. She kneels under the console, popping the panel with a screwdriver from the kit. Wires spill out like colorful guts. She doesn’t hesitate. She strips the insulation, attaches the clips, and bridges the connection. Her hands are steady.
I feel a surge of something hot and bright in my chest. Pride. She’s not a tourist here. She’s an operator. She belongs.
The screens above her flicker. A command prompt appears.
SYSTEM LOCKOUT. BIOMETRIC REQUIRED.
“It’s asking for a print,” Talia says. “Standard encryption keeps shifting.”
“Feed it a loop,” Halo advises. “Use the loop script I loaded onto the module. It mimics the last authorized user.”
“Running it.” She types furiously.
The screen flashes red. ACCESS DENIED.
“It’s adaptive,” she says, frustration creeping into her voice. “It’s fighting the loop.”
“Breathe,” I say. “You got this.”
She takes a breath. “It wants a heartbeat. It’s checking for liveness.” She types a new command. “Simulating pulse variance—now.”
HANDSHAKE ACCEPTED.
The red screen turns green.
“I’m in,” she breathes.
“Good girl.”
She plugs the Root Seed—Vargas’s titanium brick—into the interface she just built. The drive hums as it powers up.
INITIATING ROOT ACCESS …
A progress bar appears. 1%. 2%.
It’s crawling.
“It’s slow,” she says. “The architecture is ancient. It has to translate the kill code into a language the modern kernel understands.”
“How long?”
“Ten minutes. Maybe fifteen.”
“Movement in the elevator shaft,” Whisper’s voice cuts in, calm and detached. “They’re rappelling down the service shaft. Three teams. Heavy armor.”
“They’re coming,” I say.
“I can’t make it go faster,” Talia says, her eyes glued to the screen. “But while it uploads … I’m in the file structure. I can see the logs.”
“Find the head,” I say. “Find out who pulls the strings.”
She dives into the data. I stand guard at the door, watching the empty corridor, waiting for the inevitable violence. Behind me, the rapid clack-clack-clack of her typing is the only sound over the server hum.
“I found Reed,” she says. “User ID: A_REED. He authorizes every kill.”
“We knew that.”
“But he reports to someone. Encrypted node.” She types faster. “Tracing the routing headers … Pentagon encryption standards … Match found.”
She stops typing.
“Jackson.”
I turn. Her face is pale in the blue light of the monitors.
“It goes to the top. The Admiral. I have a name.”
“Give it to me.”
“Harrison Cole.”
The name hits me like a physical blow. “The Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs? He retired two years ago.”
“He didn’t retire. He took Phoenix private. He’s sitting on the board of Nexus Holdings.”
“Contact,” Whisper says. “They’re on your floor. Breach imminent.”
I see movement at the far end of the corridor. Shadows detaching from shadows. Laser sights cutting through the gloom.
“Talia,” I say calmly. “Is the upload running?”
“40%. It needs more time.”
“We’re out of time.”
I step back inside the room and grab the detonator.
“Ghost,” I say. “Hostiles at the door. I’m sealing the breach.”
“Do it,” Ghost says. “We’ll dig you out when the dust settles.”
I look at the Phoenix squad rushing the door. They’re setting up a breaching charge of their own.
“Not today,” I whisper.
I trigger the detonator.
BOOM.
The explosion isn’t a shattering blast; it’s a shaping charge. It liquefies the hinges and the locking mechanism, fusing the heavy steel door to the frame in a twisted, molten scar.
The concussion knocks the Phoenix team back; their own breaching charges are useless against a door that is now part of the wall.
Dust rains from the ceiling.
“We’re sealed,” I say.
Talia looks at the door, then at me. “You trapped us.”
“I bought us a fortress.” I move to her side. “Now finish it.”
She turns back to the screen. “60%. Almost … I need to secure this evidence. I’m copying the Admiral’s directory to the drive.”
Suddenly, she freezes.
“The cursor stopped.”
I look at the screen. The upload bar is frozen at 62%.
A message flashes on the center screen.
REMOTE SESSION DETECTED. USER: A_REED.
“Someone’s in the system,” she says. “Reed. He’s on the Executive Floor. He sees the intrusion.”
The progress bar starts to tick backward. 61%. 60%.
“He’s purging the upload,” she shouts. “He’s fighting me.”
“Fight back.”
A second explosion rocks the door behind me. The metal buckles inward. They are cutting through.
She types furiously. “I’m trying to reroute … He’s cutting off the nodes. He’s cutting off the limbs to save the body. Anticipating my commands before I execute them.”
“Fix it.”
“I am. I’m rerouting through the cooling system protocols.”
The bar stops falling. Holds at 60%.
“You want to play?” she mutters, a manic edge in her voice. “Let’s play.”
She floods the terminal with commands. The bar ticks up. 63%. 65%.
The door behind me glows cherry red. Sparks shower onto the floor.
“Halo.” I bark. “Status on extraction.”
“Torque is two minutes out. He’s bringing the wall down.”
“Wall?”
“Loading dock wall. Be ready to run.”
“80%,” Talia yells. “Almost there.”
The screens flicker.
All three monitors go black.
The hum of the room changes. The pitch drops, deepening into a subsonic growl that vibrates in my chest.
“What happened?” I ask, weapon raised, though there is nothing to shoot.
The screens flare to life. Not the command prompt. Not the file directory.
A single, pulsing eye. A geometric avatar of shifting fractals.
The text appears, typing itself across the screen, character by character.
UNAUTHORIZED HARDWARE DETECTED.
ANALYZING ROOT SEED.
THREAT ASSESSMENT: CRITICAL.
“It’s not Reed,” Talia whispers, stepping back. “It’s the AI. It woke up.”
The progress bar vanishes.
ISOLATING THREAT.
The lights in the room turn red. A siren begins to wail, a deafening shriek.
“It’s locking us out!” Talia yells over the noise. “It’s rewriting the port protocols to reject the hardware.” Her fingers fly across the keyboard. “I can’t out-code it. It thinks in nanoseconds.”
Talia stares at the screen.
99%.
ACCESS DENIED.
The text turns red.
Angry.
“No,” she whispers. “The AI blocked the final packet. It caught the bullet just before it hit the brain.”
PERIMETER brEACH.
INITIATING LOCKDOWN.
The lights die completely, leaving us in the dark with the pulsing red eye of the machine.
We are trapped. The upload failed.
And the killer is in the room with us.