CHAPTER 22 #2
He put his hand at her nape while he taped the compress. He did not say anything. She sat still. The braid was warm under his palm and her pulse was in the skin below his thumb and it was steady. He counted three of its beats and took his hand away.
The handheld clicked. Havlin’s voice was a beat sharper than she had let herself be with an intruder still in the corridor. “The vault interface is throwing corruption on every sector I ping. I can see the drive. I can’t read it, and it isn’t the drive.”
Elias tightened the tape once and stood. Mara slid off the table before he had finished the last wrap.
The vault stairwell dropped seventeen steps below the operations wing.
Concrete. No rail on the wall side. LED strips at ankle height.
He took it in front of her because the corridor ran narrow that way.
She came behind him with one sleeve rolled once above the compress and the tablet in her right hand and her left arm held slightly out from her body.
He heard her breath on the sixth step and on the twelfth step and it was even.
The vault door recognized his palm and opened at 05:41.
Havlin was already at the terminal, her braid across her shoulder as she leaned into the console.
Cool air off the biometric server rack. The RAID sat behind its own steel cage inside the shielded alcove — matte black, hand-marked R7-M.V.
09/09 in Mara’s own capitals. Its status LED glowed steady green.
The interface glowed too. Every sector Havlin pinged came back the same — an unbroken lattice of read errors that looked wrong to Elias without his knowing quite why they looked wrong. Havlin looked up.
Mara stepped past him. She put the tablet down on the console and used her right hand to scroll the log. Her left hovered at her side, half-lifted, the way a hand hovers when its owner is thinking about it. She read for eleven seconds. Elias watched her count them because he was counting them too.
“They didn’t take it,” Mara said, when she saw the interface. “They trapped it.”
Havlin did not lift her eyes from the console. “Talk me through what you’re seeing.”
“Encryption injection above the file table,” Mara said.
“They pushed a shell layer between the drive and the reader. The data is still there. The read heads are still spinning. The system just can’t get through to the sectors.
It’s a lock, not a theft. If we were reading a stolen drive we would be reading zeros. We are reading errors.”
She said it out loud because she wanted the distinction on the record. Elias marked it. Havlin marked it. Reyn, coming down the stair behind them with the coffee, marked it.
“How long?” Elias said.
“Hours, not days,” Mara said. “If we start now.”
She turned her left arm and looked at the bandage and set the arm down along her side again.
She was already thinking two moves ahead.
He could see it in the angle of her shoulder.
She reached for the tablet with her right hand and her thumb was already moving on the screen before he had drawn a breath to answer her.
He held the answer back. He would give it in a minute.
He looked at the RAID first. Seven terabytes of Whitcomb Fault data on a titanium-shelled brick behind a steel cage behind a biometric door, and every wire in and out of it running through his own compound.
He had built the vault to hold this drive.
He had built the ridge to hold this vault.
He had picked this ridge, six years ago, because the ground under it did not move and the sightlines above it were clean, and he had bought the airspace out to two miles because he did not like surprises coming in low.
Cross had come in low anyway. Cross had known where the fourth line was. Cross had known which safe held the decoy and which door led to the vault. Cross had also, for one soft-edged second on a compromised radio, sounded like a man with a sister.
Elias set that beside the drawer with Kwan and the callsign. He would open both later. He would open neither now.
Havlin’s fingers moved across the terminal, and the read errors kept coming back the same, and above the terminal the alcove light held the RAID in a cold even glow.
Mara had already tucked her tablet against her ribs and pulled the console keyboard toward her right hand.
Her left arm was still down along her side, weight off it, but her eyes were moving across the log the way a surgeon’s eyes moved across a field.
She had a way in. He could see her finding it in the tilt of her mouth.
Hours, not days. She had said the word start and she had meant it.
Havlin shifted a fraction of an inch on the console bench to make room for her without being asked.
He was going to need to give the compound a reason to hold for the length of time it took a woman with six stitches in her arm to unlock a drive Cross had bricked. He was going to give it that reason. He would give it a lot more than that.
Behind the biometric lock the drive glowed steady and useless, and Elias thought, for the first time in six years, that his ground had grown teeth he had not planned for.