The hairs on the back of my neck stood up, whether from fear or from caffeine overdose I couldn't be sure. I frowned doubtfully. "But the dossier said there were armed guards and barbed wire all around--"
"Say no more!" the old man cut me off, "We're going in through the net -- that's your specialty inn't?" He turned to me, as if accusing me of being less competent than I remembered myself being from my spy days, fifteen years ago.
"Well, uh, of course. I just thought with the pickup truck you meant--"
He rolled his eyes. Clearly he felt he had no more time to waste on fools, and I was dangerously close to being in that category. As the truck bounced over the Canadian roadways, he worked a panel on the dashboard, and some kind of network port opened up. "You brought your laptop and the Illiad data files, right?"
"Uh, yeah, how'd you--"
"Plug it in and we'll get to work. With the access codes in that source dump, we can infiltrate their top-secret ARS system and know what they're up to in there before we go blazing in." He glanced as his watch for a millisecond as he dodged oncoming traffic. "We've got 6 minutes and fifteen seconds, get hackin'."
I jacked in the machine, popped in the CD with the stolen data, and started grepping for ARS. Thanks to a combination of misconfigured server software on Hypermegadatadyne's systems and the power outage, I was able to recover their private keys from a swap file. A quick connection via our secret MI12 wireless satellite broadband 'net connection, and we were into the sixth-level secret section of the ARS system.
Two minutes to go. I was about to click Building Security Preferences, when a name caught my eye in the top-level thread list. It was ________________________! |
