Chapter 6 - CIPHER IN THE SMOKE
“We can’t blow the door!” Major Reynolds yelled over the blaring siren. “The blast will detonate the thermite charges instantly!”
“Stand back!” I shouted.
I dropped to my knees in front of the terminal box beside the vault door. My hands were trembling, but my mind snapped into the hyper-focused clarity that had kept me alive during eleven years of auditing corporate cartels. I ripped the plastic maintenance cover off the cryptographic terminal, exposing the tangled nest of fiber-optic cables and bus lines.
I plugged my diagnostic tablet directly into the terminal’s mother-bus, bypassing the user interface.
*ACCESS DENIED — ADMINISTRATIVE PRIVILEGES REQUIRED.*
“Eighty seconds!” Hart called out, watching the digital countdown display on the wall.
“Vance used a rotating cipher based on the 1996 Procurement Reform Act,” I muttered under my breath, my fingers flying across the virtual keyboard. “He always used bureaucratic statutory codes because he believed nobody outside his inner circle ever read the fine print.”
I typed in the master override sequence: *USC-TITLE10-SEC2302-OVERRIDE.*
The screen flashed: *INPUT SECONDARY BIOMETRIC IDENTIFIER.*
“Damn it!” Reynolds cursed. “We don’t have Vance’s thumbprint here!”
“We don’t need his thumbprint,” I said, pulling up the digital hash file I had lifted from Sloane’s decrypted mobile terminal. “His biometric signature was cached in the local authentication handshake when he signed off on the Fort Meade burn order this morning!”
I injected the captured cryptographic hash into the data stream.
The screen flickered. A soft click echoed from inside the heavy mechanism, followed by the heavy, mechanical thud of six steel deadbolts retracting.
*ACCESS GRANTED. VAULT OPEN.*
Hart and Reynolds threw their shoulders against the massive steel door, forcing it open.
A thick cloud of white smoke and halon gas billowed out into our faces. Coughing violently, pulling my jacket collar over my mouth and nose, I stumbled into the server room.
Directly in the center of the room sat the master rack—a monolithic black tower pulsing with blue LEDs. Mounted right above the primary drive bay, a red warning flare hissed, heating up the magnetic thermite canister. The metal casing was already turning cherry-red.
“Dr. Mercer, get back! It’s going to ignite!” Hart shouted, lunging forward to pull me away.
“No! If we lose this drive, we lose the country!”
I grabbed an emergency CO2 fire extinguisher mounted on the wall, slammed the safety pin out, and blasted the freezing white fog directly onto the thermite housing. The sudden thermal shock hissed violently, wrapping the room in a cloud of vapor. The red glow dulled to black.
With seconds to spare before the system’s automated wipe script completed, I grabbed the drive bay handle, wrenched the locking lever upward, and ripped the master cold-storage drive out of the rack.
The digital countdown hit zero. The remaining secondary drives in the room sparked, clicked, and went completely dark as their memory chips fried.
I stood in the smoky room, clutching the freezing, heavy drive against my chest, coughing through the haze.
Major Reynolds stared at me in stunned silence.
General Hart walked over, looked down at the drive in my hands, and let out a long breath. “Did we get it?”
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I wiped the cold condensation from the serial number on the drive casing. “We got everything. The foreign bank routing numbers, the shell companies, the names of every senator, general, and contractor on the payroll.”
Hart offered a rare, faint smile. “Then let’s go show Congress what an unapproved audit looks like.”
