The Cyclops Initiative (19 page)

As soon as she was gone Top leaned back over the table and stared at Chapel wide-­eyed. “And that means you need to rob a bank?” he asked.

SOUTH HILLS, PA: MARCH 22, 18:38

“We're not going to rob one,” Chapel said. “Just break into one. We need the biggest, fastest computer we can get and banks have those. I know it sounds crazy, but we've worked it out as best we can. There's a bank branch about twenty miles from here, one that's not going to have much security after hours. We get in, Angel uses their computers for a ­couple of minutes, and then we leave.”

“Security,” Top said, frowning. “I know something about you, Captain Chapel. I know what kind of training they gave you in Ranger school. You can get past alarms and whatever, sure. But I'm guessing they won't make it that easy. There's no bank I ever heard of didn't have an armed guard sitting by the door all night.”

Chapel nodded. “Right. But in Ranger school they taught me how to deal with guards, as well. That's one reason I'm telling you all this. I need your help. I don't plan on hurting anybody—­I hope you know me that well. But I'm going to have to convince any security guards to stand down.”

“You might try that winning smile of yours,” Top suggested.

“I need you to loan me a gun,” Chapel said.

Top pushed back from the table, shaking his head. He got up and went over to the counter and started putting away the groceries Dolores had left there. “Not going to happen,” he said.

Chapel got up and moved over to his side. “I'm serious about not hurting anybody. Give me a pistol with no clip, if you have to. Give me an old handgun that doesn't even fire anymore. I need this, Top.”

“Son,” Top said, not looking at him. “You think I would say no, now? After that fine speech I gave you about my dog? No, I'd give you a rocket launcher if I had one, because I know who you are and I know you'd do the right thing with it. But I can't give you a gun tonight. For the simple reason I don't have one.”

He turned and faced Chapel eye to eye. “I got a house here full of highly trained men and women with anger issues, with night terrors, with PTSD coming out both pant legs. Some of whom are what you might call a high suicide risk. You understand that? You think I would bring a firearm within five miles of this place?”

Chapel leaned hard against the counter. This was a real problem. There was no way he could break into a bank without some kind of weapon. The guards would just open fire the second they saw him. One thing he'd definitely learned in Ranger school was that an unarmed man facing a man with a gun was always going to lose.

“Damn,” Chapel said. He glanced into the living room and saw Angel watching him from her chair. She needed him. He was going to save her, but that meant getting her into a bank. “If I had any better ideas . . .”

As if to underscore his predicament, the noise from the living room rose to a sustained pitch just then. Ralph must have been taking on a Nazi pillbox with a machine gun, judging by the sound.

Chapel tried to think of what to say next, what to do next, but the noise of the game just seemed to rattle around inside his head. He was surprised when Angel jumped up out of her chair and ran toward the television. Was she going to ask Ralph to mute the sound? That might be helpful, or—­

He heard her talking to Ralph in the other room. He couldn't hear the reply, but she was asking him about his video-­game console, about what generation it was and whether he had a certain accessory for it. Chapel had never had any interest in such things and wasn't sure what she was talking about.

When she poked her head back into the kitchen, though, her eyes were bright. “Um, excuse me,” she said. “Can I say something?”

“Of course,” Chapel told her. “What is it?”

“I think I just had one of those better ideas.”

PITTSBURGH, PA: MARCH 22, 23:31

They drove past the big box store three times, just to make sure it was as deserted as it appeared. It sat well back from the road, at the far end of a well-­lit but empty parking lot, surrounded on three sides by thick stands of trees. The big sign out front that read
CIRCUIT BARN
was lit up, but metal security gates had been pulled down across the plateglass windows that fronted the store and it looked like there were no lights on inside. Chapel had kept an eye out for police cars or any sign that someone was watching the store, but he'd seen nothing.

“You really think this'll work?” Julia asked.

Chapel shrugged. “I think we can get inside without setting off any alarms, yeah. I figure in a neighborhood like this they probably don't worry too much about robberies, so they're not likely to have a lot of security cameras. I think we're good.”

“I was actually asking Angel, about her side of this,” Julia said.

Chapel turned around to look at Angel in the backseat. She nodded.

“Good enough,” he said.

He parked Top's car outside a Chinese restaurant a block away. The three of them headed around behind the restaurant and then made their way through the trees that screened the Circuit Barn lot. There was a chain-­link fence back there, about six feet high, installed so long ago that tree branches had woven through the gaps between the chain. There was no barbed wire on top of the fence, so it was easy enough to climb up and over.

On the far side, still inside the cover of the trees, he gestured for the two women to wait a minute. He studied the back side of the Circuit Barn and saw about what he'd expected to find, a place for Dumpsters and a loading dock where trucks could bring in the store's merchandise. The loading dock had a big rolling door, but he knew that would be hooked up to the store's alarms. Another, smaller door opened into a patch of weeds strewn with old cigarette butts and decaying coffee cups. He guessed that was where the store's employees took their breaks. That was their way in.

He took one last glance around for security cameras, just in case, but he didn't see any. Then he waved Julia and Angel forward, and the three of them gathered around the employee door.

“There's almost certainly an alarm on this door,” Chapel said, “so we'll need to be careful, but—­”

Angel squatted down next to the door lock and pointed a little flashlight into the crack between the door and its frame. “Anybody have a stick of gum?” she asked.

“I do,” Julia said, looking surprised. She rummaged in her purse, then handed the gum to Angel.

The younger woman unwrapped the gum. She handed the stick back to Julia but kept the foil wrapper. “Give me that screwdriver,” she said, and Chapel handed her the flathead driver he'd brought.

For a minute Angel worked at the door, carefully folding the foil wrapper into just the right shape and then wedging it into the doorframe with the blade of the screwdriver. “The way the alarm works is there's a wire in the door and a wire in the frame, and when they meet, an electric current flows between them. If you open the door, you break that current and the system knows the door is open, so it sounds the alarm. Then there's another pair of wires for the lock. Same basic principle, but in reverse—­if the current is flowing, the door stays locked, but if the current is broken, it unlocks automatically. The foil in there now will send current from the alarm wire to the lock wire so both systems think they're intact when in fact,” she said, and pulled the door open, “neither of them are.”

Chapel peered into the darkness behind the open door. “Where did you learn how to do this?” he asked.

Angel laughed. “Sugar, I spend all day, every day on the Internet. You get bored, you start looking at random pages. You pick up a few things.”

Julia shot a look at Chapel and mouthed the word
sugar
. He shrugged in response. Angel had called him that a million times before when he was on a mission. Just never face-­to-­face before.

“Okay,” he said. “We're in. Let me go first.” He ducked inside, into a stockroom, where only a single bulb burned in the ceiling high overhead. He took in the rows of shelves holding boxed electronics, but just then he had other things to worry about. Moving quickly but silently he worked his way through an employee break room, the management offices, and then out onto the sales floor, where hundreds of television sets stared blankly back at him. There was no sign anywhere of a night watchman, no sign that anybody had been inside the store since it closed for the day.

When he was sure of it, he let himself breathe again. Then he headed back to where the women were still standing outside. “We're good,” he told them. He took a prepaid cell phone out of his pocket and handed it to Julia. He showed her how to switch on its walkie-­talkie mode, then turned on a second one for himself. “You're standing guard,” he said.

Julia nodded. “Anything I'm looking for in particular?”

“Just let us know if you see anything at all. If anybody pulls into the lot, if somebody starts looking at our car, if you hear anything—­just let me know. Angel, you're with me.”

The two of them crept inside. Angel headed down the rows of shelving units in the stockroom, running her finger along the rows of boxes. Chapel winced, thinking of all the fingerprints she was leaving behind. He knew that was the least of their problems, though—­breaking and entering was a much less serious crime than treason.

It didn't take her long to find what she needed. “Over here,” she said.

Chapel came to stand next to her. He saw immediately what she'd found. One entire shelving unit was stuffed full of identical merchandise, big colorful cardboard boxes advertising the latest, hottest video-­game system money could buy. There must have been three dozen of them sitting there, waiting to be put out on the sales floor.

“Jackpot,” Angel said.

PITTSBURGH, PA: MARCH 22, 23:58

Chapel found a ­couple of box cutters in the stockroom and the two of them got to work, furiously slashing open the boxes and pulling out the video-­game consoles. “Don't even worry about the peripherals,” Angel said. “All we need are the actual consoles and their power supplies.” As Chapel laid out the devices in neat rows, Angel headed down another aisle and came back with dozens of Ethernet cables cradled in her arms.

“Back before the war, you weren't allowed to sell these consoles to Iraq because they were classified as supercomputers,” Angel explained. She tore open the plastic bag of a cable with her teeth. “They're not like normal computers, though, because they have different requirements. You wouldn't want to use one of these to check your e-­mail, probably. What they do have is top-­notch graphics cards. They need them to be able to render games at sixty frames per second. We're talking about billions of floating point operations a second. Which, by happy accident, turns out to be the same kind of operations you do while trying to break hard-­core encryption.”

“Seriously?” Chapel asked.

“Uh-­huh. The NSA buys graphics card by the boatload. Here, do it like this.” She plugged a power cable into one of the consoles, then an Ethernet cable into one of its ports. “They're also exactly what I need for the kind of data mining we're talking about.”

As usual, Chapel just nodded along, understanding a tiny fraction of what she told him. This was her field of expertise. He just needed to follow orders and stay out of her way.

“The game consoles need robust connections, too,” Angel went on. “To allow for multiplayer games with minimal lag. So these Ethernet connections are the best you can get. You know what a LAN party is?”

“LAN stands for, uh,” Chapel said, trying to remember. “Something something network.”

“Local area network. A LAN party is when a bunch of kids get their machines together in the same room and they connect them up in one big network so they can all play the same game at the same time. Which is good—­it means these consoles will work well together when I put them in a serial network. They have great WAN connections, too, because they want you to use your video-­game console to stream video and download patches and DLC for the games and . . .” She stopped and looked over at Chapel. “I'm just babbling now,” she said.

“If it helps you focus, babble away. Just don't give me a pop quiz about all this when we're done.”

Angel smiled. She plugged a cable into a console and then set it down on the floor. “We make a great team, don't we?” she asked.

“Just going on the fact that I'm still alive after all the missions we worked together, I'd say yeah,” Chapel confirmed. He smiled back.

She looked at him then in a way he didn't know how to read. Over the years of listening to her voice he'd come to know her moods, the private jokes they shared. But seeing her face-­to-­face was like meeting a whole new person. He didn't understand what it meant when she tilted her head to the side while smiling at him. Or what it signified when she started scratching at her neck and looked away in a hurry.

He had no idea how to respond.

“Anyway,” she said, “let's start plugging these together. I'm going to need a pretty serious router, but there'll be one of those around here somewhere.”

“Sure,” he said. “I just keep plugging them together like this?”

“Yeah,” she told him. Then she laughed. “It's kind of fun, giving you orders for a change. I could get used to this.”

PITTSBURGH, PA: MARCH 23, 00:22

Chapel moved around the stockroom as fast as he could, collecting all the bits and pieces Angel needed—­power strips, the fastest laptop he could find, a bewildering array of cables of different pin numbers and lengths. For somebody who had just figured out the difference between USB-­A and USB-­B connectors, it was a harrowing process.

When it was done, though, he had to admit Angel had created something impressive. She sat on the floor with the laptop, its ports connected by a thick bundle of cables to twenty of the game consoles. These formed a ring around her, each of them wired to each other and to the store's Internet connection. Finally she attached her hard drive—­the one he'd rescued from her trailer—­to the laptop and switched everything on.