The room was barely larger than a janitor’s closet. Other than a metal storage cupboard that took up half of the opposing wall, it was empty.
A metal fire escape door on the other side of the room was the only other exit.
Sara locked the door behind her and pulled at the metal closet doors. They rattled but stayed closed.
She pulled out her tension wrench, her hands shaking, and dropped it on the ground. In a tranquil setting, where guards weren’t closing in, seconds away from her capture, picking the lock of an office supply locker would be a walk in the park.
She picked it up and gritted her teeth.
Come on, Sara. You can do this. Breathe.
She knelt down and inserted the wrench, twisting it until the catch gave and the door pulled open.
Inside, a wall of wires, pulsing with colour, snaked from the floor to the ceiling. This was the information highway flowing down from the dish satellites on the roof to the neural computers housed in the basement.
Sara pulled out a transparent plastic box the same size as a portable sewing kit from her pocket. Fibre optic taps – thin blue jacks attached to orange wiring that connected to her phone – nestled inside. Her assumption – that this access point would be within the formidable firewalls that ringed the perimeter of the facility’s IT systems – was about to be tested.
She ran her fingers down the wires until she found the lettering she was seeking.
NEURAL NET.
She spliced the fibre taps into the wire and tapped an app on her phone. Instantly, geometric shapes bubbled and popped on screen, dissolving and reappearing into schematics of a database system.
She could hear voices approaching, and doors swinging open and slamming shut in a progression that suggested every room was being checked.
They were close. Her door would be next.
Steady. Keep steady.
She tapped her finger lightly on her iPhone screen, over and over, qualifying each choice she made, zeroing in on the exact location she was seeking.
Suddenly, the handle of her door twisted down, once, then twice.
‘It’s locked. Over here!’ came a voice from outside.
There was a moment’s silence and then the entire door thudded up against its frame as a heavy foot kicked at it.
‘Get the keys!’ a voice shouted from outside.
Sara kept tapping the screen until the file she was seeking dropped down like a blind. She saved it to her hard file and pocketed her phone just as she heard a key scrape into the lock behind her.