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Aydan and I sit inside the van parked off-road under the cover of trees. We left the warehouse around 3:20 A.M. and drove west on I-90 for forty minutes or so. After Oso exited the interstate, I lost track of where we were. He took several secluded roads. And all I know now is that we are in the boonies, surrounded by mountains and lots of trees. I can’t see much else. It is dark and cloudy outside. Eerie, if you ask me.
We stare into four monitors that display different perspectives. The first one shows Rheema’s car’s dashboard with her hands at the steering wheel. The second, jumpy images of bushes and trees rushing by. They come from James’s camera, who—accompanied by Oso and Blare—left the van ten minutes ago and ran up the wooded hill toward the clinic. The third and fourth monitors show two empty roads where Xave and Clark are serving as lookouts.
A speaker crackles to life and Rheema’s voice resonates through the van. “All right, we’re here,” she says.
On the first monitor, her car slows down as it approaches a thirty-foot-wide metal gate.
“Okay, working on it,” Aydan responds through a tiny microphone attached to an equally small earpiece. He types on the keyboard at a prodigious speed, running the program that will allow Rheema and her companion entry to the compound.
When James described the place, I started thinking about it more as a compound than a fertility clinic. Located in a remote area, surrounded by tall stone walls, protected by a high-security system, it’s hardly a place that makes me think of cuddly babies. Apparently, Riverbend caters to Seattle’s elite. People who pay top dollar to receive advanced fertility treatments in anonymity and extra comfort. If they knew what they were getting, I bet they wouldn’t feel so special.
Rheema pulls over and turns slightly to her left. A hairy arm appears on the screen: the gate guard. He moves closer to the car.
“No signal yet, Rheema,” Aydan says as he continues to smash keys like a mad man.
I grind my teeth, a fist pressed against my lips. Oh please, please, work.
“Your card,” the guard asks Rheema in an unfriendly tone.
“Good night, or I guess I should say good morning,” she says in good humor, trying to make time.
“Your card,” the guard repeats after an annoyed grunt.
“Sure.” Rustling cuts through the speakers as Rheema pretends to dig in her purse. “It’s here somewhere,” she adds with a nervous laugh.
Aydan mashes the enter key with an index finger. “Got it!”
“Ah, here it is.” Rheema hands the guard a white plastic card.
Aydan explained that, when the guard flashes the card with his handheld device, Rheema’s picture will appear on his screen indicating whether she’s authorized to enter the facility at this time. During normal business hours, she would have no problem getting in. It turns out a few months back, she snatched a proper job as a lab assistant, and since then she’s been gathering information about the clinic’s operations.
Just now, Aydan managed to intercept the mobile’s signal and download all the required data to get Rheema and her companion through the front entrance. They didn’t have approval to be here today at this early hour, but Aydan’s program took care of adding them to the list on the fly.
I hear a beep. I assume it’s the guard running Rheema’s card through the security check. There’s a long silence, during which I bite my nails, hardly noticing what I’m doing. The computer monitor shows Rheema’s hands squeezing the wheel.
“Here,” the guard says. His face appears as Rheema turns to retrieve her card. The square-jawed man peers in to check the empty back seat then the person in the passenger seat.
“Your card,” the guard orders.
A hand holding a security badge crosses in front of the camera. It belongs to a man, a fertility doctor named Dr. Schmitt, who also works at the clinic.
The guard grabs the card and puts it through the same test. Aydan sits, hands on his lap, jaw working with a nervous tic.
Rheema’s job was to fool Dr. Schmitt in to accompanying her. He has clearance to enter the vitrification lab, something Rheema doesn’t possess. The doctor is in charge of readying embryos before implantation. Rheema, his clever lab assistant, has access to all medical records and informed him that one of his patient’s hormonal levels indicate the woman will be ready for implantation at 7 A.M., which is why they had to be here so early to prepare the sample.
Apparently, this is a common occurrence. It turns out fertility isn’t an exact science and women’s bodies will do whatever they want, whenever they want to, no matter how many pills and injections they push on them. So Dr. Schmitt came along suspecting nothing out of the ordinary.
“You’re clear,” the guard says, opening the massive metal gate. As the car enters the compound, both Aydan and I breathe a sigh of relief. We switch our attention to James’s monitor. It shows a dark backdrop punctuated by even darker shapes. Bushes, I guess.
“She’s in,” Aydan announces after pressing a button to switch audio over to James, Blare and Oso.
They have finished trekking up the steep hill behind the clinic and are now stationed outside the fortress, waiting for Aydan’s signal to climb the wall. The guards’ shift ends at 5 A.M., at which time they perform a patrol. If all goes well, the crew should have enough time to do what they need to do.
On the computer screen, Aydan pulls up the next piece of code. It will disable the various cameras and alarms that monitor the perimeter, giving James, Blare and Oso two minutes to scale the wall. This is a small window of time, but more than two minutes would cause a failover systems to activate, giving away our presence.
“Ready?” Aydan asks.
“Ready,” James’s deep voice rumbles through the speakers.
Aydan clicks on a button labeled “X Perimeter Security” and says, “Go, now!”
The images coming from James’s camera start moving as he runs toward the wall, which looms like a giant. Seconds tick by, flashing on Aydan’s computer screen.
“One hundred seconds,” Aydan informs James.
Oso gets ahead of James and drops to one knee a couple of feet away from the wall. He looks as if he’s about to propose. James doesn’t slow down. Instead, he leaps, uses Oso’s bent leg as a step stool and propels himself upward. In a blur, the wall passes by on the screen.
Once at the top, he secures a rope and lets it drop. James doesn’t wait for Blare and Oso. Instead, he jumps down on the other side and starts running toward the main building. His camera reveals a place that looks like a mansion, not a clinic: a perfect hideout for the rich and famous to get their little spawns implanted. AR-Tech’s tactics are scary. They target the wealthy, where Eklyptors seek to place parasites in positions of power.
“Sixty seconds,” Aydan announces.
James runs through an almost empty parking lot. I spot Rheema’s car already parked there. When he’s only a few paces from the building, he slows down, looks back and confirms Oso and Blare are right behind him. They soon catch up.
“No sign of guards,” James says.
There are supposed to be guards that patrol the grounds, but they’re probably sleeping, too confident in their state-of-the-art security system to care. One can never underestimate the complacency of an underpaid employee, Eklyptor or not.
Instead of going straight to the front entrance, James and the others approach from the side and walk along one of the walls. These are blind spots, so if the cameras activate again they’ll be in the perfect place to remain unnoticed.
“Forty seconds.” Aydan presses mute and glares at my hands. “Stop that!” I’ve been cracking my knuckles and hadn’t even realized it.
“Sorry,” I say.
James comes to a halt and presses his back against the wall. Slowly he peeks around the corner. In his camera, I see Rheema and the doctor standing in front of a huge glass door. Rheema’s monitor shows the same door, except up close. The palm, retina and voice scanners are in front of Dr. Schmitt, who lets the device take his bio-data.
A big thumbs-up from James lets Oso and Blare know everything is going as planned.
“Twenty seconds,” Aydan says.
“Welcome, Doctor Schmitt,” a computerized voice echoes through Rheema’s audio feed.
As soon as the thick glass doors slide open, James and the others rush in. Rheema walks into a large lobby, followed by Dr. Schmitt. After a few steps, she whips around, takes two quick steps, and stands only inches from the doctor.
James is quietly entering the lobby. From his perspective, I see the doctor’s back and Rheema wrapping her arms around the man’s neck, as if she’s going to ... kiss him?
I look to Aydan, wondering what’s going on. I’m about to say something when Dr. Schmitt falls to the floor like a limp rag. Oso and Blare come in just as he falls.
“What did she just do?” I ask.
“Neurotoxin,” he says.
“Huh?”
Aydan looks at me as if I’m incapable of adding two and two together to save my life. “They made it in with time to spare. Too easy.”
“Shut up. You’re gonna jinx them,” I snap.
“Jinx them? You don’t seem like the superstitious type.”
“I’m not, but still.”
“Now to the lab,” Aydan says to no one in particular.
My hands have already been sweating, but the thought that this part of the mission depends on my hack makes them feel as if I’ve dipped them in a pot of drool.
All four rush through long, expertly decorated corridors. When they reach the lab, Oso, who’s been carrying Dr. Schmitt over his shoulder, lets James grab the man’s hand and place his thumb on a little scanner. After the thumb print, it’s time to enter the six-digit number my program deciphered. They dump the doctor on the floor next to the door.
My gut clenches as Aydan pulls up the number onto the screen and starts calling it out. “Seven ...”
Skipping beats, my heart makes itself noticed. My back tingles and a strange sensation rolls in waves down my spine. James’s hand goes up to the keypad.
“Wait!” I yell.
“Marci says to wait,” Aydan blurts out.
James’s hand freezes. “What’s wrong?”
Aydan gives me an incredulous look.
“I ... what if the code changed?” I ask.
“Changed in the last couple of hours?” Aydan asks, sounding annoyed. We ran my algorithm more than once and got the same six-digit code every time. I don’t quite understand why all of a sudden I’m freaking out. But something feels funky in the pit of my stomach, like a swarm of bees buzzing their way up my esophagus.
“Yeah, it could have,” I say.
“Didn’t you check for maintenance programs that could change the code on us?”
“Of course, I did. There weren’t any.”
“Sooo?”
“What if they changed it manually?”
“I guess they could have, but that’s stupid and error-prone. So, not likely,” Aydan says.
“What’s going on?” James asks through clenched teeth.
“One sec,” Aydan tells him.
“I knew we shouldn’t have trusted her with this.” Blare’s voice breaks through in a growl.
I ignore her. “Let’s run it again. Let’s see if it comes back with the same six numbers.”
“Marci, we don’t have time for that,” Aydan growls.
“It’ll only take five minutes,” I plead.
“Five minutes that could make all the difference. The guards’ shift is in half an hour.”
“Please, just run it again. I don’t know why, but I have a bad feeling about it. Please.”
Aydan sighs. “James, Marci wants to run her program again. She says she has a bad feeling about it, thinks the numbers may have changed since the last time we checked. It’ll take at least five minutes to rerun.”
“Shit, shit,” Blare curses.
“Quiet,” James says. “Put Marci on.”
Aydan hands me his headset, digs for another one and puts it on.
“Marci, we have no time to waste,” James says.
“I know, I know, but something doesn’t feel right. I don’t know why, but I think we should run it again.”
“Are you sure?” James asks.
“Yes,” I say firmly.
“All right, do it,” James orders.
Aydan cracks his neck, then clicks on the button that runs my program. I watch, chewing on my lower lip. The computer screen shows an hourglass as my code flies through the list of possible six-digit combinations, checking them against the encryption algorithm.
The minutes drag by and I’m drenched in sweat, tasting blood from biting so hard on my lip. Blare curses, spewing expletives like a public toilet spews bacteria. Aydan stares at the screen from under tense eyebrows and taps on the keyboard’s edge using all ten fingers. I want to yell at him to stop, but instead I bite harder and draw more blood. The last few seconds are more than physically painful. My body is so tense that my muscles are literally working out.
When the last few seconds tick down, I feel myself relax. A brand-new set of numbers appears on the screen. Aydan curses.
“The numbers are in. They’re different,” he announces.
James clears his throat. “Marci, can we trust these new numbers?”
“Ha, if you run that stupid program of hers again, you’ll probably get a different answer.” Blare voices what I’m sure everyone else is thinking.
But the weird feeling I had before is now gone. I know my program is foolproof. I know the numbers are good. “You can trust them. They will work,” I say with as much confidence as if I was stating my name.
“Call them out, Aydan,” James says.
Aydan begins, intoning every number with a question mark at the end, as if he expects each one to be the last one before the keypad auto-destructs. James punches the buttons with confidence, though. He either trusts me or his nerves are made of steel. It’s probably the latter, but I can’t help but hope to have earned some of his trust.
When James enters the last number, there’s a collective sigh of relief as the door clicks open. I feel like standing and doing a little dance, but a gasp from Rheema and a few choice curse words from Blare keep me in my seat.
“What the hell?” Oso exclaims.
Rheema enters the room. Her camera suddenly shows revolving walls as she turns round and round. I feel dizzy as I try to make sense of what seems to be an empty room.
“It’s all gone,” Rheema says, coming to a stop. “Everything was here just yesterday morning. I don’t understand. It’s all gone.”