He walked away.
Shuffling and muttering grated from the other part of the camp, and then a tiny, quiet uproar. Something was going on over there.
Tristan asked Blaise, “Did that guy work on Stuxnet?” Stuxnet was an infamous computer worm that attacked Iran’s nuclear program twenty years before, causing the nuclear centrifuges to destroy themselves while feeding the monitors normal-looking reports. It was the first true cyberattack, and the code had been elegant.
Blaise scoffed, “Yeah, sure, Aaron Savoie worked on Stuxnet when he was seven years old. No. But I chide him about it, nevertheless. He is not a coder. He is a meat puppet for wetwork. But he will lead the team to extract your friends.”
“That guy?”
“Yeah. Don’t make him mad. I’m the only one who can make him mad and live.”
Tristan leaned in. “Why?”
On the other side of the encampment, a man’s voice called out, “Hey! Who are you?”
Softer voices whispered.
Blaise lifted his head. “Because I’m the hacker, and he doesn’t perceive me as a threat. But he is wrong.”
Tristan nodded slowly, rue filling his every movement. “Yeah, the casuals don’t respect that cyberwarfare is more dangerous than nuclear now.”
Blaise nodded along with him. “We could send them all back to the Stone Age with a few keystrokes, and they would never know what hit them.”
They stood in silence for a minute, pondering how they could very well hold the fate of humanity in their fingertips.
“Anyway,” Tristan said, “I hacked one of the hostages’ phones, so we have video and audio inside.”
Blaise gestured toward a black hump a few yards farther away from where the other mercenaries were assembled. “We’ll find a way to utilize your surveillance that we’re both comfortable with. This way to the brains of the operation.”
Behind them, in the main part of the camp, the commandos bunched up. Their whispered talking became louder.
Tristan turned toward the others. In the eerie monochrome plus green of his night-vision goggles, one much smaller figure walked away from the group of commandos and approached Tristan and Blaise.
The figure was petite, curvy, and bounced on her toes a little when she walked.
No way.
Some of the other guys were following her over.
The NVG’s image fuzzed for a second, and then Colleen’s face resolved into visibility like she stepped out of a television screen. She was already wearing night-vision goggles.
She sidled up to Tristan. “What’cha doing?”
“How the hell did you know where I was?” he asked her.
She rolled her eyes. “Something has been going on with you all day, and it doesn’t take a genius to figure out you were writing all that terrible code to run out the clock. Of course, you were doing something to rescue Jian and Anjali. They’re at The Boulders, so that’s where you must be. And you logged into my Wi-Fi at my apartment, so now I can track your phone. Duh.”
What! “You shouldn’t have put tracking software on my phone. That’s intrusive.”
And why hadn’t his phone’s antimalware programs prevented it?
“I didn’t mean to,” she said. “I coded it a year ago for fun. No one ever comes over to my apartment, so I forgot it was even on there.”
Tristan leaned in. “Wait, is your tracker on Anjali’s phone?”
“Yeah, I already confirmed she’s still at the hotel and in the same approximate place. I checked right before I left. Her phone battery is getting low.”
Behind Tristan, Blaise said, “That is useful.”
“Why didn’t you tell me you could track her before?”
Colleen tilted her head at him. “You were so proud of yourself for your video hack. I didn’t want to one-up you.”
The other guys caught up and stood around the two of them whilst they argued.
Tristan sighed at Colleen. “It might get dangerous. I didn’t want you here.”
She tilted her head when she looked up at him. “Well, that’s too bad, huh?”
“You are not going into that hotel room.”
“Like hell, I’m not. My best friend is inside. She has to be freaking out.”
Tristan said, “Colleen, let the professionals do their work.”
“I’m a country girl. I can shoot a deer eight hundred yards away with a proper scope. The wind is light tonight. Maybe nine hundred yards. And I didn’t get rattled when some alt-right lunatic pulled a Lugar on me in the feed store because we were selling seeds to hippies.”
Really? That was interesting.
One of the nameless men leaned in. “How much weapons experience do ye have?”
Colleen told him, “I’m better with a rifle than a handgun, but I use my sights. My dad put a twenty-two in my hand when I was five.”
Huh. Good to know.
The guy said to the group, and his gentle Irish accent became apparent, “She’ll go in with the target retrieval team in the second wave after the room is secure. It’ll calm the hostages if they see someone they know and make it easier to gain their cooperation. Someone give her a sidearm.” He turned back to Colleen. “I’m Eian Summerhays. Don’t worry. I’ll be at your side and in front of you the whole time. This will be a blitzkrieg-type operation, and the hostages will be disoriented during extraction. Your role will be to convince the subjects to come with us. Welcome to Delta Team, miss.”
Tristan wanted to step in front of her.
Colleen smiled up at that other guy, her teeth shining under her visor-like goggles. “I’m Colleen Frost. It’s a pleasure to meet you.”
Tristan’s molars ground together in his mouth, and the hand gripping his phone slipped as he nearly crushed the metal case.
37
Extraction
Tristan
Tristan sat on a camp-stool in the surveillance tent, watching browser windows from twelve different viewpoints tiled over three enormous monitors and rubbing the raw indentations the night-vision goggles had left around his eyes. Because they were inside a tent, the light was low, but they could take off their NVGs.
One browser window showed the feed from Jian’s phone inside the hotel room. It appeared to be lying face-up on a coffee table, showing the ceiling and Sergey’s shoes occasionally peeking in from one side of the frame.
Earlier, they’d heard men speaking Russian, but now the rhythmic buzz sounded like snoring.
A game show host called out letters.
A different browser window displayed people wearing combat gear and inching, prone, over a rough surface. The visual field was scribbled in charcoal gray and acid green tones, as the feed was through someone’s night-vision goggles. A line of bright light appeared under the fingertips of the person wearing the camera. “In position.”
Blaise, who had kept his hoodie draped over his face, whispered into a microphone, “Alpha Team is in position.”
In another browser window, which appeared to be a feed from the hotel’s closed-circuit security cameras, four unusually muscular frat boys wearing jeans roughhoused and shoved each other as they stumbled toward the elevators. Their untucked tee-shirts dragged oddly over bulges around their belts and hips. One waved a hotel keycard at the reception area as they passed.