“I know, I know,” Rex said. He pointed at the cop on the floor. “We were trying to get past this guy.”
“Oh,” I said, vaguely relieved to know I hadn’t led the cop to them. “Okay.” I turned to Ogden and pointed at the green door. “Is this the place?” It wasn’t until then that I got a good look at him: sweaty and gray with dark rings under his eyes. “Whoa, are you okay?”
He closed his eyes and nodded as he shuffled over toward the door. “I didn’t think I’d be doing so much running around…but I’ll be alright. Come on, let’s go.”
As we followed him toward the green door, Claudia snorted. “Um . . ‘H4H Forever’? You have a change of heart?”
“What are you talking about?” I said.
Rex snorted. “Your jacket. Going deep undercover, are you?”
Even Ogden grinned at me as I took off the jacket I’d swiped from the tourist shop and looked at the back, which was plastered with the H4H logo and H4H4EVER in bold letters.
“Ugh,” I said, realizing maybe that was why the woman in the shoe store had been giving me such an attitude. I balled up the jacket and threw it into a nearby trash can.
The green door didn’t have a handle, but Ogden picked at the edge with his fingernails, then his fingertips, and then he pulled it open.
We followed him inside, down a dank, concrete-and-cinderblock corridor, through a dirty boiler room filled with massive machines and a loud wash of noise, then down another corridor to an elevator.
Ogden pushed the call button, and the door opened immediately. It was a freight elevator, and as we got on, Ogden pressed 8. “We have to change elevators to get up to the ninety-seventh floor,” he said. “That cop said the quarantine was set up on the fifth floor, so I figured we should switch above that.”
Then he closed his eyes and leaned against the dirty pads hanging against the wall.
I looked at Rex and Claudia and tipped my head at Ogden questioningly. They both shrugged, their faces grim.
“I’m fine,” Ogden said without opening his eyes. “Well, I’ll be fine.”
The rest of us watched the numbers on the display counting up—1, 2, 3, 4. When it showed 5, I heard people, lots of them, talking and coughing and moaning. Ogden opened his eyes, and all four of us exchanged glances. I pictured an open-plan office and rows and rows of cots filled with deathly ill people being cared for by workers in biohazard suits. Then I pictured armed guards stationed by the elevator, maybe noticing as we ascended past them and wondering who we were, asking their superiors about it, warning them so they would be expecting us.
The elevator came to a stop with a loud ding. The doors opened and we stepped out into a nondescript office: cream-colored walls, beige carpet, gray cubicle dividers, and inoffensive art prints in pastel shades lining the walls. Apart from the background hum of climate control, the only sound came from our feet on the carpet and the rustle of our clothes as we followed Ogden to another bank of elevators.
He pressed the button and we waited in silence. Above each elevator door, a display revealed what floor each car was on. To the left of us, the display showed 22, then it changed to 21, then 20. As it came closer to us, I scanned the other displays, to see if any of them were moving toward the 12th floor, but they all stayed where they were.
The elevator arrived with another gong-like tone, and we all got on. It was a lot nicer than the freight elevator, with polished wood—or a convincing fake—and brass accents.
Ogden hit the button for the 147th floor, and after the doors closed, he said, “The tech suite is up on 148, but to be safe, I figure we should get off one floor below and take the steps up—in case anyone is in there.”
We nodded our understanding, and he resumed his eyes-closed resting against the wall as the elevator hurled us into the sky. It was a smooth ride, but I knew how high we were going and how fast we had to be moving to get there.
There was an instant of near weightlessness as we decelerated, then the doors opened with another ding. This floor was almost identical to the twelfth, except that the cubicles were larger and there were fewer of them. And the view, which I could only see from a distance, looked spectacular.
Ogden led us to a door set in the far wall. We followed him through it and up a flight of concrete steps to another door, this one with a security panel. He didn’t seem bothered. He opened the duffel bag Claudia was carrying and pulled out a fabric tool kit and a can of liquid nitrogen.
“Excuse me,” she said, but he ignored her, spraying the liquid nitrogen onto the security keypad on the wall, and the lock mechanism on the door next to it. It steamed and crackled, but he kept spraying, letting the cold really sink in. Then he jammed a slender screwdriver into the gap between the keypad and the bolt. Holding it in place, he turned to Rex and said, “Can you give that a whack?”
Rex gave it a sharp jab with the side of his fist, and several inches of the door and the frame surrounding the lock shattered, raining bits of metal and concrete and plastic circuitry onto the floor.
Ogden put the can and the screwdriver back into the duffle and pulled the door open.
We were at the end of a little alcove that opened onto another open-plan floor. There was a desk at the front, and next to it, a thick glass-composite wall, four or five feet tall, running to our right. Beyond the partition was a wide space with white walls and pale gray carpet, open and airy, with high ceilings. Windows took up an entire wall, looking onto the city and, from this height, a good bit of the surrounding countryside, as well. There was a row of desks to our left, but the focus of the room was an enormous, reinforced composite glass cube, twenty feet high, twenty feet on each side. A door of the same material was set into it. To the left of the door was another security panel, and to the right, suspended in the glass composite, delicate chrome letters spelled TECH SUITE.
Ogden reached into Claudia’s duffle bag again, and pulled out the liquid nitrogen and started spraying the glass all around the lock. “What’s the time?”
“Three fifty-one,” Rex said, his voice tight with stress.
Ogden looked over at him, mildly alarmed. “Cutting it close.” He kept spraying for another few seconds, as more and more frost built up on the glass. Then he put the can back in the duffle and took out a small hammer. He stood at arms’ length from the door and gave the glass under the locking mechanism a solid whack. The area he had sprayed, all around the lock, shattered and fell away, pattering onto the carpet. The lock stayed attached to the door frame and the security panel, and Ogden pushed the whole assemblage open and walked in, beckoning us to follow.
Inside, there were two long work benches. One had a basic workstation, but the other had an assortment of crazy-high-tech computers—crystal-based, gel-based, glass chambers full of liquids or glowing plasma. Stuff I couldn’t even identify. At the end of the table, connected to everything else by a bundle of thick cables, was a large black metal mesh cage, with stacks of computer servers inside, humming and whirring and sparkling with blinking blue, red, and orange lights.
“How the hell are you going to hack into that?” Claudia said.
Ogden was looking even worse than before, but he managed a smile. “That cage holds the quantum servers that run all the in-house computing for the entire tower. Those on the bench are next-gen experimental—5Q quantum, DNA gel phase, 4D crystals. But remember, the Wellplant network is distributed—there is no central computer. So we only need to hack into that.” He turned and pointed at a very basic desktop computer, sitting on the other long table. “It’s barely even a computer, more like an access port they use to push the software upgrades.”