Cold Vengeance (Special Agent Pendergast) by Preston Douglas & Child Lincoln

Author:Preston, Douglas & Child, Lincoln [Preston, Douglas]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9780446576000
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Published: 2011-08-01T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 40

River Pointe, Ohio

IN THE MIDDLE-CLASS CLEVELAND SUBURB, the bell in the tower of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church tolled midnight. The wide streets were drowsy and quiet. Dead leaves skittered in the gutters, rustled along by a gentle night breeze, and somewhere in the distance a dog barked.

Only a single second-story window was illuminated in the white clapboard house that stood on the corner of Church Street and Sycamore Terrace. Beyond the window—locked, nailed shut, and covered by two layers of heavy curtain—lay a room whose every corner was stuffed full of instrumentation. One floor-to-ceiling rack held tier-one, high-density blade servers; numerous layer-three, forty-eight-port gigabit Ethernet switches; and several NAS devices configured as RAID-2 arrays. Another rack held passive and active monitoring devices, packet sniffers, police and civilian scanner-interceptors. Every horizontal surface was littered with keyboards, wireless signal boosters, digital infrared thermometers, network testers, Molex extractors. An ancient modem with an acoustic coupler sat on a high shelf, apparently still in use. The air was heavy with the smell of dust and menthol. The only light came from LCD screens and countless front-panel displays.

In the middle of the room sat a shrunken figure in a wheelchair. He was dressed in faded pajamas and a terry-cloth bathrobe. He moved slowly from terminal to terminal, checking readouts, peering at lines of cryptic code, occasionally firing off a machine-gun-like series of typed commands on one of the wireless keyboards. One of the man’s hands was withered, the fingers malformed and shrunken, yet he typed with amazing facility.

Suddenly he paused. A yellow light had appeared on a small device situated over the central monitor.

The figure quickly rolled himself to the main terminal and typed in a volley of commands. Instantly the monitor dissolved into a chessboard-like grid of black-and-white images: incoming feeds from two dozen security cameras placed in and around the perimeter of the house.

He quickly scanned the various camera feeds. Nothing.

Panic—which had flared up in an instant—ebbed again. His security was first-rate and doubly redundant: if there had been a breach, he would have been alerted by half a dozen movement sensors and proximity triggers. It had to be a glitch, nothing more. He’d run a diagnostic in the morning—this was one subsystem that could not be allowed to…

Suddenly a red light winked on beside the yellow one, and a low alarm began to bleat.

Fear and disbelief washed over him like a tidal wave. A full-scale breach, with hardly any warning? It was impossible, unthinkable… The withered hand reached toward a small metal box fixed to one arm of his wheelchair, flicked away the safety toggle covering the kill switch. One crooked finger hovered over the switch. When it was pressed, several things would happen very quickly: 911 calls would go out to police, fire officials, and emergency paramedic units; sodium vapor lights would come on throughout the house and grounds; alarms in the attic and basement would emit earsplitting shrieks; magnetic media degaussers placed strategically throughout the room would generate targeted

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