The Tau Directive by Tomas Black

Author:Tomas Black [Black, Tomas]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Teardrop Media Ltd
Published: 2021-04-07T22:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

Fen Wootton

Stevie looked up from her terminal inside the main room of the old rectory where she was working and watched helplessly as a dishevelled Jeremy Burnett was dragged from the back of the police car and marched to an outbuilding close to the house.

Baz Kulik walked over and stood beside her as Burnett disappeared from view. “It looks like your boyfriend was holding out on us,” he sneered. “Turns out he had one of the keystones. His life won’t be worth shit after Vashchenko finishes with him.”

“He’s not my boyfriend,” said Stevie, as evenly as she could.

“Yeah, well, if you say so,” said Baz.

“What will they do with him?” asked Stevie.

“Nothing until they find out who sent him the keystone,” said Baz. “Until then, we keep him on ice.” He looked at her screen. “You need to finish the site. We have less than a week.” He stomped back to his seat on the other side of the room.

Stevie looked at her screen. She had almost finished working on the auction site and was now playing for time. Fortunately, none of the other programmers had bothered to check on her work. She minimised the terminal window she had been working in and opened another. The script she had written had been busy in the background, scanning for open ports on the network inside the building, looking for any vulnerability that her arsenal of hacking tools could exploit. She had already cracked the passwords of several programmers who had illicitly opened up the network connections on their computers so that they could play games with each other in the evening. They felt confident that they were secure from attack from the outside world, sitting behind the network’s main firewall, but hadn’t reckoned on being hacked from inside the network where the firewall was all but useless. With each hacked computer on the network, her account gained more privileges. Soon her account would be strong enough to take on the administrators. Once she had one of these accounts, she could search for the whereabouts of the stolen data files. But first, she had to talk to Jeremy.

Stevie minimised her terminal window and logged out, securing her login with a strong password to discourage nosey teammates. She walked to the main entrance and pulled open the heavy oak door, letting the crisp evening air envelop her. She took a deep breath and walked across a small courtyard to the building where they were holding Jeremy.

A previous owner had converted the old building into a garage. She cautiously pushed open the door and walked into a brightly lit space illuminated by the harsh light of a flickering fluorescent tube suspended from the rafters. Jeremy sat forlornly on a stool by a workbench laden with old car parts and bits of machinery, looking dejectedly down at the floor. Vashchenko stood over him, holding what appeared to be a glowing crystal up to the light. A man in a police officer’s uniform stood behind Burnett, his eyes also fixed on the device.

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