CHAPTER SEVEN
Pretending to be nervous wasn’t a huge stretch for Parker right now. He hit the hallway and turned to face the tour guide, who looked concerned.
“I’m better now,” Parker said. “I think it was the lights.”
“I can call and have someone take you where you feel comfortable.”
“No, no, I’m good. It just felt like the walls were closing in when it got dark.”
Robert looked cautious, but understanding. “Like I said, it happens all the time.”
There was a bench nearby, so Parker took it. He needed to get rid of the tour guide as quickly as possible. Every second spent here was one less he’d get in the server room. “I’m good. Lemme just sit here and get it together for a few minutes. I’ll be fine.”
The guy was skeptical. “Are you sure? Usually the decontamination shower part of the tour is what gets the claustrophobics.”
Robert meant well and was just doing his job, but Parker needed to move his ass. “Is it dark in the shower?”
“No, but it’s small.”
His tone was pointed. “I’ll be fine.”
Robert brought his eyebrows together and looked down the hallway as if considering something. “All right. I’m not allowed to leave the group unattended. If you need a restroom, it’s just up there. If you want to leave, there’s an office at the front where we came in. Someone will be able to help you, and let me know what happened.”
“Sounds good. Thanks.”
He gave Parker a smile that seemed to say, “Good luck” and disappeared into the media room.
The thud of the door closing behind the tour guide was a starting pistol. Parker tore off the bench and hurried toward the exit, then double-backed the way he’d come, only this time he flattened himself against the wall, staying out of the surveillance camera’s field of view. If anyone was paying attention to him, it’d look like he’d taken off for the bathroom.
The tour guest pass was taken off and tucked in one pocket, and then he dug into the other, pulling out the keycard he’d finished cloning this morning, and a tiny bottle of fog spray. He had to move as quickly as possible, not just because he had a short window to work with, but he had no idea how often people roamed this hallway. Avoiding cameras made a person look shady as fuck.
He got as close to the door of the server room as he could without being seen, and took a breath. Assuming the cloned keycard worked, he had no idea what to expect on the other side of the door. If there was a technician in the room, would they buy Parker as one of their own? He didn’t have the typical IT guy look.
Whatever. He’d figure out how to deal with the situation when it presented itself, which he couldn’t do from this side of the door.
He held the bottle under the camera and pointed the nozzle upward, then misted a single spray. It’d haze the lens for ten seconds. Not enough to lose picture, but it’d blur everything and render facial recognition impossible. If anyone was watching, they would see someone enter, but probably not think anything of it. Occasionally cameras went out of focus, especially when the ventilation system turned on and kicked up dust.
The mist wafted into the lens and Parker stepped up to the door, holding the card to the sensor.
Nothing.
His heart stopped. You’ve got to be fucking kidding.
He lifted the keycard away, then placed it on the sensor again. This time, the light on the pad flashed green, and Parker exhaled loudly, recovering from his mini-heart attack. He jerked the door open and darted inside.
The lighting was bright, but the towering racks of servers blotted it out and cast long shadows. Lights winked at him between the black metal grates that closed in the individual towers. It was like standing in the stacks of the library, only the hum of fans whirring was so loud, Parker couldn’t hear his own footsteps thud on the hollow, ventilated floor.
The center aisle down the room was empty. He glanced left and right, saw it was clear, then turned his gaze upward. No cameras inside, at least none he could see. On the wall, there was a map identifying the different rows of racks, names listed for each. Charlie. Woodstock. Snoopy.
Huh. They’d been named after Peanuts characters.
There was a desk beside the map, containing an ancient computer with a mismatched keyboard. He knew what it was in an instant. A recycled piece of office equipment that was still good enough to perform one task.
It was the card catalog for this digital library.
The information he was looking for belonged to a shell corporation, and he found his target’s server with a few quick keystrokes. Linus, tower eighteen, server F. He was about to haul ass for it, but the hairs on his arm lifted. A tingle pricked at his neck. Just because he couldn’t see anyone, didn’t mean he was alone, and with the cooling system running, he’d never hear if he was, either.
A shadow grew in the center aisle, and Parker spun to his left, darting away just as someone stepped into view. He pressed himself in the tight space between two towers, grateful he hadn’t been lazy at the gym. He was lean, but it was a tight fucking fit. No room for an extra five pounds of love.
He could see movement between the equipment and through the mesh walls wrapped around the rack. Whoever was in the room headed toward the exit. Parker hadn’t been spotted, thank fuck. He caught a glimpse of the guy, a laptop tucked under an arm, right before he disappeared out the door.
Time was ticking away.
Parker shoved his way out of the towers, bolted down the aisle, and skidded to a stop when he reached the row labeled Linus. Down he went, yanking open the door to tower eighteen, and rolling out the drawer with the keyboard and mouse. The monitor woke and leaped to life. There was a knob on the drawer. As he turned it, the screen flickered, switching from one server to another, until he had the dial set to F.
Whatever processes were running, he didn’t recognize, but it didn’t matter. He was about to kill the whole damn thing. Parker dug the low-profile flash drive out of his pocket. The thing was smaller than a postage stamp, but the program on it was as powerful as an RPG. And that’s essentially what it was—a grenade. He’d blow the hell out of the operating system, and as it patched itself back together, his backdoor code would quietly slip inside.
Not the most elegant hack, but it’d have to do.
He popped the flash drive into the USB port, seized the mouse, and got to work. Installing the program was simple. There wasn’t much security on the server since he was behind the firewall, and he was able to exploit a flaw in the system’s default browser, which hadn’t been updated. It took one minute to convince the system he was an administrator.
As the program downloaded, he checked his time. Four minutes and fourteen seconds left until the video was over and Robert would expect to find his claustrophobic tourgoer sitting on the bench where he’d left him.
The status bar crawled.
It wasn’t warm in the room, but a bead of sweat ran between Parker’s shoulder blades. He’d hoped to stay through the hard reboot and make sure the code installed, but that was looking less likely as the bar inched along.
Finally.
The download finished and the dialog box changed. Parker slapped the ‘Enter’ button, and pulled the pin on the grenade. One by one, applications froze and hazed to a pale gray. The cursor morphed into a spinning circle. A warning splashed on the screen. “Fatal error. Operating system has stopped responding. Searching for a solution.”
“Boom,” Parker mouthed as the screen abruptly went black. The steady green light on server F died, and then blinked orange.
It wasn’t off for long, and he hoped the downtime was so brief, no one would think much of it on the logs. The monitor flickered and when the initialization screen came up, Parker wanted to do a cheesy fist pump in the air. Instead, he yanked the flash drive out, switched the dial back to server A, and shut the tower door.
He had ninety seconds to spare. A lifetime.
As he sprinted for the door, he reached into his back pocket to grab his tour pass . . . What the fuck?
It wasn’t there.
He didn’t have time to panic, but he didn’t have a whole lot of time to retrace his steps, either. Where had he dropped it? Back in the Linus row? No. It had to be when he’d squeezed between the two server racks and hid.
Sure enough, the lanyard was snagged on a hinge, all the way at the back. He pushed his way into the tight space, grasped the cord, and pulled it free. As he started to shimmy out of the spot, movement caught his eye.
Son of a bitch!
The same guy from before was back. If Parker hadn’t gone to retrieve his tour pass, he’d have been busted coming out of the server room right in front of the guy. The man lingered by the ancient computer right by the door, maybe looking up a server. Or, you know, just hanging out for no fucking reason in front of the only exit to the room.
Parker would swear he could feel the second hand ticking on his watch. It reverberated up his wrist, each tick shrinking his odds of not being discovered. Getting caught was bad all around. He’d be arrested, and sure, Boss Man would put pressure in just the right places to make the charges disappear, but not before he’d chewed a new asshole into Parker for getting caught.
More than anything, it was the worry over Lexi. He did not want her seeing him in cuffs, and he sure as shit didn’t want her dragged in for questioning. If Parker was arrested, the authorities would have to assume his notorious hacker wife was an accomplice.
There was nothing to do but stay still, alert, and wait. He couldn’t exactly put the tech in a sleeper hold. That kind of downtime would most definitely raise flags.
From where he was hidden, he couldn’t tell where the guy went, only that he’d moved off. Parker risked a glance and inched his head out. The coast was clear—at least this row. He prowled to the corner and glanced around it.
That way wasn’t as clear. The guy stood in the wide aisle and had his back mostly turned. His head was tipped down, the open laptop in his hands held his attention. A check of the watch confirmed it. Parker was out of time, but hopefully not luck.
He moved swiftly to the door and exited.
The hallway was empty, and he flattened himself against the wall once again as he slinked away from the field of view of the camera. It probably caught the back of his head for a moment, but that was it.
He slung the green lanyard over his head, stepped into the center of the hallway, and calmly walked back to the bench, expecting the door to the server room to come flying open at any moment. His ass hit the cushion, just as a door did swing out, only it was to the media room.
Robert smiled pleasantly. “How you doing?”
“I feel much better.” It certainly wasn’t a lie. Lexi was right behind Robert, and the first of the tour group to start filtering into the hallway. She hurried to him, and he could tell the last ten minutes hadn’t been easy on her either.
“How was it?” she whispered.
He stood, put his arm around her shoulders, and grinned. “Piece of cake.”