Poisonfeather (Gibson Vaughn #2)(62)
“What line?”
Deja slapped the side of the van three more times. After a moment, a second man stepped out of the far side of the clearing, also carrying a rifle. He moseyed toward them. Gibson wondered how many more guns Deja Noble had pointed at them.
“Starting to get hot,” she said. “Let’s go somewhere cooler and cut it up.”
“What line?” Gibson asked for the third time.
He didn’t like the answer.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
12:57 a.m.
Three minutes until he crossed Deja Noble’s line.
It had been a hectic thirty-six hours prepping her little job. That’s what Deja called it anyway. Easy enough for her to say from the sidelines, but there was nothing little about the prison time they’d face if caught.
Gibson started the van and reached for his phone to send Swonger an angry text for running behind schedule. It had been tough to sell Deja Noble on his plan. She favored a far less subtle approach, but he’d made it clear that violence was not an option. No one would pay for his choices but him. Deja agreed and made it clear that any foul-ups would be on him, so a late start did not augur well.
As if on cue, Swonger roared to a stop in a black 2013 Mustang Boss 302 Laguna Seca, pelting the side of the van with gravel. The love Swonger had for that car was not wholly platonic, and he was already mourning her loss after tonight. The ex-con looked a full three inches taller in the driver’s seat—truly a case of the car making the man.
Swonger grinned, a little too amped up for Gibson’s liking, and gave a thumbs-up that meant Lea was in position and the alarms and cameras were down.
Most modern security was networked to off-site servers that stored camera footage and other data. A good system, in theory, but one that rendered it vulnerable to direct, simple hacks. Gibson had found the junction/relay box a quarter mile up the road. A drab, easy-to-overlook metal box. Tens of thousands like it spread along roadways throughout Virginia, millions across the country. Those boxes cobbled together the digital infrastructure of the country, yet few had security beyond a simple pin-tumbler lock. It had taken Swonger less than a minute to pick it.
Security tended to be a reactive profession, and basic principles predicted that there was only ever enough to prevent the last type of intrusion, not the next. Most businesses learned the hard way again and again and again. American banks, for example, had excellent security precisely because they had been targets ever since the first bank robbery in the 1860s. By contrast, the average Internet-facing business was vulnerable because they didn’t think of themselves as potential victims. At least not until a hacker splashed their customers’ credit-card data across the web. A state-police motor-pool depot in the middle of rural Virginia fell into the latter category. It, too, had a false sense of safety derived from its low profile. Since no one had ever thought to rob it before, it got by with a few fences, cameras, and rent-a-guards. It was sufficient because it always had been. Until suddenly it wasn’t.
For the thirty-six hours, Gibson and Lea had toggled the network connection at the junction box off and on at irregular intervals for a few minutes at a time. Long enough for the outage to be reported but brief enough that by the time diagnostics were run remotely, the systems were up and running again. By now, it would have been logged as an ongoing issue, but a low-priority one since the outages were short and intermittent. No doubt, it lay near the bottom of the to-do list of some overworked technician. Tonight’s outage would be interpreted as yet another inconvenient outage. It would be called in—again—but security wouldn’t panic.
Gibson checked his phone. Time to go. He slipped off his latex gloves. He’d put them back on when he was through the security checkpoint. He dried his sweating palms on his shirt. He’d broken into a lot of places in his life but always from the relative safety of a computer. It was a whole other thing to drive up to the front gate, where an armed guard got a good look at your face. Unfortunately, though, this thing couldn’t be done remotely. Time to get your hands dirty, he thought, and put those same hands carefully back on the steering wheel at ten and two. He would wipe the van down once they were inside the vehicle storage facility, but he didn’t want to leave anything to chance. Thanks to his childhood indiscretions, the Virginia State Police were already intimately familiar with his fingerprints.
Swonger pulled out behind him, and together the two vehicles crested a small rise. Up ahead Gibson saw it: the Virginia State motor pool, which serviced and maintained police vehicles from across the state. Apart from the chain-link fence and barbed wire, it looked no different from your average auto dealer: At the center stood an operations building that was 90 percent maintenance garage but also housed offices and a waiting area. Hundreds of vehicles fanned out across the two-acre lot. Row after row of white-and-blue Dodge Chargers and Ford Interceptors—the backbone of the force. Mobile command posts. Heavily armored BearCats and other specialized SWAT vehicles. A fleet of pickup trucks. In addition, out of sight on the far side of the garage, the facility housed an impound lot for seized vehicles. Inside of which lay Deja Noble’s prize and the price for her support. The line she needed Gibson to cross.
They rolled toward the front gate.
“Are you really going to do this?” he muttered to himself. How many laws was he about to break? Turn around. Turn around now, call it off, go home. But his inner voice sounded distant, no real conviction behind it, and he pushed his doubts away. He would do it for the judge. And if he didn’t do it, then Deja Noble would, and then people would get hurt, or worse. On some level, he recognized it as hollow rationalization. Nicole’s words came back to him from their fight at the house: Were you always this person? He wasn’t as sure of the answer to that as he once had been.