Wormhole (The Rho Agenda #3)(77)

Twenty minutes, thirty-four seconds.

An adrenaline surge almost caused her to roll to a sitting position. Heather funneled the feeling into a big smile.

“Gotcha!”

She didn’t need long. Five minutes. Maybe less, just enough time to get from her cell to the nearest room with some more capable networked computer systems, time enough to take out any resistance and get up on the local area network.

Heather entered the commands to force an immediate shutdown of the camera control system, switched telnet targets, and unlocked all electronically locked doors throughout the facility, forcing a reboot of the security control system. Then, to add just a bit more confusion to the coming mayhem, she killed the facility lights—not the power, just the lights.

As the lights went out, Heather leaped from her bed, pulled the heavy cell door open, and hit the corridor at a dead run. Although the sound wasn’t loud enough to provide a bright image, the echoes from her running footfalls provided enough detail for her to clearly see her surroundings. She didn’t need louder sounds. She wanted to see the sounds made by others.

Taking a right into the first hallway, Heather saw a flashlight beam stab from the opening door on her left. The look of pain and surprise on the guard’s face barely registered as Heather’s spinning side kick broke his arm at the elbow, sending the flashlight flying, the beam whirling through the dark corridor like a Jedi light saber, before smashing out on the concrete floor.

Then, like a lioness, she was on him.





Bud Gendall stared at the bank of security monitors that all displayed the same message: “VIDEO SOURCE DISCONNECTED.”

“What the hell just happened to our feed?”

John McCall, his night shift partner, looked at him and shrugged. “Looks like the system just rebooted. Gotta love Microsoft.”

Then the lights went out.

“Shit! Power’s down too?”

“Can’t be. The computer’s coming back up now.”

Sure enough, the security and computer monitors still wept their pale light into the encroaching darkness. Weird. Bud didn’t like weirdness. Not in the NSA’s most secret supermax facility. Not on his shift.

Grabbing the heavy black flashlight from its wall mount, John switched it on and headed toward the door. “I’ll check it out.”

As John stepped into the corridor, a loud crack accompanied his scream. A rush of adrenaline coursed through Bud’s body like an electric shock, throwing the unfolding scene into slow motion. The flashlight spinning out of John’s hand. The whirling flashlight strobing the action into a sequence of freeze-frame images. The McFarland girl’s cold, hard face, eyes gone white. John’s right arm flopping like a rag doll’s. McFarland catapulting John’s 240 pounds of muscle toward him like a human cannonball.

Bud was halfway to his feet, hand tugging the Beretta from his service holster, when John hit him. Rolling with the blow, Bud came back to his feet with a grace that spoke to his years of training. Even as he sought to level the gun, the girl’s axe kick knocked it from his hand, the force of the blow numbing his arm from the shoulder down.

Bud responded with a leg sweep that should have landed her flat on her back, but she countered, using his own momentum against him, her elbow smashing his left orbital socket, wiping his vision with a red haze of blood and pain. As the floor rose up to meet him, her knee interrupted his downward progress, the impact crushing his trachea and rupturing several branches of his inferior thyroid artery.

As Bud felt blackness enfold him, he realized the unthinkable. This slender young woman in her blue hospital gown had just taken him and John out. As easy as putting out the trash.





A quick pulse check confirmed what Heather’s visions had already told her. She was this room’s sole survivor. Shunting aside a wave of revulsion, Heather let her training propel her forward.

Moving quickly, Heather retrieved both guards’ duty belts, holsters, and pistols, closed the door, and slid into the chair recently occupied by the second guard. As she used the back door to bypass the log-in screen, Heather heard the wail of an alarm, accompanied by distant shouts and the muffled thumps of gunfire.

It took her twenty seconds to bring the camera controller back online and another eighteen to take root control of that system. Overriding the default settings, Heather rerouted all camera output to her station, displaying the live video in a grid of small windows spread across the security monitors. A quick glance told her what she needed to know.

Heather pulled up a three-dimensional facility diagram, then three additional windows on the primary computer display, rerouting all facility controls to her terminal. Noting Mark’s and Jennifer’s locations, she engaged every other lock in the building, restored the lights, and initiated the central control center’s fire suppression system, flooding the locked room with halon 1301. Apparently the NSA was exempt from the EPA global warming ban on halon fire suppression systems. Not that it mattered to Heather which fire suppression gas they used. Fire wasn’t the only thing it would suffocate. She couldn’t have someone trying to restore central system control while she had work to do.

On a different sublevel, two dozen Arabic prisoners had stormed from their cells, killing three guards, but losing five of their own in the process. Now armed with pistols, nightsticks, and flashlights, the survivors were systematically working their way down the corridor.