Jack dropped the security guard from the fireman's hold onto the floor next
to the employee entrance, onto the thin concrete verge so the man's limp
legs landed on the grass. Jack sniffed loudly. Across to his left the
security camera moved from side to side, seemingly performing its intended
task, but he could make out its snapped cover hanging limply, and a bundle
of dangling wires.
Across to his right Nina was knelt in front of the door, having slipped a folded piece of card into the mouth of the magnetic scanner, she was keying in the forty something digit number that was the door key. "There's no zero." She muttered.
"What?" asked Jack, stepping over the guard to get to her.
"There's no zero." She said again, holding the paper with the code on it. Her thumb was under the zero she had to input, and her other hand was poised over the laminated controls.
"What?" He queried again, scanning the control panel "Skip it." He finally ordered, agitated, and waited for her to input the last set of controls. He moved back to the security guard and bent down, lifting the heavy man over his shoulder.
Nina finished inputting the code and the panel asked her for a retinal scan. She moved out of the way, flipping open the cover to the iris scanner, as Jack hoisted the security guard and propped him against the door, he gripped a fistful of his hair and pulled his head back enough for the scanner to see his eye.
The scanner flashed green and then the door mechanism let out a harmonious tone, indicating it had clicked open. Nina rounded Jack and pushed the door, it opened easily. Jack gave the walkway outside a quick check before he tugged the security guard inside.
Nina began walking off down the corridor while Jack carefully positioned the security guard up against the wall, out of the view of anyone looking through the narrow window in the door. "This is the door." She said, and began opening the first door in their maze trail.
-24-
"This is the last door code I have, so it'd better be behind this one." Nina muttered as they walked down the corridor, shining torchlight on each door number in turn.
Jack glanced over at the pages he'd copied out yesterday, now, copied at one am. It was probably a little past midnight, but he hadn't had long to adjust to Spanish time yet, and being up for a day or more in a row was hardly a feat for him.
Nina, on the other hand, had managed to switch to the Spanish time at some point last night. She'd been awake at ten the next morning, when she'd accidentally awoken him, apologising, saying that she'd been unable to sleep anymore, body clock and all. She was a little tired and a little tense, she'd rolled the papers up not long after they'd memorised the number and was shaking it in her hands.
"This one." Jack said, as his torchlight hit the door number, 135. On the left. Next to him he heard Nina let out a sigh, and slide the piece of card out of her pants. She was getting bored, it had taken them at least fifteen doors to get to where they were now, and her fingers were probably getting pads on them by now.
He watched as she forced the folded card into the slot, waiting for it to start scanning and then keying a code in. "Why do you have to put the card in?" He asked, leaning against the other side of the doorway, squatting down so his head was level with the control.
"When the scanner starts it opens up the diagnostic mechanisms, I can input the code and tell it it came from the key." Nina explained as she unrolled the key code sheet, and began with the number. Jack watched, sympathetically as she pressed a hand to her forehead between numbers.
"Why don't you let me do that?" He offered, taking the sheet.
Nina glanced at him, surprised. "You sure?"
"Yeah." He reached out an arm and took the paper from her hand. He made his way past her, and squatted down. "Where did you get to?" He asked, as she pointed it out the fourth digit.
Nina watched as Jack pressed each of the numbers on the page. She'd thought that it took a long time to input it when she'd been doing it herself, watching Jack, it seemed to last an eternity. She pressed her back against the door they wanted to open, making sure not to put too much pressure on the door. She arched her back, and reached a hand behind her to rub the lower spinal disks. Several quick glances at Jack later, she shone her torch off down the corridor in either direction. "We must have walked for longer than...what scale was the map, do you remember?"
"I doubt the map was complete, I think we're inside the mountain now." Jack commented to her.
The Malero building backed onto a mountain. They hadn't seen the back of it, but it was a fair bet that, had they been giving satellite shots, the building wouldn't have ended before the rock face. Nina blew a stray tuft of hair out of her eyes. "That gallery opening was tonight, wasn't it?" Nina commented, thinking through the large amount of information that was layered in her head. There was no way he could get back in time, but there was a chance that he could call Teri before hand, maybe wish her luck. He'd just have to use a payphone and have it put through secure channels at CTU.
"What?" asked Jack, momentarily looking over at her. He had heard what she'd said, but he wasn't sure that she meant to get an answer.
"The gallery opening..." She was interrupted as the door chimed melodically, he'd completed inputting the code and it was correct. She rose to her feet and pressed a hand against the door. It moved aside and opened to a large dark cavern.
Fluorescent lights sputtered several times before they came on. Nina took a cautious step inside, moving over a little to allow Jack to step in behind her. The central archive room was huge. Painted white, it was a cube, each side a hundred and fifty feet. It was larger than CTU, and the height of the room was spanned by huge storage shelves, filled with rows upon rows of removable hard drives, billions of bytes.
There were two computers in the centre of the room, placed face to face, one chair, and a circular desk. Jack peeled the huge Velcro strip off from around his watch and check the display, it was the first time he'd checked all evening. "Codes change in twenty minutes." He told Nina.
He'd only just finished his sentence when she sprinted towards the central island, jumping over the edge of the desk and sliding into the central seat. She tapped a key on the computer, bringing it from its screen saver, brandishing the company name, to a log in screen. In the desk a magnetic scanner opened beside her elbow, and she took the papers from Jack. They didn't have a key code.
An options screen opened on the computer and she selected 'manual'. The computer provided her with a prompt to input, what they hoped, would be the code to give them access.
This one was alphanumeric, twenty digits long, and Nina input it as fast as she could, glancing over occasionally at the door and Jack, who was reading the information printed on the end of each row of hard drives.
The computer chimed, and entered the main screen, there were images - icons across the top of the screen, and a panel at the side with a list of options on. It obviously wasn't a Microsoft based operating system, nor was it easily recognisable, most likely it was specially designed, like the computer systems at CTU.
Jack moved back over, hovering near her shoulder. He was satisfied the room was secure. "What's wrong?"
"I have the file name, I just don't know how to get it." She was having a momentary lapse in her Spanish. She was usually better under pressure than this.
"Find in Spanish?" He smiled at her.
"Mmm." She glanced at his reflection in the darker parts of the screen. "I obviously don't spent enough time with Tony...or Jamey." She brought up one of the sidebars, and glanced down the options list.
"Tony speaks Spanish around the office?" Jack queried.
"Only when he's pissed off." She muttered. She looked down at the list of words, many looked familiar, but she couldn't tell if it was from trips to Mexico, high school Spanish, or listening to Tony cursing. _At least he has that self-restraint_ she thought, glancing slyly over at Jack, mind you, he didn't have the luxury of being bilingual.
Nina sighed, they should have brought a Spanish dictionary, chances were, at least one of these options were firewalls, and at least one was an alarm. She thought back to any instances she'd heard Tony talking Spanish in the office. She could hear him in her mind.
"Maldito sea, no lo puedo descubrir!"
She scanned the list for 'descubrir'. The first part of his sentence was sure to be swearing, and she knew no...puedo meant 'I can't'. She found a word that began with 'descubr' so she took a leap. Clicking on the icon she was relieved to be presented with a second screen that requested a file name to find, if descubrir meant to find.
She typed in the long chain that was the name of the files, watching as Jack once again began walking around the room. The computer made a loud clicking sound as it scanned all of its hardware, and then popped up with a seven-digit number.
"Got it!" She yelled out at Jack, who came running up from one of the rows towards her.
"What is it?" He sprinted to the ladders at the side of the wall. He tugged on one, and then the other - neither would budge, they were both magnetically locked to the wall.
"Isle 4, on the left, 49 along from here, 29 up from the floor." Nina spieled off.
Jack walked around the end of the rows, slapping the side of each row until he found row 4. He walked to its left and looked at the numbers along the bottom, painted every five drives, and reached 49. Looking up at the rows in front of him, twenty-nine was probably ninety foot up.
There were any ladders, and there didn't seem to be any purchase along the massive cabinet. "You have to input a code in order to pull the disk out?" He asked her, gripping the handles on two drives just above waist height.
"Yeah, otherwise the hard drive is wiped and the data goes back into the server computer." Nina recited from Walsh's briefing. An agent had come into the Malero building as a prospective client and been given lots of information about the safe guards.
"Have you got the code for our drive?" He asked.
Nina still had nearly a page of coding left to input, so she called out to him, sliding the chair along to see down the row, Jack was hunched over, holding onto two hard drives, she didn't know what he intended to do.
After he'd heard her response he pulled the drives from their slots, signaling a beep in the corner of her computer, and she watched him for a second, pulling drives out a little and then using them as footholds and handholds to scale the cabinet. She heard a second beep and pushed the chair back to the terminal, checking to see if it had triggered any alarms, it seemed like they were only notices on screen, she couldn't see any indication the computer was contacting the security system.
She watched as each alarm sounded, canceling them as they went, and glanced nervously over her shoulder at Jack, he was getting high above the ground, and there was little chance of him surviving if he plummeted from that height.
"Nina!" She heard him call, she didn't respond, waiting for his question. The room seemed to echo any noise over a certain level, so Jack's request came in loud and clear. "Where is the drive?"
"Forty-nine along, twenty-nine up." She yelled, hoping her voice resounded as well in the room as his did.
"Put the code in." He called back.
Nina nodded, her internal translator seemed to be back online, and she clicked on the button to retrieve the file. Once again, the magnetic scanner opened, and she had to over-ride the computer and input the release code in manually. She clicked on 'verifice', leaning over her shoulder to see Jack's precarious position whilst she waited for the computer to give her the all clear. "Okay, pull it!" She yelled up at him as the computer okayed her command.
"I got it!" He yelled, and hooked the drive over his wrist. It wasn't quite a large enough handhold to fit much higher up than his knuckles, but he did it anyway, and reached his foot out below him for the foot holds. He slid himself down onto it, and pushed his second hand hold away. The drive slipped down his hand, tearing up a layer of skin and he let himself wince, once, before he resolved to ignore the pain. He heard Nina's footsteps on the ground beneath him, and kept extremely quiet to hear her pack up his gear, what little of it he'd taken off and left on the ground.
When he reached the ground her ripped the drive off of his hand, taking a little skin around his knuckles off with it, and passed the slightly bloody drive to Nina, who slid it into the zip pouch of her pack, free from water exposure, shielded from magnetic scanners, so no chance of wiping the data, and away from Jack's bleeding hand, and the problems caused by corroding iron in his blood.
Jack leant against the adjacent shelf for a minute to catch his breath, whilst Nina forced the last few footholds back into the wall. She was reaching for Jack, ready to help him up, when she heard the computer start to beep.
She sprinted over, while Jack slowly rose back to his feet, and tapped a few keys. "Uh...Jack?"
The uncertainty in her voice caused Jack a little alarm, and he rushed towards the central island to join her, pulling his pack on as he went.
"We've triggered an alarm."
Across to his right Nina was knelt in front of the door, having slipped a folded piece of card into the mouth of the magnetic scanner, she was keying in the forty something digit number that was the door key. "There's no zero." She muttered.
"What?" asked Jack, stepping over the guard to get to her.
"There's no zero." She said again, holding the paper with the code on it. Her thumb was under the zero she had to input, and her other hand was poised over the laminated controls.
"What?" He queried again, scanning the control panel "Skip it." He finally ordered, agitated, and waited for her to input the last set of controls. He moved back to the security guard and bent down, lifting the heavy man over his shoulder.
Nina finished inputting the code and the panel asked her for a retinal scan. She moved out of the way, flipping open the cover to the iris scanner, as Jack hoisted the security guard and propped him against the door, he gripped a fistful of his hair and pulled his head back enough for the scanner to see his eye.
The scanner flashed green and then the door mechanism let out a harmonious tone, indicating it had clicked open. Nina rounded Jack and pushed the door, it opened easily. Jack gave the walkway outside a quick check before he tugged the security guard inside.
Nina began walking off down the corridor while Jack carefully positioned the security guard up against the wall, out of the view of anyone looking through the narrow window in the door. "This is the door." She said, and began opening the first door in their maze trail.
-24-
"This is the last door code I have, so it'd better be behind this one." Nina muttered as they walked down the corridor, shining torchlight on each door number in turn.
Jack glanced over at the pages he'd copied out yesterday, now, copied at one am. It was probably a little past midnight, but he hadn't had long to adjust to Spanish time yet, and being up for a day or more in a row was hardly a feat for him.
Nina, on the other hand, had managed to switch to the Spanish time at some point last night. She'd been awake at ten the next morning, when she'd accidentally awoken him, apologising, saying that she'd been unable to sleep anymore, body clock and all. She was a little tired and a little tense, she'd rolled the papers up not long after they'd memorised the number and was shaking it in her hands.
"This one." Jack said, as his torchlight hit the door number, 135. On the left. Next to him he heard Nina let out a sigh, and slide the piece of card out of her pants. She was getting bored, it had taken them at least fifteen doors to get to where they were now, and her fingers were probably getting pads on them by now.
He watched as she forced the folded card into the slot, waiting for it to start scanning and then keying a code in. "Why do you have to put the card in?" He asked, leaning against the other side of the doorway, squatting down so his head was level with the control.
"When the scanner starts it opens up the diagnostic mechanisms, I can input the code and tell it it came from the key." Nina explained as she unrolled the key code sheet, and began with the number. Jack watched, sympathetically as she pressed a hand to her forehead between numbers.
"Why don't you let me do that?" He offered, taking the sheet.
Nina glanced at him, surprised. "You sure?"
"Yeah." He reached out an arm and took the paper from her hand. He made his way past her, and squatted down. "Where did you get to?" He asked, as she pointed it out the fourth digit.
Nina watched as Jack pressed each of the numbers on the page. She'd thought that it took a long time to input it when she'd been doing it herself, watching Jack, it seemed to last an eternity. She pressed her back against the door they wanted to open, making sure not to put too much pressure on the door. She arched her back, and reached a hand behind her to rub the lower spinal disks. Several quick glances at Jack later, she shone her torch off down the corridor in either direction. "We must have walked for longer than...what scale was the map, do you remember?"
"I doubt the map was complete, I think we're inside the mountain now." Jack commented to her.
The Malero building backed onto a mountain. They hadn't seen the back of it, but it was a fair bet that, had they been giving satellite shots, the building wouldn't have ended before the rock face. Nina blew a stray tuft of hair out of her eyes. "That gallery opening was tonight, wasn't it?" Nina commented, thinking through the large amount of information that was layered in her head. There was no way he could get back in time, but there was a chance that he could call Teri before hand, maybe wish her luck. He'd just have to use a payphone and have it put through secure channels at CTU.
"What?" asked Jack, momentarily looking over at her. He had heard what she'd said, but he wasn't sure that she meant to get an answer.
"The gallery opening..." She was interrupted as the door chimed melodically, he'd completed inputting the code and it was correct. She rose to her feet and pressed a hand against the door. It moved aside and opened to a large dark cavern.
Fluorescent lights sputtered several times before they came on. Nina took a cautious step inside, moving over a little to allow Jack to step in behind her. The central archive room was huge. Painted white, it was a cube, each side a hundred and fifty feet. It was larger than CTU, and the height of the room was spanned by huge storage shelves, filled with rows upon rows of removable hard drives, billions of bytes.
There were two computers in the centre of the room, placed face to face, one chair, and a circular desk. Jack peeled the huge Velcro strip off from around his watch and check the display, it was the first time he'd checked all evening. "Codes change in twenty minutes." He told Nina.
He'd only just finished his sentence when she sprinted towards the central island, jumping over the edge of the desk and sliding into the central seat. She tapped a key on the computer, bringing it from its screen saver, brandishing the company name, to a log in screen. In the desk a magnetic scanner opened beside her elbow, and she took the papers from Jack. They didn't have a key code.
An options screen opened on the computer and she selected 'manual'. The computer provided her with a prompt to input, what they hoped, would be the code to give them access.
This one was alphanumeric, twenty digits long, and Nina input it as fast as she could, glancing over occasionally at the door and Jack, who was reading the information printed on the end of each row of hard drives.
The computer chimed, and entered the main screen, there were images - icons across the top of the screen, and a panel at the side with a list of options on. It obviously wasn't a Microsoft based operating system, nor was it easily recognisable, most likely it was specially designed, like the computer systems at CTU.
Jack moved back over, hovering near her shoulder. He was satisfied the room was secure. "What's wrong?"
"I have the file name, I just don't know how to get it." She was having a momentary lapse in her Spanish. She was usually better under pressure than this.
"Find in Spanish?" He smiled at her.
"Mmm." She glanced at his reflection in the darker parts of the screen. "I obviously don't spent enough time with Tony...or Jamey." She brought up one of the sidebars, and glanced down the options list.
"Tony speaks Spanish around the office?" Jack queried.
"Only when he's pissed off." She muttered. She looked down at the list of words, many looked familiar, but she couldn't tell if it was from trips to Mexico, high school Spanish, or listening to Tony cursing. _At least he has that self-restraint_ she thought, glancing slyly over at Jack, mind you, he didn't have the luxury of being bilingual.
Nina sighed, they should have brought a Spanish dictionary, chances were, at least one of these options were firewalls, and at least one was an alarm. She thought back to any instances she'd heard Tony talking Spanish in the office. She could hear him in her mind.
"Maldito sea, no lo puedo descubrir!"
She scanned the list for 'descubrir'. The first part of his sentence was sure to be swearing, and she knew no...puedo meant 'I can't'. She found a word that began with 'descubr' so she took a leap. Clicking on the icon she was relieved to be presented with a second screen that requested a file name to find, if descubrir meant to find.
She typed in the long chain that was the name of the files, watching as Jack once again began walking around the room. The computer made a loud clicking sound as it scanned all of its hardware, and then popped up with a seven-digit number.
"Got it!" She yelled out at Jack, who came running up from one of the rows towards her.
"What is it?" He sprinted to the ladders at the side of the wall. He tugged on one, and then the other - neither would budge, they were both magnetically locked to the wall.
"Isle 4, on the left, 49 along from here, 29 up from the floor." Nina spieled off.
Jack walked around the end of the rows, slapping the side of each row until he found row 4. He walked to its left and looked at the numbers along the bottom, painted every five drives, and reached 49. Looking up at the rows in front of him, twenty-nine was probably ninety foot up.
There were any ladders, and there didn't seem to be any purchase along the massive cabinet. "You have to input a code in order to pull the disk out?" He asked her, gripping the handles on two drives just above waist height.
"Yeah, otherwise the hard drive is wiped and the data goes back into the server computer." Nina recited from Walsh's briefing. An agent had come into the Malero building as a prospective client and been given lots of information about the safe guards.
"Have you got the code for our drive?" He asked.
Nina still had nearly a page of coding left to input, so she called out to him, sliding the chair along to see down the row, Jack was hunched over, holding onto two hard drives, she didn't know what he intended to do.
After he'd heard her response he pulled the drives from their slots, signaling a beep in the corner of her computer, and she watched him for a second, pulling drives out a little and then using them as footholds and handholds to scale the cabinet. She heard a second beep and pushed the chair back to the terminal, checking to see if it had triggered any alarms, it seemed like they were only notices on screen, she couldn't see any indication the computer was contacting the security system.
She watched as each alarm sounded, canceling them as they went, and glanced nervously over her shoulder at Jack, he was getting high above the ground, and there was little chance of him surviving if he plummeted from that height.
"Nina!" She heard him call, she didn't respond, waiting for his question. The room seemed to echo any noise over a certain level, so Jack's request came in loud and clear. "Where is the drive?"
"Forty-nine along, twenty-nine up." She yelled, hoping her voice resounded as well in the room as his did.
"Put the code in." He called back.
Nina nodded, her internal translator seemed to be back online, and she clicked on the button to retrieve the file. Once again, the magnetic scanner opened, and she had to over-ride the computer and input the release code in manually. She clicked on 'verifice', leaning over her shoulder to see Jack's precarious position whilst she waited for the computer to give her the all clear. "Okay, pull it!" She yelled up at him as the computer okayed her command.
"I got it!" He yelled, and hooked the drive over his wrist. It wasn't quite a large enough handhold to fit much higher up than his knuckles, but he did it anyway, and reached his foot out below him for the foot holds. He slid himself down onto it, and pushed his second hand hold away. The drive slipped down his hand, tearing up a layer of skin and he let himself wince, once, before he resolved to ignore the pain. He heard Nina's footsteps on the ground beneath him, and kept extremely quiet to hear her pack up his gear, what little of it he'd taken off and left on the ground.
When he reached the ground her ripped the drive off of his hand, taking a little skin around his knuckles off with it, and passed the slightly bloody drive to Nina, who slid it into the zip pouch of her pack, free from water exposure, shielded from magnetic scanners, so no chance of wiping the data, and away from Jack's bleeding hand, and the problems caused by corroding iron in his blood.
Jack leant against the adjacent shelf for a minute to catch his breath, whilst Nina forced the last few footholds back into the wall. She was reaching for Jack, ready to help him up, when she heard the computer start to beep.
She sprinted over, while Jack slowly rose back to his feet, and tapped a few keys. "Uh...Jack?"
The uncertainty in her voice caused Jack a little alarm, and he rushed towards the central island to join her, pulling his pack on as he went.
"We've triggered an alarm."