Code of Honor

25

Three minutes.

Cecily Lung looked at her watch and squirmed in her ergonomic desk chair. She was new to Dexter & Reed, not yet completely trusted by the rest of the engineers — but Phil had a crush on her, so that was something. She’d give herself another minute and a half and then go to his desk, two cubicles down. He made no secret of the fact he’d like to ask her on a date, but he hadn’t quite figured out how to navigate work relationships.

She’d been there only a week, but Lung kept notes on everyone in the office, looking for useful weaknesses that she could leverage — like Phil’s AWF — Asian woman fetish. She used her own made-up code to jot everything down in a notepad she kept in her purse along with a .22-caliber Beretta semiautomatic. She had a small suppressor as well that a former boyfriend had given her. It wasn’t much longer than her thumb and didn’t silence the subcompact pistol, but rendered it quiet enough that anyone listening behind a closed door might wonder if someone had dropped a book.

There were few doors here, though, and only a couple of walls. Dr. Li didn’t believe in cordoned work areas, insisting that open spaces inspired cooperation and group effort. He’d grudgingly allowed cubicles, so long as the walls didn’t go above the shoulder of the shortest seated individual. He had an office — the bigwigs at corporate had insisted so as not to make them look bad for having offices of their own — but he’d taken the door off and kept the blinds raised.

The computer control room itself had a door — an extremely secure door. Known among the engineers as “the vault,” the control room was connected to the outside world, to corporate and government clients, including the Missile Defense Agency, who purchased and depended on Dexter & Reed products — and the periodic software updates that product required. Sealed like a fortress, the vault was built of reinforced concrete block, sheathed in wire mesh walls, floors, and ceiling. Alarms and scramble pads controlled entry.

It wasn’t that there was an atmosphere of mistrust. They were all on the same team and all had high-level security clearances. But Li stressed redundant security and oversight. If anyone, including him, performed any task on the terminal, it had to be double-checked and verified. Engineers with specific hardware or software needs could enter the vault two at a time during office hours, but Li had the only code that worked after hours.

Tucked in Cecily Lung’s purse with the notebook and the pistol was a small thumb drive that her handler had delivered to her that morning, along with the instructions to upload it at once into the central terminal — behind the secure door. The sooner, the better. It would be quick — her handler estimated some fifteen seconds, but that might as well have been fifteen months if she couldn’t get into the locked facility by herself. She’d asked Phil to go in with her to check some hardware, but there was no way she could insert the drive. He was smitten, but he was also smart — and would surely see if she inserted any drive.

With any luck, the logs of the visit would help cover her tracks.

She stood, throwing her purse over her shoulder. Not that she needed the gun to talk to Phil, but it made her feel better to have it — and anyway, shit was about to get real.

The gun was meant to be a last-ditch effort. Her employers would, no doubt, have preferred that she use it on herself if she were compromised. Still, knowing it was in her purse made the tedious job of watching and waiting a tad more exciting. Cecily Lung had graduated from MIT with a degree in EECS — electrical engineering and computer science — one year after she’d been recruited by Department Two, the intelligence arm of the People’s Liberation Army. Both her parents were Taiwanese. They’d immigrated to the U.S., where, overwhelmed with the prosperity and free speech of her new country, Cecily began to display a revolutionary streak while she was in high school. At first she’d been wise enough to keep her thoughts off social media, but she was quick to grow bored and was on the verge of shucking it all to join an activist group when she was approached. Her recruitment could not have come at a better time. A life designing computers made her want to scream. A life of espionage and designing computers was something she could sink her teeth into.

If it didn’t get her arrested — or worse.

She glanced at her watch again.

Nearly there.

Dr. Li was on the phone, talking in animated tones, but hushed enough that she couldn’t make out his words. He was a decent enough man for a capitalist, and Cecily really didn’t want to have to shoot him. In truth, her superiors had never said anything about shooting anyone. They did not even know she had the pistol. But she was a spy, wasn’t she? Was she supposed to go in and do all this unprotected?

Time to move.

“Hey,” Phil Beasley said, rolling back from his workstation to show he was giving Cecily his full attention. He was no more than ten years older than her but dressed like her grandpa, with wide brown ties and stodgy leather wing tips that were so scuffed it looked like he’d worn them camping. He had a habit of clutching his hair while he worked on a computer problem, leaving a spiked forelock that would have been cool on a high school kid but looked absurd on a man in his mid-thirties.

“What brings you to my neck of the woods?” he asked, playing imaginary bongos on his desk.

“To be honest,” she said, glancing at the clock — less than a minute now. “I need some help moving an old clothes dryer out of my apartment. I’ll buy you lunch if you could help on Saturday.”

Don’t rush. Act natural.

“Color me there,” he said.

“Great. I’ll text you my address.” She took her phone out of her purse, fumbling so it dropped between Phil’s feet and bounced under his desk. Ever the gentleman, he reached to retrieve it for her. When he bent down, she snatched his ID badge from beside his computer.

It seemed a thousand eyes were on her, but no one stood up, no one pointed an accusing finger.

Phil sat up and handed her the phone at the same time she stuffed the ID into the pocket of her slacks. She looked at the clock again.

“I have to pee,” she said, bouncing a little — from nerves, not her bladder, but the effect was the same. “I’ll text you my number in a second.”

Phil rolled back to his computer. “Cool, cool, cool,” he said.

Cecily made it through the door of the ladies’ room five seconds before the fire alarm went off. She went in a stall and shut the door, standing on a toilet so her feet didn’t show. It was standard operating procedure for the floor warden — one of the engineers who’d been designated — to poke her head in to see that everyone had made it out. They didn’t expect people to hide on the toilet. She heard Mr. Li shouting for everyone to log off their computers — which she’d conveniently done before going to visit Phil’s cubicle. With any luck, he’d rush out without looking for his ID, believing she’d gone on ahead without him. Rude, considering he’d just agreed to what amounted to a date, but people behaved strangely during a possible fire.

Teetering on the flimsy plastic toilet seat, Cecily braced herself against the stall for another two full minutes, allowing everyone to clear the floor. Her handler assured her he would take care of the security video feed that covered the door to the secure computer vault — and she would have to trust him on that.

She stepped down gingerly, shook a cramp from the prolonged half-crouch out of her calf, and then peeked out the door. The alarm — which her handler had activated — still blared, giving the deserted cubicles a postapocalyptic feel.

She had a limited amount of time before the floor wardens finished their tallies and someone was sent back up to find her. Dexter & Reed took its fire alarm and active-shooter drills seriously, thanks to all the former Feds on the payroll. Cecily pushed that terrifying thought out of her mind and sprinted down the empty corridor to the vault. She used both her ID badge and the one she’d stolen from Phil Beasley to scan her way inside. She’d worried that the door might fail-secure during an alarm, and breathed a sigh of relief when she heard the electronic mechanism release with an audible clunk.

She yanked open the door and inserted the thumb drive, clicking a few keys to open the program as her handler had instructed her. She’d been assured it would do the rest. And it did, lightning fast. In less than forty-five seconds, she was able to remove the thumb drive and log off the terminal. Whatever this new program did, it didn’t need her to do it.

No one had told her what it was she was loading. She assumed it was a RAT — remote access Trojan — or some other virus that would turn over control of the system or wreak other sorts of havoc on behalf of the Chinese government. Stuxnet, the virus developed and implemented by the U.S. but blamed on Israel, and which caused Iran’s nuclear centrifuges to go off kilter and crash, had caused Iran to throw all the scientists working on it against the wall and shoot them on the mistaken notion that one of them had to be the mole. WannaCry shut down businesses, NotPetya brought a large portion of global shipping to a halt. Computer glitches (viruses that governments wouldn’t admit to having) had caused drones to crash and communication centers to go dark. The possibilities were deliciously endless.

Four and a half minutes after the fire alarm had gone off, Cecily ran out the side doors of the building, panting from jumping and sliding down three flights of stairs. She’d left Phil’s ID on his desk a few inches from where she’d swiped it, wiping any fingerprints off on the front of her shirt.

“Hey,” Phil said, giving her a quizzical look when she approached her group in the greenbelt behind the building. “Where were you?”

She gave the floor warden — an older woman who reminded her of a junior high English teacher — a nod to show that she was present.

“It’s embarrassing,” she said, rocking from foot to foot, working to slow her heart rate so she didn’t sound so guilty.

“More embarrassing than burning to death?”

Dr. Li was still on his phone, scanning the crowd of employees as he talked. His gaze settled on Cecily long enough to make her squirm, but he moved on, checking on the rest of his charges. A benevolent dictator.

She lifted the hem of her blouse so Phil could see her waist, conveniently showing a sliver of her belly to keep his mind right. “I wore button-fly jeans today. Took me a minute to get decent.”

“Ah,” Phil said. “Gotcha.”

She gave him a smile, groaning inside, adjusting the leather strap of her purse on her shoulder. A bead of sweat ran down her cheek, easily blamed on the warm weather. She could hardly wait to find out what she’d been a part of. This mission had been tense, but so far, at least, it had gone smoothly. The program was installed — and she hadn’t even had to use the pistol… Damn it.

Li looked at her again, then checked his watch — like he’d been timing her. She shook her head to clear it. That was impossible. There was no way for him to know what she’d done.

Was there?