The 13 th tribe

3

With the smell of Elias’s blood still in her nostrils and her heart racing from the excitement of taking down the guard, Nevaeh hoped for more action-someone spotting their eyes or a security code that had changed since Ben’s informant had given it to him-anything that would force them to take a prisoner and get the intel they needed through good old-fashioned violence.

And she meant good, as in God. After all, everything they did was for him. To get his attention, to please him. Anyone who had a hard time reconciling their methods with God’s Word hadn’t read the Old Testament. He ordered violence against his enemies, and all they were doing was carrying out those orders. Someone had to do it, and more people should; if they did, maybe the Tribe wouldn’t be so necessary and God would call them home. Finally.

So bring it on, she thought. His furious wrath moves our muscles and cuts with our swords.

But there would be no cutting tonight. After the incident with the guard outside, everything else flowed without a hitch, and she supposed that was for the best. Ben had outlined a contingency plan to cover the break-in, but the farther into the building they could be traced, the more likely their true agenda would be discovered. And that would blow their grand plans to make a statement against evil that the world wouldn’t soon forget.

Ben had memorized the layout, and every door opened at his digital command. They coasted past glass-walled rooms inside which workers in hazmat suits layered electronic circuitry into silicon wafers, tested them on monstrous computers, and etched or silkscreened model and lot numbers on their surfaces. The three intruders lowered their heads to keep cameras from catching their eyes and turned their faces away from assembly personnel and guards even as they breezed past them, close enough to smell their perfume, aftershave, and sweat.

Within minutes they’d found the company’s most secure storage room and the vault inside. Ben punched in a code, passed an infrared security chip over a reader, and pressed a fingerprint on a square of transparent film against a biometric scanner. The vault door opened, revealing shelves of aluminum Halliburton cases, labeled with numbers. With his back to Nevaeh he was completely invisible, so when he pulled a case off its shelf, it appeared to spring up and dance in the air on its own. An identical case materialized, drawn from a metamaterial pack on Ben’s back. It floated onto the shelf, and the original vanished into the pack.

The case contained twenty microchips that would give them access to sophisticated military weapons, enough to level a city. These chips were backups of ones already in the Pentagon’s hands. Chances were they would be inventoried but never used, and the dummy duplicates Ben had left in their stead meant their theft would go unnoticed-at least until it was too late. Their tech wizard, Sebastian, had created them from specs provided by their informant, a man privy to top secret government contracts and who sympathized with their cause.

The vault door closed, and Nevaeh and Phin followed Ben back to their point of entrance. Before exiting, Phin produced a can of spray paint and graffitied the hallway wall: STOP HELPING BUTCHERS! And on the opposite wall: THIS TIME, THIS FAR. NEXT TIME, ALL THE WAY.

MicroTech had been the target of protests over their Pentagon contracts. The idea was to pin the attack on the break-in on radical peaceniks, content-this time-to demonstrate their ability to breach the company’s security. The guard’s claims of invisible beings would be chalked up to his head trauma, and the cameras would show that no one had penetrated any deeper than this hallway.

Ben punched in a code, and they stepped into the night.