“Hello, Mrs. Tempest.”
Brin gasped and yanked back her hands. The top of the window said “Room 59” but she had no idea what that was. That aside, how had the person on the other end known she was on Alex’s computer?
“Who are you?” she typed in, and then minimized the window and popped open the search bar.
She searched for Room 59, but received no results.
She closed the search and maximized the chat window.
“My name is Denny. I think we need to talk about your husband, don’t you?”
“I’ve got a better idea. You talk, I’ll listen. How do you know my husband, and what is it you think we need to talk about? Is he in trouble? Is he hurt?”
“Alex and I work together, and as far as I know, he’s fine. But we can’t chat here. Follow this link and it will lead to a secure chat location. At the bottom of the screen is a small Easter egg—a hot spot on the screen that only activates when you mouse over it. You’ll have to search around the bottom left corner until you find it.”
Brin hesitated for a minute, but then searched and found the login. A voice suddenly began speaking through the computer’s speaker. It recited a password. When it repeated, she typed. It took her a moment to realize what it was.
“I’m in,” she typed in the window that opened.
The password had been a shared secret. Alex had once shown her a code called Caesar’s Cipher.
They’d played with it, encoding first his name, then hers and finally Savannah’s. She hadn’t realized it at the time, but he’d been leaving her an emergency message. She noticed that when the new chat window opened, nothing else on the computer reacted. She couldn’t close the window or open any others.
“This chat program isn’t just secure, it’s paranoid,” she whispered to herself, as though someone else could actually hear her.
“Now,” she typed in carefully, “why don’t you tell me just who the hell you are, and what you know about Alex?”
“To start with, I know what’s wrong with him.
I assume that you do, too. This morning, I received a report claiming that Alex has multiple sclerosis.
Can you confirm this?”
Brin stared at the screen. She read over the words several times, trying to find a way that they could mean something else. How could Alex have MS?
“No,” she typed at last. “I can’t confirm it. He hasn’t told me a thing. I knew he was, well, I didn’t think he… Alex said he was fine, but…”
“How did you know? Did he say something?”
“No, he didn’t say a thing. I got a call from the pharmacy this morning about a prescription that had been called in for him. He didn’t pick it up before he left. I’ve been trying all day to figure out why he’d be taking this particular medication, and now it makes sense—it’s an antiseizure medication.”
“Does Alex ever check in with you when he’s away?” Denny typed. “Is there any chance you could deliver a message to him?”
“He works with you and you can’t get hold of him?” It made her suspicious. She didn’t want to give anything away to this anonymous person.
Hell, she couldn’t be sure that he wasn’t someone who might hurt Alex. The secrecy of the chat room was starting to make her feel the paranoia she’d assigned to the room only moments before.
“Our field agents are often in places where communication is difficult, if not impossible. Do you have any idea how sick he was when he left?
The information that we have indicates that he has primary progressive MS. It could take him fast and hard.”
Brin shuddered and forced back tears as though she were face-to-face with Denny and needed to conceal her feelings from him. “There were a few tremors. Mostly in his hands. I don’t think it’s gone very far, actually, but I don’t know for sure.
He was hiding it from me, though. I don’t know how much you know about me, but I understand this disease. There is a very real risk that it will escalate and I have no idea whether he’s begun taking the meds or not. He didn’t pick up the prescription he was given before he left.”
“We have to get in touch with him if it is at all possible. Given his location, he isn’t likely to contact you—no more than he would contact us—
but, please, if he checks in, can you give him a message from me?”
“Sure,” Brin typed, not feeling sure at all.
“Just tell him, ‘Personal Option Mission Recall.’”
She paused, held her breath and blinked. “If he checks in, I’ll give him the message. But you still haven’t really told me who you are or what this is about. I still don’t understand why you can’t reach him.”
“That’s all for now. Thank you, Mrs. Tempest.”
There was a long pause and Brin wondered if she should shut down the window. Then, “Once you shut down the chat window, don’t open it again. I’ll know if you do.”
“How will you know?” she typed, half-smiling.
“You don’t look good in red. You should have worn your blue pajamas.”
Brin began to shake, her teeth rattling as her eyes darted about the room. The computer camera.
It had to be on. She shut down the computer as quickly as she could and then shoved off from the desk hard enough to nearly topple the chair. Once she was up, she whipped off her robe and threw it over the computer and its small camera, just in case.
The weight of what she’d learned sat heavy on her chest. Alex had always seemed so healthy. She shook her head, knowing that thoughts like that were useless. She was a scientist, she knew that things like this struck without warning.
She tried to reason it and then realized there was no reasoning. It was what it was.
Brin started to cry.
“There’s an advantage to being an electronics importer,” Liang explained as he slipped out of the chair and let Alex slide in. “You get to know all sorts of electronics engineers, technicians, pro-grammers—you know the type.”
“I guess so,” Alex said as he leaned forward.
After rising and having a quick meal, he’d started in on the MRIS files from Room 59. Liang had been out all morning and returned with a small jump drive full of files and data of his own. He was the local asset and it was his responsibility to gather as much intel on the target facility as possible. He’d come through admirably in very short order, and Alex appreciated it. He was on a shorter schedule than even his superiors knew, and all his plans were geared toward a quick hit and quicker exit.
Spread out on the computer screen was a series of documents. Each one, when maximized, was a blueprint, or a wiring diagram. The entire plan for the MRIS compound had been captured digitally.
“I don’t suppose these plans for the building just happened to be on the Internet?” Alex commented drily. “I hope there’s no trail back to the leak?”
“No trail. A friend of mine was kind enough to procure them for me. I must say, he had to go through quite a few less than standard channels to get them. You can view several different versions, calling up just the electronics plans, locations of the security components, all exits, et cetera.”
Alex brought up the security blueprints, scanned the location of all the cameras, motion detectors. He nodded slowly. It seemed too easy, and this worried him a little. Room 59 operations usually targeted high-level security risks. One thing that was standard was the quality of the enemy. Alex never trusted anything that seemed easy, because he knew that taking anything for granted was the fastest way to mission failure—
usually on a catastrophic level.
“It won’t take me long to memorize these,” he said after a couple of moments. “At least the portions I need to be familiar with. The sticky part will be identifying and allowing for any changes in the security clearances at the checkpoints. How recent are these?”
“As of six days ago,” Liang said.
“I’d like to go take another look at the place in the daylight. Is that possible?”
“We’ll go tomorrow morning. In the meantime, you can go over the files and these plans. We’ll eat dinner here,
