Relieved that we’re happy at last, the assistant leaves us to it. Caitlin stands with her back pressed against the inside of the main bathroom door to prevent anyone else coming in. Together, Li and I head into the stall right at the end of the room. Standing on the toilet seat, I whip out a plastic screwdriver and attack the screws on a plate in the ceiling that leads into a vent. When the plate falls away, I hand it down to Li and she cups her hands together to boost me up.
“Hurry up,” she says. I glance down at her and nod. I mean, is she worried I might like it so much up there that I’ll just relax and hang out?
I crawl into the vent, which is made of shiny aluminum and is fabulously clean. The bank’s air system is so new that it has the latest HEPA-type filters to reduce dust and dirt. Combined with the fact that the whole building’s air is filtered, it means very little accumulation of gunk in the cooling system. I scoot my way through, using the light on my phone, take a small bend to the left, and unscrew the next plate I come to. This one is only partly over the server room but there’s a one-inch gap—enough that I can see down into the space, filled with black computing boxes, flashing lights, and the noise of billions of bytes of data being processed. From inside my lapel, I pull out one of the drones and hold it above the gap. All around the server room, wireless signals are cut. But the comms in my ear still works.
“Ready?” I breathe.
Caitlin’s voice comes back in my head. “Yep. Count me down.”
“Ninety-nine, ninety-eight . . .”
“Cut it out, smart-ass.”
I smile. “Okay. Three . . . two . . . one . . . go.”
I drop the drone in through the hatch and it falls then veers upward—just a tiny fly trapped in the room. Caitlin has control of it now, through the app on her phone, and she should be seeing a video stream through the minuscule camera on the drone’s back. Carefully, I balance the second drone on the edge of the gap and leave it sitting there, in case we need it as a backup. Then I turn and find my way back to the bathroom ceiling and lower myself down into the stall. Li pauses the stopwatch on her digital watch.
“Ninety-three seconds,” she says. It feels like a compliment; the closest she will get to saying “well done.” I screw the ceiling plate back in, then slip on the jacket that Li is holding ready for me. Outside the stalls, Caitlin is intent on guiding the drone toward the exact port that Amber needs. I brush down my suit, wash my hands, then go to look over Caitlin’s shoulder at her phone screen.
“We need to hurry. Three minutes is the average time a woman takes in a restroom,” Li murmurs.
Feeling the pressure, Caitlin’s holding her breath, trying to dock the drone into a port deep behind a massive wall of servers. I’m itching to take over, but she’s had a minute to get a feel for the sensitivities of it, so she’ll do all right . . . I hope.
“It’s been three and a half minutes . . . ,” whispers Li.
Caitlin doesn’t acknowledge. It’s just so hard to get a lock on the right spot. She tries and the drone hits the wrong point and drops like a stone.
“Shit,” she breathes. Pressing two keys together, like you would in a video game, Caitlin gets it back off the ground and this time, she nails it. She nods to Li and we all wait there like statues for a few more, agonizingly slow seconds, waiting for confirmation—
“You did it. Very impressive.” Amber’s voice comes into our earpieces.
We nod to Li that all is well, and we’re out of there, following the echoing rap of Li’s heels down the marble corridor. The assistant comes rushing out to escort us back to the lounge. After a few more minutes of Li’s interrogation of the manager about how the bank can help her, the meeting is wrapped up. Li shakes hands and, lying smoothly, promises to be in touch.
14
WHILE WE WAIT FOR AMBER to dig into the bank’s servers, we arrive back at the locker room at Athena, where I’m totally thrilled to get rid of the hairpiece and colored contacts and change back into my regular clothes. I’ve nearly finished dressing when my Indian phone pings. It’s a text from Riya.
Info on ADS
As usual, her message hardly overflows with information, but it still makes me smile to hear from her. I doubt it would matter much if she knew, but I haven’t bothered to tell her that I’m back in London for such a tiny spell of time. Instead, Amber’s set me up a network just for this phone that makes it appear that I’m still in Mumbai. I glance over to the doors that lead to the showers and steam room. The sound of running water tells me that Caitlin is still washing up. On an impulse, I give Riya a quick call back. She picks up on the first ring.
“Jessie!”
It suddenly dawns on me how great my name sounds in an Indian accent.
“Hey, Riya. I thought I’d call you to catch up, since your texts are so light on detail.”
“I think of them as short and meaningful,” she replies.
“Try ‘cryptic,’” I say.
She laughs, a sound like wind chimes, a sound that makes me smile. And now Caitlin comes out of the shower, drying off and casting me a quick, curious glance. Immediately, I wipe the smile off my face and, diplomatically, Caitlin turns away and starts getting dressed.
“So, what do you have on the ADS?” I ask briskly.
“We tracked it to a military base north of the city,” Riya says. “It was stolen about a month ago.”
“And never found?”
“Correct. It is state of the art, and very mobile. And
