Net Force--Kill Chain by Jerome Preisler (e book reader txt) 📕

edge of light extended along the Manhattan side of the river. Almost sunrise. Probably Natasha would be up around Westchester by now. Maybe even southern Connecticut. For her sake, he hoped it wouldn’t rain. Or that any bad weather wouldn’t run on up into New England. That business Friday night still bothered him. That guy with the tats...

He was glad she was getting out of town for a few days.

Natasha was a private one, he thought. Secretive, almost. Though he’d performed with her for two years and had been crashing with her over a month, he knew amazingly little about her. She never had friends over to the apartment or got phone calls from anybody but her fellow wireheads at the Terminal. In all the time he had known her, she’d had a few casual hookups but no steady relationships. The one thing she did share about her background was that she had grown up in a Russian orphanage...and it had bowled him right over. Before she told him—it was after a show a year or so back, and they were deep into a bottle of tequila—he hadn’t even known she was from another country. She had no accent, nothing about her to make him think she wasn’t born in America.

Duncan couldn’t remember how the subject came up. They were both pretty drunk. But she’d seemed to have a hard time talking about it. In hindsight, he thought it was the most uncomfortable she had ever been around him.

Before last night.

But that wasn’t the same. Not at all. That guy at the club had spooked her. Duncan knew it beyond a doubt. He just wasn’t sure what to do about it. Or if it was even his place to do anything.

He finished his cigarette, flicked the butt to the blacktop, and started toward the back of the van. Before climbing inside, he paused and glanced up at the sky. It was still too dark to see if there were clouds moving in. But the wind was definitely blowing, and he wondered again if it would rain.

Meanwhile, he was feeling dog-tired. Four shows, lady blue, and no sleep would do that. It would be nice having the apartment to himself for a few days. A hot shower, bed, and sleeping in sounded great. He was keen to finally call it a weekend.

Kai stopped his car across the street from the perimeter fence. He’d driven along outside it for about a quarter mile, passing the electronic entry gate, then going on ahead to the end of the road, where the fence turned toward the water at a sharp right angle.

Studying it through the digicam binocs, he observed three strands of single-twist barbed wire running its upper length, with closed-circuit surveillance cameras mounted at roughly hundred-foot intervals along the fence line. The galvanized steel wire was speckled with rust.

He zoomed in on one of the surveillance cameras, easily reading its make and model. But the tiny serial numbers on the case were hard to discern even at high magnification. He would leave that to his onboard.

His eyelids flickered as his silent thoughts turned into simple task commands. As thousands of electrodes flared across the microthin lace webbing in his brain. As the camera’s serial numbers were digitally enhanced, then fed into a search engine for internet-connected devices.

The match was nearly instantaneous. He saw the camera’s IP address inside his head, its string of numbers and dots ribboning through his occipital lobe, clear and vivid, like a stock market ticker across a computer screen.

Another thought command, and his software zipped through a list of manufacturer-default usernames and passwords for the camera’s user configuration. Nine times out of ten, nobody bothered changing them during a system setup. Kai would have bet anything this cut-rate storage outfit wasn’t among the exceptions.

He was right. Within a second, his onboard gained access to the network. Thirty seconds after that, he turned off all its surveillance cameras. The whole thing was a breeze. Hardly the trick of a master hacker like, say, the famous Outlier. Any script kiddie could have done it.

The next step would be dicier, however.

Kai reached under his seat for his work belt. Lightweight nylon, it had pouches of different sizes and two scabbards. He clasped it shut around his waist, then extracted a pair of black leather gloves from one of the pouches and slipped them on. If he’d anticipated where tonight would lead him, he would have brought landscaper’s gloves or something similar. And clippers. But he would make do.

Exiting the MINI, he crossed the street to where the fence took its ninety-degree turn and then peered through its linkage at the storage facility. The building was about a hundred yards to his left, back the way he’d come, then another fifty yards north across the parking lot toward the docks. He could see the Transit outside the place, its tail end pulled up close to an open bay door. See light washing over it from inside the facility.

He looked up at the fence’s metal corner posts. There was a three-inch gap between the posts, where two segments of chain link met to form the right angle. The double lengths of barbed wire extended across the gap but would offer some slack where they passed over it.

Kai took a deep breath, grabbed the mesh with his gloved hands, and jumped up onto the fence, wedging his toe between the corner posts for a foothold.

He scaled it quickly, his body splayed like a crab’s to distribute his weight. When he was some eighteen inches from the top, he reached his right hand up to where the wire crossed the gap, gripped the uppermost row between two barbs, and pulled it down as far as he could.

There was a nice bit of give in it. Enough for him to clear the top of the fence without getting mauled by the barbs. He held the wire down low, using all its slack, then hauled himself up