Zero Day, стр. 19
Endless hours later, they were inside Telemachus, wandering around, checking on fail-safe measures that Ulysses had hacked together. It was messy, but it wasn’t his system.
“Are you ready for root?” Kelvin asked Vivek.
At the corner, Danika was asleep. She hadn’t slept in about three days. Her mouth hung open and she had been out for hours.
Vivek nodded. “Too bad there’s nothing in this for us.”
“Maybe the satisfaction that we hacked into the system in five days?”
“No glory in that, dude. We’re all going to die.”
Kelvin actually smiled. “I don’t fear death. I’m going to Heaven.”
“How can you even know that to be a fact?”
“The Bible says so.”
Vivek shook his head. “And you believe it. No questions asked? Blind faith and all that?”
“It’s not blind faith. I know whom I believe.” Kelvin wasn’t sure how else to explain his faith. He knew in his heart that he was a believer in Jesus. That was all he knew.
“Whatever floats your boat, man.”
Kelvin said no more.
They worked in tandem to hack into the root account. If Kelvin didn’t know any better, he would say that Ulysses had left a backdoor for him. Left the lights on.
One could say that it could be as easy as walking in through the front door.
However, because of that, Kelvin wondered if this was a trap.
Who was Ulysses trying to catch?
Chapter 16
One benefit of knowing more than his employer—or in this case, captors—was the freedom to add or subtract functionality to the computer system at will without their knowledge.
To Kelvin’s delight, the kill switch he had implanted into the old MedusaNet had carried over to Telemachus in a fractured sense—part of the code was still functional.
He could see the pieces that he had debugged and fixed—the last thing he had done before Aspasia lost him to the FSB, just moments before he activated it.
From what Leland had told him in the van the week before—had it been a week?—the kill switch was in Cayson’s head, but who had put it there? Was it Neon before he died? Or was it someone else?
“Kel, I’m done debugging,” Vivek called out from his corner of the room. “You can test run it, if you want, but I think it’s green for go.”
Vivek lumbered toward the cot and dropped on it. Within seconds, he began to snore.
Danika was asleep at her keyboard, head in her folded arms on the table.
The wall-mounted screen came to life.
“You done?” Reuel asked.
Sitting next to him was someone Kelvin had not seen before.
“Do you have the admin account?” he asked.
He had heard that voice before. Sometime ago. And that accent. Was he Israeli, by any chance?
Could he be…
Could he be Neon’s handler?
It was a shot in the dark. Kelvin decided the probability for that to happen was very low.
“Yes, we just reached root.” Actually it was almost two hours before, but he needed that much time to activate what he had left unfinished the last time he was inside MedusaNet.
Kelvin couldn’t recall why he didn’t have enough time to finish the second malware he added to the system the year before. He wondered sometimes if he was slowing down.
At thirty-three years old?
He wasn’t sure if age had anything to do with it.
He yawned.
Or a lack of sleep.
After this, he decided he would sleep for days. Maybe weeks.
Well, he might get his wish. There would be plenty of time to sleep in jail.
“Do we have control of Telemachus?” Reuel asked.
Kelvin nodded. “If you heard Vivek, he just finished debugging some procedures. I need to run some final tests, and then it’s all yours.”
“Very good. No more lunches with your sweethearts until this process is complete,” Reuel said.
“To be sure, Ulysses is going to know as soon as we cut off control to the VPN,” Kelvin warned him. “Are you prepared for that?”
“We have his location surrounded,” the other man said. “Don’t worry about Ulysses.”
“I’m sorry, I didn’t catch your name.” Kelvin felt braver now that he had the upper hand in the transaction.
“It’s not your concern. Get us Telemachus.”
“And we go free? All four of us?”
“That’s the agreement.”
But it might not be the plan. Kelvin was sure now that he had to find a way out. The homing beacon had to work.
As soon as he made the switch and kicked Ulysses’s system administrators off the VPN, the homing beacon would transmit the location of their new machine room.
If it worked.
Please, Lord, let it work.
Danika stirred from her table. “Are we ready to test?”
“Yes.” Kelvin looked up at the camera mounted on top of the wall screen. “If you’d excuse us, we have work to do. I will let you know as soon as we’re done.”
Danika typed furiously on the keyboard.
Vivek snored on the cot.
Kelvin prayed his old software pieces he had completed tonight—or was it day?—would not fail him now. He ran the malware in the background. If it worked, it would completely obliterate Telemachus once and for all.
“What’s that…” Danika sounded perplexed.
“Diagnostics. Ulysses has a habit of adding background processes that might prevent us from doing a complete takeover. We need to eliminate all those before we proceed, obviously.”
“Okay.” She still looked a bit confused.
“Why don’t you wake up, Vivek? We need all hands on deck.” Kelvin hoped his voice was not nervous.
As soon as Danika stepped away from her workstation, Kelvin activated the homing beacon.
One shot.
That was all he had.
If it failed, all of their lives would be in the hands of Reuel and his co-conspirator.
If it succeeded, Leland would get someone to come over here to rescue them. Perhaps Dario and the CIA. Perhaps INTERPOL. He didn’t care who, as long as they were rescuers.
Kelvin knew that he would be arrested, tried for treason, and incarcerated.
He prayed that the sentence