Ixeos: Book One of the Ixeos Trilogy (35 page)

“
Thank you all for coming,” Abacus started out. “We know many have traveled far to get to Rome. We won’t keep you long, but we wanted you all to be able to meet since we’re going to be working together, and discuss the raid. We’ll hand out assignments in a minute. There’s not a lot of time for training and each cell has a specific task—most of you will be on defensive lines around the city to protect the infiltration team. We know what the prison looks like on the outside, but not on the inside, so there’s a limit to what we can actually plan for, but we’re going to do our best. We’re also working hard in Paris to get some help with communications, and there’s a possibility we can disrupt the GPS so the Firsts won’t be able to track their slaves, at least for a time.”

There was murmuring in the audience as this was translated. Abacus looked at Vasco and gave a small smile. Nothing like a little pressure. Marty was still searching for a way to access the GPS satellites.

“Okay, so in two weeks, the prison arrives in Rome. As we all know, it’s always put down in Circus Maximus, and it’s well guarded. Obviously your cell leaders have watched it over the years, so we have intel on door, staff, vehicle traffic, guards, that kind of thing. Your leaders will go over your assignments with you—we’ve got 15 rebel cells and all of the outsiders, for a total of 25 individual units. We’ve got a lot of work ahead of us and we all know it will be dangerous. I’d like to say we’ll all come out of this alive and unharmed, but honestly, I don’t see how that’s possible. Our best hope is to know our jobs backwards and forwards and go into it knowing that freeing Darian is the only hope for freeing the people of this planet. Whatever the cost to ourselves, if we can achieve that goal, then it will be worth it.”

The room was solemn, but as he looked up at the rows and rows of chairs, he could see energy and focus. From his own people, he saw the excitement of years of hard work coming to fruition. From the rebels, he saw a determination to win back their freedom. They would need both, as well as an extraordinary amount of luck.

“Marty? You in here?” Marissa was running down the hall towards the kitchen. Marty stood up and took a step towards the door. She ran right into him, grinning from ear to ear.

“What?” he said, trying to catch the papers she was waving around over her head.

“We’ve got it!”

“Got what?” he asked, afraid to hope.

“The satellite.”

“Are you serious?” Marty’s grin matched Marissa’s as she handed him the printed pages. He sat down at the table, spread them out and started muttering to himself, frowning over the information. Marissa smiled and left.

“Okay, we know it’s geosynchronous… Stationary over Europe…” He flipped through pages and a wide grin creased his face. “Gotcha!”

Grabbing his cell phone, he checked his watch. Fifteen minutes until his scheduled call. It would be Hannah or Monkey, and he wouldn’t be able to give them a definitive answer quite yet, but he’d have hope to give them, and that was enough for today. Tomorrow, he hoped to be able to control the satellite. Now
that
would newsworthy.

“What would the slaves do?” Neahle asked. “I mean, we won’t have time to instruct them in any way.”

“Escape, if they want to,” Vasco said. He scrubbed his face and ran a hand through his hair. He’d been working eighteen hour days for weeks and was exhausted. His hair still hadn’t been cut and it was falling over his eyes.

“Won’t they get caught again when the satellite goes back online?” Clay asked.

“We can remove the tracking units,” Abacus said.

“I thought you said that killed people.” Neahle looked around the room at her group. Her brother, Abacus and Vasco, Hannah and Monkey, Riley. These were the people who were going to infiltrate a maximum security prison and free the most dangerous criminal on the planet.

“It can, but then again, so does being a slave. Our main problem with the trackers up til now is that we haven’t been able to take the people somewhere safe to do the surgery. That would trigger an alarm because of the GPS signal. When a slave leaves somewhere he’s supposed to be, they know immediately. But if the satellite is down long enough for us to get the slaves underground where the GPS won’t work, even if the satellite comes back online, we’ll have time to surgically remove the implants in a safe environment.”

“Maybe Marty can figure out how to permanently disable the satellite,” Clay said.

“That would be great, and we can certainly pray for that, but we can’t count on it. If he can get it off and block their access to it, even for a day, we can accomplish a lot. The Firsts are going to be very busy that day, with the comm center blowing up, the prison being stormed, and the satellite going down. We can only count on that one day,” Abacus said.

“We’ve got a few other things going on, too,” Vasco said. “We’ll be blowing up the breeding facility in Osaka and another one that’s not online yet outside of Istanbul. The other rebel cells are all anxious to do what they can, so we’ve given them free reign to cause a ruckus, as long as everything happens simultaneously worldwide.”

“Nice,” Monkey said.

“We’re likely to lose some people,” Riley said.

“It would be impossible not to, but everyone is aware of the risks. The more distractions around the globe, the better chance we have to get Darian out and to safety. It’s a chance the rebels are willing to take.” Vasco sat back in his chair.

“Speaking of that,” Clay said. “The outsiders are the only ones who can use the portals. So… What do we do with Darian when we’ve got him?”

Chapter Forty-Nine

M
arty and Marissa tested their
access to the GPS satellite three days before the raid, at 3:00 in the morning. The satellite tracked GPS monitors in western Europe; their hope was that a quick takeover wouldn’t be spotted at that time of night. The disruption of the system would last for less than a minute, and Travis was coordinating a fake power glitch at the comm center to coincide with the hijacking.

“Hopefully it’ll just look like a power outage,” Marissa said, chewing her lower lip. She was seated at her station, her chair pulled up close to the table, her hands hovering over the keyboard.

“Yep,” Marty said, never taking his eyes off his screen. Marissa had said the same thing a dozen times over the last two hours; he’d learned to humor her.

Checking her watch against the time displayed on her three monitors, Marissa said, “T-minus six minutes.”

“Got it,” Marty said. He began typing in the sequences that allowed him to worm his way into the satellite monitoring system. They’d come this far ten times over the last week, at different times of the day, using themselves as bait in case the Firsts saw the infiltration. So far, nothing had happened and no new firewalls or other deterrents had been put in place.

“Hope we’re not walking into a trap,” he muttered.

“Not this time,” Marissa said, watching her screens. “But after we free Darian, it won’t be this easy again. We haven’t tried any cyber attacks in all these years. They’re complacent. We need to get all the intel we can while the raid is going on because after that, our life’s going to be a whole lot harder.” She began chewing on the fingernail of her left thumb.

“You’d better stop chewing on yourself; you’re not going to have anything left,” Marty said, glancing over. “What’s the time?”

“T-minus three,” Marissa said, sitting on her hands. “I’ll start counting down at sixty seconds. Travis?” she called.

“On it!” Travis said from the other side of the table. “T-minus two and fifteen.”

“Jack?” Marissa called.

“Yep! T-minus two.”

The four were silent, the only sound the tapping of Marty’s keys as he worked.

“You on time, Marty?” Marissa asked. “T-minus ninety seconds.”

“So far, so good,” Marty answered.

“Okay boys, we all ready? We’re in and out in one minute. Take it down, monitor the response, put her back. T-minus sixty seconds…” Marissa situated herself over the keyboard, eyeing the monitors. “T-minus thirty… Twenty-nine… Twenty-eight…”

As the countdown continued, Marty held his finger over the “Enter” key. Once he pressed the key, he would move control of the satellite to his own monitor and keyboard. To the operations center at La Defense, it would, if all went according to plan, appear as if the satellite’s communications system had gone offline. The cell towers at the comm center were being hacked at the same time and in the same way. It was possible that the blip wouldn’t be noticed at all.

“T-minus ten… nine… eight… seven… six… five… ready… three… two… one. Go!”

Frantically, all four attacked their keyboards. Marty hit Enter and watched as his middle monitor screen shifted to the orbit and controls of the geosynchronous satellite hovering over England. He did a screenshot for later use, then quickly explored the system, making sure his mouse was able to click on the controls. He could hear Travis and Jack muttering and yelling, riding the adrenaline. Marissa was counting down again.

“Five… Four… Three… Two… One!” As a unit, the four restored functionality to the systems they’d been jamming, then watched anxiously as activity scrolled down the screens.

“Nothing,” Travis called out. “I didn’t have any calls live when I crashed it and no one’s trying now.”

“Same here,” Jack said. “Nobody on this network was working.”

“Marissa?” Marty said, his eyes never leaving his monitors. As far as he could tell, no one had even noticed the blip.

“Nope. Nothing.” She was monitoring the communications into and out of La Defense. She sent her chair rolling back across the marble floor and grinned at him. “We did it!”

Two days before the raid, Landon came. No one saw him arrive, but he entered the dining room at lunch time and greeted the skeleton crew with a smile.

“Been busy, I see,” he said, accepting a plate from Will and sitting down next to Neahle.

“You could say that! We weren’t sure if you’d come,” Neahle said, chewing her cheese sandwich.

Landon glanced at Abacus, who merely raised his eyebrows. “Wouldn’t miss it for the world,” he said.

“What about Rod?” Hannah asked. “He’s been working really hard since Abacus sent him to Naples.”

“Rod is fine,” Landon said. “I will speak to him later, but for now, he’s right where he should be. No worries.”

Abacus smiled with relief. Rod had worked tirelessly and hadn’t asked for any special favors, not even to come back to the tunnels to rest. As far as he could see, Rod had been true to his word. He was glad to remove that worry from his mind.

“Things are moving along,” he said to Landon. “Is there anything we need to know?”

“Nope. Things are looking brilliant. Did Marty tell you they got control of the satellite without anyone knowing?” Landon bit into an apple.

“He did. Those guys were pretty high after that; I don’t think they slept all night.” Abacus finished his tea. “So… Meeting?”

“I don’t think so. It looks like you have everything under control here.” Landon looked at Riley. “The arm doing okay?”