THIRTY NINE | DROP THE DEEPFAKE

"Which way now?"

"Go right," said Rocco. "If there's anyone in the vault, and there shouldn't be at this time of night, you'll have to take measures."

Measures? She almost asked.

While she wasn't a black belt holder, Elodie could hold her own in a fight, even if she came out all battered and bruised. But, not against a gun, though.

She had a feeling these people shot first and asked questions later.

Elodie moved carefully, squeezing past junk: rusted filing cabinets and rotting wooden furniture, inexplicably dumped decades ago in this remote place beneath the city.

She came to another heavy door, which led into a wider access tunnel where caged bulbs provided dim light above the dirty concrete floor. A ventilation shaft disappeared into one side of the curved wall.

"The computer where the information can be accessed is air-gapped," said Lux. "Which means it's disconnected from the internet, and any third-party hardware that could compromise it."

Unbidden, the night her parents died came rushing into her mind. The police cars flashing red and blue lights, staining their porch like stained ink across paper. The empty words of condolences, and how they couldn't recover the bodies because it'd washed away.

They'd only found the car and their personal effects. Then, the topic of their debts surfaced and they'd lost everything: the house, the money in their accounts...everything.

She felt a low rumble in her cold bones, and shook her head to rid herself of the memory.

Metal pipes affixed to the side of the tunnel began to sing, as they did whenever a train passed on the other side of the wall. Puddles of water on the ground trembled around Elodie's frozen feet.

The roar increased in pitch; for a few moments it was deafening as the carriages cascaded past, and then disappeared into the distance.

She headed up an incline along one final unlit tunnel – and came to a dead end. The usual waist-high bundle of cables continued across the far wall and then back the way she had come.

"I've come the wrong way," she said, getting angry at herself for being too lost in her own head.

"Except you haven't." That was Asami.

When Elodie pointed the torch at the dead end, she saw the faint rectangular shape of a door.

The gathered wires that snaked horizontally across the door weren't connected to the bundles on the walls on either side, they just looked like they were; the cables were fake.

Even if some unhappy traveller hopelessly lost in the maze of underground tunnels had somehow accidentally arrived at this spot, and even if they had access to better light, they'd never in a million years notice the door unless they knew exactly what to look for. Elodie took out Hana's forged pass from the pocket of her jeans.

"Here goes nothing."

"There's a panel to your left," Lux told Elodie, who pressed the pass against a smooth patch of dull metal embedded in the wall. There was a series of soft clicks, and then the door opened a couple of inches.

 "Sooner or later, questions are going to be asked about why someone's walking around in the dead vault in the early hours," said Rocco. "So be quick."

"You may have realized already, but I'm not very good with computers," said Elodie, stepping inside.

"But we are, and we'll guide you every step of the way," said Asami. "Let's get to work."

In a room full of surveillance equipment many storeys above the vault, Hana's entry into the building was automatically registered.

On a small portion of a screen stacked with different CCTV images, the lights in the dead vault flickered into life as Deepfake Hana – a digital composite of image and biometric data created by a sophisticated AI algorithm – walked down the bunker's central corridor.

Not that any of the overnight security team who were on duty in the early hours of the morning knew who Hana was; thousands of people worked in the BIA building. But the computer said yes, because her biometric details and physical appearance corresponded with the identity of the woman on the screen, and that was good enough.

When one of the night security officers glanced up from his phone to see her walking along the corridor, he thought it unusual that someone was prowling the dead vault after midnight, but perhaps not that unexpected.

In the last couple of days there had been some kind of alert happening and staff were working round the clock. He'd seen people running about on the upper floors, supervisors and upper management and suchlike, as if they had the weight of the world on their shoulders.

John, the officer, stood up – he had worked nights for many months, but it was always difficult to stay alert in the stupefying ambience of the early hours – and pulled his jacket from the back of his chair.

"Popping out for a smoke," he said.

Elodie moved along the wide, softly illuminated corridor. In this part of the building, far underground, the blank grey walls were bare prestressed concrete, and cold to the touch.

Up near the ceiling were what looked like air-conditioning vents, but which introduced security fog into the room in the event that the vault's security was compromised.

 At the far end of the wide corridor was a metal sliding door – the lift that connected the building above to this high-security archive. The black bulb of a camera squatted above it on the wall, staring along the corridor, and right at her.

 "Get to a terminal," Lux told her. "But don't look like you're in a rush."

Elodie walked into one of the side rooms, a sparsely equipped office. A pair of desks were pushed together, a computer placed on each.

She was no expert where computers were concerned, but neither bulky beige terminal looked state of the art.

The ceiling lights flickered on automatically as she sat at one of the desks. When Elodie touched the space bar, the computer came to life with a noisy whir. She took out the small box she had been given in the van.

"Now what?" she asked.

"Plug it in," said Asami.

"I'm in," Elodie confirmed, after the correct authentication credentials had been found and she was able to access the computer. The process had only taken a couple of minutes, but sitting under the watchful eye of the security camera, it had felt like an age.

 Despite the chill in the room, she was hot and flustered. In her ear, Lux got frustrated with how long it took her to follow what he considered straightforward instructions, but none of it felt straightforward.

Then Asami told her to do something that completely contradicted what Lux said, and Elodie had to lift her trembling fingers from the keyboard while she listened to them argue.

"If she does that," hissed Lux, "the system will shut down. Is that what you want to happen?"

"Don't talk to me like that," Asami told him fiercely. "That's not what I'm suggesting."

"I'm just stating simple facts."

"We'll be back," Asami told Elodie impatiently. "Give us two seconds."

Then Elodie's earpiece went dead. She had to sit there, resting her hands flat on the table in case she accidentally touched the wrong key, until they had worked out their differences and started talking in her ear again.

"Okay," said Lux with great forbearance. "Here's what you do…"

She didn't understand any of what they told her to do, but did exactly what she was told, identifying each key and stabbing at it with purpose.

 "Now press the tilde key," Lux told her.

She stared at the keyboard, her eyes swimming. "I don't know what that is."

"It's the one beside the enter key. But you must press the shift key. Whatever you do, make sure you press the shift key, or you'll ruin everything."

 "Ruin everything is not helpful language," she said, heart pounding. It was all she could do not to glance over her shoulders.

Elodie wished they had come down here themselves. Let's see how they would have coped with breaking into BIA in the middle of the night.

But if they was caught, the underworld would have difficult questions to answer. If Elodie was captured, however, she'd be dismissed immediately by her Brooks as a felon.

Now she had managed to get into the online archive, she was faced with a list of incomprehensible file names cascading down the screen.

"What can you see?" asked Rocco.

"I don't know." Elodie tried to make sense of the random words and numbers.

The operating system was old, and its interface nothing like the one on those fancy tablets she'd seen, which had helpful shiny icons that allowed them to navigate easily. It didn't matter how long she looked, the list of impenetrable names made no sense to her, and she didn’t even know what she was looking for.

It was probably too much to hope for to find a file name that said: Secret_Mission_To_Destroy_Hard_Drive_ElodieEvans.

"There are dozens of files here. Hundreds!"

"Okay," said Lux impatiently. "Are there numbers on the files?"

"Yes." Elodie traced a finger along the file names. Each ended in six letters."310897l, 121106, 130609, and so on."

"So you're looking at dates. Try and find the date you agreed to accept Brooks' offer."

Elodie searched for a file name that ended in numbers 130424. "Got it!"

"Open it," said Lux.

Reaching for the mouse, Elodie heard a faint boom above the grinding hum of the ancient computer, and a whirring sound. She stood and walked into the corridor to locate the source of it.

The red light on the floor counter at the top of the lift had turned green, displaying an arrow pointed downwards.

"I've got to get out of here," she said, rushing back to the computer to open the file.

But when the data appeared on the screen, it was gibberish. The whole document was a slab of solid text; every line on every paragraph was filled with garbled, jumbled characters, letters, numbers and symbols; there wasn't a single empty space.

She desperately tried to locate meaning in the text, as if she was doing a word search in a puzzle book.

"It's gibberish, the document must be corrupted," she said, scrolling down.

"It could be code,’ said Lux, their voice tight with anxiety." But we need to see it."

 Scrolling back to the top, Elodie unzipped her pocket, took out the camera. She photographed the screen then scrolled halfway down, took a photograph, scrolled down, took a photo, and scrolled, worrying that the document had no end.

 But she made it to the bottom just as she heard the elevator approaching.

 "Is that the only file?" asked Rocco. "Are there others?"

"I've got to go."

 "We've only got one shot at this," Rocco said. "You need to make sure."

 "No time, they're on their way." She grabbed the torch and climbed from the seat.

Elodie reached the wide concrete corridor as the lift machinery sighed— it had arrived at the vault. She could run for the exit, but the doors were going to open in a few short seconds, and she wasn't a fan of getting shot in the back.

 "Drop the deepfake." Elodie eyed the sinister-looking vents near the ceiling. "Trigger the security automated system."

The doors opened and three vest-wearing men edged out of the lift, their M4 carbine assault rifles already aimed.

 "Please stay there," said a voice from behind them, and Elodie glimpsed a thin, sharp-faced man in glasses. "Keep your hands up. If you move, you will be shot, do you understand?"

 "They'll see you," Rocco said in Elodie's ear.

"Oh, I think that horse has bolted," she muttered.

"Who are you talking to?" The familiar man stepped past his team.

 "Brooks," Elodie called out, heart pounding. She was so close to danger she could almost taste it on her tongue.

Brooks looked thinner than before, which was why she probably didn't recognize him at first. But, now that she it was him, she had so many questions. But, seeing as he'd brought this army of armed men with him, it was unlikely that he was here for a heart-to-heart talk.

But, she just had to ask this one thing:

"Was it you who killed Hana, and tried to kill me?"













A/N:

Oh, wow. So many terms, so many action, and so little action at the same time.

Elodie is holding up well, wouldn't you say?

Random Question(RQ): How do you do cozy? With books and a cup of coffee, or movie and a bowl of snacks?

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Thank you for reading❤️

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