The Theater
2218 EST
"I have never had a better reason to get rid of beer," Ryckmen replied as he took a pull from a bottle. He sighed appreciatively. "And this one has been decidedly well earned."
Gregory nodded as he sipped from his own bottle. "The last beer out of St. Louis for the foreseeable future." He frowned as a thought struck him. "God, no imports anymore. No more British stouts. No more Belgian dubbels or trippels." Shaking his head, Gregory took another sip.
"Worse than that. No more genuine scotch. No more Russian vodka. No more French champagne." Ryckmen chuckled as he finished off his beer. "The list just goes on and on."
"Doesn't it just?" Gregory growled. He looked over at the door to Sawyer's quarters, where Kelso and Sawyer were discussing the future in very heated tones which leaked through to the outside. "So, level with me. Were you and Sawyer ever a thing?"
"Hell, no," replied Ryckmen mildly. "She and Dom had been married for several years before she went through the Ranch. We went through at the same time, got along pretty well, and after we finished up, we stayed in touch."
"Kind of ruins the whole point of being a sleeper, doesn't it?"
"We never discussed Division business around Dom or Eleanor. As far as they knew, she and I met when our respective rides home laid over at Rammstein Air Base, we shot the breeze, and became fast friends. Just two Army buddies. I had them come out to my place for Christmas a couple times, they invited me out here a few times. Last summer, I was over here for the Fourth of July weekend with them. It seemed like a good idea. Realistically, if we were activated, it would be more likely I'd be ending up on the East Coast than the West. And since that was true, it didn't seem like a bad idea to make sure I knew some people in the area." Ryckmen scratched his head. "Jesus, that was the last time before Black Friday we saw each other. They were supposed to come out to my place in Bozeman for Christmas. You know, I had completely forgotten that till just now."
"Probably happened a lot to other folks. What's her story?"
"Short version: not pretty, but all too common. Teenage single mom, just seventeen when she had Eleanor. Few years later, she joined the Army. After her first tour, she met Dominique LaCroix."
"Was he military?"
Ryckmen shook his head. "Civilian all the way, but he was a good man. And I mean a man, not just a dude. He came over from Haiti when he was a kid, made good, and he didn't flinch when he met Odessa. To hear her tell it, his folks were just all sorts of umbraged that their son was even thinking about seeing a single mother. Didn't stop him from marrying her, of course. He walked down the aisle with his eyes wide open and smiled the whole way.
"Anyway, when Odessa did another tour in Iraq, Dom started working with the Red Cross, and stayed with them. He was on the front lines of more disaster sites than I'd care to count. He even went back to Haiti after that big earthquake, and that took a lot of balls, given the circumstances surrounding his family's departure. The man was utterly fearless, and it was clear as day how much he loved Odessa and Eleanor." Ryckmen sighed heavily, then cracked open another beer. "I had nothing but the utmost respect for him. And God, how I wish he was here now. Not just for Odessa and Eleanor's sake. If anybody could make this place work, it'd be Dom." He turned to look at Gregory and saw Eleanor standing behind him. "How much did you hear, El?" he asked quietly.
"Enough," she replied, a scowl on her face. "You lied to me and Dad. You and Mom both. Why?"
"Because we weren't supposed to tell anybody. We were supposed to be an insurance policy. Something you have around and hope you never have to cash in. And truth be told, Eleanor--"
"What the hell would you know about the truth? Damn you, Lowell, you lied to me!" screamed Eleanor. "What else didn't you tell me?! What didn't my dad know about you and Mom?!"
Ryckmen stood up slowly, a stern expression crossing his face. "The only things he couldn't and didn't know about was the existence of the Division, the fact your mom was one of its agents, and the circumstances under which she might be activated," he said stonily. "The fact your mom and I became friends wasn't a secret, and that much has always been true. We had to hide the circumstances around how we became friends, because the truth would have revealed those things he couldn't know about. I was your dad's friend because your mother introduced us, and that has been true pretty much from the moment I met him. Eleanor, I looked up to Dom, and that's a rare thing for me. I wouldn't blame him for being angry with me about not telling him, but I also know he wouldn't be freaking out over it. He and I would have talked it out like friends when we had a second to spare. He wouldn't have liked it one bit, but he was smart enough to understand what the stakes were." A ripple of pained emotions crossed Ryckmen's face. "Dominique LaCroix was the brother I never had, and I will mourn him when I get a moment to myself. And this was the only thing your mom and I kept from him. It was our obligation to do so, however personally painful it might have been, and we did so. Not happily, not easily, but we did it."
"Did you or my mom ever think what it might do to us? Didn't you think we had a right to know?"
"It wasn't our call. Hell, we bent the rules just by hanging out with each other outside of training. You can be angry all the live long day, Eleanor, but don't think for an instant you're the only person having to deal with this crap. More than half of Division agents are married, almost two-thirds have at least one child under the age of 16, and the last seven months have seen a lot of dead agents. You think you're the only person who lost a parent with no good explanation?" snorted Ryckmen. "Look, you can sit around being all butt hurt and resentful, or you can stand on your hind legs and start helping us get this place up and running. There's a lot of people out there who need help. And I think you'd be a real asset around here."
Eleanor shuddered as she looked at Ryckmen, anger and hurt and sorrow swirling in her expression. Ryckmen came over to her, resting a hand on her shoulder and giving it a little squeeze. She threw her arms around him, beginning to sob. "I miss him so much, Lowell!" she bawled as Ryckmen returned the embrace.
"I miss him too, kiddo," he said softly. "But we gotta carry on. And we gotta hang on to the people we still have left."
Nodding, Eleanor let go of him and wiped away her tears. Just then, the door opened, Kelso and Sawyer both coming out and looking more than a little haggard. Seeing her daughter, Sawyer narrowed her eyes at Ryckmen. "Don't think for an instant I can't kick your skinny white *** for making my girl cry just because I have a fake foot," she growled.
"Just having a heart-to-heart, Oddball. You two ladies hammer everything out?"
"Yeah, we did. You and Gregory are gonna bunk down here tonight. Tomorrow morning, you start doing some real work."
* * *
Jefferson Trade Center, Federal Triangle Sector
0824 EST
"A business center," Gregory grumbled as he followed Ryckmen down the escalators. "Why in God's name would they put the main ISAC node under a business center?"
"Not just a business center, Peace. Jefferson Trade Center is home to some pretty serious corporate names, not to mention the facilities it offers for smaller businesses. But you're missing the beauty of it."
"What's that?"
"Well, they had to upgrade the building with some serious network capacity about five or six years back. Which," Ryckmen said with a feral grin, "allowed the Division to slip the node in without anybody noticing. It also allowed ISAC to sit and watch all the business traffic going through the place, legitimate and otherwise, to help train the AI components. Believe me, there's guys in Quantico and Langley who simply cannot believe the 'lucky breaks' somebody stepped into."
"We fed them intel? That doesn't sound right."
"It does. Remember, we're not chartered for international operations. We're strictly domestic, and we don't officially exist until the President activates us, which is what Directive 51 was all about. So, we have intel that can be used to defend the nation and we're not in a position to utilize it. It's no good to us sitting around in the vaults. Only thing we can do is pass it along through back channels and let other guys take the credit."
Gregory opened his mouth to reply when he saw Ryckmen's fist fly up. After a moment, he pointed to his left, indicating Gregory needed to take cover. He slid over to the opposite side of the broad pillar Ryckmen had taken cover behind. "Brontosaurus again?" he murmured.
"Uh-uh. This time, we're gonna move fast and hit hard. We don't stop running till we find the node or we come across something heavy enough to impede our progress."
"You sure you're up for that?" asked Gregory. "That MDR speaks with authority, but not loquaciously."
Ryckmen chuckled, a hand reaching back to pat the MP5K hooked to his backpack. "If I need something a little more vigorous, I'll be all right. What about you?"
Gregory smiled back, his hands firmly gripping the M249 he'd recovered from one of the Hyenas at the Grand Washington Hotel. "I'm feeling very fortified."
"Good. Eyes on target. Remember to scan and breathe as we go. One breath, one scan, and so on. We can't drop a stitch on this one. Kelso would probably take it amiss if we failed to get the node up or bring Espinoza back."
"Call the shot, Wolf."
Ryckmen had the MDR pulled firmly against his shoulder. "Now," he murmured as he squeezed the trigger. Gregory leaned around the edge of his cover, catching his target with a short burst, then followed behind Ryckmen at a trot at his seven. With each breath, Gregory scanned ahead, watching everything in front of him without directly looking at it. The two agents moved through a corridor, each one covering their respective zones, bracing briefly behind cover for a moment to steady their next shots before firing and moving forward again.
There was a sense of the surreal to Gregory's mind as they moved. He and Ryckmen had only been working together for a day or so, yet they had fallen into a rhythm with almost frightening ease. Ryckmen would pick off would-be snipers trying to keep their distance, Gregory would turn just as a knot of Hyena reinforcements attempted to take them from behind and cut them down with economical bursts of the light machine gun. The slightest movements of head and hand would communicate intentions with frightening clarity. And all the while, frantic radio reports in the clear would reach them as they rolled through the building, Hyenas almost screaming in terror as they reported to the lieutenant in charge. A corner of Gregory's mind noted the woman's control compared to the men under her, but even there he heard a sense of barely restrained frustration. It was two guys. It shouldn't have been that hard. But the surprise and the relentless movement under fire seemed to have thrown the Hyenas into complete panic. Gregory thought Genghis Khan would have approved.
Before he knew it, they had reached the basement of the Trade Center, and a heavy steel door sat waiting in front of them. Ryckmen smiled and turned his back, covering the stairwell. "After you, Ali Baba," he said.
Gregory approached the door, a part of him still unable to believe the Division had been able to put this in place without anybody noticing. "Open sesame," he murmured as he raised the watch to the sensor. There was a few moments of silence, then a small green light came on as heavy steel locking bars snapped back within the door, and the door slowly opened with a gentle puff of air. "Positive overpressure," Gregory remarked. "I guess they wanted to make sure nothing accidentally wandered in through the building's main ventilation system."
The two men went inside, racks of servers sitting cold and quiet as they approached the primary console. Once behind the desk, Gregory lifted his watch again, letting the sensor scan it and compare the data it contained against its local storage. The console lit up and Gregory began entering commands, recalling the sequence needed for a cold boot of an ISAC node.
"Intelligent System Analytic Computer online," chirped a synthesized voice from both Gregory and Ryckmen's watches.
"Outstanding," Ryckmen grinned.
Gregory looked at Ryckmen's wrist, seeing the comforting orange ring glowing around the face. "Looks like ISAC still thinks you're a solid citizen."
"Very comforting to know. I was a little worried. Let's get out of here and go spring Espinoza."
"Not yet. I want to take a few minutes and try to figure out how ISAC went down in the first place. I don't want to have to backtrack and do this all over again in five minutes."
Ryckmen glanced at the stairwell. "Can't it wait till you get back to either the Theater or the White House?"
"I'm feeling extra-paranoid," said Gregory as he began looking through event logs. "And part of that paranoia involves not dumping data files of what went wrong over the airwaves where the bad guys who pulled this off might pick them up and learn from their mistakes."
"They shouldn't be able to crack the encryption on the files if you do a transfer from here to the White House."
"They shouldn't have been able to shut down this node, either," Gregory remarked with poison dryness as he examined a log entry. "Until I'm certain they can't do it again, we're staying put. And this is one time where Analytics really does have precedence over Tactical." He looked up at Ryckmen, his expression firm. "I know you want to grab Espinoza, whack the people that may have caught him, and get out of here. I want that, too. But this is what's going to make sure we can do that without giving away our positions. I'm working as fast as I can. So let me do my job."
Ryckmen grimaced, but nodded and kept watch over the stairwell. He hated the fact Gregory was right. Given his druthers, he'd have kept rolling, burned out the Hyenas completely first, then come back for the node and Espinoza. But Kelso had made it clear that the node took priority, even over Espinoza's life if necessary. Hopefully, Espinoza had found some place to hole up and stay out of sight. And with the node back online, there was a chance Espinoza would recognize his watch was now active and he could put in a call to Kelso, who would then tie in Ryckmen and Gregory.
Gregory's eyes flicked along the screen as he took in the information. "Wolf, we have a 'good news/bad news' situation."
"What's the bad news?"
"The node is back online, but all of the comm links ISAC was managing have been cut. Basically, we have encrypted comms for about a kilometer radius from the Trade Center. Anything outside that limit, we're back to broadcasting in the clear."
"Well, crap. That severely limits our advantage. What's the good news?"
"The good news is that I think I know how the bad guys took the node down. Of course, that knowledge is a 'good news/bad news' story itself. And it's...puzzling."
"Bearing in mind I'm not a tech guy, what happened?" asked Ryckmen. He might not understand everything Gregory was about to tell him, but he was a firm believer that one could never have too many bullets or too much information.
"Basically, it was a brute force attack. One that I didn't think was supposed to work on something like ISAC. Whoever it was somehow managed to cause a buffer overflow. They bombarded ISAC with junk data to the point where it crapped out. Ordinarily, that sort of attack would leave a system vulnerable to being taken over. But ISAC isn't like most systems. Instead of allowing itself to be taken over, an emergency process running in the background triggered, sending a command to terminate all communications links before shutting down, along with every node it was connected to at the time. ISAC essentially burned all its bridges and forted up inside itself." Gregory rubbed his chin as he looked over another event log entry. "Technically, it wasn't shut down. Just hibernating, but without any kind of communications links whatsoever. In theory, we can restore the network. The other nodes are waiting for a signal with the right authentication specifically from this node, but they're in hibernation, and effectively out of play for the moment."
"That doesn't sound fun for anybody. How did the bad guys know to hit ISAC that way?"
"Not sure. What I find more disturbing is the fact the bad guys knew there was something to hit in the first place."
"If you'll indulge my paranoia for a moment," said Ryckmen slowly, "could Aaron Keener have told them about it?"
"Only in the most general sense. He was Tactical, right?" Ryckmen grunted in the affirmative. "Right, so he wouldn't have known hardly anything about the infrastructure other than the fact a node of some sort existed. He wouldn't have known anything about network topology, routing, anything like that. And if he's been on the run this whole time, he wouldn't have been in a position to do any sort of serious investigation. The most he could have told anybody would have been that a node existed somewhere in D.C."
"Half the work of hitting a target is knowing it exists," Ryckmen said philosophically.
"True, but that's what I think is bothering me more than the fact they hit ISAC in the first place. Lowell, the way they hit ISAC is troubling. Have you really thought about how the Internet works? Not from a user level, but an infrastructure level."
"I think I see where you're going. All those servers, all those data centers scattered around the world, or even just here in the States. I know a lot of them got shut down because the companies involved didn't have the manpower to keep them up and running. Too many people calling out sick," Ryckmen said with a bitter smile. "Analytics guys like you have been keeping some major data centers running so ISAC has something to work with, but there's still a lot of computer hardware out there. You're thinking somebody took over a data center or two which our guys didn't grab hold of, and then launched an attack from there."
"Looks like a few dozen, if these logs are right, and they're not some third-rate data centers, either. They're the kind of sites we'd have prioritized securing. And to make things even more interesting, about three-quarters of them are from overseas." Gregory looked over at Ryckmen with confusion and a touch of fear. "I think we're up to our necks in rok-toi, partner."
"Then I hope you brought a real sturdy fork."