Above From Below Part 7

Rick held his hand up, his fingers clenched into a fist, warning Andrea to hold. They were along side the building, working their way toward the back door to the complex, and Rick heard a noise. The technician they'd watched smoke two other cigarettes in an hour was at it again. Rick leaned back, and told Andrea about "Smokey the Bear," and cautioned her to wait. But, as they were on a clock, Andrea had other ideas.

She tapped Rick on the shoulder, and moved around him. Andrea was quick, light on her feet, and had the ninja like quiet of a trained assassin sneaking up on her target. As she moved on the technicin, Andrea quickly swept the guys legs out from under him, and rolled him into a sleeper style choke hold as she cut of the oxygen to the technicians brain long enough for him to pass out.

Jesus, thought Rick. Not only was she fast, but she'd taken the guy out of the equation with such ease that she could have been an operator. He knew the skill set. She was well trained in silent maneuvers, and possessed the confidence of someone who'd used the skills more than once.

"Good job," he whispered, coming up behind them and rifling through the man's pockets.

Rick found a key card in the young man's shirt pocket. Looking at the door, there was a key slot to plug it into. It was how they doors opened for staff. Rick showed it to Andrea, and the two made entry into the building, carefully peaking behind the door.

"They're out of commission," he smiled. "The ventilation system pulled some of the gas into the main building."

"What do we do?" Andrea asked.

Rick got into his bag. He pulled out two masked systems. Each had a small tank attached to it, a tank that would give them air. Both had a half hour's worth of air, but with Rick's other tricks, they would be fine. After getting ready, Andrea and Rick got in without being noticed.

Andrea was the first to hit a computer. She looked up past work stations, and hacked into the security that assigned the station to a user. When she found the right station, she flashed a hand sign at Rick, telling him where to go.

Rick found his way to the main monitoring station, and began typing frantically. It took him five minutes to get past all the security. This was definitely an NSA level system, thought Rick.

Each system user's work was recorded on the mainframe. Rick plugged in to the computer, and began running a program used for bigger jobs. It started to catalogue all of Nico's entries, and everything that happened in the observatory while Nico was working. As he waited, Rick watched the files flash in front of him as they moved into a new folder. One set of words popped up in front of Rick that caused him to grab it and open the file.

Rick looked at the date, and it was the morning Nico was killed on the road home. As he read the different data entries, he found one that looked hopeful. Opening it, Rick was certain they'd found the piece of the puzzle they were looking for. His heart raced as he read through the alert from that morning.

"Jesus," he said to himself.

Rick pulled the stick from the computer, closed everything out, and turned toward Andrea. She was still inputting something at her station. Rick walked over and looked at her screen. She'd found the same files, but was going over the system and killing the servers with the files logged on them. One by one, she'd planted a chaos virus into the observatory servers.

"That'll keep anyone from knowing we were here. It took down the security monitoring, and the servers feeding into this area. Each station's history should have been uploaded into a cloud server, and that'll keep whoever's funding this place from tracking us this far," she explained.

"Good," said Rick. "I have what we came for, so let's get out of here before these sleeping beauties start to come ouf of it."

They were in and out in twenty-five minutes. The gas Rick hit the place with would keep them down for another half hour to an hour, unless someone came and opened the doors to the front end to clear out the gas. As they hit the back door and took off running toward the hills that kept Rick's car from being noticed, both took off their masks.

"So," asked Andrea. "Did you see what it was that Nico was into?"

Rick had found the alert, and it wasn't hard to understand what it meant. He was shocked, and would have to go over all the readings, but he knew it was the one thing that would be worth killing to keep a secret. Now, he had to track who would issue the order.

"And when you figure that out," suggested Andrea. "What's the plan?"

"What would you do?"

To be continued...