Net Force--Kill Chain by Jerome Preisler (e book reader txt) 📕

The Lada went along at a good clip for a while, then slowed as it approached a fork in the road. Still distressed by Anna’s probing, Natasha turned to look out the windshield. A metal sign at the juncture showed a red circle with a horizontal dash in the middle. Below it on the same post, a separate sign read: Vkhod Ogranichen: 30 km.

Krupin swung onto the side road.

“We should see the city wall in minutes,” he said to his passengers.

Natasha gazed out into the night. She’d already spotted it and guessed it was closer than the distance marked by the road sign. But judging by their silence, the others hadn’t yet discerned its dark shape up ahead.

That hardly surprised her. She tended to catch sight of things long before anyone else. Especially in the dark, when her eyes were at their sharpest.

As it turned out, Krupin’s vision was good enough for him to spot the train tracks to their left. But the high orange lights shining down over their metal rails made them difficult to miss. They cut through the snow cover on the ground, running from the valley’s ragged rim in a perpendicular line. A short distance before meeting the road, they swung east toward the wall.

“The Uzhur Railway,” he said, and gestured. “The city’s main supply line. It can take you from here to Moscow...after six connections, four thousand kilometers, and two days of chugging through these mountains.”

Natasha gazed out her window. The storm had lulled, and the air around her was suddenly alive with spectral hues. They arced over the treetops, flickered brightly under the hooded rail lights, and darted across the Lada’s front grill like tiny fish underwater.

And then the wall was close enough for everyone in the vehicle to see it.

Anna’s chin tilted upward. They were rapidly coming up to the gate. Ahead were sentry booths, warning lights, and boom barriers painted red like the sign back at the road juncture. Three rows of barbed wire were strung atop the wall.

The sight of it constricted Natasha’s throat. The wall was black and solid and high and threatening. It curved off to the left and right, like part of a huge circle.

Unwilling to look at it, she returned her gaze to the checkpoint. For the first time since the start of her trip, she felt truly lost and afraid.

“Is that where they keep the butterflies?” She was surprised by her own words. She couldn’t quite have explained what they meant. It was like someone else had spoken them.

The old woman gave her arm a gentle pat. There was an odd look in her eyes.

“Don’t worry,” she said. “Everything will be fine.”

Natasha didn’t think so. Her hand shaking in her pocket, she clutched her hidden doll.

Anna noted her reaction in silence. The girl was a living validation of Pinnacle. Her measures were singular, approached by those of only the teenager Grigor Malkira. But she showed a quick temper that hinted at roiling emotions within. It would all have to be monitored.

Looking out at the wall, Anna remembered another seemingly impassable concrete barrier that once stood half a continent away in Berlin. She would never forget when it finally toppled. She was a young woman in those days, an official with the Ministry of State Security. But she could still picture the guard towers crashing to the ground. Her careful preparation had been all that spared her from imprisonment. Or, worse, from the people’s street justice.

Several minutes passed. The 4X4 creaked and banged, rocked backward and forward, swayed left and right. Anna rode in silence, Natasha jostling against her side. Then Krupin stopped at the checkpoint and lowered his window, cold air blasting through as he presented his ID to the sentry.

The guard’s eyes shot between his face and the photo on the card. Krupin waited in silence. The guard checked him out some more—longer, steadier looks. Krupin kept waiting. Finally, the man gave a satisfied nod and returned the card. The boom barrier began to rise.

In the rear, Natasha’s eyes widened. Anna felt her shrink closer, her spine straight and rigid, her arm stiff as a plank. But for all her compassion for the girl, she said nothing to soothe her. Try as she would, she could not muster a word.

Her guilt did not allow it. She felt paralyzed.

Then the barricade was up. Krupin stepped lightly on the gas pedal and rolled forward, the shadow of the wall spreading over the 4X4 like an immense blanket.

Within minutes, it was swallowed in darkness.

Chapter One

The HIVE

April 4, 2024

“Wow,” said Bryan Ferago. “Tasha, this is awesome.”

Physically, he was in a huge, fortress-like brick building known as the Terminal in the Hell’s Kitchen section of Manhattan. Converted from a nineteenth-century warehouse, it now served as the New York–East Coast headquarters of the US Department of Internet Security and Law Enforcement.

Net Force, for short.

“Is it?” said Natasha Mori. “I mean, you seriously think so?”

Physically, she was seven miles to his south and across the East River, in the Williamsburg, Brooklyn, apartment she shared with Duncan Ulysses, her temporary roommate and regular collaborator in the electronic house duo, Dev Zero.

Bryan was looking around with fascination.

“Seriously,” he said. “I love it.”

Natasha smiled. They, or more properly, their avatars, were both inside the Highly Integrated Virtual Environment—HIVE, for short—developed by Net Force’s director-in-chief, Professor Alex Michaels. Not so long ago, it had existed only as a dedicated room in Michaels’s lab at Columbia University, serving as repository of the most destructive malignant software ever created, a kind of digital plague vault. Michaels had been able to reproduce past cyberattacks for forensic analysis, model a bug’s evolution and internet spread with lifelike simulations, and develop ways to combat it.

These days, the original HIVE was a relic, having reached obsolescence in a hurry. Over the past several months, Michaels had transferred its functionality to standalone VR headsets, allowing authorized users to access it from wherever in the world