Identity Theft, Chapter 18

18.
The Game, Afoot

By the time the lights rose at 2 a.m., Jack’s nerves were screaming at a fever pitch. She and Kyra sat up simultaneously.

Jack walked over to Kyra’s side so she could keep her voice to a whisper. “Anything you want, grab now. Once we walk through that door, it’s going to lock behind us and nobody will be able to open it until Lights On.”

Kyra gave her an impressed look, walking over to her drawers and grabbing the two pairs of socks she had told Jack about: the ones hiding her knives. She gestured to her pajamas. Do we need to change? was her unspoken question.

Jack shook her head and motioned toward the door. The only thing she had chosen to take was a small cloth, which she planned to use to keep her fingerprints off of everything. She’d already erased her fingerprints from her files this afternoon, retracting two outstanding database queries at the same time, but there was no point in leaving them new samples to collect. Their room had already been thoroughly wiped down.

The lights dimmed back off as Kyra opened the door, exactly according to plan. Jack followed her out, closing the door behind them and giving it a gentle, testing push. It had locked. She took a deep, shaky breath, aware that Kyra was watching her in the dim light, and led the way toward the door out of C Ward.

The halls were empty and silent, with no sign of the usual guard staff that would normally be on duty. On the very rare occasions when Jack had needed to use the bathroom in the middle of the night, someone had always been nearby and watching. Not now. It was more than a little spooky.

Jack knew exactly where all of the staff probably was right now, exactly where her faked orders had sent each of them at 1:45 and how long it would take them to complete the tasks they believed they had been assigned… but there was always the possibility of error, of some annoyed or bored person deciding “let’s not and say we did” about an assignment, someone being so efficient that they would manage to get done well ahead of schedule, or someone procrastinating. Her nerves screamed at her that, any moment, she and Kyra would be caught before they had even left C ward. It took all of her effort not to launch into a flat-out run for the door.

She made herself keep walking, steadily and carefully. She had budgeted them plenty of time. As long as they weren’t seen, they should be all right.

They had reached the door when she heard voices around the corner, grumbling about the stupid task she had assigned them and arguing over whether it really had to be done right this moment. Kyra gave her a stricken look.

Deep breath.

Her cloth-covered hand was surprisingly steady as she punched in the Ghost Code. The security light flashed green and, with a soft click, the door opened before her. She motioned Kyra through.

And then, they were in the stairwell. She closed the door as softly as she could, releasing the breath she was holding as the security light switched back to red.

Two more doors greeted them. One, to Jack’s left, opened on the stairway down to D Ward, while the other, across from the door she had just closed, led upward to B Ward and the levels above it. Like a twisted airlock, the landing itself was just a waiting area, a security measure to prevent… well, to prevent exactly what she was doing.

Next to her, Kyra looked as taut-wound as she felt. An aura of danger was coming off of her, similar to the one that she had felt coming off of Riddick months ago, as he prepared to flood the skiff with fire suppressant. The older girl had switched into battle mode.

Jack didn’t, as far as she knew, have a battle mode, but she could feel her own mode switching on, the one that had let her power through exams and crack her way through research sources. The one that she had used when she was leaving Deckard’s World, to make her way through both familiar and new security systems. Her focus had gone needle-sharp.

“Nobody can get into the stairwell now, not as long as we’re in it,” she murmured to Kyra. “I need you to remember this number chain. 7-4-3-3-4-2-5. Put it in any keypad and whatever you’re trying to open will open. Repeat it back.”

Her voice the tiniest thread in the silence, Kyra responded. “7-4-3-3-4-2-5.”

Jack nodded and punched the code into the door that led up to B Ward. She ushered Kyra through, made sure it locked behind her, and began climbing the steps. She could hear Kyra almost-silently repeating the numbers beside her.

Most of the keypads had letters on them. She wondered if Kyra would notice that the code was spelling out Riddick’s name. Didn’t matter. That had been her own private joke. She was, after all, pulling a Riddick here, breaking out of a place that was supposed to be too secure for such breakouts.

She wondered if her father would be mortified by what she was doing.

She had, after all, cut through virtually every safeguard he had ever designed, because she knew the designs as intimately as if she had created them herself. That, she realized, was one handle she would have absolutely no control over: if anybody realized that the compromised systems had a designer in common, John MacNamera, who had a missing daughter her age…

It didn’t matter. Not now. There was nothing she could do about it, anyway.

They had reached the door to the next landing. Jack entered the code again. Green. They passed into the B Ward vestibule.

Below her, she knew, things would be returning to almost normal. Aside from her room with Kyra remaining locked until Lights On, few other anomalies would remain as long as nobody tried to go up from either C or D Ward. If D Ward called for backup for any reason, the orderlies on C Ward would know and could respond, and the reverse was true as well. Only a few minutes had passed so far, but they were on schedule, and the disruption was still minimal, negligible, hopefully both unnoticeable and unnoticed.

She punched the Ghost Code into the door for the A Ward stairway and ushered Kyra through. The older girl had remained silent and hypervigilant, seeming to understand the stakes every bit as well as — and perhaps even better than — she did.

And now, Jack thought as they climbed the stairs toward A Ward, B Ward was returning to a level of normalcy… as long as nobody needed to go up.

They passed through the A Ward doors two minutes later. Now all of the wards could go about business as usual, slightly more isolated from the outside world than they realized, but otherwise normal except for one locked and very empty room.

The last flight of stairs, used by both the girls’ and boys’ wards and the isolation wing, was as ghostly-silent as the previous ones, but it felt somehow more momentous. At the top, she would no longer be controlling most of the cameras, after all. She wouldn’t need to.

They reached the door at the top, and she put her hand on Kyra’s shoulder, feeling the tiniest flinch beneath her fingers. She kept her voice to the thinnest thread of a whisper.

“Okay. This is where you want to do exactly what I do, exactly when I do it. If I walk, you walk with me. If I stop, you stop too. I know how all of the cameras on the main level are timed. If we do this right, we won’t appear on any of them.”

“What about the cameras in the stairwell? And below us?”

“I put them on a loop.”

Kyra looked stunned. “How?”

“I set it up this afternoon. Short loops of the cameras, seeing nothing, from recordings made about this time last night. So the light would be the same. The loops started when I punched in the code to leave C Ward. When we walk through this door and it locks behind us, they’ll go back to actually recording what’s happening now.”

“You couldn’t do the same with the ones up top?”

“Not with most of them. Many of them are moving. And this level has actual windows. Furniture. Things that get moved around from day to day. A loop from another night would be more obvious. But it’s fine. They’ll never see us. You ready?”

She could feel Kyra steeling herself next to her. “Let’s do it.”

Once more, Jack punched in the Ghost Code. The door’s click echoed through the stairwell as it opened, but nobody from the lower wards should hear it. She hoped.

Most of the people who worked on the Admin level worked there in the day. The nighttime staff was a skeleton crew, much as the orderlies on the Third Shift were a third in number of either of the two day shifts. A handful of security staff and a few janitors were the only occupants, and almost all of them had been assigned to the two upper floors for the next hour. Jack glanced at the chrono in the hallway.

2:15.

Their silent, careful ascent had taken fifteen minutes, mostly because of how cautious she was being.

Jack closed the door behind them. She rested her hand on Kyra’s arm as she watched the movement of the cameras closest to them. One stationary camera stared right at them, but saw nothing. It would continue to loop on nothing until she punched in the Ghost Code again, away from its reach.

Once she was certain of where she was in the timing, she squeezed Kyra’s arm and began walking. Not toward the exit.

Kyra gave her a confused look but kept up with her, halting when she stopped abruptly and then walking again with her once the cameras were looking away again. When they reached Jack’s destination, she gave Jack another quizzical look.

Jack wished she could put more concrete meaning into the smile she gave Kyra in return, as she punched the Ghost Code into the door of the Women’s Locker Room and ushered her through.

The lights came on automatically as they entered, and Jack closed her eyes against the sudden brightness for a moment. Behind them, the locker room door closed, locked, and became impervious to all codes except the Ghost Code until their exit.

“What’s this for?” Kyra whispered.

“We can’t go out in our PJs,” Jack whispered back with a grin. “It’d be dead obvious where we escaped from. Locker number 223. The nurse who uses it has your shoe size and is maybe a size bigger than you in pants and shirts. She’s on duty down on D ward right now, so her street clothes should be in there. Her shift won’t end until after they realize we’re gone.”

“What’s her combination?”

“Just use the code I gave you. It works for all the locks.”

Kyra gave her another impressed look and walked over to locker number 223. Jack walked over to 347 and popped it open. Her choice was an orderly on B Ward, who was tall enough that her pants wouldn’t show Jack’s ankles.

The chrono read 2:25 when they finished changing, and 2:35 when Jack finished going through the night shift lockers for spare cash and wiping prints off of everything she and Kyra had touched. There wasn’t a huge amount, but there didn’t need to be. She had other plans for that. But cash was always useful, and its absence might distract law enforcement, briefly, from the real nature of what had happened tonight.

“One more stop and then we’re on our way out.”

She could see that Kyra was already feeling antsy. Freedom was so close, after all, why delay it? But this was necessary.

They reached Director Flint’s office, unseen, at 2:40. Twenty minutes left until the diversionary activities she’d assigned the staff ended on the levels below them, fifty until they ended in the admin levels. Jack intended to be out of the building before 3 am, but she had built in the extra time, just in case.

His office was much as she remembered it. She glanced over the papers on his desk, quickly, spotting the transfer orders for Kyra, awaiting final signatures. Helion Prime, it seemed, had a real thing for hard copies rather than digital, probably thanks to the whole AI Rebellion that had happened on Helion Six a decade earlier. Lajjun had told her about that one day, when she’d asked why so many of the things that were automated on other worlds — or, at least, on Deckard’s World — were done manually. The people of Helion had a huge distrust for computer minds.

Which, come to think of it, probably explained why so many of the higher security features on her father’s security had been switched off. In all probability, the hospital and local law enforcement didn’t even know Ghost Mode existed on their systems.

She moved to Flint’s file cabinet. Its keypad control was susceptible to Ghost Mode; she’d made sure of it a few hours ago. The files, well organized, included hard copies of everything known about her, and Kyra. She pulled their files out and closed the cabinets.

The decision, to go full-on Scorched Earth, had come to her when she was almost done preparing for their escape. At 3:30 am, the instructions she had left behind would wipe the last year’s worth of backup data stored by the hospital, in both its secondary and tertiary locations. Meanwhile, a small collection of its data, about Heather and other patients on her deadly medicine, would be forwarded to several local media outlets. Most of the current, live records would be undamaged by the purges, but two files would be irretrievably corrupted: hers, and Kyra’s. With their hard copies lost as well, it would be hard for the hospital to reconstruct most of the details they had amassed about their two missing jailbirds… especially given the heat that would hopefully come down on them almost immediately with the news about the potentially lethal drug being handed out to a dozen patients.

“Wipe down anything I’ve been touching, please,” she said to Kyra, as she moved to Flint’s physical Inbox.

Kyra nodded, pulling out one of her special socks from the pocket of her new pants, and running it thoroughly over the file cabinet. Jack flipped through the Inbox until she found the packet she was looking for. It would have arrived shortly after midnight — the courier had been instructed to deliver it between midnight and 1 am — and so no one except the front desk would have seen it.

Inside, a dozen cards, ostensibly reward gifts for high-performing staffers, waited to be activated. Jack logged into Flint’s terminal, in full Ghost Mode, and activated them, one eye on the chrono. It was 2:50 once she was done. She divided the cards into two piles, pocketing half and holding half out to Kyra.

“Funds for our travels,” she whispered. “There’s a muni transport card in there, and money for food and clothes.”

Kyra’s expression was a little awed as she took the cards.

The last time Jack had staged a bug-out — back when she’d left Deckard’s World to go after her father — she hadn’t had these kinds of resources, and she’d found herself desperately wishing for them. This time, she was going to make sure she didn’t have to learn from the same mistakes twice. The hospital might not even notice how light their petty cash account was until after they finished dealing with all of their more pressing scandals, by which time — she hoped! — the last traces of the path the money had taken would be wiped away.

“We’re almost ready,” Jack said. She slid her file, and Kyra’s, and Kyra’s transfer papers, into the empty envelope. Then she opened up Director Flint’s printer, pulling out a loose piece of paper and nodding for Kyra to wipe the machine down. She set the paper on Flint’s desk and inscribed her final message to him.

I promised you that I would tell you the truth about Riddick before I left.
I always keep my promises, so here it is:
You will never, ever find him.
—Jack B. Badd

Kyra laughed softly beside her.

She had promised that the truth would be sitting on his desk when she left, but that part was one she needed to break. It would be too easy, too obvious, and would give the game away too quickly. She folded the paper, twice, and opened the drawer that had contained her file. She tucked the paper into the now-empty hanging folder that bore the label Jane Doe 7439, closed the drawer, and gave it a final wipe-down.

It was 2:55.

The stuffed envelope tucked under one arm and a smaller envelope in her hand, Jack opened the door to Flint’s office. He rated a stationary camera, which had begun looping when she and Kyra had left the women’s locker room. It would continue looping until she put in her next code. With Kyra waiting beside her, she timed the nearby cameras in their sweeps, and then began walking purposefully toward the front desk. Kyra kept pace, silently. Jack was suddenly aware that Flint’s decorative letter-opener, a bit of metal styled like a miniature antique sword, was now in Kyra’s right hand.

Well, why not? So far, everything had gone according to plan, but there were no guarantees.

She could make out the bank of monitors at the front desk, showing moving and static shots from around the hospitals. The timing was completely randomized, but she knew that nothing had appeared to break the desk guard’s boredom.

Well, until now… She put her hand on Kyra’s shoulder, stopping her by a door with a keypad. Taking out her little cloth, she keyed in one penultimate code.

It wasn’t 7-4-3-3-4-2-5. Not this time. Instead, she keyed in a new Ghost Code, switching from the quiet escape scenario to her Scorched Earth plan: 4-3-2-8-4-3-7.

HEATHER

And all hell began to break loose.

The monitors on the front desk dissolved into static. Then the lights died, plunging the complex into total blackness for ten seconds before emergency lighting activated. Throughout the hospital, Jack knew, a very convincing simulation of a blackout was unfolding. To everyone else within the building, it would appear that the emergency generators had switched on, powering essential systems.

Except that none of the cameras were recording anymore.

Except that some of the locks that were supposed to automatically unlock in an outage appeared to be stuck. And others, that were supposed to automatically lock down, were wide open.

Such as the freight entryway, just out of the direct line of sight of the front desk, and right next to her.

She pushed it open and ushered Kyra through, closing the door quietly as she heard the front desk guard trying to reach for backup on his comm.

Too bad the comms system was completely offline, now, too. All he’d get in response would be static.

Low red light bathed the short corridor she and Kyra hurried down. At its end, she simply pushed on the waiting, disarmed door. It opened onto a driveway with LOADING ZONE marked on it in Helion Prime’s four primary languages.

Heather’s body, she suddenly realized, would have taken this exact route when it left the hospital.

“Come on,” she murmured to Kyra. “We’re almost all the way out.”

“There’s more?” Kyra asked, keeping her voice soft as she jogged beside her up the driveway.

“Just the gate. Then we’ll be out. Gonna take us about five minutes to reach it.”

It took less than that.

With the gate almost in sight, Jack pulled Kyra to the side of the driveway and motioned for her to get low, creeping forward next to the hedge that lined both sides of the drive. She could hear the gate guard cursing, unable to raise either the outside world or the main building. The gate stood partway open, frozen in that position, seemingly having malfunctioned upon the start of the blackout.

“We can make it if we run,” Kyra murmured.

“We’re not going that way,” Jack told her. “C’mon.”

The hedge had a small break between one bush and the next, and a cobbled pathway emerging between the two bushes. Jack pulled Kyra down the path, to a small human-sized gate that appeared in the wall. Through the bars, she could see the virtually deserted parking lot beyond it. Only one vehicle was parked there; only one visitor was staying overnight.

She keyed Riddick’s name into a security keypad for the final time, and the little gate opened.

“When you go through, go left and stay close to the wall so the guard on the main gate can’t see you,” She told Kyra in a whisper.

Kyra nodded and went left. Jack closed the gate and followed her.

Now, behind them, the security system moved into its endgame, simulating a whole slew of minor malfunctions that expanded to include the guest facility — mostly — and the outer grounds. The lights over the parking area flickered and died. Most of the guest facility lost power as well. But not Eve Logan’s rooms. Nothing happened within them to disturb her rest… Jack hoped.

Enveloped in full darkness now, Jack grabbed Kyra’s hand and pulled her into a run, through the vast emptiness of the parking lot and toward the driveway beyond.

“Is somebody out there?” a man’s voice called from behind them.

A moment later, Jack heard a window roll up.

“What’s going on?” a woman called.

Fuck. Eve Logan, awake. Jack squeezed Kyra’s hand and ran flat out for the driveway.

“We got no power down here! I can’t even call anybody! Can you?” the gate guard shouted to Logan.

Jack and Kyra reached the driveway and sprinted up its length as the guard began sweeping his flashlight around the lot. Kyra had begun to outpace Jack, but waited for her at the edge of the road.

“Where the hell are we?” she asked. “I thought we were in a city!”

“More like its outer suburbs,” Jack told her. “Don’t worry. Logan can’t get out of her room for about another fifteen minutes, tops, and by then…”

The headlights for the muni bus appeared as it rounded the curb and approached. Jack stepped up to the bus stop and touched its call button. This, she knew, was how most of the staff got to and from work.

“…we will be long gone. Get out the muni transport card I gave you.” Jack already had hers in her hand.

Kyra fumbled for it, almost dropping her other cards, but then had it in her hand as well. Jack wasn’t sure what she’d done with Flint’s letter opener, but doubted she’d actually let go of it.

Jack opened the smaller envelope she’d been carrying and pulled out the final two items she’d ordered along with the money cards. “Here,” she told Kyra, clipping a GUEST tag from the hospital onto her shirt. She clipped her own on just before the headlights from the bus illuminated them.

The driver barely gave them a second look once he’d glanced at their tags. The muni transport cards worked. Jack sank down into one of the bus’s seats, Kyra beside her, struggling not to give into the urge to shake herself to oblivion.

“Four stops from now, we get off, and get on the train. We’re taking a detour into one of the shittiest parts of town to get rid of our files and change out our clothes. Hope you still have your knives on you,” she murmured to Kyra, low enough to keep the bus driver from hearing.

Kyra’s nod was tight, but the look in her eyes was warm in a way that it had never been before. Jack had been aware that, at some point in the past, she had earned Kyra’s respect, but that had changed.

Now, she realized with a strange lurch, she had earned something even stronger.

Admiration.