Sneakernet Read online

  Sneakernet

  A John Crane Novella

  Mark Parragh

  Contents

  Copyright & Credits

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  John Crane will return

  Afterword

  Also by Mark Parragh

  Sneakernet

  By Mark Parragh

  A Waterhaven Media Publication

  Second Edition – June 2017

  Copyright © 2017 by Waterhaven Media, LLC. All rights reserved.

  Cover Design by Kerry Hynds, Aero Gallerie

  Edited by Jennifer Harris

  Production Coordination by Nina Sullivan

  The adventure doesn’t have to end when you’ve finished Sneakernet! There’s a lot more of John Crane’s world to explore, and new stories coming all the time. Check out these other exciting John Crane adventures, available at Amazon.com.

  And be sure to follow the John Crane web site at agentcrane.com, and Mark Parragh’s own site at MarkParragh.com to keep up with the latest new Crane adventures, bonus materials, and sneak peeks behind the scenes of the John Crane series.

  * * *

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or to events or locales is entirely coincidental. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

  For my father,

  who didn’t have a very good time in Iceland either…

  Chapter 1

  Iceland, 25 km outside Reykjavik

  According to the map, this place had been a farm once. Not a particularly fertile one from the look of it. It lay tucked between a steep hill to the south and the rocky flanks of the Esja volcanic mountains to the north. The land was rocky and rough, swept by cold winds. It offered little to anyone trying to work it. The former owners might have planted some grain, but their main source of food and income would have been sheep. It would have been a hard life.

  When the Allies came during the Second World War and built a huge, modern airbase outside the tiny fishing village of Reykjavik, many rural families had abandoned their farms and moved to the new boom town for steady work. John Crane imagined these particular farmers would have been among the first to leave.

  Crane lay prone on the hillside. He had carefully made his way to one of the few patches of brush that offered some cover. There were no trees in sight, just thick grasses and the occasional stand of shrubs like these. If he stood up, they’d barely reach above his knees; he’d be readily visible to the guards below.

  He swept the slope with a pair of Leica binoculars. The old farmstead had been replaced by an ultra-modern building of stone, steel, and dark glass. It was a black, flat-roofed circle in the middle of carefully maintained grounds, surrounded by a larger circle of chain link fence. Two armed guards manned the gate that commanded the only approach road. There was nothing else along the road. Nobody ever wandered out here to disturb the guards. They had to be bored out of their minds. Crane hoped that made them less observant because this was a terrible place to try to sneak into.

  Not only was there no cover, but it was June in Iceland. The sun hung near the horizon to his left, a sullen red ball floating just above the sea. Technically, it would set sometime before midnight, but even then there would be only a murky twilight. It would never get truly dark. Crane saw no point in waiting.

  He had repeatedly timed the security cameras in their arcs. He knew just where he had to be and how long he could be there. He put the binoculars away and prepared his wire cutters. Then he leapt to his feet and sprinted down the hill.

  Crane was a figure in black tactical gear with a small pack, running down a hillside in plain view. Any moment he expected to hear alarm sirens, but he made it to the fence. He fell to the ground and quickly snipped through the bottom links until he could slide through. Then he folded the chain links back in place and dashed to a metal access door at the rear of the building. There were two cameras along the roof that swept the grounds. But if he made the wall before they converged on him, he’d be safely out of their field of view. He slammed into the wall and pressed his back against the stone, looking frantically for approaching guards. Nothing.

  Crane breathed slowly, forcing his heart rate down. He had a few minutes until one of the workers came out for a smoke. Crane didn’t know what the man did, but it happened on a precise schedule. Every night at the same time, the door opened, and the same man leaned against the back wall long enough to finish a cigarette before going back inside.

  At least that was the pattern he’d spotted over several nights of watching the compound. Last night, the night Crane meant to make his move, that pattern had been broken. Someone had shown up unannounced, and there had been what Crane took for a security drill. He’d had no choice but to back off.

  The coincidence bothered him. Crane wasn’t a big believer in coincidence. But they’d given no sign that they suspected he was out there. So far tonight, things seemed to be back to normal.

  Crane heard the latch click and rose to a crouch. The door opened and a figure stepped through. Crane grabbed the man’s shirt in both hands and hauled him out. Before the door could close behind him, Crane kneed him in the gut. The man wasn’t a guard; he’d obviously never been trained to fight. He’d barely registered that something was wrong before Crane put him down.

  Crane pulled the man’s access card off his belt and swiped it across the reader. The door beeped and Crane opened it. He slid inside and quietly closed the door behind him. So far, so good.

  Chapter 2

  The Ionian Sea, Six Weeks Earlier

  The two-seater Dornier flying boat picked John Crane up at the pier in Vola, on the northern Greek coast. The plane sliced through the impossibly blue water and then leapt into an equally blue sky. It was a short flight. Soon the plane descended toward a small island, one of dozens dotting the sea here. This one was perhaps half a dozen acres of green slopes and chalky white cliffs. There was a single building with a long terrace built into the cliff face. They touched down on the water, and the pilot pulled up to a wooden dock.

  Josh Sulenski waited at the end of the dock. He wore shorts, boat shoes, and a gray t-shirt that said “Keep Calm and Activate Bankai.” Crane had no idea what that meant, and he’d learned not to ask.

  “John! Thanks for coming,” said Josh. “What do you think? Is this place great or what? Wait until you see the view from the terrace. Did you eat?”

  “I’m fine,” said Crane. “So did you buy an island?”

  They walked back up the dock toward an arc of beach stretched between two white cliffs.

  “Rented it,” said Josh. “It’s not for sale. Can you imagine? I mean it’s probably a bad idea. I’d just disappear here and then nothing would get done. Anyway, I appreciate you going
out of your way.”

  Crane looked around. “Yeah, this is a real hardship, Josh.”

  “Well, I’m not done imposing on you,” Josh answered. So there was a job. Crane had expected as much.

  Josh led him up a staircase carved into one of the cliffs. The terrace had a sweeping arc of glass and sliding doors on one side, and a spectacular view of the sea on the other. Josh led the way to a small table with two glasses, a pitcher of ice, and a bottle of ouzo. He prepared the drinks and they drank in silence, listening to the sounds of the ocean, watching sea birds wheel and dive for fish.

  “So where are you sending me?” Crane asked at last.

  “We’ve got a problem in Iceland,” said Josh.

  “What kind of problem?”

  “A company called Gögnfoss Greinandi, hlutafélag,” Josh said, and Crane was surprised at how easily his tongue rolled around the complex, Nordic syllables. “Datafall Analytics in English. They do some public facing stuff. Social media, massively multi-player gaming. Less publicly, they do data mining, consumer profiling, and some less savory things. They’re responsible for 21 percent of all Internet traffic into Iceland. And apparently, they’re up to something. A few months ago, I was contacted by an employee at their supercomputing center outside Reykjavik. They were working on strong crypto, and he was worried about what they meant to do with it.”

  Crane sipped his ouzo. A gull cried overhead. “So why did he come to you?”

  “They’re building on my work,” Josh said. “Predicting large dataset fluctuations. He’d figured I’d understand. If they pull this off, they’ll have the keys to everything. Every government secret, every banking password, right down to my aunt’s Facebook page.”

  “I gather they can’t be trusted with it,” said Crane. “I’ll take a little more of that, by the way.”

  Josh poured him another glass. “We gotta watch ourselves with this stuff.”

  They clinked their glasses and drank.

  “And nobody can be trusted with that,” Josh added. “Not even me. I wanted to see how close they are, so I had my people work up something to tap their data. That part was really cool. They’ve got 150 racks of blade servers, over 10,000 nodes, something like 200,000 cores altogether. We figured out how to holographically image just one of them over very short intervals to capture the state of the whole system.”

  Crane had no idea what Josh was talking about, but he gathered it was meant to be impressive. “Really?” he said, leaning in.

  If Josh noticed the sarcasm, he didn’t acknowledge it. “I haven’t been sitting on my ass since I cracked the stock market. If these guys are using my work, I’ve got a couple years on them.”

  “So all’s well?”

  “No,” said Josh. “We wanted to bug their system and watch it in real time. But their network security’s pinpoint. We couldn’t slip a bit through without them noticing it. So we did the next best thing. We made a recorder and sent it over to Iceland. Our contact planted it in one of the servers. Plan was, he’d leave it there for a couple months, then pull it and send it back to us.”

  “I take it something went wrong.”

  “Datafall got suspicious. They fired him, walked him out of the building, and that was that. Apparently they didn’t know about the tap. As far as we know, it’s still there. But I need you to go in and get it, and sneakernet the data back here.”

  Crane considered the implications, assembled his questions into some kind of orderly list.

  “What do we know about the place? The physical layout? Security?”

  “I’ve got a file for you,” said Josh. “We know the basics. Plan of the building, data and power trunks, things like that. We know their security’s very good. That’s why I have you.”

  “Flattery won’t get me into the heart of a secure supercomputing center, Josh.”

  “No, but it gives you a warm feeling and makes you want to do things for me.” Josh grinned, then waved the issue away. “You can get in. We’ll make sure you have what you need.”

  “What about the device itself? What’s it look like? Where’s it hidden?”

  “Got you some backup for that,” said Josh. He tapped his smart watch and spoke into it. “Can you join us on the terrace, please?”

  A few moments later, a set of doors slid open and a young black man emerged. He might have been Josh’s age, though Crane wouldn’t have bet on it. He was a little overdressed for the beach in oxfords, black slacks, and a white shirt open at the collar. He approached rather tentatively, Crane thought, the way you might approach a movie star for an autograph on the street.

  They stood and Josh made the introductions. “John, meet Georges Benly Akema. Georges, this is John Crane.”

  They shook hands and Crane said, “Nice to meet you.”

  “I’ve done some of your tech support work, Mr. Crane,” said Georges, and Crane heard a lilting African accent in his crisply enunciated English. “It’s a pleasure to meet you face-to-face at last.”

  “Georges was studying electrical engineering in Cameroon. He actually built a smaller version of my prototype system out of cast off parts as a school project! But his family got caught up in something over there, and they had to leave the country. When I found him, he was busing tables in an Indian restaurant in Palo Alto. Total waste of talent. He’ll be your tech support. He knows his way around the hardware, and he has the specs on the data tap. He’ll fly into Reykjavik with you, and you’ll wear a pair of stereo cameras so he can see what you see. If you have any trouble with the technical setup, he can walk you through it.”

  Crane glanced over at Georges. “You’re comfortable with this?”

  “Yes, Mr. Crane,” said Georges. He drew up to his full height and tried to look confident. “This is an important job. I look forward to contributing to the success of the mission.”

  Crane grinned. “Well, you can dial it back a little,” he said. “And call me John.”

  Chapter 3

  Inside the Datafall building, Crane looked down a darkened hallway lined with closed doors, a bulletin board, a fire extinguisher. Somewhere, a radio played jangly Europop. Nothing moved. He slipped in his earpiece and put on the glasses they’d given him with its tiny cameras at his temples.

  “Georges, you there?”

  Georges was aboard Josh’s Gulfstream at Keflavik Airport, with the pilots in the cockpit and the engines warm. Crane had told them to be ready to leave on very short notice.

  “Coming in now,” Georges said in his ear. “I’ve got your position. The maintenance shaft is about thirty meters up.”

  Crane moved quickly down the hallway. His keycard could get him through most of the doors. But the plan was to avoid the hallways entirely. In a niche behind the elevators, he found an access panel that opened onto a maintenance crawlspace. Crane slipped inside, closed the panel behind him, and was plunged into darkness. He switched on the flashlight mounted on his shoulder and saw a cement shaft with steel rungs for climbing. He started down.

  At the bottom, another panel opened into a narrow tunnel. He followed it until it ended at a door. The supercomputer chamber would be on the other side. Crane switched off his light and crouched in the blackness, listening. When he heard nothing after thirty seconds, he slid the panel open and stepped through.

  “Whoa,” Georges said in his ear.

  The chamber appeared to be carved out of sandstone, hung with panels of deep burgundy fabric. The stone facade was layered into tiers of false columns and arches that held recessed lights. With the coolness, the dim light, the quiet, the place suggested a medieval basilica.

  Suspended in the center of the chamber was a huge metal and plexiglass cube. Inside, server racks stood in orderly rows. They were strung with color coded bundles of cable and glittered with LEDs. In their setting, the racks made Crane think of gravestones.

  Crane was at the bottom of the chamber, a sub-floor strung with thick bundles of power cables and hoses for cooling water. Directl
y above him, a metal mesh deck ran around the outer edge of the chamber, and a narrow bridge crossed to the cube of the supercomputer itself.

  Crane heard a door opening, then footsteps echoed on the metal deck. He edged back into the shadows. A few moments later, a guard walked past above him. His black battle dress uniform and MP-5 submachine gun effectively shattered the ecclesiastical feel of the place. He walked around the cube and left by the doors on the opposite side.

  When the doors had closed, Crane moved quickly up a metal staircase to the deck. The bridge led to a revolving door of plexiglass panes. Crane passed through it. Inside, he heard the quiet whisper of cooling fans. He scanned the server racks, letting Georges read the code numbers as he moved down the rows.

  “We want node 1186, rack 29,” said Georges. “Next left.”

  Crane turned the corner. He spotted rack 29, crouched beside it, and pressed the release button. The rack hissed softly open on pneumatic runners to reveal rows of processors and memory modules. Crane moved aside a thick, orange bundle of cable and scanned the board.

  “Where is it?” said Georges, echoing Crane’s thought.

  Crane had seen photos of the data tap. It was a little smaller than a cigarette pack, built to look like another processor so it would be easy to overlook. But Crane knew what to look for; it just wasn’t there.

  “Check the board ID,” said Georges.

  “Where is that?”

  “Look left.”

  Crane did and saw a small code number etched into the board. He heard typing, then, “That’s not the right board. That should be in rack 41. Check the next drawer up.”

  Crane moved up a drawer, pressed the release, and the rack hissed out. He looked at the code number.

  “That’s wrong, too. They must be rotating the nodes! Try…hang on.”