"Hey there. Hope you don't mind that we let ourselves in."
As he walks over and pats her down, he looks over to the laptop she's working on, shaking his head.
"I hope you're aware that we log web access through our secured network. So, er, perhaps you'll check Slashdot from a normal line next time. Could piss off the tech geeks there if they can't trace your IP."
Still moving slowly, the woman removes her headphones so she can hear any responses from the men. She turns her head slightly to get a look at her captors.
"I'm Agent Thrush, Ilyanna Kinski. The Agency asked me to give you a hand as it looked like your op had gone seriously pear-shaped."
Ilyanna smiles prettily as she interlocks her fingers behind her head as requested. "No, I don't mind, Peter. And tech ops can bite my cute little butt. If they don't want me to web surf, the Agency shouldn't leave me sitting around a naked little safehouse for a day and a half."
She looks up at the gunman. "Mind if I take another sip of my latte before it gets cold, Artis?" she asks, nodding at the coffee cup next to the computer.
"Drink all you want - AFTER you tell us what's going on with our communications." Without moving the handgun, he continues. "Prove you're not part of that pear-shape and then we might start getting along."
Peter finishes his search - sure, it was a bit cursory, and he knows a few places where she *could* hide a gun, but he's not about to sour the situation by looking there.
"Well, you know our names. Either you tell the truth, or we're way more fucked than we realize, in which case keeping you here at gunpoint won't change a thing. Alright then, Ilyanna. We've got a serious problem at our hands, and it looks like we're headed for an all-nighter. No offense to your taste for designer coffeee, but I think we'll need some black beauty for what's ahead."
He cracks his fingers.
"Welcome to Electronic Warfare 101. I'll be your host for this episode..."
"May I?" Ilyanna asks, gesturing toward a backpack under the desk. "The communications snafu is one of the reasons I was sent. The Agency provided me with new SATCOMMs for everyone, which should help resolve some of the issues we've been experiencing." If allowed, Ilyanna will pull the backpack from under the desk, open it where the others can see what she's doing, and pull out a new SATCOMM from each of the other agents.
"The Agency briefing *did* include photos of you and all of your team," Ilyanna says to Peter. "And don't worry, we can get you all of the coffee you need."
"Alright. First order of business is changing the point-to-point cypher on these to secure our internal communications. I'm going to need my laptop, Art. I may be smart, but this'll go a lot faster when I have my machine to crunch the numbers."
"According to my briefing, the last contact with the rest of your team was about three hours ago. At that time, they were a little ways northeast of Novosibirsk."
She looks at Artis with a grin. "So are you guys as wild as Nightengale said? He made it sound like working with you could be a lot of fun."
While not truly *beautiful*, Ilyanna is definitely an attractive woman with a nice figure.
"Are we talking about the same Nightengale? Fun?" Artis' thoughts drift for a second as he contemplates this:
Middle of Siberia. Get shot at, nearly blown up by British Intelligence. Not fun.
Driving experimental bulletproof car 120+mph: makes up for the getting shot at. And last time it was a submarine.
"Yeah, I suppose it IS fun. Now we gotta get moving. You and Pete need to finish up here, 'cause the trail is getting cold for both Spiner and meeting the team."
"Well, Nightengale didn't really seem particularly fond of your methods. But hey - what's life without a little excitement? If I wanted a boring life, I could have gotten married." Ilyanna smirks.
"Hey, I'm ready any time, just let me know where you wanna go..."
A few minutes later, Peter's in full geek mode, hacking away at his laptop, with a SATCOMM dissembled next to it.
"Alright, we get these with a preinstalled 256 bit key. The chips in these can't decode much more in real time, and I see no reason to go for less, so what I'm going to do is kluge together a little bit of software that allows me to select the key I'm going to use. I'll hack that into the SATCOMM's firmware and generate a new key I'll put on the phone's flash memory. We'll use the factory key to contact the Agency and the secondary key for internal comms. That means the key is easily changeable in case there's another leak. To further protect this, I'm going to secure this secondary key with a short passphrase so I can store the actual key encrypted. Once I've finished modding this phone, I'm gonna shadow its firmware and flash memory to my laptop and reflash all the other SATCOMMs with that modified payload. Actually, Art, how about you come up with a nice passphrase? Preferably something only we know."
He pauses to breathe and looks at the laptop's screen.
"Goddamn TechOps slackers. My grandfather could've coded better Assembly than these greenhorns."
Peter clicks the last SATCOMM shut and begins to pack up his EEPROM writing kit. Noting Artis hovering over his shoulder, he grabs a SATCOMM and hands it to the wheelman.
"Three months consulting for Ericsson, and the only useful thing I took away was when I nicked that Erlang manual from the software engineer party. Hope I didn't push them into the red or anything. Fascinating read, though."
Ilyanna goes back to web surfing while Peter plays tech geek. Accepting her updated SATCOMM back when he finishes it, she slips it back into place on her belt.
"Actually, I have a little question. How do we contact the others? It's not like we can lock sensors on their biosignatures and teleport a bundle of SATCOMMS to them."
The coast is clear, with all three leaving the safehouse intact and without major incident...a first in memorable history for Artis.
They arrive at Le Car, still in one piece and free from any outward signs of disturbance. A thorough check of the engine, trunk, undercarriage, and interior finds no sort of tampering or explosive charge. Again, not the least bit comforting to Artis and Peter.
Ilyanna finds their paranoid behavior a bit weird, to say the least, expressing the ubiquitous female sign of female contempt in the form of the sigh/eye-roll combo.
"We don't. We check the police radios we brought with us and see if they've gotten into more trouble than we have. Barring that, we head to Novosibirsk and look for clues. Corpses, crime scenes, etc. Between Brian and the girls, someone has to have run afoul of them."
Gatac
