Hammerjack Read Online Free PDF Page B

slowly mutated, making the crawler think it was under conventional attacks from the outside, when in reality it was consuming
itself.
By the time it realized what was going on, it was already hemorrhaging—and the endless reams of company data were ripe for the plucking.
    The climax had occurred two hours ago. By now—if Cray’s profile was correct—Zoe would be converting the information to flash and looking for a way to get it out of the country.
    That part was the runner’s job. Tagura—like most other companies—encoded its data to be proprietary. As long as it stayed in the local system, no alarm bells went off; but the second it was moved or copied to another location, the individual bits sent tracers back to their point of origin. Spoofing could delay the process for a few minutes, but ultimately there was no way around it. By downloading the data, you gave away your physical location. The only way to do it without getting caught was to dump it to a remote flash console, somewhere far away from where the jack had taken place. There, a runner would be waiting.
    According to the trace, the stolen data ended up here in Singapore. Cray figured Zoe for the run because she had been operating out of Malaysia on her last couple of jobs and knew the territory. As for identification—that was something he hadn’t let on to the agents. Cray had pieced together the little he knew about Zoe from chasing the scant few electrons that defined her existence in the Axis. None of it had included a picture or even a bio. He only knew a few of her work habits, and had extrapolated everything else from that. Even so, he had no doubt he would recognize her. Runners had a certain spirit that he recognized from a former life, before he had sold his skills in order to save his ass.
    Cray watched for her in the parade of faces that moved through the airport. You could always tell when you were in the Zone, because no two people looked alike. Almost all of them were street species, or were at least trying to make it look that way. Cray saw that it made the agents who hovered close by even more anxious. The mark could be
any
one of them—so they watched him for any hint that the intercept might be on.
    It was hardly the crack undercover team Cray would have chosen—but at least the sight of agents in the airport wasn’t uncommon. They were in the international terminal, loudspeakers announcing departures and arrivals in a dozen different languages. Huge windows looked out onto the tarmac where thousand-seat suborbital transports were parked, belching out people who had come to the Asian Sphere from Moscow, Berlin, London, New York. Cray saw a group of Japanese business types mixing it up with one of the Zone’s flesh peddlers, who had brought a few samples of his stock for customers to admire. Not far from them, a couple of Crowleys were on the lookout for potential recruits—probably to drag them off to a black mass, the kind of thing that passed for religion around here.
    Nothing but the usual weirdness. Nothing like the image of Zoe that Cray had formed in his imagination.
    “You think this thing is going down?” Cray heard in his ear. The agents used implanted transmitters to communicate with each other via encrypted hyperband. It was their way of keeping
him
out of the loop. Cray had jacked their frequency and was listening in.
    “I think the boss is full of shit.”
    “I think
you’re
full of shit.”
    “How much longer are we gonna give this?”
    “Until the man says it’s time to go,” Cray interjected. “If I can tap your comm link, then the mark can, too. Shut the fuck up before you tip her off, okay?”
    One of them sent back a burst of angry static followed by silence.
    Assholes,
Cray thought, returning his attention to the crowd. For some reason, his eyes were drawn back toward the Crowleys, who had accosted a woman headed for Flight 1571—service to New York City and the U.S. Eastern Metroplex. That in itself