The Walls of Jericho

Investigate

“Are you sure you know where we’re going?” I ask, staring at the dense, moss-covered forest surrounding us on the impossibly narrow, winding road.

Huffing indignantly, Channing flicks me a sidelong glance. “Shut it, Jinks. Of course I do.”

“Mind telling me? Because I’m starting to feel like I should have at least made you give me some candy before I got in the car with you. How many bodies do you suppose are buried out here?”

I shift in my seat at the humming noise he makes as he considers my question. “That—what you just did—it’s not reassuring. Not at all. Spill the details. Now.”

The car slows as we go around a hairpin curve. Before he accelerates again, Channing looks over at me with a half-lidded gaze and slinky smile curling his lips. “I’d have though with everything I’ve done to you today, you’d be too tired to be this jumpy, babydoll.”

The truth is even I’m not sure why this little visit to yet another Avernus hideaway has me so uptight. Still, ever since he told me what had happened while we were sitting at an uncomfortable picnic bench eating truly delicious grilled cheese sandwiches and homemade pickles, I’ve felt like there was something just—wrong. About the whole break-in and theft. In the same way my instincts were screaming that Ferdi’s confession about the life debt is strange and just off, they’re also doing that here.

“Was that your idea of flirting?” I reach over the console and touch one finger to his thigh, discharging a hard electric spark into him. “Because it’s not funny.”

“Ow! What the hell, Jericho!?”

“Show a little respect for my instincts, will you?”

“I am,” he pouts. “I get it. I get what you’re feeling. The whole thing stinks of cover-up, but until we get there and do our own investigating, there’s nothing else we can do but enjoy each other’s company and have some fun.”

“Driving through this creepy forest is ‘fun’?”

“Look, I admit it’s kind of eerie. It’s green with dense underbrush, the trees here grow tall and twist and bend with age. And this road is deliberate, designed to make people turn back because they think they’re lost. You might try to be grateful though. When Avernus first bought this place, this was a barely visible dirt trail, almost impossible to find unless you knew what you were looking for. We hiked in and it took a couple hours, even for werewolves.”

“Why are you guys so fond of these creepy places?”

“Because they’re remote and meant to be hard to find. Because they’re already built to withstand massive bombings. Because the local governments are generally eager to get rid of them and at a reasonable price. And because they’re quick and easy to repurpose,” he lists.

“So this is another bunker? Like the one you appropriated outside Crossroads?”

“Essentially.” He slows the car for another switchback in the road. “The one in Crossroads was a Cold War bunker. The ones here are mostly underground military installations left over after World War II.”

“Doesn’t it seem a little ironic to you that werewolves favor these kinds of places? They’re relics of fear and paranoia. I mean, really, what do you guys have to be afraid of?”

“Same thing everybody else does,” he says dryly, bringing the car to a halt alongside four other police cars in front of a moss-covered utility tunnel in what I’d argue is the bleakest and most remote area of Northern Ireland. “Losing the people we care about. Plus, you know, dragons.”

The non-descript tunnel is hidden in a hollow, surrounded by a forest of immense trees, hundreds of yards from a main road. Exiting after he parks, he hurries around the car and opens my door for me.

Outside of the climate-controlled vehicle, the damp closes in quickly and the heavy scent of loam and forest decay hits me hard. I draw a little pattern in the air, essentially tracing the landscape and the tunnel before me. “You know this—is only adding to the whole horror movie vibe.”

“I’ll make a note to get some flowers planted. Maybe put up a park bench or two. Have a clown waiting around with a red balloon.” Channing grabs my hand and leads the way into the low tunnel. “Will that make you happy?”

“It’d be a start.”

Stooping, we make our way to the center of the tunnel. Naturally, it’s the darkest point in here and sets the hair on the back of my neck on end. Somehow, my mate locates a notch in the tunnel wall, and a quick series of clicks triggers an electronic sequence of steps to open the door—essentially an airlock. As the rubber-sealed, gas-proof door slides aside automatically, the electronics that support it light up my brain with a cognitive map spanning the underground facility below.

The visible tunnel we’re in is just the entry level of a three-story building built below ground. The lower two levels are separated from each other by three, eleven-inch thick layers of asphalt, and then at least three feet of earth—all to protect those who worked inside against a blast, heat, and radiation.

The door slides aside to allow us to enter a small, dimly lit chamber with barely enough room for the two of us to stand before an elevator door. Overhead, the light turns red, and the secret door we entered through closes behind us.

“Claustrophobia sets in real quick in here, doesn’t it?” I sense when the series of tiny scanners embedded into the walls, ceiling and floor around us engage. “What would happen if some kind of threat was detected?”

“A knock-out gas is deployed. Then the room fills with water.”

Aghast, I look up at him, then my gaze shifts upward as the light overhead turns white again. There’s a ding to signal the elevator’s arrival, then the narrow doors slide aside for us to enter. Channing steps inside and faces me.

“What happens in there? Is it like an iron maiden? Maybe a cryofreezer? Or an incinerator?”

Flashing one of his megawatt smiles, he reaches out to grab my arm and yank me inside with him. “Who’s paranoid now, Jericho?”

Immediately, I raise my hand. “Duh. Me. You just told me the entry is a killbox. What am I supposed to think?”

He nuzzles my neck. “Mmm, you smell good. And you’re not supposed to think anything standing in there, unless you’re up to no good.”

We’re subjected to a series of additional security scans as the elevator slowly descends the twenty feet into the actual bunker’s first level. After the fourth one, I roll my eyes and look up at Channing again. “So you know, if I get cancer after this, I’m suing you.”

“Jesus, Jinks. You’re a pill today,” he laughs. “Maybe I should have blistered your backside before we came instead of what I did.”

He times his comment to provide the full effect of my furious blush exactly as the elevator doors open into a wide gallery overlooking the various laboratories and operations areas, another level down.  Along the long wall to the left of the elevator are a row of unoccupied plastic chairs and in one corner, there’s a plain wooden table scattered with papers with uniformed police and white lab-coated employees huddled around it.

My cognitive map solidifies here, and I estimate the bunker is around six thousand square feet. It’s repurposed well for the research and development labs on the level below, and for supporting day-to-day living for the performing staff of the tasks Avernus has assigned here. To support the workforce, there’s a kitchen and cafeteria, dormitories, a UV-illuminated plant room, a generator room, another Dr. Zhivago-style communication exchange, and sleeping quarters for the senior scientist and engineer on staff.

The gallery is full of white labcoat-draped scientists and engineers mingling in small groups with police officials. Mostly clean-shaven, the police are all dressed in heavy work boots, the typical high-visibility waterproof uniform jackets, and warm wooly hats that I kind of envy in my snappy-looking but not particularly warm business suit and high heels.

As soon as the elevator doors open fully, all eyes are on us. Pretty quickly, one officer, smartly dressed in stiffly pressed slacks with an unruffled air of efficient competency and organization about him, detaches from the huddle and approaches Channing with a hand extended to shake in greeting.

“Mr. Stark?”

“Yes,” Channing acknowledges, shaking the officer’s hand. “I’m Channing Stark. My fiancé, Jericho Jinks.” He introduces me with a gesture but I can feel his watchful wariness through the electric hum of our mate bond.

“I’m Constable Gerard Alamy, in charge of this investigation,” he returns brusquely. “We’ve collected some preliminary information from your staff at the facility. Based on the evidence we've gathered, this wasn't an opportunistic or convenience theft, this was a well-organized and executed robbery. Any other details you can provide for us?”

“Potentially.” Taking my hand, Channing starts across the gallery. “My fiancé is an information technology and surveillance expert. We’ll take a look at the security footage in the communications area.”

Did you just growl?> I ask him as we pass through the parting crowd of workers and investigators, heading for a corridor that leads to the other rooms on this level as a few of them fall in behind.  

Yes.> The answer is terse, though I don’t get the impression his snippiness is directed at me.

Why?>

He huffs in mild amusement through the wolf link.

It’s all I can do to keep the abject horror off my face at the mere thought of the scent I’m giving off to their sensitive noses.

Scanning his handprint, Channing opens the door to a well-outfitted communications and conference room, gesturing me inside first. “Mr. Alamy, you and your team may take seats wherever you like.”

My mortification transforms quickly into indignation, but I take a seat at the computer console where my mate has led me.

“If you wouldn’t mind, babydoll. Work your magic,” he urges, giving me leave to trounce through the Avernus securities.

With relish, I stroke the keyboard with my fingertips.

He laughs through the wolf link. Best get used to it, babydoll. When I stomp you at backgammon again, I intend to see to it you’re filled to capacity of my essence every single day.  People will know you’re mine.>

As soon as I hack the system, by-passing the credentialing log-in and begin directly accessing the security programs involved, there are some sharply drawn breaths of surprise from the collected police officers and Avernus engineers and scientists seated at the conference table behind me. Hijacking the wall of monitors beyond me, I begin directing pertinent security information onto them for display as my technomage tentacles creep their way through the data, looking for irregularities.

“I’m afraid Constable Alamy is correct.” I point to the monitor where I’ve displayed the security footage from the time the criminals arrived outside the bunker’s tunnel entrance to the moment they left with their stolen goods. “You can see they’ve used some sort of individual signal jamming devices to prevent the security cameras from picking up their images. Whatever the device was, it was sophisticated enough that it also defeated the other nine scans that occur during the elevator’s descent to the gallery level. Besides the video footage, the biometric data from our crooks was also corrupted.”

“Biometric data?” someone asks from the table behind me. I assume must be a police officer unfamiliar with the protocols in place at this facility.

I don’t bother turning around. “Yes.” Hijacking another monitor, I scroll the security footage to the point when Constable Alamy and two other officers entered the tunnel with the employee who’d been sent to retrieve them after the theft was discovered. On the screen beside it, I post the relevant data from that initial biometric scan. “The first biometric scan collects basic identification data. An image, height, weight, build, and through a complicated process I won’t go into, heart and respiration rate, number of blinks per minute and body temperature.”

Highlighting the outline of Alamy’s image, I display the biometric data collected from him. “The entry chamber is designed to get baseline biometrics on each person who enters, then take a secondary read as soon as the airlock door seals and the red light engages, which is when those measures trigger anxiety. With each successive scan, additional information is fed into a predictive algorithm and a threat assessment is generated. Anything above a certain threshold triggers a security warning and the elevator doors shouldn’t open.”

Scrolling backwards through the footage, I bring up the images of the thieves. “Look at our crooks though. There’s a failsafe built-in to the profiling algorithm for non-living items brought or put into the initial screening area that requires a manual override. When the system couldn’t get a bead on them, it should have triggered the manual override, but it didn’t.”

"Why?"

"Because they disengaged that too." I swivel the chair I’m seated in around and seek Channing at the table, finding him instead leaning against the back wall in the shadows with his arms crossed over his muscular chest. “These guys had the external door’s digital entry code, they knew what security protocols would be deployed against them, they even knew which computer to use in this room to access, copy and delete the plans they came for and how to breach the cybersecurity to get to them. This was a tactical strike. To pull it off, at least one someone on the inside was compromised. Someone high up in the organization.”

“Is there a back-up of your data to a secondary server?” one of the officers asks. “Some redundancy we might restore the data they corrupted?”

Channing steps into the light, shoving his hands into his slacks’ pockets in frustration. “This is the back-up. It’s the most secure facility we have.”

What my mate says isn’t the entire truth. I’ve already located the back-door protocols built into the system, which means somewhere else—probably Crossroads—is more secure and acts as the final data storage hub. I suspect he can't reveal that information though. 

As if that wasn’t enough to confuse me, while I was crawling through this particular Avernus system, I got a flash from Amber of Channing confirming background checks on all the employees cleared to enter here. It doesn’t sit right, because it’s almost as if he anticipated this theft, maybe even sanctioned it. 

SOFie twinkly tingles her agreement.

“So there’s no way to scrub the data?” Constable Alamy asks.

“I initiated a descrambling program that may help clean up the video images, but I don’t know how close we’ll get.” Directing that activity onto another monitor, the whole room watches as the nine minutes it took the thieves to commit their crime run in slow motion from start to finish.

“Good work, Jericho,” Channing says softly, approaching to stand quietly behind my chair, his forearms crossed over the back of it. “I appreciate your help.”

It’s not until the thieves reach the gallery area and the lighting is bright enough that we can see exactly how successful my attempt to descramble the video was. 

It’s terribly disappointing.

I recognize Constable Alamy’s gruff voice as he verbalizes what we can all see. “They were wearing hood masks.”

Which might have been the end of this shitshow except that a few frames later, I catch sight of something that sends a cold chill up my spine. One of the robbers is wearing a familiar style baseball cap.

One with a Nike logo on it.

Channing’s large warm paw closes on my shoulder quickly. He squeezes reassuringly. Stay calm. For all we know, it’s one of the people inside this room.>

I reply sarcastically.

 >

When I’m on my feet, Channing turns to Constable Alamy, and says quietly, “Investigate the backgrounds of all the employees with clearance at this facility. Don’t skip a single person. I’ll have our Human Resources department comply and provide any records you need.”

Taking my hand, he whisks me out of the communications room and heads for the elevator to the surface.