Caldwell ducked below the worktop just as two PLA ehe door of the trol room. Mei Lin caught the first by surprise delivering a blow to the side of his neck. The man slumped to the floor but his friend was quick. He was already whipping out a revolver. As the PLA turned around, Caldwell saw Mei Lin』s hand slip behind her back with blazing speed. She was reag for the Glock. There was a delay as the man』s brain tried tister the fact that there was a woman in the trol room. That delay cost him his life. Mei Lin』s arm was already extehe Glock spat fire and a black hole appeared in the middle of the man』s forehead. He slumped to the floor face first. Mei Lin stood still listening.
「Quick. I am not sure whether they heard that,」 she said. Caldwell ran to the server. There was a toolbox nearby. He switched the servers off and started removing the metalliels on the mae with a screwdriver.
「What are you doing?」
「The AI is gohere seems to be no backup, the other server is just a bunch of data, some kind of knowledge work used by the AI』s neural work. I am going to remove the processors.」
A minute and a half later, both servers had been opened up and Caldwell had carefully eased the processor from its housing on the modified motherboard. The other server seemed to be running a powerful industry-standard Sun Microsystems processor. Caldwell hahe processor to Mei Lin, who slipped it into a small grey box and placed it in her rucksack, all the while listening out for the PLA.
「OK. I o get the root username and password,」 Caldwell said, breathing heavily. The adrenalin umping. A PLA officer had been killed. If they were to get caught they』d both be killed without a shadow of a doubt. No amount of diplomatic wrangling could ge that, not even Fouler』s maneuverings. This is what Kat had meant when she had said Fouler was sending him on a fool』s mission, that day outside The Puzzle. But he had to keep cool, keep his wits about him. This was no time for fear. This was, for him personally, the biggest frigging score in the world full stop. At stake, his past his future, his life. Their lives!
Caldwell sat at one of the other terminals and attempted to find the user directory. All the maes seemed to be ected to the work in one way or another. Sometimes in his haste, his fingers slipped on the keyboard. Sweat was dripping out of every pore of his body even though the temperature in the PLA』s trol room was quite low.
「I am not happy being up here while these guys walk in and take shots at us. I am going downstairs to secure the area. Give me ylod hurry,」 Mei Lin implored.
「OK. I am trying my best,」 Caldwell said, reag in his trouser pocket for the Glod handing it to her. Mei Lin disappeared into the corridor, both Glocks at the ready.
Caldwell removed Yamamoto』s sole and its peripherals from his knapsad switched it on. He dohe goggles and tiyping away on the PLA terminal. The same text display he』d noticed on The Bund appeared otht of the goggles. The sole was disc new works. He removed the goggles. Caldwell found the user directory on the PLA terminal and sed the list of users. There were 2038 in total, including oh root access and five with administrator privileges. The rest had identical low levels of access.
Caldwell called up his base on the sole. There were two messages but he didn』t have time to read them. The sole had locked onto the PLA work. He turned quickly to the PLA terminal as an ide