CHAPTER 2 CONTINUED
"The gate on South Canal has a magnetic trip wire," Frank said, his knuckles pale where his hands gripped the steering wheel. "Richard replaced the local night crew with a third-party security contractor out of Tacoma three weeks ago. Two men in a guard shack, roving patrol every forty-five minutes. They don't know terminal maintenance. They only know incident logging and trespass containment."
"What about the service cut-through behind the rail spur?" I asked.
"Chain link is still intact, but the padlocks are rusted brass," Frank replied. "The maintenance crew never upgraded the manual bolt on the pump house basement. If the water hasn't pooled over the intake threshold, the cellar passage connects straight to the primary transformer room beneath the server cage."
"And the backup array?"
"Physical SCSI tape carousels," Frank said, glancing into the rearview mirror. "The mainframes run on twenty-year-old proprietary infrastructure. That's why Richard had to hire an outside specialist to scrub them. The automated remote wipe only hits the digital network mirror. The master physical drives write to magnetic ribbon inside a climate-controlled steel vault behind the boiler bulkhead. If you pull the physical cartridges before tomorrow's scheduled maintenance, Richard’s digital deed transfer will have nothing to anchor to."
We turned off the harbor bypass onto the cracked asphalt of Canal Street. The smell hit me before the visual did: damp sulfur, heavy bunker crude, and the cold, metallic stink of burned creosote that never entirely washed out of the soil. Ahead, the perimeter floodlights of Vance Logistics cut white swaths through the rain. The new corporate signage—brushed aluminum with sharp modern lettering—was bolted directly over the oxidized copper plates that still bore my family's name.
Frank killed the headlights two hundred yards out, coasting the sedan into the weed-choked ditch behind the decommissioned coal trestle. The engine ticked down into the cold air.
"Take this," Frank said, reaching beneath the driver's seat and pulling out a heavy steel utility wrench and a plastic-sleeved keycard. "That badge belonged to Marcus before the blast. The reader at the rear service bulkhead was disconnected from the network hub after the fire investigation closed. It still accepts local offline authorizations if the manual relay doesn't short out in the wet."
I took the wrench. The cold metal bit into my palm, grounding me in a way the velvet carpets of the Bellevue ballroom never could. "If the perimeter alarm trips, Frank, don't wait for me. Clear the road and head straight to the county clerk's residence."