Weiss Kreuz Fan Fiction ❯ New Rules, New Ruler ❯ Chapter 15

Part Fifteen

* A/N: look, making up missions is hard, and finding plausible reasons is even harder, but it's time for a little more action. The plot requires it. Bloody plot (grumblegrumble…) *

Brad ran his fingers lightly over the thing paper, wishing briefly that he shared Tanya's gift. The urge passed swiftly though, as he remembered her excessive clothing and delicate sanity. And this was who was in charge? How did he get himself and his team into these things?

Well, this one promised to be a little safer. The target was a civilian, apparently not connected to SS. He'd passed round all the details before accepting, just to make sure. But the name wasn't even remotely familiar to any of Schwarz, and considering what it was it was reasonable to assume this girl wasn't an SS member.

Honestly, with a surname like `Hooker', what idiot would call their child `Elizabeth Zoe'? The woman must be terrified of using her initials.

Anyway, simple enough. Hacker. Tanya needed her. So, go fetch. Brad was getting somewhat annoyed at this. They were a premier assassin team, not a group of errand boys to be sent on find and retrieve missions. Besides, where could one find a better hacker than Nagi? If she wanted to look at SS files, why not get Nagi in?

Wonderful, Tanya was withholding information from them. At least she was coming to Japan. Crawford would have words with her then. Perhaps it was just as well she didn't want Nagi, he wouldn't trust her with any member of his team. Schuldig was a case in point. He was still missing several memories, and not all related to his childhood. Chunks of Rosenkruez were missing, and some of their early missions, and a great deal on random facts about SS he'd picked up over the years. They'd been looking for something in Schuldig, and what worried Brad most of all was that they hadn't found it.

He rubbed his forehead, feeling another migraine coming on. Schuldig was in the main room, petting the cat, Nagi was convalescing in his room (well, he was just milking it now to avoid going back to school, but Brad was feeling lenient) and Farfarello was trying to catch birds from the balcony. Brad hated to think what would happen if he actually managed it.

He caught it before it happened, but he still jumped slightly as the moggy was deposited in his lap. Schuldig's arms wrapped snugly around his shoulders and chest, and Schuldig rested his head on Brad's shoulders.

"Yeah, I've been worrying about that too," Schuldig told him, giving his lover a peck on the cheek. "Know something else? I can't get the precision I used to. People tend to know when I'm in their head. When she comes, I won't be able to have a little poke around without her knowing, and if her shields are anything like the garbled memories I have of them, we're fucked."

Brad smiled at Schuldig's bluntness. "There are more ways to find out what she's thinking than getting into her head. It would help if we knew exactly what it is you've lost."

"Brad, hon, the problem with forgetting stuff is that you don't remember what it is you've forgotten."

"Hon?"

Schuldig blushed slightly. "Sarcasm," he said.

Brad frowned. It had sounded sincere, but with Schuldig you really could never tell. "What did I do to warrant sarcasm?" he asked, a little more harshly than he meant to.

Schuldig winced. "Forget it," he said abruptly. "Besides, it isn't that I've forgotten stuff, I just can't remember it. It's still there."

"The problem is we need another telepath to dig them out."

"What about a telempath?"

Brad sighed. "Tash is coming too, I think. She's on Tanya's leash, it seems. I can't imagine the hell she'll go through in a city like Tokyo. She won't help us, not with Tanya breathing down her neck, and we'll be lucky if she retains even a shred of sanity."

"Tash projects," Schuldig said. He was sitting on the other desk now, feet propped up on a chair.

"Projects?"

"Yeah. If someone's feeling down, she makes him or her happy. That's how she cheered Nagi up."

"Oh yes, I remember." Brad frowned. How had he forgotten that? He'd been worried Nagi would slip back into depression as soon as he was out of her influence. "So, you think she'll be cheering all of Tokyo up?"

"May- Wait a min, will you? Farf's actually caught something. We'll be walking on feathers for weeks if I don't get it off him now." Schuldig half walked, half sprinted out of the door, accelerating through the main room until he burst onto the balcony. Out of interest, Brad pushed his chair over to the window to watch. He'd never admit it when anyone else was there, but he still got a bit of a thrill out of scooting along on a computer chair, spinning slightly. The cat sat up on his lap and stared hypnotically at the birds. Farfarello abandoned his catch almost immediately and stared through the window at the cat, his single pupil oddly feline in it's intensity.

Brad was a little disturbed. It was one-way glass, but, dammit, when the cat blinked so did Farfarello.

* * *

Nagi ran over the blueprints on his computer. He felt a little hurt. He could get anything out of a computer, why were they looking for this random person? She wasn't even connected to SS, how would she know what she was looking for? Besides, what would they do when she found it, what if she read it? They couldn't…possibly…let her…

Ohshit. They were going to kill her. She was expendable. It didn't bother Nagi so much that they were about to cause an innocent's death, they did that all the time, but it was the fact that whatever Tanya was looking for was going to be for her eyes only. If Schwarz heard anything, it would be a filtered down, censored, generally corrupted version. It wouldn't be the truth.

Nagi swallowed. He checked the blueprints again. Once they'd got her, which would be no big deal really, they were to take her to a secure location. After some cross-referencing he worked out where this `secure location' was. There were no computer terminals there.

SS had never kept a hardcopy of anything. It was all on the Internet. The amount of hacking, decryption and decoding it would take to get in was immense. You had to know where to look, as well. You'd never find an SS site by chance, and you'd never find one from another. And they moved, deleting, copying, changing as they were used.

Nagi began to check the woman's background. She was good, he had to admit it. The problem was, Tanya clearly had an idea of where the site she was looking for currently was. If he hacked in now, it would move. Once she'd gone in, it would move. But if he could get a Trojan into whatever computer they were going to use, he'd be able to track their process. The question was whether the hacker would pick up on it.

He slipped into one of the SS sites and began searching for nearby bases in Tokyo. He found only viable one, a safe house they'd used once. It was an indistinguishable building, one of many sets of cloned flats, but it was the only one with a router that would allow Tanya to access the sites. It had to be a digital line.

Nagi scanned his shelf for suitable programs. He'd written several Trojan's and viruses as part of SS, and he'd developed a lot of software to do it. SS had kept tabs on almost everything he'd developed. Almost.

It was a small floppy disk, labelled `Physics revision'. He had several such disks, and this was the only one that didn't only contain real revision notes. He opened the notes and began to type furiously. After several lines of complex code another window opened.

He'd written the entire thing himself. Even the coding couldn't be found anywhere else. Fighting through layers of encryption so intense they'd been banned by some governments as a security risk. <A/N: I can't remember what level of encryption it is, but the British government banned it after it was developed because they couldn't break it. It was considered a security risk, as terrorists would be able to pass information across the Internet without any form of surveillance. So there you go, freedom of speech has it's limits no matter where you are. > Nagi hacked his way into his own program, eventually arriving at the password screen.

This had been Schuldig's suggestion, actually. Anyone who typed in the box would wipe the disk. Nagi calmly closed it.

The next bit was even harder. He had to keep up a typing rate of fifty keys a second. If he hadn't been telepathic he'd never had managed it. Fortunately, he'd already planned what he was going to do. Writing layer after layer of encryption and coding he began to create a passive Trojan that would activate as soon as they entered any SS site (they didn't have cookies, but the complex addresses and ridiculous coding tended to give them away) and store every page patiently. Next time the computer was turned on, it would send it all to Nagi's computer before self-destructing.

Nagi sent the program and closed the program, going back through all the coding he'd had to get in through. This wasn't a disk that could just be removed. Eventually, Nagi took the disk from the drive and leant back. He spotted Farfarello's reflection on the screen and spun on the chair to face him.

"I brought you a pussy cat," Farfarello told him holding the cat up. He was grasping its waist and it hung down like a dead thing, purring happily. "Are you tired?"

Nagi nodded, accepting the uncomplaining feline from Farfarello. He felt like a Bond villain, sitting in front of a computer stroking a cat.

"You need a new keyboard," Farfarello observed. Nagi glanced at it. He'd worn all the writing from the keys. Last time he'd written a virus on that program, the keyboard had actually caught fire. It wasn't a particularly cost effective way of getting in to someone's machine, but it was worth it on occasions like this.

"I think Tanya's trying to screw us over," Nagi told him bluntly.

Farfarello crouched on his heels and rocked back and forth, nodding. He was staring at the cat again. It made a playful swipe for his nose.

"She was watching us. I switched off all the security cameras, hidden microphones, phone bugging, pressure pads and so on."

"Let the birdies sing their songs, and the rabbits eat their kittens."

"Huh?"

Farfarello gave Nagi a look that implied the boy was extremely stupid. Nagi frowned back, not in the mood to play these sorts of games.

"Rabbits don't eat their babies, Farf," Nagi said a little scornfully.

"They do if you scare them."

"Oh. Oooh." Nagi stared at him for a long time. "Are we the kittens?"

Farfarello looked blank. "I thought Weiss were cats?" he offered. Nagi sighed. Perhaps Farfarello had been trying to tell him something; perhaps he was just slipping in and out of lucidity again. Whatever it was, it wasn't worth worrying about. It was gone now.