The Router

"...Hiding his face behind an outer of 24 SPC baked bean cans, Darren pulled his SIG from his pocket. Switching the laser on, Darren aimed for the right tyre of the black Holden..."

The day before tomorrow, 1545 hours.

He spat the hairpin from between his teeth, into his idle left hand. Many soldiers take a small photo of their sweet-heart into action, but Darren however, was content with the hair-pin as a keepsake. His hand trembled, shaking almost arthritically as he slipped the hairpin into the left pocket of his jeans. Casting a hurried glance over his shoulder, and out through the back window of the Suzuki minivan, Darren rested his right hand on the keys, which were in the ignition. “Jase!”. Darren spoke quickly, and under his breath. “Give 'us five” Jason returned. “It's this fog mate. You know, water resonates at 2.4 gigahertz, and my wifi runs at 2.4 as well” “Huh”, responded Darren. “Pretty dodgy reception, can't you back up to the corner?” Darren swung his arm round behind his seat, grabbing hold of his well-used and threadbare back-pack. He pulled out an antenna. “This any good?” It had a good solid base, which was magnetic, and a roll of cable attached. “Fantastic – but we need a pig-tail, bro” Darren was pretty up on the lingo, but he wasn't as clued up as his younger brother, when it came to computer speak. “Yes... I suppose we do” Darren agreed thoughtfully. “Give me that thing you were chewing on” Hesitating for a moment, Darren produced the hairpin. It was a very nice hairpin, slimline, not wavy, but a straight, almost cylindrical piece of metal, bent 180 degrees in the middle. Prising the two ends apart slightly, Jason slotted one end of the hairpin into the appropriate hole in his PCMCIA wireless card in his Laptop, and the other end, he slipped into the end of the antenna cable. The passenger window winding mechanism of the van was broken, so that the window wouldn't wind down properly. A couple of nails, slotted through holes in the door panel held up the glass.

Jason got eye-contact with his brother, and pulled out the two nails. Darren sucked the air in between his clenched teeth, grimacing. The glass fell into the bottom of the door, but didn't break. Jase slapped the antenna onto the roof. “Beauty” Jason's grin was contagious. “Yep, gotcha... She's just sniffing the packets now... See, what this program does is, it access the router and checks out the post data, kind of reads the log, which is a very small file, stored on the firmware, inside the router itself... Jason spoke to himself, and so as not to leave Darren in the dark. “Instead of spending weeks, you see, sniffing the packets, it can do it all at once – should take a few minutes and we'll have our key.” Darren looked quizzically at his brother. “Sniffing; it's like, looking for patterns in the way the data is encrypted, works a treat” Jason trailed off, concentrating on his job. Darren fiddled with the radio, and found one station. “Cheap blimmin Suzuki vans...” Don't Panic by Coldplay was playing; Jason's eyes lit up and Darren lowered the volume sufficiently. Humming under his breath, mouthing the words of the song: “we live in a beautiful World...” Jason looked up “Right, she's copying. It's bigger than I expected, but what can you expect from Access?” They were here to borrow a database from their friendly neighborhood library, only, they'd forgotten their library cards, and so were bypassing the conventional withdrawal procedures. In fact, it was a tad more serious than that. The database consisted of a list of names and organisations that were deemed “potentially harmful to the state” With this database, for at least a few weeks, they could remain one step ahead of the enemy.

Since an early age, Darren was sure he had some measure of ESP. He found he was, more so than others, able to sense the presence of other people, before he saw or even heard them. When he and Jase, as young boys used to play Age of Empires together, It was always Darren that said when it was time to stop. Not so much because they weren't supposed to be playing, but that they'd been playing for too long... More often than not, Darren now thought, belligerently, Mum and Dad got home soon after we stopped. And now Darren, taking his right hand off the keys, and letting it rest on his coat pocket which hid his SIG Sauer, he glanced at the rear view mirror. “How long's it got?” “twenty-five seconds” Jase returned. Fifty meters behind them in the fog, Darren made out the figures of four men walking towards a tidy 99 Holden Commodore. “Bro! do your thing, there's some guys going to a car!” Darren spoke quietly and hoarsely. Fn+F6. Jason held down the keys on his Toshiba Satelite 2410. Since simplifying the source code the other day, Jason had been able to speed up the program's load time. Within two seconds, waveJam was open and Jase had jammed the radio wave that remote car keys operate on. Darren had no idea how it worked, but Jason seemed to be pretty keen on it. “Right mate, she's copied”. Jason grinned. Jase pulled the antenna in, waving unhelpfully at the men who looking towards the van. Pulling his head back in to the van, Jason looked strangely at Darren. “They're flippin getting in the car!” Darren swung himself over the flimsy driver's seat, into the back of the van. “Drive”, he ordered simply. Jason acted quickly, turning the keys even before he was seated. “Plenty of cars have keys and remotes, bro.” Darren breathed heavily. “This isn't Germany”. It was not, in fact, Germany, they were in the southern side of Auckland, New Zealand's largest city. The back tires spun, and the back of the van skewed round as Jason accelerated. “Gotta teach him to blimmin drive”, Darren thought to himself.

Lying full length in the back of the van, head facing the back door, Darren shouted “flip the boot!” The van veered into the center of the road as something happened in the boot opening mechanism. A convulsive shiver racked Darren's body as he punched the back door of the van. The back door swung violently open, and Darren hooked his feet round a bar of metal in the driver's seat. Hiding his face behind an outer of 24 SPC baked bean cans, Darren pulled his SIG from his pocket. Switching the laser on, Darren aimed for the tyres of the black Holden, that was now accelerating fast towards them. Darren clenched his teeth in a triumphant grin as he heard the distant and harsh “psshhh” of the Holden's right tyre. Whoever was driving was managing all right, Darren thought, as the black vehicle continued the pursuit, gaining on the white Suzuki minivan with the single wide blue racing stripe. Leaning out of the rear passanger window of the black Holden was a heavily built man wearing a German Army overcoat. With the hood low over his eyes, he aimed his M16 with grenade launcher attachment at the speeding minivan. Something violently struck the back of the passenger seat of the van. Darren spun round, and seeing the grenade rolling along the floor of the van towards him, he instinctively leaned round, grabbed it, and flung it out the door.

30.05.06, 800 hours.

Darren was sitting back in his office, leaning back in his good old office chair. Bit of a story behind the chair. Darren had received it along with the Toshiba Satelite 2410, when he started work for an IT company several years ago. But when his job was made redundant, the proprietors had let him hang onto his laptop and office chair. A large cup of tea held to his lips, in his right hand, Darren wiped his brow as he read one of the smaller headlines on the front page of the Herald, Auckland's daily newspaper. “4 die in horrific explosion” As Darren skimmed over the text, he saw “Police believe the explosion was not an accident”, and then down at the bottom of the article, “full coverage on pages 2-3”. The phone rang, and it was Darren's other brother, Lionel, who was in their base office, in Christchurch. “Mate! I got the list this morning!, this is going to be pretty useful...”