Operation Sting Read Online Free Page B

placed to one side of the hideout’s large, dimly lit main room. The gang kept busy, respectfully leaving Williams alone unless summoned, and turning a blind eye to the Insider’s presence, as instructed.
    The Insider leaned over to Williams and whispered, “I should get back to Techna-Stik. They’ll wonder where I am.”
    “Any problems there?” whispered Williams.
    “I’m expecting a few secret service types to start snooping around soon, but there’s nothing for them to find. There’s nothing there to link me to … what did you call it, Operation New Age?”
    Williams cracked his lizard-like smile. His eyes shone behind his thick spectacles. “Good name, don’t you think? Makes this bunch of idiots think they’re doing something noble.”
    “All I’m concerned about is making sure everything goes to plan,” whispered the Insider. “I’ve got the bank hassling me for money.”
    “You deal with your side of things, I’ll deal with mine.”
    “None of these people suspect the truth?”
    Williams scanned the room and smiled tohimself. “No. Deluded halfwits. By the time the police turn up, we’ll have got what we want and be well away.”
    “Aren’t you worried about them seeking revenge?”
    “From prison?” grinned Williams. “When they’ve no idea who you are, and they still think I’m a Londoner called Williams? Leave it out.”
    The Insider chuckled and patted him on the shoulder. “I really must go. Are you sure Fraser there can break into Whiplash’s code? It’s highly advanced stuff. Don’t forget, I know all about the Whiplash project, but I can’t bypass its security protocols. You need a technical genius.”
    “Stop fretting. Fraser and Bullman are eco-terrorist superstars! Fraser’s the guy who hacked into the FBI’s central computers in America last month and put a smiley face on their website. There’s nothing he can’t crack.”
    At that moment, Fraser looked up from his computer. “Boss? I … I don’t think I can crack it.”
    Williams launched himself from the sofa and strode across the room. “What? What did you say?”
    “Look at this,” pleaded Fraser. “There’s, like,a six-terabit encryption module embedded on the main CPU chip.”
    “And translated from the Geek, that means…?” growled Williams.
    “It means you need a code just to switch Whiplash on, let alone fire it. And working out what that code is could take months.”
    “What?” bellowed Williams.
    “Maybe even years.”
    “Years?”
    “There’s no way around it, boss. I keep coming up against something called an AKA number. I don’t even know what that means!”

    “AKA,” said the first technician, “stands for Activation Keycode Authorization.”
    On the twelfth floor of the glass tower that housed the UK offices of Techna-Stik International, two technicians were fussing around SWARM’s Agent J. Their workshop was possibly the untidiest place Agent J had ever seen, the exact opposite of SWARM’s gleaming,state-of-the-art lab. The entire room was a mass of bleeping, flashing machinery, as eccentric and geeky as the technicians who worked in it. Outside the enormous windows was a spectacular view across London.
    Agent J casually placed his smartphone on a cluttered table and entered a code on its keypad, causing a small flap to hum open in its side. As he talked with the two technicians, distracting their attention, Sirena the butterfly and Morph the centipede silently emerged from the phone, Sirena uncurling her wings as she crawled out into the open. She took up a position above the window, her sensors decrypting the room’s Wi-Fi signal, while Morph used connectors in four of his legs to plug into a networked tablet left on a nearby chair.
    “We developed AKA ourselves,” said the first technician, Philip Jones.
    “How does it work?” asked Agent J.
    Jones and the second technician, Lewis Macarthur, hurried back and forth producing circuit diagrams and computer readouts.