Date Played: 21 October 2001
Game Date: Tuesday, 6 March 2001
The team was unsure how to deal with FBI Agent John Sandaval, tied to a metal chair and sitting the shower recess of the teams' fallout shelter bolt-hole, until he said that it didn't matter what happened to him as Aegis would cease to exist after 7.00pm that night. He refused to explain the nature of the threat against Aegis and the team, using their typical ingenuity, surgically applied taser shocks to Sandaval's body then a ball-peen hammer to his feet. Neither method elicited any information.
In frustration, they turn to William Rockefeller, who suggests a that psychic he knows, Sam Daniels, may be able to help.
Daniels first meeting Angela, the public face of the cell, and is escorted to meet the rest of the team. Daniels expresses his admiration for and pleasure at meeting the team who had such a victory at Vickersburg (see Strangers In The Night).
After an extensive session of psychic probing, Sandaval cannot help but reveal that at least one ground-launched cruise missile will be fired against an Aegis target from a proud army capital tonight.
The clock is ticking. Aegis appears doomed. The cell are the only people who know that Aegis under threat but they have no idea of what will be targeted. Time is slowly but surely running out.
At this point, the stress begins to take its toll. Malachi pulls the surveillance video from the wall and locked the intervening door so that no one can see what he does to get more information from Sandaval. Flex kicks it in and threatens Malachi. He tasers her. Later, Flex unloads Malachi's weapons, which he left on the table in the other room to stop Sandaval making a grab for them, so that he will be unarmed when she seeks her revenge. Angela leaves and sits in the surveillance van hoping the whole thing will blow over. Osbourne sits at the table, head in his hands, dejected at the turn of events. Daniels stands agog watching the Aegis poster-boys and poster-girls fall apart.
Malachi leaves to find out the capabilities of a cruise missile and where the army base may be. Flex shoots Sandaval in frustration. Osbourne draws his pistol on Flex and would have shot if Daniels had not karate chopped it from his hand. Angela, in the van, turns up the stereo and pretends she's somewhere else. Daniels gets on his motorbike and drives away, unable to fathom how this bunch of losers could have achieved so much. Malachi returns to find the mess. He believes that the proud army capital is Fort Bragg, Maryland, the home of the US Army.
Malachi and Flex travel to Fort Bragg to see what they can do there. Osbourne calls Rockefeller to warn him of the impending disaster. However, with no clear idea of a target and given the size and level of security at Fort Bragg, there is no much they can do. It is only when the Hermes off-site backup store at Andrews Air Force Base is assaulted and destroyed do they realize that the Hermes database system is the target.
Malachi and Flex are helicoptered back to Washington, DC, with the aim of protecting the Hermes fail-over system several floors beneath the Smithsonian Institute from attack. They consider main Hermes system, located on the 15th floor of Nakatomi Towers in downtown Washington, is simply too vulnerable. They arrange the Hermes facility security detachment so that they can effectively fight an attackers.
Meanwhile, Osbourne goes home and starts drinking heavily.
Angela, however, is made of sterner stuff and begins downloading as much of the data from Hermes as she can to the cell's computers at the office. She wracks her brain for a solution to protect the Hermes backup system but without solid knowledge of the attack planned against it, there is very little she can come up with.
Fifty-three minutes later, two ground-launched cruise missiles armed with conventional warheads slam into Nakatomi Towers, destroying the main Hermes facility and Aegis' operations centre. Thirty seconds later, the Hermes fail-over system fires up and kicks in. However, instead of the familiar Hermes login screen, Malachi and Flex are presented with a screen which says "A present from the Black Book" and a progress bar starting at 0% and rapidly counting towards 100%. Black Book have infected Hermes with a virus.
One of the security features of the Hermes system is that if any cell terminal is cut off the main comms link, it must be reinstated by a site visit from a central squad of Hermes technicians. This means that if they cut the power, every Aegis cell in the world will be off-line, essentially blind and dumb, until visited by a Hermes technician. But, if they do not cut the power, all the data on Hermes will be destroyed.
Malachi makes the decision to cut the power after removing a whole bank of data storage for safe keeping.
Malachi and Flex, realizing what Angela and Osbourne already knew, that they will all become the scapegoats for this, head for the hills.
Unanswered Questions and Mysteries To Be Solved