The shattered blueprint of the underground pipe network, the secret code in Natasha's terminal
There were no lights in the four corners of the Containment Room; the only way to make out objects was by the dim light coming through the ventilation holes in the half-corridor.
The engineering terminal in the hidden compartment, which had been locked, was now flashing red light on its screen at a frequency of once every two seconds.
The hardware indicator light in the lower right corner of the screen was forcibly boosted by an external signal, emitting a faint, very faint electrical whine.
Natasha sat on the edge of the iron-framed bed, her legs flat on the floor and her hands resting on her knees.
She didn't touch the machine immediately.
Two minutes ago, the sound of the patrolling guards' boots paused for three seconds outside the door before turning towards the equipment room on the west side, in accordance with the defense zone regulations.
That was the gap left by the warden Horn as agreed to cut off the surveillance; it was only nine minutes.
Natasha stood up, her bare feet stepping silently onto the cold cement floor.
She pulled open the iron hidden compartment under the bed and pulled out a rectangular terminal, no bigger than the palm of her hand, with two fingers.
There was no text on the screen, only a line of 32-bit hexadecimal machine code that kept jumping around.
If an ordinary agent were to forcibly input the decryption command, the built-in lithium oxide battery would melt the Motherboard within half a second.
Natasha examined the pattern of the characters.
This is an old trick from the early technical specifications of the Management Committee: the first eight bits are check bits, the middle sixteen bits are the channel frequency, and the last eight bits are the physical address mapping of the information source.
Her fingertips tapped three times lightly on the edge of the rusty metal casing.
Then, she pulled out a thin Steel Needles that secured her hair bun at the back of her head and inserted it into the emergency adjustment hole on the side of the fuselage.
The needle tip actuated the third internal spring.
The red light on the screen suddenly stopped, and the previously chaotic code cascaded down, reorganizing into a piece of text.
The physical hop links of the information source are stripped away layer by layer.
Seventh relay station.
Third energy pump station.
Ventilation shaft No. 9 on the west side of the abandoned exhaust system of the Department of Technology.
The final access point had no registration department, only an old vector totem composed of double gears and a hairspring.
Below the totem, a line of neatly printed small characters appears.
"To Agent Romanoff: Original topology data of underground pipe network zones 7 through 12, in exchange for a complete set of compliant travel documents and a covert Shuttlecraft route to leave T-03 Defense Zone at midnight tonight. Signed: Watchmaker."
Natasha's eyes remained expressionless.
This man, who called himself Watchmaker, reached out even further than Commander Monk's military police.
The ability to bypass the firewall of the defense zone and directly connect the signal to the exhaust system of the Department of Technology is no ordinary skill of field agents.
What's even more intriguing is the price they offered.
According to the Management Committee's criminal law, releasing a person under Level 1 restrictions without authorization is tantamount to treason, yet the other party can produce a "compliant release permit."
This means that the person who issued that pass is currently sitting openly in a Collegiate Bench office with a plaque bearing the name of a panel of judges.
Natasha's fingers, gripping the Steel Needles, were as steady as a rock.
She knew perfectly well why the other party was in such a hurry for these blueprints.
During the day, Gwen Stacy barged into the Department of Technology's mailroom with a warrant, and Xiao Li set fire to the Asset Registration Agency. The entire Management Committee's attention was drawn to the orbital deflection of the Reconnaissance Satellite No. 7.
The louder the noise outside, the faster the fishermen underwater must move.
The Watchmaker chose this particular point to request the pipeline diagram in order to bypass the monitoring of Wanda's main reactor and to dig a secret underground passage.
As for that so-called escape route, it was nothing more than a death warrant.
The moment she hands over the complete blueprints and steps out of this solitary Containment Room, she will be blasted to pieces by the surrounding anti-aircraft fire for "fleeing from justice and resisting investigation."
Using someone else to commit murder and then destroying the evidence has always been a common tactic used by inspectors to Sweep house.
Natasha raised her hand and pressed the Enter key on the miniature keypad.
She neither refused nor delayed.
In the rules of Intelligence Contest, hesitation is tantamount to admitting defeat.
She accessed the terminal's underlying cache partition.
The blueprint of the pipeline network that she had swallowed during the day after it was developed with chemicals, every corner and valve number, was etched perfectly into her mind.
Fingers flew across the keys.
The parameters of each segment of the vector pipeline are regenerated and filled into the transmission channel.
The main return pipe in Zone 7 has a diameter of 3.2 meters and is made of high-silicon cast iron.
The maintenance slide rail in Zone 8 has a load-bearing capacity of four tons and a slope of twelve degrees.
The data is comprehensive and impeccable.
However, at the turnout point leading from the Ninth District to the core underground, Natasha adjusted the coordinate parameters she entered to the right by 0.7 units.
This was not a simple oversight, but rather a clever transfer of the tactile paving that originally led to the high-pressure flood discharge channel to an abandoned cooling water return pipeline.
Even with a sophisticated surveying instrument, someone unfamiliar with the old construction blueprints of the Management Committee cannot discern the true nature of these two pipelines.
Not only that.
As is customary, an eight-bit checksum is appended to the end of data packets in the transmission protocol to prevent frame loss during cross-network transmission.
Natasha paused for half a second.
Her fingers landed on the side keys, typing out a set of extremely clumsy and redundant gibberish.
[Ref-42-Null-L]
The prefix Ref indicates internal review of the dossier.
Forty-two was the execution number that had been buried and erased.
Null represents zero permissions.
The last letter, L, is a scribbled mark Lynn habitually left when signing official documents.
This is a backdoor feature that Lynn deliberately left in the Level 3 encryption system when he was working at the bottom of S.H.I.E.L.D.. to prevent Hydra's Department of Internal Affairs from eavesdropping.
This feature has no technical destructive power, but it is like an invisible seal buried deep at the bottom of an official document.
As long as the Mainframe receiving data at the Watchmaker's end has been connected to the Management Committee's core document flow, this string of garbled characters will silently trigger a top-secret retrieval and backtracking in the background.
Natasha closed the terminal cover and pressed the send button.
The data progress bar moves rapidly across the screen.
Thirty percent.
Seventy percent.
hundred percent.
There was no text response from the other end of the channel, only a brief low-level handshake code sent back, indicating that the data had been completely received.
Immediately afterwards, the double-gear totem began to disintegrate into countless scattered points of light, a harbinger of the self-destruct program being activated.
Just moments before the communication link was completely severed and the screen went completely black.
Due to a slight bounce from the reverse tracing code, the underlying mapping software on the terminal forcibly generated an overlapping regional thermal imaging base map.
That is a cross-section showing the physical location of the source Mainframe.
The pixels on the screen are refreshing rapidly.
The No. 9 ventilation shaft of the abandoned ventilation system of the Department of Technology extends vertically downwards for a full 120 meters.
Directly below the dust collection piston at the very bottom of the exhaust duct, there is a huge cavity sealed by double lead plates.
In the center of the cavity, a code was marked with Scarlet warning box.
[Zero Storage Room]
A red light flashed, and the entire terminal shuddered violently in my palm, its temperature instantly soaring to a scalding point.
The Motherboard has blown.
The last faint smell of burning escaped from the ventilation gaps, only to be instantly blown away by the cross breeze.
Natasha stood still, her face hidden in the darkness.
The Watchmaker didn't need an escape route at all.
Taking advantage of the chaos of the troop rotation and impeachment, the group of people hiding in the shadows, fiddling with the gears, had already put their shovels directly over the head of the warehouse that Wanda was fiercely guarding.
The sound of patrol boots echoed again at the end of the corridor.
Heavy, sluggish, and relentless pressure was creeping closer and closer to the solitary Containment Room.
Natasha shoved the broken metal rig back into the hidden compartment under the bed, dusted off her palms, turned and lay back down on the thin cot, closing her eyes.