Caldwell emerged from the stairwell on the ground floor and found himself in the NEXT Tower lobby. The pristine white marble walls were dotted with massive plasma screens, erected for the sole purpose of reassuring customers that their data was safe if they stored it at NEXT data centers. There were screens showing the data flows of the NEXT networks in complex but beautiful color-coded graphs. There were monitors displaying pulsing traffic-light icons indicating that systems were healthy with a green light, about to have problems with amber or in deep trouble with a red light. All of NEXT’s systems seemed to have the green lights. It was all systems go.

A huge horizontal screen, a grid of multiple monitors, displayed multiple camera views of the main NEXT data center control room. Technicians in shiny silver and purple windbreakers with the NEXT logo emblazoned on them gawked at terminals, studied the graphs and generally tried to look like they were giving the customer their money’s worth.

It was lunchtime. The security guard in the lobby was stuffing his face with the contents of a Styrofoam lunchbox. In the bright glow of white light firing down from a giant modern chandelier in the high ceiling, designed to look like stalactites hanging from the roof of some ice cave, the bereted security guard looked woefully out of place. Four Haier robots roamed around the marble floors. Their sensors told them to stay away from Caldwell. He walked up to the electronic directory board and studied it like a visitor looking for the right floor. The control room was on the twenty-eighth floor, sandwiched in the middle of the building.

There was a terminal in one corner of the lobby that spewed marketing bullshit about the benefits of letting NEXT handle all your New China Region data needs. Video montages waxed lyrical about the size of NEXT’s backbones, bandwidth-on-demand, amazing 24/7 customer support, raised floors, temperature control and automatic server maintenance and traffic monitoring services. The terminal went on about how ninety percent of the Hang Seng New China 100 used NEXT to serve all their data center needs. Logos of said companies linked to more cyberspace marketing hype from said customers were displayed ready to be clicked by the potential customer. Caldwell had seen enough. It was all one big smokescreen. He had remotely broken into enough data centers to know.

Caldwell walked up to the security guard who was chewing on some kind of green vegetable. Half of it, the leafy bit, was hanging on the outside of his mouth because the other half on the inside was refusing to be chewed. Swallowing was not on the cards for this guy as he seemed to have managed to get a huge stalk of some veggie lodged halfway down his throat. Caldwell made his move.

“Chung King Real Estate technician,” he said in Cantonese. “Was here earlier, I just went out to grab some lunch. See you are still enjoying yours. Where did you buy that? It looks really good.”

All the security guard could do was motion with his head in the direction of the lifts. His expression said: “Don’t bother me while I am eating, gweilo half-breed.” Caldwell winked at him and entered an empty elevator. He pressed the button for the twenty-eighth floor. The lifts in Hong Kong were way too fast. It took all of eight seconds for the bell to sound and the computerized voice to say “Twenty-eighth floor”.

Caldwell walked out into a huge hall lit with purple halogen like a nightclub. There was a metallic designer reception desk to one side at which a mosquito-thin Chinese girl with a cute face was also enjoying the contents of a Styrofoam rice box. She didn’t pay him the least bit of attention, focusing all her energies on lunch.

There was a sunken area in the middle of the hall with a glass floor. Expensive-looking black and gold goldfish swam lazily in a lit pool below the glass. Just beyond the underground aquarium was a reinforced steel door and a large window showing essentially the same view as the monitor downstairs in the lobby. This was the control room. The cameras must have been inside the control room because Caldwell could only spot one camera outside in the hall and it was pointing at the reception desk, making sure the skinny receptionist didn’t fall asleep on the job. Caldwell spotted a lit Gents and Ladies sign and walked casually towards the washrooms. The lack of security was frightening. In the hacking age, electronic security was deemed orders of magnitude more important. Criminals the world over had realized that valuable data was locked up inside computers and networks not in the physical premises.

Caldwell entered the men’s toilet. It was empty except for a solitary closed cubicle. The occupant was making enough noise, from both ends, to suggest that he had made the wrong choice for lunch. Caldwell entered the next cubicle along and waited. He still had not heard from Mei Lin. The AR Unit was now telling him that NEXT Tower was built just two years ago and was another magnificent contribution by the powerful Lee family to Hong Kong’s vibrant world-class economy. It was even going into how many tons of concrete, steel and glass were used and how many construction workers had worked on the site. “Talk about useless information,” Caldwell muttered quietly to himself. The entire building was pre-wired for cyberspace. The AR went on to explain that it was in fact a node in cyberspace. The last piece of information grabbed Caldwell’s attention. If NEXT Tower was a node on cyberspace, then the entire building could be hacked but only if he could gain high-level access into the network that managed it. As it happened, that was exactly what Caldwell was trying to do.

The toilet next door flushed and Caldwell heard the cubicle door open. He walked out of his cubicle. A balding middle-aged Chinese man wearing the shiny purple and silver NEXT windbreaker was washing his hands at the sink. The man needed the windbreaker because the temperature on the twenty-eighth floor of NEXT Tower was close to freezing. This was to prevent the computing equipment from overheating. A thousand computers can generate a lot of heat. NEXT Tower had to have ten times more than that judging from the rows and rows of server consoles visible behind the control room and there were several more floors full of servers according to the marketing blurb downstairs.

“Dodgy lunch, eh? Can’t be too careful,” Caldwell said in what he figured was Mandarin as he stood at the sink next to the NEXT employee. The balding man turned round slowly.

“Who the fuck ...”

Caldwell didn’t give the man time to finish. The back of his right arm, the muscled bit just above elbow, made contact with the bridge of the technician’s nose. The man’s head snapped back and he slumped to the floor. Caldwell allowed his breathing to slow. He was nervous but the adrenalin was pumping.

“You’re not having a good day are you,” Caldwell said as he dragged the technician into the same cubicle he had been using earlier. The cubicle smelled of something rotten. Caldwell stripped him of his fancy windbreaker and put it on. Underneath the windbreaker, the NEXT technician was wearing a black t-shirt with f.c.u.k. printed on it in white. Caldwell locked the door from the inside and started climbing over the partition. There was a sound of somebody entering the toilets. He slid back down and crouched on the toilet bowl. The comatose technician was mumbling something unintelligible. He was still out in mumbo jumbo land.

“Ah Wah, you have a phone call. What the hell are you doing in there? Having a baby?” a deep baritone voice inquired in guttural Cantonese. The door closed shut. Caldwell figured whoever owned the voice had gone. He climbed over the partition into the adjoining cubicle.

The only way he was going to gain access to the system was to take a gamble. Caldwell was betting that if he walked up behind one of the technicians in the windbreakers just as they were going through the door into the control room, they would let him in without another thought. They would be so caught up in their post-lunch schedule that they wouldn’t even bother to compute whether he was one of them. And he was wearing the AR glasses. The visual cue of the comatose technician’s windbreaker would be enough.

Caldwell stood in the corridor leading to the washroom hoping that the technician called Ah Wah would not suddenly become reacquainted with his surroundings. The elevators chimed and a couple of similarly-dressed technicians strolled across the hall chattering about something unintelligible. He waited until they reached the sunken aquarium then made a beeline for them. The technician in front was having the palm of his hand scanned and laughing at something the other technician had said. He then peered into an iris scanner. Caldwell could see the beam from the scanner making passes over his left eye. He was so close to the other technician that he could smell his hair gel.

Then the worst thing that could happen did.

“Ah Fai, you have a package,” the skinny receptionist shouted across the hall. Her voice was so shrill that both technicians turn round in surprise. So did Caldwell behind them, who also whipped round to look in the direction of the receptionist and avoid his face being scrutinized by the two technicians. The girl was too far away to notice that he was not one of them. He could feel the two technicians looking at the receptionist past the back of his head. Caldwell hoped he could pass for an oriental for the brief few seconds that they were looking at him. Many Hong Kong youngsters dyed their hair brown or blonde as part of the prevailing fashionable. Caldwell was more worried that the headphone plugged in his ear and the AR glasses wouldn’t give him away.

Ah Fai slid past Caldwell without even a sideways glance and headed towards the reception desk. The other technician keyed in his code. The massive door slid open and he entered. The door closed shut. Caldwell was inside the control room. He was relieved to notice that coming out of the room was much easier than coming in. You just pushed a button in a square recess beside the door. The technician walked to his terminal without paying him any attention. The AR display shuddered and an image appeared superimposed over the view of the control room. Mei Lin had hit pay dirt. It was a stack of blueprints for NEXT Tower stacked one on top of another. The readout said there were fifty-six in total. How the hell was he going to find the right one?