Reflexive Fire - 01 by Jack Murphy Page A

way to the top, he stepped out into the capstone level of the pyramid.  The center of the room was left open with a circular table constructed around an oculus.  The walls that reached up to form the point of the pyramid were all glass, now allowing him to see Astana lit up in the darkness.  The city glowed, golden in the night. 
       Looking up he could see that the panels of glass at the very tip of the pyramid had been stained yellow and streaked downwards as rays of light.
       It hit him like a sucker punch.
       That was what the pyramid and really the capital itself was built to honor.
       Not the peace and reconciliation of the world's religions but worship of its single oldest religion.
       Sun worship.
     
     

     
     
       It was a good thing he had brought his bag of tricks with him because it took the better part of twenty minutes to pick the door lock and then the dead bolt, and then another ten minutes for him to find the switch contact on the magnetic alarm and bridge them at the splice point.  Finished, Deckard eased open the door, hoping that there wasn't a tertiary system like motion detectors in place.
       Seeing no sign of motion sensors or pressure plates under the area rug in the room, he stepped inside the lobby and closed the door.  Behind the secretary's desk in large raised letters was the company name, Samruk International along with its logo, the bird of Kazakh mythology.
       Getting into the offices required a numerical code for the keypad at the door.  Blowing a small portion of talcum powder on the keypad, the former soldier could see which buttons had fingerprints on them.  Four digits, three, seven, six, and nine.  With the design of this particular keypad lock it actually didn't matter which order the user entered the digits in.  Pressing each of the digits with fingerprints on them Deckard twisted the knob and opened the door.
       Making sure to wipe the talcum powder off the keypad with his sleeve, he closed the door and proceeded into the offices.  While the three old men at the Grove had placed Deckard in charge of Samruk's private army, he was not made privy to what was going on at the corporate level.  That was going to change tonight.
       Samruk had been established not long after Kazakhstan declared independence and although it was a private enterprise on paper, it was well known that Samruk was owned by powerful men in Kazakhstan's government, not to mention some of its larger financial institutions.  Past dealings had been legit for the most part, mostly executive protection work for the politicians and bankers who had started the company.
       This recent rapid expansion into a full-blown private military company at the behest of the old men back in the US showed who the real puppet masters in Astana were.  The remaining question was, to what end?
       A row of file cabinets lined one wall, packed full of corporate documents.  Sticking a switchblade above one drawer, he unlatched the gang lock easily enough.  Turning on a red LED flashlight, Deckard browsed through the documents.  Although they were mostly in Cyrillic, he was able to tell from the numbers involved and what English nomenclature there was that he was looking at tracking forms for the equipment he had been ordering over the last few weeks.
       Putting the files back in their correct place, he sat down behind one of the computer terminals.  Moving the mouse, he watched the screen light up, taking him directly to the corporate website's log in screen.  Deckard noted that since they were using the web rather than a local area network that meant that their data was being stored off-site.
       A SQL injection attack was enough to get him into the system, but now he had to queue up individual files, one command at a time.  Reaching into the backpack he brought along, Deckard pulled out a USB drive and stuck it into the computer.  After a few hiccups he got the keylogger installed on