The Cardinal Bird (1 of Cardinal Series)

Chapter 27

A/N: Almost halfway through posting this story with 63 chapters total.  If you want to receive notifications about sneak peeks or insights into the story, make sure to follow!  

"She's in," Karl said, excitement suffusing his voice.

The traffic grid had a lot of different parts to it, but the street names were hard to access and even read. I had to zoom in really far to make the text legible. The interface was slow and choppy. It didn't seem very practical. There wasn't any sort of analog or search function to be able to pinpoint a specific location either. Though, if I thought about it, the antiquated features went along with the outdated security features that had originally made me think it was easy to break into the system...and it was pretty easy, once we hid the garishly obvious Superman suit the powerhouse computer was wearing.

Karl and Marc were still leaning close on either side of me.

"What? How?" Corey asked. "Turn left ahead."

"Masked our ether code," I said.

I tried to find where we were from glancing at the GPS between Corey's screen and comparing it to the traffic grid in front of me. It was archaic and not very effective. If I had more time, I could create a code to superimpose our location on top of the grid, but I didn't have that.

Corey turned to me. "Did you use the TOR net to bounce the signal and mask our host's computer? I would hate for the person to be targeted because they were unlucky enough for us to use their code."

"Of course," I said, struggling to find our location on the map in front of me. We were moving too fast for me to get a good read by glancing between the two maps. Google Maps was my best friend whereas reading maps was not my forte. "Force of habit. It's routine and just common courtesy."

Corey gave me a look that was hard to decipher--maybe impressed?  Proud? "Not as common as you'd think."

Marc leaned in close, stretching an arm over my shoulder to point out a spot on the grid. "We're here," he said, his eyes going back and forth between Corey's and my screens once more before giving a confident nod.

Karl let go of Raven's seat to lean closer as well. He pointed to one of the intersections slightly ahead of where Marc pointed out our location. "Does that show the traffic lights?"

I looked at it. It was the intersection we were about to turn through. There was a couple of different icons listed. "Only one way to find out."

Clicking on one of the icons pulled up more of the metadata to give me a detailed list of information. I went down to the section for the traffic light. At a quick glance, it had files of service and maintenance work listed along with dates, times, and employee numbers of the people that last worked on the light. I quickly scrolled past that along with the information about the manufacturer.

Nothing.

I backed out of that and tried a different icon. It pulled up something that was much more useful to us. It looked like what was real-time status of the traffic lights for the intersection along with timers that were counting down seconds.

"That's what we need, Sang. Keep that open and watch it." Karl turned back up front. "Brandon, Raven. Let us know what the light is when we go through."

"No problem," Raven said as he leaned forward.

"Hey guys?" Nathan's voice filtered through the van's speakers, startling me. "I think we've got company. Two black SUVs, coming in hot. North's trying to lose them, but they're persistent. That and traffic's starting to pick up. We must be coming close to morning rush hour here."

"Tell North to just keep them behind him for now," Karl said. "We're working on something that might help."

"Brace yourselves," Brandon said, right before the world tilted.

I kept my eyes on the screen in front of me, not even bothering to brace because Marc and Karl had both reached out a hand each to help keep me in place. In theory, the light we were turning through was green and would remain that way for another seven seconds. The crossway traffic lights were red right now with green right-turn arrows.

"Light is green," Raven said from up front as we were still turning.

"Are there green arrows on the lights we just turned through?"

"Yes."

I jumped into action now that we had our bearings. I opened up a command box and started trying to decipher how the programming worked. If I figured that out, I should, theoretically, be able to control when the lights changed. "Corey, let me know when we need to turn. I'm going to try to hack into the programming to see if I can find any holes."

"Okay, we're not turning for another three blocks," he said before he turned to my screen. "The way's clear. How can I help?"

My eyes were flying across the screen, already having opened the program up. The coding was complex, but there was a sort of pattern to it. If I used it, I should be able to exploit it. "We're looking for a backdoor," I said.

"There!" Corey said excitedly, pointing at the screen. "Can we just change the programming there to mask our presence?" He sat back. "No, but then, how do we allow us control."

I looked at the bit of programming he had been talking about while he turned back and helped to direct Brandon through the next couple of turns. He was right. We could use that bit of programming to help hide ourselves, but the part of the coding that controlled the timers was in a different section. Either way. It would get us incognito.

I pulled up the box and started typing:

EXPORT_SYMBOL (groups_alloc);

Void groups_ether(struct comp_info *ether_info)

{

If (group_info>blocks[0] != group_info->small_block) {

int i:

for (i = 0; i < group_info->nblocks; i++)

Ether_acct((unsigned unkn) group_info->blocks[i]);

}

Kblock (group_info);

}

"How are you doing that?" Marc said, but he didn't really seem shocked. I'm guessing he had seen Corey type similar things before without using any sort of reference.

"Practice," I said, finishing the coding and praying it took. "You remember certain things after a while. It's a language that I was learning at an early age. My dad bought me my first programming book when I was 11." Right before I was kidnapped.

I typed a code to check the status.

Return 0;

 Nothing happened for a moment, but then the programming confirmed that we were in.

"Static void groups_sort(struct group_info *group_info void ether//)," popped up on the screen.

"Okay, we're incognito," I informed Corey when he could turn back to my monitor. I started scrolling through the remaining programming.

"You could separate the commands out?" Corey asked, leaning close once more, eyes scanning over the coding.

"Uh huh," I said. My eyes lighted on the section that we needed. It took my breath away. With this coding, if we could hack it, we would be able to control the traffic signals. It was a godsend because we were barreling hot through another intersection. By the increased amount of honking, I could tell that the streets were becoming more and more busy. "Here's the bit we need."

Corey leaned closer to check it over, but then all of the monitors started going off in a repetitive alarm.