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    The Midnight Watch: A Sigma Force Short Story
    The Midnight Watch: A Sigma Force Short Story
    The Midnight Watch: A Sigma Force Short Story
    Ebook71 pages1 hour

    The Midnight Watch: A Sigma Force Short Story

    By James Rollins

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    About this ebook

    From New York Times bestselling author James Rollins comes a lightning-paced short story, in which a major attack on U.S. soil can only be stopped by…The Midnight Watch

    In the dead of night, a faceless enemy hacks into the Smithsonian Institution’s network of servers, but it is only the first strike masking a larger attack. To rescue a biologist trapped in the National Museum of Natural History and to discover the true intent behind an assault that grows bolder and bloodier by the minute, Sigma Force must unleash its most headstrong operative—Joe Kowalski—to do what he does best: lay waste to anything between him and his goal. From a daring rescue to a cross-city chase like no other, Kowalski will discover the shocking truth hidden in the most unexpected of places: the heart of the National Zoo.

    Included with this short story is a sneak peek at The Bone Labyrinth, where events that unfold here explode into one of Sigma Force’s greatest adventures of all time.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins
    Release dateNov 3, 2015
    ISBN9780062464286
    Author

    James Rollins

    James Rollins is the author of international thrillers that have been translated into more than forty languages. His Sigma series has been lauded as one of the “top crowd pleasers” (New York Times) and one of the “hottest summer reads” (People magazine). In each novel, acclaimed for its originality, Rollins unveils unseen worlds, scientific breakthroughs, and historical secrets—and he does it all at breakneck speed and with stunning insight. He lives in the Sierra Nevada.

    Read more from James Rollins

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    Reviews for The Midnight Watch

    4/5

    47 ratings3 reviews

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    • 5/5
      Really enjoyed this short story. Nicely paced and plotted for a short story.
    • 5/5
      An awesome adventure to whet the appetite for the main course on December 25th: Bone Labyrinth!
    • 3/5
      This one's a short story that's 99% action of various degrees of silliness and perhaps 1% plot advancement in terms of the SIGMA series as a whole. It's a quick read, but there's nothing here that's compelling enough to make it required reading for anyone other than the complete-ists out there like myself. My main takeaway was that SIGMA's resident computer expert really needs to make locking down a computer a weeeeeeee bit more of a priority than he did in this one. On multiple occasions.

    Book preview

    The Midnight Watch - James Rollins

    cover.jpgTitle-Page

    Contents

    The Midnight Watch

    What’s True, What’s Not

    An Excerpt from The Bone Labyrinth

    Epigraphs

    Prologue

    Chapter 1

    About the Author

    By James Rollins

    Copyright

    About the Publisher

    The Midnight Watch

    April 25, 12:21 A.M. EDT

    Washington, D.C.

    WE’RE UNDER ATTACK.

    Jacketless, with his sleeves rolled to his elbows, Painter Crowe paced the length of the communication nest at the heart of Sigma Force’s central command. Data streamed across the monitors that covered the curved walls as a single warrior waged a battle against a faceless enemy.

    Jason Carter sat at a station, typing with one hand, clutching a Starbucks cup in the other, while studying the screen before him. It looks like they built their own back door into the Smithsonian Institution’s network using a high-­level system administrator access. At this point, they literally have the keys to the kingdom.

    "But who are they?" Painter stopped to stare over Jason’s shoulder. The twenty-­three-­year old was Sigma’s chief intelligence analyst. He had been recruited by Painter after getting kicked out of the navy for hacking into Defense Department servers with nothing more than a BlackBerry and a jury-­rigged iPad.

    Could be the Russians, the North Koreans, but I’d place money on the Chinese. This has their fingerprints all over it. A few months back, they hacked into the Office of Personnel Management, stealing information on millions of federal employees. They used a similar back door, giving them administrator privileges to the OPM servers.

    Painter nodded. He knew the Chinese government employed an army of hackers, numbering over a hundred thousand, dedicated solely to breaking into U.S. computers. Rumor had it that they had successfully hacked into every major American corporation over the past several years, absconding with blueprints to nuclear plants, appropriating technology from steel factories, even cracking into Lockheed Martin’s servers to copy the top-­secret schematics for the U.S. military’s F-­35 fighter jet. If there was any doubt about the latter, one only had to view the Chineses’ new FC-­31. It was almost an exact copy of the American jet.

    If it is Chinese, what are they after? Painter asked. Why hack into the Smithsonian servers?

    Jason shrugged his shoulders. Either data theft or sabotage. That’s the end goal of most hacks. But from the code, it looks like they’re just blindly grabbing files. I’m not seeing any attempt to install malware into the systems.

    So data theft, Painter said. Can you stop them?

    In the reflection of a neighboring dark monitor, Painter caught the young man’s crooked grin. Did that a full minute ago, Jason said, and slammed the door behind them as I kicked them out. They won’t be coming in that way again. I’m now attempting to identify which files were taken from which servers.

    Painter glanced to the clock.

    00:22

    The attack had started exactly at midnight, most likely timed to strike when the hack was less liable to be detected. Still, twenty-­two minutes was twenty-­two minutes too long for an enemy to have unfettered access to the Smithsonian servers. The Institution was home to nine different research centers, encompassing a multitude of programs that spanned the globe.

    Still, they were lucky. The only reason this attack had been caught so promptly was that Sigma Force’s servers were linked to the Smithsonian’s systems—­though Sigma’s operations were heavily guarded behind multiple firewalls to keep their presence hidden. Painter imagined those towering digital walls. It was a fitting metaphor. Sigma’s central command had been covertly established beneath the Smithsonian Castle. He glanced up, picturing the turrets and towers of red sandstone above his head, a true Norman castle perched at the edge of the National Mall.

    A fortress that someone had attempted to breach.

    Or at least that was Painter’s greatest fear: The Smithsonian servers were not the primary target of this attack but, instead, the hackers were sniffing at the walls of Sigma’s own digital fortress. Sigma was a covert wing of DARPA, the Defense Department’s research-­and-­development division. The unit recruited former Special Forces soldiers and retrained them in various scientific disciplines to act as field agents for DARPA. It was one of the reasons the Castle had been chosen for Sigma’s central command. It was ideally situated within the heart of the political landscape, while allowing Sigma and its operatives to have easy access to the Smithsonian’s resources and global reach.

    If Sigma was ever compromised, its agents

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