The Shadow File (An Alex Vane Media Thriller, Book 4)

by A. C. Fuller

  When I told her the last part, she nearly dropped her straws, and I could tell she was about to launch into an epic rant about how there was no way I was going to help him. Before she could, I said, "I told him no, of course. No way."

  She leaned away a little, still looking concerned. "That's a relief. You know how I—"

  "I know," I said. "And even if I hadn't promised to avoid stuff like this, I wouldn't help him."

  I sipped my coffee and locked eyes with Greta, who seemed to be studying me as only she can. She often knows me better than I know myself or, more accurately, knows things about me before I know them. And she's usually not shy about telling me.

  "Why do you have that look?" she asked.

  "What look?"

  "Like a little boy who wants to know how a computer works so he takes it apart to see the inside."

  I tried to clear any looks off my face. "I don't look like that."

  She just stared at me, and I knew she was right. "I'm curious, okay. The whole thing has me curious is all. There is no way in hell I would help Amand. Even though I don't agree with what Innerva is doing—and to be honest I'm a bit freaked out about it—I wouldn't get on a plane to Dubai for all the money in the world."

  "We have plenty of money, Alex."

  "I know, that's…that's not the point. The point is I said no."

  She smiled slightly. "Then why do you have that look?"

  "I have questions. That's what I do. I'm not going to try to answer them by flying off to Dubai, but I do have questions. Is Innerva actually behind the hack? Is she really trying to destroy the entire private security apparatus of the United States? If so, what does that even mean? I'm not a security expert, but Amand seemed rattled, and I don't think he rattles easily. Maybe it was an act, but if so it was a good one. Finally, I want to know why a piece of hack leaked to Tech Triune, and not the full story?"

  "That last part you might be able to find out. You do own the Tech Triune."

  "I do, but...three rules of journalism: always carry a notebook, never give up a source, and if your mother says she loves you, check it out. I gave up on the first and the last years ago, but the second rule doesn't stop applying because, technically, someone owns your site."

  Greta said nothing.

  "I guess it wouldn't hurt to call them," I admitted.

  Finally finished with her foam-eating routine, Greta sipped her drink, then slid the mug around in a small circle on the table. "Why are we here? I mean, why not meet at the apartment?"

  "I was being paranoid. I'd left Amand five minutes before and thought…I don't know what I thought. Maybe he had people at our place. I don't know." I sighed. "Let's go home."

  "Have you checked your app thingy? The one Innerva left you with?"

  "Not for a while."

  "You have that laptop at home now, right?"

  "Right, that's why I want to go home. If Amand is telling the truth that they lost track of her, she might have messaged me. I doubt it, but I won't be at ease until I check."

  "I wouldn't be so sure she didn't contact you," Greta said, standing. "You may be the only person left who she can trust."

  6

  As soon as I put the key in the lock, Smedley ran to the door and followed his usual routine: two or three seconds of pawing at the door, followed by a slow backing away to give me room to open the door and walk in. I grabbed my laptop from the bedroom while he danced around the room, waiting for me to sit down on the couch so he could rest his front paws on my knees.

  As I sat, he leapt at me like he hadn't seen me in months, and I had to stow my laptop under a couch cushion to keep it safe from his slobbering love.

  He licked my face and I rubbed his brown fur affectionately, adjusting my position to make room for his muscular body.

  I hadn't planned to get a dog, but circumstance and a half-insane hardware hacker named Quinn Rivers had dropped Smedley in my lap. Greta and I had both fallen in love with him over the last months.

  Our only child had been stillborn years ago, and my pain over the loss was one of the things that caused me to isolate myself and focus on my work. Talking through that pain had been one of the things that brought Greta and me back together. Smedley had been another, and it now looked like Smedley was the closest we would come to having a child.

  "Promise me you're not going to obsess about this, Alex," Greta said from the kitchen.

  "Just gonna see if Innerva wrote to me. I'm sure she didn't."

  "And if she didn't?"

  "I'll drop it."

  Our place was a two-bedroom on the eleventh floor of a newish building with a view of Lake Union. A low, L-shaped couch filled the living room, which opened into a modern kitchen, where Greta was pouring hot water into two cups.

  As Smedley lost interest in me and ran into the kitchen to rub against Greta's legs, I booted up my computer, taking in the smell of the apartment. One of the things I missed during our months of separation was Greta's smell. Not that my apartment smelled bad or anything, but it didn't smell like Greta, a mix of jasmine and something earthy, like organic produce and coffee grounds. Since coming home, I couldn't breathe it in deeply enough.

  When my screen lit up, I opened the Collude app, a simple text box bordered in orange. According to Innerva's first and only message to me, messages were protected by military-grade encryption and were as secure as messages could get.

  Like every other day since that first message, though, there was nothing from Innerva.

  I was tempted to do another round of searches, but I could feel Greta watching me so I closed the laptop. "Nothing," I said.

  She sat next to me on the couch and handed me one of the cups. The tea gave off an odd smell, like fancy garbage, and she saw the look on my face. "It's yerba mate."

  "Thanks," I managed, taking a tentative sip and smiling weakly at Greta. "Not as bad as I thought. But it could use some honey or something."

  "You'll get used to it," Greta said, adjusting her legs so she was sitting cross-legged on the couch. Smedley got onto the couch and wedged himself between us.

  "You know when I read that look on your face in the coffee shop?" Greta asked.

  "Yeah, you had me pegged, as usual."

  "Actually, I didn't."

  "What do you mean?"

  "You said you were curious about the story, about the facts. I thought you were worried about Innerva."

  I considered that for a moment, but I had to admit that it wasn't high on my list. "In my experience, Innerva can take care of herself."

  "James couldn't."

  "James was…James. Innerva is different. She was a black hat hacker long before she got into the leaking and hacking and journalism game. No one is untraceable, but she's pretty close."

  "But it could have easily been Innerva at The Las Vegas Gazette that day."

  "But it wasn't."

  "No, it wasn't. It had me thinking, though, sometimes you go into 'saving mode.' You see a problem and you want to fix it, even if it's not your problem."

  "I'm telling you, Innerva doesn't need saving."

  "Even from Amand?" I went quiet and Greta glanced down at the teacup in my hand. "You want me to add some lemon?"

  "Yeah, I mean, I can do it," I said, but she was already taking my cup.

  "I know how you can get," she called from the kitchen. "I know that—"

  But I'd stopped listening. My face was in my laptop.

  First I checked the Collude app again. Nothing.

  Next I opened a browser and re-created the searches I'd run before, this time on sites ending in .ae, the Internet in the Arab Emirates, including Dubai, where Amand had said Innerva was.

  My hope was that, if Innerva had been hiding out there for the last few months, she'd left some trace of herself, or maybe teamed up with someone who had mentioned her name or one of her hacker names on a message board. It was a long shot, but worth a try.

  Before I could get far, Greta was back. She held the tea in
my face, blocking the screen.

  "I'm sorry," I said. "I had one last idea about how to search for her."

  "Drink your tea," she said. "I've gotta make a quick call to reschedule the clients I canceled today. I'll give you twenty minutes, then we drop the thing, okay?"

  "Deal," I said, sipping the tea and pretending to like it, then turning my attention to my laptop as Greta went into the bedroom.

  Searching sites in the United Arab Emirates wasn't as easy as I'd hoped. First I had to translate all my key phrases into Arabic. Next, I ran searches for them on Google.ae, but, of course, the results were also in Arabic, so I had to run them through Google translate and hope for a decent translation.

  After about five minutes, I hit on something promising. A search for "Next Underground Media" with date parameters over the last three months brought up a few results from a public message board in Dubai.

  It took a lot of cutting and pasting into Google translate, but, within a few minutes, I had a rough idea of what I was looking at.

  The site showed the following Arabic phrase:

  وسائل الإعلام تحت الأرض القادمة ... أتلانتس الرؤيا

  Translated into English lettering, it was:

  wasayil al'iielam taht al'ard alqadima ... 'atlanats alruwya

  Then, translated into English, it was:

  The Underground Media Coming…The Atlantis Vision

  I figured that, in the translation, "Next" had been turned into "Coming." A word being swapped out for another similar word, as often happens when there isn't a literal translation between languages. If I was right, and I switched the order of the words around, it read:

  The Next Underground Media...The Atlantis Vision.

  I clicked through to the full link, which turned out to be a comment on a movie torrent website, one of the ones where people upload pirated copies of films and allow people to download them. The full comment read:

  الكلمة هي أنه لم يتم تسريبه. شخص أمسك هذا الحق قبالة الكمبيوتر الرئيس التنفيذي ل. انها تماما بعض وسائل الإعلام تحت الأرض نوع من الاشياء.

  In the English alphabet, it read:

  alkalimat hi 'anah lm yatima tasribuh. shakhs 'amsik hdha alhaqu qubalat alkambiutir alrayiys altanfidhia la. 'anaha tamamaan bed wasayil al'iielam taht al'ard nawe min alashya'.

  And when translated into English:

  The word is that it has not been leaked. Someone grabbed this right off the computer's CEO. It's quite some coming underground media kind of stuff. The Atlantis Vision is biggest film yet hacked.

  The comment was one of hundreds on a page that allowed users to download a film called The Atlantis Vision, the sequel to the blockbuster film from two years ago, The Atlantis Revelation.

  When I switched the words "computer's" and CEO, the second sentence read as, "Someone grabbed this right off the CEO's computer." This made sense, given that movie studios are notorious for guarding copies of unreleased films like pots of gold. My guess was that the commenter was saying that the version of the film available on the site had been stolen directly from the CEO's computer. And if "coming underground media" was a poor translation of "Next Underground Media," I figured that the commenter was comparing the hack to something NUM would have done, rather than saying that it was something they did do.

  When James and Innerva were at their peak running NUM, they hacked all sorts of CEOs, politicians and athletes. Usually, it was to expose corruption and hypocrisy, but even they weren't immune to having a little fun. From time to time they'd steal something just to prove that they could.

  For example, before everyone was streaming video on Netflix and Hulu and HBO Go, James and Innerva stole the entire digital library of the children's shows owned by Family Media Holdings and put them up online, figuring that parents deserved a break from overpriced DVDs. Their site got shut down a week later, but not before a hundred thousand tech-savvy viewers had downloaded the films to their computers.

  So, even though the leak of The Atlantis Vision was something Innerva could have done, it didn't seem likely. I wasn't certain, and there was no way I could be without a real translator, so I decided to drop it.

  There was a knock at the door. I glanced over, but I didn't make a move to answer it right away. My heightened sense of paranoia had me repeating a phrase over and over in my head. It always starts with a knock at the door.

  It was something Quinn said to me once. Quinn was the computer hardware expert who got wrapped up in the mass shooting with me early last summer. In fact, she was the one who killed James's killers, and my torturers. After an insane car chase that she broadcast on Facebook Live, Quinn was arrested, and my lawyer was still working to defend her against a whole heap of charges, the worst of which was murder.

  In addition to being brilliant—and one of the strangest people I've ever met—Quinn was dangerously paranoid, and every knock at the door meant that "the Man" had finally come to take her away.

  I saw Greta's slim figure gliding across the room and watched as she opened the door.

  7

  "It's a courier," she said, signing for a large envelope. "Didn't you hear like two minutes ago when the front desk guy called?"

  I gave her my best are-you-serious? look. There was no way the phone had rung without me noticing.

  Greta shut the door and walked over to the couch. "It rang and I told him to send him up. You're starting to scare me, Alex."

  In the past, I'd occasionally fallen so far into my computer research that I'd lost touch with the world around me. I thought I'd gotten over that. "Who's it from?" I asked.

  "Doesn't say."

  The envelope was large, the kind you can fill with a half-ream of office paper. Greta opened it carefully, then tipped it upside down so the contents fell onto her lap. "What the hell?"

  "What?" I asked, grabbing the small stack of papers off her lap. The first two were plane tickets, one in my name and one in Greta's name.

  Destination: Cuba, via New York City.

  Departure: the next morning.

  I tore open a plain white envelope, which contained a single piece of paper. "Holy hell. It's from Innerva."

  "What's going on, Alex?" Greta put her hand on my leg, but I didn't look over.

  Instead, I read the note aloud.

  Alex,

  I have reason to believe that the Collude app I installed on your computer may no longer be secure, which is why I'll no longer communicate with you electronically.

  For the last months, I've been in Cuba, planning my retaliation against the people who killed James. You have heard a small piece of it in the news.

  I've got something much larger planned.

  But now I'm in trouble. My networks here have been disrupted, and I may be in serious physical danger. I have no way to get out of the country.

  Please, come help me.

  I've enclosed two tickets to Cuba, one for you and one for Greta. Since travel to Cuba is restricted, you will be traveling under an exemption allowing for personal travel for religious reasons, which I "arranged" through the U.S. Treasury Office of Foreign Asset Control.

  Technically, you are traveling to Cuba to visit a cathedral: La Virgen María de la Concepción Inmaculada.

  Of course, I know Greta may not want to come, and you can destroy her ticket and travel alone if you prefer, but the trip will seem more believable if she accompanies you.

  Don't stay at any of the hotels. Instead, find a casa particular, a small boarding house that you can rent by the night for cash.

  Another thing you should know: You can't use American credit cards in Cuba, and ATMs won't work for American banks. Bring a lot of cash. Dollars are okay, but they will charge you a 10% fee on those. British pounds or Canadian dollars are best.

  -I.S.

  P.S.: I've had your name removed from the No Fly List.

  When I'd finished reading the letter, I ha
nded it to Greta, who reread it under her breath.

  "I…I don't know what to say," she said, handing the letter back to me. "Do you think it's really her?"

  I'd been thinking about that while she read. "I do. It sounds like her, and I know that Cuba is one of the places she and James talked about ending up. After he died…I don't know, it kinda makes sense that she'd go there."

  "Do they even have Internet there, though?"

  "Heavily-censored Internet, available only to a fraction of the people. But Innerva would know how to get around all of that."

  Greta stood and walked a small circle around the couch, as I had earlier in the day with Amand. She and I are opposites in most ways, but we have a few mannerisms in common. Sitting down, she read the letter again, then asked, "You really think she could hack the No Fly List?"

  "I do."

  "I thought you were already off that."

  "Not quite."

  "Have I told you lately how sorry I am about that?"

  My lawyer had been working on getting my name removed ever since I was put on the list last summer. Greta, in her bitterest moment of our separation, had called the Department of Homeland Security and told them I was a potential terrorist. It was one of the few times she'd acted out her anger, and it was one we laughed about from time to time.

  "Not lately," I said, "but there's no need. I know it was the red zinfandel that made that call."

  Greta did another lap around the couch. "What kind of trouble could she be in?"

  "That's what I was wondering. Amand seems to think she's in Dubai, or at least that she was in Dubai. If she's in Cuba and he doesn't know it, then she's in a different kind of trouble than I thought she was when I thought that only Amand was after her." I thought for a moment. "I guess it makes sense. If Amand is in Seattle, talking to me, there have to be a dozen other Amands out there, turning over every stone, pressing every source, to find Innerva. There could be any number of people after her."