“Michael!” Morgen shouted loudly as soon as he realized the Commander was in the room. “Come join us.”
Michael crossed the den, noting as he passed the slight ozone smell and a chill in the air. The latter was explained when he noticed the plastic piping connecting the air-circulation vents with two massive air conditioning units set up in front of Charles’s bookshelves, now covered in white sheets to protect them. Instead of cooling the laptops and, yes, the server towers he now saw had been tucked under the tables, they’d decided to try and freeze the room.
“Where did you get this drive?” Morgen asked, gesturing at the central section of Charles’s setup, where Michael saw that the hard drive Rodriguez had given him was hooked up with some large cables.
“I can’t say,” the werewolf replied gruffly, a little intimidated by the sheer mass of computing power—machine and otherwise—in the room. “But it looks interesting.”
“We broke intar the first layer of encryption six hours ago,” Charles said softly—for him. The room rumbled with his voice, and Michael blinked at the incongruity of the perfectly pronounced technical term in the midst of the thick brogue.
“What did we find?” the Commander demanded, then paused as he fully translated Charles’s statement. “First layer?”
“Whoever encrypted this thing was good,” Morgen explained grimly as he walked over to a human-sized keyboard and mouse by Charles’s setup. He brought up something on the screen, a single icon, and then double-clicked it.
Michael examined the resulting screen for a moment and shrugged. “Looks like Outlook to me,” he confessed. He couldn’t tell any difference between this and any other email program.
“That’s what was under the first encryption layer,” his hacker replied. “An email program and an archive of about nine years of emails. The major keywords showing up were references to the Catholic Church, a mother, a sister and a brother. Looked like a senior Catholic official’s personal email.”
Michael nodded slowly, unwilling to say more. He wasn’t sure how much his people would be able to guess about the source of the disk from analyzing it, but he’d promised Rodriguez not to reveal it himself.
“The first encryption was very high-grade commercial software with some customization,” Dilsner continued. “However, it was one most of us here”—he gestured at the small crowd of cryptographers still working away as the techno-Mage explained things to the boss—“had broken for practice. So, it only took us sixteen-odd hours to break once we’d pulled all this together.”
“But all you found was his personal email?” Michael asked, disappointed.
“That’s what ’tis supposed tae look like we found,” Charles replied softly.
“The emails were from Prelate Ambrose,” Morgen said quietly. “Which I’m sure you knew,” he added before continuing. “In a casual look-up of the name, we found out three very interesting facts.
“One, Prelate Ambrose has no sister—never has. Two”—the Mage counted off the points on his fingers—“his mother has been dead for six years. Lastly, his brother’s name is never mentioned in these emails. In fact, no one is mentioned by name.”
“As soon a’ we took tae looking, we find doubled-up messages,” Charles continued for Morgen. “’Twere all a lie, a fake.”
“So we looked at the ‘email archive,’” Morgen finished. “The entire damned thing is a carefully generated cover for the encrypted data. What’s underneath is an encryption we’ve never seen. However,” he continued, raising a finger, “the email program has done us one bit of good—it is the decryption software. Once we find the key, we’ll have the whole kit and caboodle.”
“How long will that take?” Michael asked.
The hacker shrugged and gestured at the laptops and towers set up in the room. “We have an ungodly amount of computing power running through thousands of possible keys on hundreds of copies of the original data every second as we speak. Every minute or so, it’ll pop up a possible, and we’ll take a look, and maybe use it to refine our testing sequence. We’ll keep getting closer until we get it.”
“How long?” the werewolf, who was perfectly willing to admit his lack of real technical skill, repeated.
“We could strike lucky and have it today,” Morgen said quietly. “But we could also have to run through every possible key permutation. It’s a multi-terabyte key, Michael—thousands of characters. Each time we find even one bit, it cuts our time down by eight, but we could still be looking at weeks—possibly months. Anyone without our…advantages would be looking at years.”
“Keep working,” Michael ordered, and Dilsner gave him a dirty look.
#
David woke up alone, and for a moment, he didn’t remember anything of the night before. Then the smell of sex and perfume hanging through the hotel room hit him, and he bolted upright as memory returned.
The other side of the bed was empty, without even a note. Only the scent and the slightly damp impression of Jasmine’s form in the bed suggested it had not all been a dream.
The ONSET Agent sank his aching head into his hands. Apparently, he’d done a little too well at drinking to try and forget what had happened. He’d forgotten all about Angela, and now sparks of guilt drove against his conscience. While they’d made no commitments to each other, David White wasn’t the kind of man to take that as a license to fool around.
Jasmine had obviously left not long after they’d finished having sex, and he doubted she’d slept at all, simply waited for him to fall asleep. It wasn’t, he reflected, as if he’d had any illusions about the nature of the encounter, but it still seemed…rude.
With a grunt of pain, David turned to stand up. As he did, a crackling pop sounded as the TV turned on. Blinking against his hangover, David saw that the screen showed an oddly greenlit view of familiar-looking scene: a security checkpoint—metal detector, glass booth. The room shown was empty.
That didn’t last. Even as David began to wonder what was going on, a stream of six figures, eerily silent in the film, moved onto the camera. They ignored the metal detector, which went off at their studded clothing as they passed through.
When the lead figure reached the door shown in the video and ripped it off without slowing, David realized what he was watching. The room was familiar because he’d been in it only a couple of months before. This was the warehouse in Charlesville where his life had turned upside down.
The video then changed, cut by an unknown editor, to the inside of the warehouse. Struts and racks of crates and pallets shone an eerie green in the light-gathering optics of the camera. So did the silver studs on the vampire punks who’d sneaked in there.
David watched his own figure—recognizably so, as the image zoomed in on his face when he appeared—enter the camera’s view. Bound in place, both by his hangover and by the impossibility of what he was watching, he watched the ensuing battle. He winced as he watched his arms being broken and then saw the men and women of ONSET Nine inexplicably descend through the presumably solid roof.
On the video, he saw Michael transform into a werewolf and Kate throw flames from her fingers. Things that everyone knew were impossible and even a cursory scan of the tape would likely show were not special effects.
The video ended, just as the black-clad figure David thought was Morgen left the room, presumably heading to attempt to prevent just this kind of tape from being left.
Before David could gather his thoughts at all, the hotel room phone rang. He stared at it, numb with the shock of watching his own brutal induction to the world of the supernatural as ONSET had seen it.
The phone rang twice more before he finally grabbed the presence of mind to take the receiver and answer it.
“Yes,” he said flatly, wondering what would be on the other end.
“David White,” a crisp mechanical voice said flatly. It wasn’t a recording or a computer generation, he didn’t think, but it definitely wasn’t a human voice either.
“You saw our tape,” the voice continued. “We also have original, unedited files from the warehouse. If you do not do as we ask, those files and this tape will be forwarded to the Associated Press, where they will cause questions to be asked that your new employers would almost certainly dislike.”
“I…I don’t know what you’re talking about,” David told the voice, desperately trying to lie.
“You do,” the voice replied, still flat and mechanical. “You encountered vampires in that warehouse, which you demonstrated superhuman strength and speed in combating. Those who rescued you employed blatant magic and shapeshifting. These are not mundane happenings.
“After these happenings, you were recruited by the group that rescued you,” the voice continued. “We want to know what this group is.”
“You want me to answer twenty questions?” David asked, still trying to recover his mental balance. An hour ago, he’d believed no one outside the Omicron Branch knew any of the true details of the incident in Charlesville. Now that safe assumption was shattered.
“No,” the voice answered. “We desire more information than you can readily supply us and from more reliable sources. There has been a package left for you with the hotel’s front desk. It contains a USB drive. You will smuggle this drive into your new employers’ headquarters and place it in any computer. It will run automatically. Once done, you will destroy the drive.”
“And if I refuse?” David asked, considering the level of betrayal they were asking of him. He had no idea what was on that drive. He could be agreeing to upload a virus to destroy ONSET’s computer system. This strange voice had a threat against Omicron, but it wasn’t much of one against David himself.
“If the drive has not been run in one of your computers within fourteen days,” the flat voice said harshly, “these files will be forwarded to a man at the Associated Press who will take them with the seriousness they deserve…and they will be sent from your email account. Your employers will believe you betrayed them.”
David didn’t answer the voice for a long time. He didn’t know how ONSET would handle the betrayal of one of their own, but somehow, he didn’t think it would be with a slap on the hand and a hundred-dollar fine. If these people could do something like that, they could very well destroy everything he’d done with ONSET—have him driven out of the one place he could fit in now.
But he also knew ONSET. He knew their resources in the affairs he’d dealt with, the skill and level of technology they brought to bear on issues. He doubted that anyone could deceive Omicron’s investigators for long enough to damage him.
“Go to hell,” he said thickly. “No one would believe the tapes, or your deception. You won’t get the chance, either. Run,” he instructed, “hide. But we are Omicron—and we will find you.”
“I doubt that,” the voice told him. “We are Majestic. You have fourteen days.”
Then the line cut off with a click.
#
After killing the phone line connection, Majestic spent a moment eyeing the naked form of the police officer on the video feed she was watching as she cursed. Who was he to threaten her? Even as she watched, however, he was grabbing a cellphone.
Suddenly afraid, she took one last glance at White, who was now dialing a number, and disconnected the video feed. She then set her mind to the task of erasing every trace of her presence in the system as quickly as possible.
With that done, she leaned back in her chair and considered. A friend, who had no idea what Majestic did for a living, had dropped off the USB drive at the front desk for her. She couldn’t risk prying closely enough to see if he’d picked it up, but she doubted the agent would. Somehow, she’d thought he’d be more vulnerable to that threat.
Now she’d failed. Other options had to be considered, and Majestic was angrier than she’d ever been. She knew she couldn’t be tracked—but these were the same people who had that impenetrable server. Fear touched her as much as anger.
This was White’s doing. She was going to find a way to punish him for it. And there was always a way. Slowly controlling her emotions, Majestic brought up her file of research on White. The direct approach had failed, but that didn’t mean there weren’t other approaches.
#
David sat on the edge of the messy hotel bed for a long time, ignoring the tangle of sheets and blankets around and behind him. He’d never before had anyone attempt to blackmail him, and the attempt had shocked him to his core.
Reporting it to his superiors had been the right thing to do, and they’d told him to stay put while they tried to track down the source of the phone call and the video feed he’d received.
He hoped they could track it down. If that video reached the news… He shuddered. There were a lot of people out there like his father, and the video showed his face very clearly. He’d never be able to leave the Campus again without being seen as some kind of freak.
His cell phone rang, and he answered it quickly.
“White.”
“Agent White, this is Inspector Hill with OSPI Internet Security,” the voice on the other side said calmly. “Your report was forwarded to us and we just swept the hotel computers remotely. I have a team heading over to request physical access, but we couldn’t find anything.”
To his astonishment, David was sure he could hear a hint of doubt in the Inspector’s voice. Without his Sight, however, David was no judge of people and couldn’t quite tell.
“They covered their tracks?”
“It appears so,” the Inspector confirmed. “As I said, I have a team en route. I’d suggest you clear out of there, however. We’ll contact you if we need you.”
David sat on the bed for a long moment, looking at the cell phone. He wasn’t entirely sure the Inspector believed he wasn’t crazy or making this up, but at least he’d reported it.
With a sigh, David called the airport to book a flight back to Colorado Springs. His holiday had just become much less entertaining.
#
Anger had never been something to distract Majestic. It was something that drove her, made her focus. Now she dug through her research on David White, looking for the vulnerability that her intuition told her had to be there.
It didn’t take her long to find. After all, she’d been tracking his emails all along. She knew that the only person he corresponded with even semi-regularly through his personal email was Darryl Hanson—his old police chief.
Finding Hanson’s computer proved more difficult than she’d expected. Finally, she tracked down his ISP—a small company specializing in rural internet—and found his connection.
Her utilities and tricks got her through his firewall, too. It was harder than it should have been, a lot harder, but Majestic didn’t consider herself the best for nothing. Once in, she took a moment to analyze the firewall. It shared features and coding with that black server that had crashed her. Not as powerful but an earlier form of the same code. She was on the right track.
Attaching a worm to an email was child’s play for a hacker—literally. It was what stupid children who wanted to be hackers did. Attaching a worm to an email coming from a white-listed address so that the most powerful firewall she’d ever seen missed it and it ran without the user ever even knowing it existed…that was the kind of thing you needed a hacker like Majestic for.
Most notably, the worm wasn’t on its own email. It would wait until Hansen sent an email of his own, and then piggyback itself on that email through these bastards’ firewall.
Then, then, let David White think he’d beaten her just by being stubborn!
Chapter 27
David returned to an empty dormitory. Most of ONSET Nine was still away, busy with their vacation or other time away from the Campus. It was Thursday night, and the team wouldn’t go back on active duty until Monday.
He thanked the driver for getting him home and carried his own bags upstairs. These days, his major limitation with carrying suitcases was the number of handles he
could hold. His two newly purchased suitcases, with their newly purchased contents, were no problem.
The sight of his old brown couches in his apartment living room was a relief, something familiar in his life even as his brain fought an internal war. He had no hesitation that he’d done the right thing, but Hill’s attitude worried him.
Picking through his suitcase, a crinkling of paper caught his attention, and he pulled out the slip with Angela’s phone number. He pulled up a tall wooden barstool to the kitchen counter and dropped the slip of paper and stared at it.
Jasmine had been a mistake; he knew that. Alcohol and frustration and loneliness combined with an opportunity, and he’d taken it. Angela wouldn’t approve. He doubted she’d hold it against him, but he did.
He’d liked the Canadian woman, he really had. He had no idea, however, what to do about that. The life he’d chosen wasn’t going to let him get up to Canada often, and he doubted the RCMPP were much for letting their people to leave the country either.
It was something he’d have to think about, and he tucked the number into a drawer on his desk. Putting the thought aside with the paper, he booted his computer up. Before he’d left, Chief Hansen had promised him pictures of the annual Fireman’s Fall Ball fireworks in Charlesville.
Opening his email found the Chief’s email sitting there amidst a scattering of spam. A few moments later, he was downloading the pictures of the fireworks and wondering why it was taking so long.
#
The worm pinged a server Majestic had rented in Russia for just this purpose thirteen hours after it had been placed on Chief Hansen’s computer. With no idea of when the email would go through, she was busy doing something completely different when the little icon popped up in her screen, informing her it had made contact.
Apologizing to the other members of her guild, she dropped out of the raid and logged off the server. This was far more important than the game.
ONSET: To Serve and Protect Page 23
