“Coffee.”
“You got it,” Benjamin said.
Haylie clutched the straps of her backpack, continuing to spin around the room. She had never seen anything like this before, and she knew she might not get the chance ever again. She took a few steps towards the jet’s wing, looking above and below, reaching a hand out to touch its smooth, polished surface, but then looked over at Benjamin for permission.
“Yes of course you can touch it,” he said, walking to the other side of the wing, admiring the lines. “It’s a beautiful thing, isn’t it?”
“This plane,” she reached out and ran her hand across the back flap. “This is yours?”
“Well, sure,” Benjamin said. “It’s how we get around. So much easier than doing the whole public airport thing. Cramming onto a plane with a few hundred strangers, sitting around waiting for connections—I don’t miss any of that. Now we just hop on and go.”
“That’s … that’s amazing,” Haylie said. “You guys are so lucky. You can go anywhere, do anything, any time you want. That’s so cool … I never thought I’d see one of these up close.”
Walter, walking towards them, laughed from across the room. “You were coming to an airport and didn’t expect to see a plane?”
“Well,” Haylie said, “yesterday I thought I was going to get a cup of coffee and then two billionaires walked in and asked me to solve an unsolvable puzzle. My world’s full of surprises this week.”
The brothers laughed. Benjamin made his way back towards the sitting area and guided Haylie in the same direction with a sweep of his arm.
“Please tell me you’ve heard some good news about Caesar,” Haylie said. “Anything?”
“No,” Walter said, flicking through his phone. “There was an update from our security team this morning, but no new leads, and no messages back from him. Unless you’ve heard anything?”
Shaking her head, Haylie dropped her bag onto the leather couch and took a deep breath.
“He’s fine, Haylie,” Benjamin said. “We’re going to find him. And you’re going to be a huge help. I bet he’ll reach out to us before we even get too far into this whole thing, you know?”
“You’re doing the right thing,” Walter said as he took a seat, sinking deep into the couch cushion. “We’re all going to look back on this one day and laugh.”
She nodded and accepted a cup of coffee from Marco, who smiled and walked back to continue arranging the table of refreshments.
“So, should we get started?” Walter asked. “I’d love to see what you found from Caesar’s puzzle solution. Benjamin and I did some research on Raven last night and wow, there’s a lot going on in those forums.”
“Lots of crazy people,” Benjamin added, taking a deep sip of coffee. “Super weird stuff.”
“They’re just—enthusiastic—about this sort of thing, that’s all,” Haylie said. “Puzzles like Raven are designed to drive that sort of chatter.”
“What do you mean?” Walter asked.
“The mystery,” she replied. “The references to banned books and shady organizations. It’s all by design. It’s all meant to boost interest, to get more people talking about it. There’s a reason this puzzle is making headlines across the world. People love a good treasure hunt, especially if there’s supposedly some secretive organization behind the whole thing.”
“It’s just so unbelievable,” Benjamin said. “It doesn’t seem like something that should actually exist, you know?”
“I’m pretty sure it’s going to turn out to be fluff,” Haylie said. “Just two or three guys that wanted to see if they could get some attention. If I had to bet, I’d say there’s nothing at the end of the rainbow.”
With a sudden clap of his hands, Walter sprung to his feet. “Let’s get started! I’ve got a surprise for you,” he said. “Your war room is set up over here. Come on, I can’t wait for you to see it.”
Haylie stared him down, puzzled, and slung her backpack over her shoulder.
What the hell is a war room?
The three walked across the hangar towards the door on the far wall. Haylie stumbled, almost tripping over a twisted braid of thick extension cords running across the cement floor and under the door in front of them. Walter pulled at the handle with a little too much effort for a guy his size, and slid to the side.
Haylie squinted as she tried her best to see inside. The room was dark, but with faint traces of light reflecting off the concrete floor. She followed the line of cords across the room to the most unbelievable computer setup she had ever seen—a desk arranged with a collection of monitors perched above its tabletop like a huge electronic peacock.
This is insane.
Featuring six screens—three monitors side-by-side with two flanking LCDs to the right and left, all capped off with a giant forty-two inch plasma hovering over the other five—the workstation was perched on a table with keyboard, mouse, a stack of paper notebooks, and two cans of Red Bull. The collection of panels towered over the desk, looking down from every angle. The room was illuminated only by the glow of the orange screensaver, igniting the walls an almost magical tint fashioned in starburst patterns.
“We’ve got the latest CPU, water cooling, a series of hard drives adding up to over 50 terabytes of storage, and a fiber Internet connection hard lined into the machine. It’s all state of the art,” Walter said, beaming and bouncing on his toes with excitement. “I hope you like it.”
Haylie stared into the flat panels, the orange glow reflecting back off her glasses. She looked back at Walter with a thick air of confusion.
“This is your base camp,” Walter said, filling in the awkward silence. “Your workstation for this project. We wanted you to have the best tools for your craft. We’ve had a team working all night to gather and assemble the components.”
Haylie took a few steps forward, inspecting each individual screen, running her hand across the display edges. She reached down to click the spacebar on the keyboard. The screens immediately burst to life, showering the room with a bright blue light as Haylie jumped back, startled.
“Do you like it?” Walter asked with a proud grin.
She turned to face him with a scowl, pointing over to the machine. “What the hell do you want me to do with this thing?”
Walter’s smile morphed to disappointment as he took a step back. “We want you to, you know, hack. Do your hacking thing.”
Haylie shook her head and pointed back to the workstation. “With that? C’mon.”
Benjamin began to chuckle under his breath as Walter looked on with quiet despair.
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” Haylie said. “First of all, it looks absolutely ridiculous. Second, I don’t even know what I’d do with all that stuff. Six screens? Water cooling? This thing would take me all day to set up, I don’t even know where I’d start with all the packages I’d need to install. We’re in a hurry here, right guys?”
Benjamin watched Walter’s face drop as quiet laughter grew audible, filling the room. “You had one job, Walter,” Benjamin laughed, enjoying every ounce of the moment.
“You guys run a tech company, right?” Haylie asked. “Have you ever seen anyone in your office with something like this?”
Benjamin looked over to Walter. “Well, Walter, have you?”
Walter just stared back at his machine, deflated.
“Guys,” Haylie said, “Stop. We need to be portable to solve Raven. We may get through the first few steps here in the hangar, but before long we’ll need to be mobile. Our best piece of hardware to help solve this puzzle is going to be that.” Haylie pointed through the doorway to the jet.
“All right,” Walter said, composing himself. “What do you need to get started?”
Haylie pulled her MacBook out of her backpack. “What’s the Wi-Fi password?”
CHAPTER EIGHT
Capital of Texas Airpark - Austin, TX
March 7th, 11:32AM
Haylie’s eyes narrowed as s
he stared mindlessly up at the wall, pushing back deep into the couch cushions. She let her mind work the problem as she sat motionless. There wasn’t a computer system she had ever encountered that could keep her out, but she had never seen anything like this. This was new.
It was a bunny rabbit.
Well, it was a photo of a bunny rabbit. Or more specifically, a 37KB JPG image file of a rabbit named, quite appropriately, ‘rabbit.jpg.’ It was sized at 500 by 375 pixels, encoded with Baseline DCT Huffman coding, and it was staring her right back in the face.
And it was beginning to piss her off.
The image appeared to be a generic piece of stock photography—a three-quarters view of a brown, fluffy bunny. But what was confusing to Haylie wasn’t just the animal, it was the printed block of text that had been added to the top right corner of the image.
The text read:
YIIIKES
Looks like you eight the wrong carrot.
Bet you can’t figure out how
to get the message.
She frowned as she sipped on her cooled cup of coffee, scanning the message again and again; searching for anything she hadn’t noticed over the past thirty minutes. Haylie dragged the file to her metadata extraction tool and checked the results one more time.
>> Camera: data not found
>> Author and Copyright: data not found
>> Location: GPS coordinates not found
>> EXIF: data not found
>> XMP: data not found
>> Maker notes: data not found
>> ICC Profile: data not found
She tabbed over to Google to perform a similar-images search, scouring their servers in an attempt to find pictures with the same patterns, outlines, and colors as the JPG file. But the results came back pretty much empty, only pointing back to the original stock111photo.com image site where the rabbit picture must have been purchased by Raven’s author.
Turning back to the text in the image, she transcribed the first letter of each word to check for patterns. She scrawled ‘YLLYETWCBYCFOHTGTM’ onto a scrap of paper before staring at it for a moment, crumpling it up into a jagged ball, and tossing it into the corner. The nonsensical mishmash of text could very well be a cipher, but with such a short string it would be almost impossible to attempt a frequency analysis to find anything useful.
C’mon, Haylie. Think. You’re better than this.
Standing and stretching her hands above her head, Haylie walked the length of the hangar, head down, hoping for inspiration as the ticks and pops of a fresh pot of percolating coffee echoed off the corners of the gray concrete floor.
“The message doesn’t make any sense,” Walter said, leaning over the couch and reading off of Haylie’s laptop. “‘Eight the wrong carrot?’ Does that mean we went the wrong way? We couldn’t have, unless Caesar pointed you to the wrong place. They must be trying to throw us off.”
Haylie’s face scrunched as she repeated the words from the clue in her head. From what she had read on the Raven boards, the puzzle had never signaled a “wrong way” message before, even when steps were solved incorrectly. She was sure they were in the right place.
Caesar’s puzzle pointed me to a website, but websites can change. Maybe they updated the image after he–
“Let’s think about this one more time,” Benjamin said in a raised voice from across the hangar, breaking her concentration. “It says ‘eight the wrong carrot,’ what does that even mean? Is that some sort of hacker terminology?”
Haylie shook her head, trying to refocus. She was used to taking on puzzles and hacks as a solo mission, getting lost in her own mind for hours on end. She usually had to get completely immersed in the problem to find its solution—but that zone wasn’t attainable with a festival crowd surrounding you, throwing ideas in the air every few seconds like verbal grenades.
What do you know about rabbits? What if the solution is actually about–
“We’re approaching this wrong,” Benjamin said. “We must be. It has to be easier than this.”
Haylie glared at Benjamin, turning back towards the hangar’s whitewashed wall, fighting once again to regain her train of thought. She strolled over to her position on the couch and sat back down.
“No one on the forums has made it this far,” she said with a defensive tone. “I haven’t seen any posts about the rabbit image. Everyone else is still stuck on the runes. I’ve checked the metadata for the file, did a similar-image search, checked for anything weird going on with the hosting location, and read up way too many things about bunnies. I’ve still got nothing.”
She took off her glasses and rubbed her eyes. “Don’t worry, I’ll figure it out.”
“You’re just going to figure it out? Figure it out? How does that work?” Benjamin’s voice echoed off the hangar walls as he stood tall, arms crossed and looking down on her as she huddled in closer to her machine.
“I don’t know how it works,” she shot back. “But it always does.”
Haylie darted her eyes around the screen as she worked the problem. For some reason, she couldn’t get Benjamin’s words out of her mind. They began swirling and repeating, over and over.
Figure out. Figure out. Figure ... figure. Why does that sound–
“Calm down, dude,” Walter said. “You heard what she said; just give her some time.” He motioned at Benjamin to head outside with him. “Haylie, we’ll give you some space to think it over.”
Haylie tried her best to block out the chatter. She closed her eyes, concentrating on the problem. She forced everything out of her mind that she didn’t need: the hangar, Caesar, the brothers. Everything.
What do I know? What do I have to work with?
A clue.
It was a file.
An image with text.
Why was it an image?
Figure out.
A picture of a rabbit.
Rabbits live in holes in the ground.
Figure out.
Why was YIIIKES spelled with three Is and in all-caps?
None of the other text was in all-caps.
Rabbits eat carrots.
Eight the wrong carrot.
No. Focus.
Focus on the problem.
Figure out figure out figure out ...
“Time? We need time?” Benjamin shouted, ignoring Walter’s invitation to leave the building. He plopped down on the opposite side of the couch, pulling out his phone. “By all means, let’s waste the whole morning just staring at a screen. Great idea.”
“Can you two shut the hell up, please?” Haylie snapped. “I don’t usually do this by committee.”
Raising his hands with an “I give up” motion, Benjamin tapped out of the conversation. Walter paced the room, stopping to admire their jet, just trying to fill the time, somehow.
It was useless. Haylie couldn’t focus. Not with the brothers counting the seconds as she worked. “I can hear you guys judging me,” she said. “From inside your brains. I can hear it.”
“No you can’t,” Benjamin replied. “You can’t hear anything. You said be quiet, now we’re quiet. You’re welcome.”
“Can we get back to the puzzle?” Haylie cut him off, pointing back to her computer. “I still don’t know where Caesar is, and I’d like to figure that out.”
Figure out. Figure out. Figure out.
Haylie stopped dead in her tracks as a sense of calm came over her.
Figure out. Eight the wrong carrot. Of course, dummy.
Suddenly, her mind flew into motion as she moved on to a new task. Her fingers flew, bringing up her application window.
“Hey, did we lose you there?” Walter said. “Are you still with us, Haylie?”
“Quiet,” she said. “I just got it—what we need to do. Steganography. It’s a program called FigureEight. Hold on, I’ll explain in a minute.”
“See?” Walter said, looking over to his brother, “She just needed a little bit of time to–”
“Quiet,” she
repeated, leaning in.
CHAPTER NINE
The Grove Hotel - Watford, England
March 7th, 6:47PM
The Prime Minister stood firm, his eyes rolling across the curves and edges of the sculpture sprawled out before him. The crisp evening air had just made the turn from pleasant to chilled, and he knew his time was running out; he was needed inside, but didn’t want to pull himself away quite yet.
The twilight’s shine, reflecting off the sculpture’s twisted body, had locked him in a daze. Its giant, stainless steel torso was frozen mid-crawl, emerging from the water, half-formed in its design: part flesh, part skeletal.
The exposed glimmering silver bones rose from the dead center of the calm pool, looking quite out of place in the quaint English garden. But it wasn’t the brutal nature of intertwined structure and chromed flesh that captivated Crowne; it was the struggle of the piece. On all fours, half submerged, struggling to reach out of the water with one extended hand, taking its last earthly breath.
He’s done for, but he hasn’t given up.
The PM tilted his head, but still couldn’t tell if the form was crawling towards salvation or away from certain death. Was there a difference?
In the distance, Crowne heard muffled, garbled shouting and the continued beat of drums echoing off the hillsides. The guards were holding the protesters back by the road, roughly a kilometer from the hotel grounds, but sound traveled far in this valley. Such wasted energy. These people—they just need to understand how to follow and get on with it all.
He checked his watch and sighed, dreading the formality and pomp of what awaited him inside. The morning had started nice enough, one of the best he could remember. A quiet, innocent breakfast with his daughter. A mix of hugs and “eat up, darling” nudges as he flew threw a stack of newspapers and cups of coffee. But he had been pulled away by a call from the German Chancellor. She was having second thoughts.
He had tried to subtly guide the Chancellor towards the light, but it was no use. Her cancer had returned, and her priorities had changed. She wanted out of The Project before tonight’s meeting. She had asked Crowne to consider the same: to shut it all down. To go back to the way things had always worked.
Crash Alive (The Haylie Black Series Book 1) Page 6
