Crash Alive (The Haylie Black Series Book 1)

by Christopher Kerns

  She’s a fool. How much more time will we waste on this earth, spinning in circles? Pretending this system works? The enemy isn’t on the other side of the globe, anymore. The enemy isn’t in tanks or trenches.

  Staring deep into the contours of the sculpture, his hands turned to tight, balled fists as he thought of all the wasted effort, all the wasted time. A world, spinning in place, without an end in sight.

  The enemy is all around us. The enemy has broken into our ranks. It’s the every-man. The every-man that is dragging us down. Not with bombs or wars, but with a slow drip of constant debate. The great experiment of democracy will be the end of us.

  I want the world to be great. I want the world to meet its potential. And I can’t wait any more.

  The English countryside lost its color, fading into gray as the sun snuck behind the horizon. Crowne thought back to the Chancellor’s call, and what he had done next. He knew that most men would have felt regret or remorse for those actions, but he felt none of it. His lack of sympathy was the only thing that worried him.

  I’m supposed to feel … something … about this, but I don’t. Does that make me a monster, or does it just make me better than other people? Does it just make me the right person—the only person—that can get this job done?

  After his call with the Chancellor, Crowne had called in his aide and made the first of many steps to becoming part of the solution. The Chancellor’s cancer was unfortunate, but it made things easier for The Project. Just a few phone calls to the right people inside the German system and her mid-morning medication was switched out with something a bit more potent.

  She was dead within hours. The phone calls and headlines and urgent meetings by his unknowing staff filled the rest of his afternoon, until he had made his way to the Bilderberg meeting here in the countryside. Here with like-minded people, to take the first big step the world needed them to take.

  It had been quite a day, indeed.

  “Sir, it’s time.”

  Crowne nodded silently to the aide that was waiting on him and turned on his heels. He fastened the top button on his jacket as he walked into the back side of the hotel lobby, past the silk-lined halls of The Grove Hotel. He quickly found himself flanked on all sides by clipboards, earpieces, and iPads holding schedules and lists that would dictate his fate for the rest of the evening.

  “The first guests have arrived. We’ve set up an informal receiving line over to the left, which will include you and Princess Saskia of the Netherlands,” the aide said, catching his breath as he skipped faster to keep up with Crowne.

  “Ah, the formal-informal receiving line. My favorite kind.”

  “Very good, sir.”

  The Bilderberg group had met annually for the past sixty-two years, assembling one hundred and forty of the world’s most powerful leaders. The official sessions would begin in the morning; most of the delegates were due to arrive this evening under the cover of darkness, with a few exceptions.

  The Secretary General of NATO would be late due to an uprising in the Crimean Peninsula. The CEO of AlumCo was stuck in union negotiations. The head of the world’s largest financial services company, who also happened to be a former Director of the CIA, was having mechanical issues with his jet. But, God willing, all the other members would arrive tonight, hidden from the prying cameras of the growing crowd.

  Bilderberg attendees were greeted at the main road juncture by four armed, private security guards and a bright red ‘Road Closed, Use A41’ marker. Once the proper documentation had been checked and approved by a second detail via radio, the cars travelled through a double ring of ten-foot-tall security fencing topped with razor wire. They then carved up the one-lane private road towards the hotel. The road led them along a black picket fence framing acres of wide-open pastureland, finally proceeding over a white-railed bridge and to the hotel’s main entrance.

  The hotel itself resembled a small medieval castle stacking more than two hundred rooms into three stories of luxury suites. Its original construction dated back to the 1700s and, despite its many owners over the years, had managed to retain its largest asset—over three hundred acres of privacy and solitude. Gardens, pools, volleyball and croquet courts scattered across the grounds where wealthy Londoners enjoyed long weekends away from the bustle of the city. But for the next three days, tourists would be replaced with scores of delegates, world leaders, and hundreds of security personnel with short-cropped hair, sunglasses, and loose-fitting suits covering firearms hidden safely beneath.

  Crowne followed his entourage into the main receiving hall, where clusters of men and the occasional woman huddled in each dimly-lit corner, the swells of their conversations growing into a buzz that filled the room. Simple crème-colored curtains had been pulled closed across the windows, and the reserved tone of the room was matched by the conservative nature of the crowd.

  He saw a haphazard line of attendees lined against the south wall, standing at attention as he entered. At the front of the line he recognized a familiar smile.

  “Your Royal Highness, so wonderful to see you.” The Prime Minister extended his hand to Princess Saskia of the Netherlands, an informal greeting for royalty, but that was no matter for an old friend.

  “Mr. Prime Minister,” she replied. “Thank you so much for your hospitality, as always. My father would be proud to see how well you’re carrying the torch for his cause.”

  Crowne grinned as he surveyed the crowd. Princess Saskia’s father, King William, had created the conference years before. Its original purpose was to address the Communist influence spreading across the globe, but as the years went by, the topics and attendees changed along with the times. The Bilderberg meeting had grown to become an essential element of the global system—connecting powerful people on the issues that would help steer the world over the next year. The meeting’s agenda items were always kept close, and remained a mystery to anyone unfortunate enough to find themselves outside the walls.

  “And my God, what a shame about Adele,” she said.

  “Yes, yes, when I heard the news this morning from my staff, I couldn’t … I still can’t believe it.”

  “I knew about the cancer, but something as random as the wrong prescription being filled, it’s just … such a tragedy.” Princess Saskia kept close eye contact with the Prime Minister as she spoke the last few words without emotion.

  “Unthinkable,” Crowne replied.

  The Princess took a quick check around the room, snatching two champagne flutes from a passing waiter’s gleaming silver tray. She took a long sip from one. “They are angry about Adele, John. The others. No one likes surprises at a time like this.”

  “This is news to me,” Crowne said. He checked around the room, now noticing a few icy stares back in his direction. “I’ll take care of it.”

  “I would hope so. We’re so close. Don’t drive this thing off a cliff at the last turn.”

  “It’s under control.”

  “It was under control, but now there are questions. Questions about your leadership. Go do your job, or we’ll find someone else who will.”

  The Princess looked up, realizing that a growing collection of eyes had begun to drift in their direction. Forcing a faint smile, she raised her glass to toast with Crowne and the room filled with the sharp clink of fine crystal.

  “We’ll move ahead, as we always do, I suppose,” she said. “Pushing forward. Isn’t that right, John?”

  “We always do, Your Highness. Keep calm and carry on, and all that.”

  “Good boy. I knew we could count on you. Chin up, this is a big day for us. Don’t screw it up.” The Princess turned and floated off towards her staff, handing the champagne flute off into the air, where it was quickly retrieved by a young aide.

  Crowne checked his watch and exhaled. Scanning the room, he walked in the direction of the receiving line, wiping a bead of sweat from his brow.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Capital of Texas Airpark - Austin,
TX

  March 7th, 12:01PM

  “Ok, tell me about this FigureEight thing. What is it?” Walter asked as he sunk back into the couch.

  “I can’t believe I didn’t think of this before,” Haylie said, doing a quick search for the tool’s download location. “Here it is. It’s one of the better-known open-source steganography tools out there. Let me just install it here real quick.” She typed away at the keyboard as she spoke.

  Walter watched on, nervously wringing his hands. “Can I help out with anything?”

  “More coffee,” Haylie said. “That would be a big help. Please.”

  Walter nodded over to Marco, who flew into motion.

  Benjamin perked back up, watching as Haylie’s fingers flew. “So what is stegla–”

  “Steganography,” Haylie corrected him. “It’s when someone hides a message inside of something else. Images, documents, whatever. Back in the day, people used invisible ink for secret messages, you know? Steganography is the same thing, but with computer files. The message gets embedded in the file, and nobody can tell unless they have this tool. If they don’t know any better, they just see a rabbit.”

  She flipped back to her Terminal window, the black command line box she knew all too well, and typed out a command:

  HayBase$ FigureEight -r 2309.jpg 2309.txt

  “This program checks for any hidden messages and spits the result out into a text file on my desktop,” Haylie said. She hit the return key with enthusiasm, the click echoing off the hangar walls.

  The script paused for a few moments and then displayed the output:

  Reading 2309.jpg....

  Extracting usable bits: 29049 bits

  Steg retrieve: seed: 228, len: 358

  “All done,” Haylie said.

  “That’s it?” Benjamin asked.

  “Yeah, pretty simple,” Haylie said, minimizing the command line window and searching around her cluttered desktop for the resulting file. “Let’s see if we found anything good.”

  A TextEdit window popped up as Haylie checked the printed text in the file. It began with a greeting:

  Welcome back.

  To travel to your next clue, break this riddle:

  A text written early

  And meant for the end;

  From the banks of Rhodesia

  His will wouldn’t bend.

  I:1:10 I:1:14 I:1:24 I:1:25 I:2:4

  I:3:35 I:4:44 I:6:6 I:5:5 I:19:1

  I:12:2 I:11:23 I:15:18 I:19:8 I:3:10

  I:16:1 I:14:9 I:5:19 I:7:5 I:2:5

  I:19:33 I:5:5 I:14:3 I:6:14 I:17:13

  I:2:32 I:20:6

  Good luck.

  /2309

  The three shouted a quick cheer as they hovered over the laptop, reading the message a few times over.

  “This bottom part—it looks like a book cipher,” Haylie said.

  Her mind raced as she scrolled up and down through the stack of digits, squinting to make out each line.

  “What’s a book cipher?” Benjamin asked.

  “Each number represents a letter that makes up a larger message. So we need to find the letter located at Chapter One, line one, tenth character,” she said. “Then on to Chapter One, line one, fourteenth character. But that’s not the hard part.”

  “What do you mean?” Walter asked.

  “The hard part is figuring out which book,” she said.

  > > > > >

  Walter sat on the back of the sofa, extending his arms out to the side and yawning as he stretched. He peeled off his hoodie to reveal a bright blue ‘Brux’ t-shirt, tossing the sweatshirt onto the other side of the couch. The hangar was beginning to warm with the rising Texas sun, and the tiny AC unit sticking out of the wall wasn’t exactly up to par with the seventy-one degree, humidity-controlled office the brothers were accustomed to in their New York headquarters.

  “So if we find the book, we break the code. That’s the way this works?” Walter asked, staring up at the hangar’s vaulted ceiling for any sort of inspiration.

  “For the tenth time, yes.” Haylie ran her fingers through her hair, trying to reset her brain to attack the puzzle from a different angle.

  “So there’s no program we can use to just figure this out?” Benjamin asked. “No FigureEight or whatever?”

  “Theoretically, it’s possible,” Haylie said. “But that tool would need to grab the text of every book in the history of the world, and then write a script to index each individual character from each block of copy based on the book code. Then it would need to use natural language processing to check if the output matched dictionaries from a bunch of different languages, and do it all at a massive scale that no one has ever attempted before.”

  The brothers just stared back at her with a pair of perfectly matched annoyed looks.

  “In other words, no,” Haylie scrolled back to the top of the text file and zoomed the view. “Our best bet is to focus on the riddle. Let’s go through it, line by line.”

  “How could we even begin to guess what book this is?” Benjamin said. “It’s impossible.”

  “It’s not impossible,” Haylie said. “It’s difficult. Difficult and impossible are two different things. Besides, Caesar figured it out somehow. We can, too.”

  How did you solve this, Caesar?

  Her eyes blurred as thoughts of her brother filled her mind. She drifted back to the nights when she was young, falling asleep to the clicking sounds of his keyboard floating down the hall each and every night. Caesar had always stayed up late writing code. Building things. He had spent his nights tapping away, each key finding its place, washing into a mix of white noise that you could hear throughout their house. It was those nights that put the big question in Haylie’s mind: what was he making?

  And so she had peppered him with questions, trying to understand his world. At first she was too shy, or maybe too proud, to ask him to teach her how to code; she just wanted to know enough to learn what might be possible. He gave her enough hints to start her on her way and without as much as an “Introduction to Computer Science” class, Haylie had started building.

  If she wanted hourly data on headlines from a news site, she’d write a screen scraper to grab the information. If she needed to study a new dataset, security wrapper, or website widget, she wouldn’t buy a book to read up on the technical details, she’d just learn by building something with the tech. Learn while doing: that’s what worked for her.

  Haylie rubbed her eyes, trying to get back on track. “A text written early and meant for the end.’ What does that mean?” she asked, rising to her feet to try to get her mind moving again.

  “It could be something that’s old and meant for modern times,” Benjamin said.

  “Well, The Bible would be the obvious choice,” Haylie said. “But I don’t want to go down that path.”

  “Why not?” said Benjamin.

  “We haven’t seen any religious references in the Raven puzzles so far,” she said. “If this was a church thing, we would have seen hints already. Hackers tend to be atheists. Or agnostic.”

  “What about the second line: ‘From the banks of Rhodesia, his will wouldn’t bend,’” Benjamin recited as he read from the screen.

  “So that’s Rhodesia, in Africa?” Walter asked.

  Haylie stared back at him with amazement. “Were you guys, like, homeschooled or something? Of course, Africa. Rhodesia was in Africa. What other Rhodesia would it be?”

  “I’m just asking the question,” Walter said. “Like we say at Brux, ‘there are no stupid questions.’”

  “Well, congratulations,” Haylie said. “You just found one.”

  “Can we just keep moving here?” Benjamin said, jumping in to break up the round.

  “Something on the Rhodesian shores,” she repeated, eyes back on Walter. “Rhodesia—in Africa. But here’s the weird thing….” Haylie pointed to the search results in her browser. “Rhodesia, or what used to be called Rhodesia, doesn’t have any big lakes or rivers. N
o riverbanks that would be big enough to mention. I mean, just look at the map, it’s completely landlocked.”

  “‘His will wouldn’t bend.’ Let’s figure out who they’re talking about,” Walter said. “Who’s an important guy from Rhodesia? Maybe we can start there.”

  Haylie clicked over to Wikipedia. “Rhodesia was a British Colony; let’s check out the Prime Ministers. Alec Douglas-Home was in charge in the early sixties, helped define terms for independence, but I can’t find any books that he wrote.”

  Benjamin pointed at a headshot farther down the page. “What about that guy?”

  Haylie clicked the link and read the details out loud. “Ian Smith,” she said. “He was the PM for fifteen years, but wasn’t an author. He died in 2007.” As her eyes searched the page, they rested on a black and white portrait. It was a man staring directly back into the camera, expressionless in his three-piece-suit. She read the paragraph of text beneath him and sat back into the sofa cushions, beaming.

  “What is it?” Walter asked.

  “Rhodesia was named for Cecil Rhodes,” she replied. “The British businessman who built his fortune off of mining. He started the African diamond trade.”

  “Cecil Rhodes. I remember reading about him back in college,” Walter said, checking the text on the page. “He was the diamond guy—made tons of money doing it. His estate still funds the Rhodes Scholar Program.”

  “Oh yeah,” Benjamin said. “We tried to get Rhodes Scholarships back in college but … it didn’t work out.”

  “You guys needed scholarships?” Haylie said with a cocked eyebrow.

  “No, it’s a status thing,” Benjamin said, leaning back out of her direct line of sight. “Never mind.”

  “Anyway, the banks of Rhodesia,” Haylie said. “A rich dude that has an entire country named after him. Maybe the riddle isn’t referring to riverbanks, maybe it’s the other kind of banks. The type that Cecil Rhodes would know something about.” She was already Googling his name and checking the results for any books that he had written. “Damnit, he didn’t publish anything. This is a book code; we need a book.”