Crash Alive (The Haylie Black Series Book 1)

by Christopher Kerns

  “Rich guy. Written early, meant for the end. His will wouldn’t bend,” Benjamin said. After a few moments, all three looked up at the same time.

  Of course.

  “His will wouldn’t bend. Cecil Rhodes is the author of the text,” Walter added, excitement growing in his voice, “but we’re not looking for a book.”

  Haylie began a new search, her fingers flying across the keyboard. “We need to find the last will and testament of Cecil Rhodes.”

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Capital of Texas Airpark - Austin, TX

  March 7th, 2:32 PM

  Haylie massaged her temples with her index fingers, trying not to think for a minute. She had searched all the corners of the Internet over the past few hours—archive sites, museum write-ups, message boards—and found exactly what she was looking for. The problem was she had found too much of a good thing: six different versions of Cecil Rhodes’s will, to be exact. The man had apparently commissioned new versions every ten years or so, each rewritten from scratch.

  My brain hurts. This is the worst.

  The group had decided that the best route was to start from the most recent document and work backwards, so Haylie was now beginning to transcribe the book code for the sixth time. Her mind was jelly at this point, and she knew there was a good chance she might be screwing up the code translation as her mind wandered.

  So far, each transcription had only resulted in a mishmash of letters and numbers. Haylie knew that the book code’s solution could very well be another code to break, so the weird results didn’t necessarily mean she was on the wrong track. But it wasn’t going to make this step of the puzzle any easier.

  The Sterling brothers paced the hangar as she worked, stopping every now and then for brief chats with each other, staring blankly at their phones. Haylie could tell they were getting anxious, that they weren’t used to the grind and boredom of trial and error. But the grind was where things happened—hacking wasn’t some magical power, it was just never giving up. Good hackers just have the patience to do boring, mundane tasks over and over with slight variations until they finally see daylight on the other side, somehow.

  “Finally, the first Will and Testament of Cecil John Rhodes, dated September 19th, 1877. This is the last one I have to transcribe.”

  “Thank God.” Benjamin walked over from the other side of the hangar, running his hand across the leading edge of the jet’s wing as he moved. “What does this one say?”

  “Don’t care what it says,” Haylie said, the fatigue growing as she blinked her heavy eyes. “I just need the characters that match the book code.” Haylie selected the full length of text and pasted it into TextEdit. Turning back to the book code, she found the tenth character on the first line and typed an ‘H.’

  “Well, I’ll read the will while you do the math stuff.” Benjamin walked over to Haylie to check the web address, typed it into his phone, and sank onto the couch next to her. “I’ve got nothing else to do. I’m starting to go a little crazy.”

  “By the way,” Walter said from the other side of the room, “after you’re done with school you should consider coming to work for us.”

  “I’ll think about it,” Haylie replied with a robotic tone.

  “No, really,” Walter said. “It would be great. You could work with Caesar, do this kind of stuff every day. You’d love it.”

  Looking up from her laptop with a dull sheen in her eyes, Haylie stared at Walter for a few seconds. “I could do this type of stuff for a living? This isn’t programming, this is treasure maps and trinkets.” She sunk back into her work. “I can’t believe you guys run a software company and you have no idea what happens inside of it.”

  “We’re good at what we do,” Benjamin said, scrolling through the first Rhodes will on his phone. “And this is actually pretty fun. I love helping out, getting in the weeds.”

  “Just keep quiet and let me finish this thing,” Haylie said. “You’re going to screw up the result if you keep helping me.”

  After a few moments of reading, Benjamin jumped up from his seat, pointing at his phone. “Have you been reading this? Like, the stuff he’s saying in here? It’s crazy.”

  “Quiet, please,” Haylie pleaded.

  “No, really, it’s insane.” Benjamin continued scrolling. “It says here that Rhodes devoted a portion of his fortune, here’s the quote: ‘To and for the establishment, promotion and development of a Secret Society, the true aim and object whereof shall be for the extension of British rule all over the world.’ Are you sure this is the right document?”

  “I’m about ready for some lunch. We need to eat.” Walter tucked his shirt back into his belt, patting his stomach and glancing around the room. “I’ll call in an order. Marco, can you pick it up for us, please? What’s good around here?”

  “Pizza,” Haylie said, eyes still fixed on her screen as she counted character positions, typing in one slow, methodical result at a time with a single finger.

  “I don’t want pizza. I’d like a nice salmon filet. Or maybe a smoothie?” Benjamin said, continuing to read. “Something with protein.”

  “I’ll get something good,” Walter said, walking to the other side of the hangar to talk to Marco.

  “Pizza,” Haylie repeated, her head turning back and forth between the book code and the text as she transcribed.

  Benjamin rubbed his chin as he continued to read. “Ok, this gets weirder. The will includes a line talking about building a ‘foundation of so great a Power as to render wars impossible and promote the best interests of humanity.’ He was talking about creating a one-world government,” Benjamin said.

  “Well, the book code is working,” Haylie said, raising her head out of the decoding results. “The first four letters were H, T, T, and P. The code is spelling out another URL, another link to a website. This is the will we were supposed to find.”

  She opened a new browser window and did a quick search. “Looks like he had some weird ideas about politics ... this article says he created Rhodes scholarships to bring more smart people to the UK from Europe, the U.S., everywhere, hoping they would stick around after school and help build the second British Empire.”

  “This is crazy,” Benjamin said. “I had no idea.”

  “Lots of people think a one-world government is a good idea,” Haylie said as she went back to decoding, squinting her eyes, trying to make out the next line. “There’s a funny thing about that, though.”

  “What’s that?” Benjamin asked.

  “They only think it’s a good idea if they are in charge.” Haylie typed out a few more keystrokes as she located the correct letters. “What’s wrong with people? You give someone money or power and they think they should run the world. Drives me crazy.”

  Benjamin edged back in his seat and away from Haylie, keeping his distance.

  “Chill out, I’m not talking about you guys,” Haylie said. “You guys are fine. Just give me a few minutes to finish this up. I’m almost there.”

  > > > > >

  After fifteen more minutes of transcribing, Haylie raised her head to face the brothers in a daze. “I think I’m done,” she said with an exhausted breath. The brothers quickly assembled, each hovering over a different shoulder from behind the couch.

  With two more keystrokes, she had the full message decoded. Pasting the text into the browser address bar, she hit the return key and they leaned in to check the result.

  “Ok,” Haylie said, “here it is.”

  “This is so cool,” Walter said, leaning in closer.

  A page from a popular file-sharing site filled the screen. It displayed a single icon at the center with a label directly below. The three of them watched the page, waiting for anything else to happen. Nothing did.

  “It just says ‘2309,’” Benjamin said. “What is this?”

  “It’s a file,” Haylie said. “Posted by an anonymous account. There’s no other info about it listed in the description. We’ll have to do
wnload it.”

  Benjamin checked his Rolex and rolled his neck left, then right. “So, download it. Let’s get moving,” he said. “Let’s see what’s inside this thing.”

  “Are you out of your mind?” she said. “I’m not downloading some random file. It could be a Trojan horse; it could be a keystroke monitor. It could wipe my machine clean. Let’s not start making stupid mistakes.”

  Walter’s phone let out a ping as he checked the message. “Marco’s back with lunch. I’m going to go help him out; be right back.” He jogged to the front door and slipped out.

  “So, what do we do?” Benjamin asked.

  Haylie’s eyes drifted over to the far side of the hanger where, through the open war room door, Walter’s ridiculous computer workstation sat, idling with a constant metallic hum.

  “Walter wanted me to use that big, fancy machine, right?” Haylie said. “Well, today’s his lucky day.”

  Benjamin smirked as the two rose, walking across the hangar in lockstep and into the war room. The world’s most cutting edge hacking machine was finally going to be put to use—as a toxic waste dump.

  Haylie slid into the ergonomic roller chair and all screens blinked to life with a click of the mouse. She rested her laptop to the side of the keyboard, squinting at the book code results and typing them into the browser window on the larger machine. After the page loaded, Haylie clicked the download button next to the file. The machine sucked down the 130MB file in the blink of an eye. Haylie dragged it to the desktop and checked the file’s details to find out what she was working with.

  “Lunchtime, everyone,” Walter’s voice cried, loud enough for Haylie to hear through the open war room door. Benjamin stuck his head out into the main hangar and waved his brother down. Haylie could hear Walter trotting over, finally appearing with overstuffed brown bags in each hand. “What are you guys doing in here?”

  “We’re about to destroy your machine,” Benjamin said.

  “You’re … what?” Walter stuttered.

  “Don’t worry about it,” Haylie said, scanning the details of the file. “What’d you get for lunch?”

  “Oh, right,” Walter said, gesturing with the bags in his hands. “I read on Yelp that the BBQ down here is amazing. So I called up the top rated place in the area and asked them for their best vegetarian stuff.”

  “Vegetarian?” Haylie asked, “Are you serious?”

  “Sure,” Walter said. “Benjamin and I try to eat healthy when we can.”

  Laughing, Haylie looked curiously at the bags in his hands. “Have you ever tried Texas BBQ before? There’s nothing vegetarian about it.”

  Walter frowned and peeled open the mouth of the bag. Out came three containers of beans, a loaf of bread, and a plate full of pickles wrapped in cellophane. That was it.

  “I said to give me everything vegetarian, enough for three people. They were laughing on the other end of the phone, but I figured….” Walter’s eyes fell to his feet. “I don’t know what I thought.”

  “You had one job, Walter,” Haylie said.

  “Stop saying that,” Walter said, unwrapping the plate of pickles.

  Turning back to the machine, Haylie pointed up to the main monitor that hung above their heads. “It’s an ISO file, which means we’ll need to boot up the system using the file as the OS. I’ll need a USB drive.” She searched the top of the desk, pushing away pens and stacks of Post-It notes to find a drive behind the stack of paper notebooks.

  “Ok guys,” Haylie said, grabbing the drive. “Buckle your seatbelts.”

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Capital of Texas Airpark - Austin, TX

  March 7th, 2:50PM

  “The drive is ready,” Haylie said. “If you were planning to take any photos of your shiny new computer as a souvenir, now would be a good time.” She pushed the drive into the machine’s chassis and rebooted.

  As the computer sparked back to life, Haylie held the alt/option key down tight, forcing the machine to restart using the USB key instead of its normal OS.

  boot:

  Loading /boot/vmlinuz………………

  Loading /boot/2309.img……………

  Decompressing Linux… Parsing ELF… done.

  Booting the kernel.

  “What’s it doing?” Benjamin stood a few feet behind the desk, crunching on a pickle. “This looks weird. I don’t think it’s working.”

  “It’s just loading, doing its thing. Give it a minute,” Haylie said, her eyes fixed on the main screen.

  Booting Core 4.7.2

  Running Linux Kernel 3.0.21-tinycore.

  Checking boot options...Done.

  Suddenly, after a few more commands executed, the screen came to life with a giant blurred green image constructed out of console text. It spanned the entire width of all six screens, lighting the dim room with an eerie, ghost-like glow.

  Its form was unmistakable.

  “It’s a raven,” Walter said, pointing at the screen on the left.

  Haylie nodded. “It sure looks that way.” She turned around to face Benjamin. “Do you think it’s working now?”

  The boot sequence paused for a few moments, displaying only a blinking lime green cursor in a field of black. A few seconds later, numbers began to appear, one by one.

  2 3 5 7 11 13 17 19 23 29

  31 37 41 43 47 53 59 61 67 71

  73 79 83 89 97 101 103 107 109 113

  127 131 137 139 149 151 157 163 167 173

  181 191 193 197 199 211 223 239 241 251

  257 263 269 271 277 281 283 293 307 311

  313 317 331 337 347 349 353 359 367 373

  379 383 389 397 401 409 419 421 431 433

  439 443 449 457 461 463 467 479 487 491

  The numbers filled the giant screen—ten numbers, left to right, then down to the next line—until the script hit the number ‘1039.’ The program paused printing for a few seconds, and then got back to work.

  “I don’t get it. It’s just a bunch of numbers,” Walter said.

  “Not just any numbers,” Haylie muttered as she scanned the readout. “Prime numbers. All of them. It’s a list of every prime number, in order. 2309 is prime, too—I’m guessing this is building up to that.”

  “So what does it mean?” Benjamin asked.

  “Maybe it’s a clue—or maybe whoever created these puzzles is trying to make some kind of point. Who knows, they could just be messing with us.” Haylie watched as the script resumed printing, continuing its progression with the same pattern. The readout began to scroll faster and faster as more and more rows of prime numbers were added—one at a time, ten in a row.

  “We’re almost to 2309,” Walter said, slowly taking a few steps away from the computer. Benjamin, noticing his movement, followed with silent, backward footsteps on the concrete.

  “It’s not going to blow up. Get back over here you idiots.” Haylie shook her head and took a bite out of the two pieces of white bread she had found at the bottom of the lunch bag. “Here we go.”

  The program hit 2309 and the screen froze. The cursor began to blink as the three watched and waited. With a flash, the screen went dark, and another message appeared.

  38.466555, -122.999732

  now it’s time to enter the real world.

  deep in the woods, Weaving Spiders Come Not Here.

  find the next step behind the founding father.

  good luck.

  /2309

  “Weaving spiders?” Benjamin asked. “What the hell?”

  “These first two numbers,” Haylie said. “They look like coordinates: latitude and longitude.” She looked down to her laptop, typing the two digits into Google Maps. As the location loaded, she saw an overhead view of miles and miles of deep green forest cover.

  “What are we looking at?” Walter asked.

  Haylie zoomed out, toggling between street map and satellite views; there wasn’t much to see. A few, small roads that curved around the bend of a winding river. A group of small cabins,
nestled together, partially hidden under the foliage.

  “California,” she said, leaning back into the chair. “It’s just north of San Francisco, deep in the redwoods. A bunch of cabins all clustered together in the middle of nowhere. Some sort of camp.”

  She stood, turning to face the jet. It gleamed under the spotlight at the center of the hangar. Her heart began to pound.

  This is about to get interesting.

  > > > > >

  The Grove Hotel - Watford, England

  March 7th, 9:05PM

  The Kent Room, nestled deep in the basement of the Grove’s patchwork of ancient hallways, was brimming over with activity. Charcoal-suited men huddled, whispering in each corner with worn expressions showing worry and growing fear. Suddenly, a single voice shouted from the center of the room.

  “This has gone too far!”

  The leadership of the Bilderberg group met regularly, and even more so in the weeks and days leading up to The Project’s zero hour. As the start date grew closer, the tone of the group had slid from optimistic to brittle. Earlier in the evening, Gregory Stein, the US Secretary of State, had stealthily tapped each of the twelve men and two women that made up The Project’s core team, informing them that a meeting was needed in urgent fashion; each, that is, save one.

  “Crowne needs to learn that we are all in this together,” Stein said, spinning to catch the eyes of the room. “The foundation for this group—and the enormous risk that we have all taken on—is based on trust. This cannot be the way we operate going….”