The Project

by I C Cosmos

  Frank froze. “I wish you wouldn’t make such accusations.”

  “They aren’t accusations. They are facts. But that’s not the issue. I called you because you can stop the Consortium right now. You have the evidence on your computer of what they are planning.”

  “Stop playing games with me,” Frank yelled, losing it. “What’s on my computer?”

  “The Consortium is planning a terrorist cyberattack that’ll ruin thousands of lives. If not millions. The files on your computer suggest you are their co-conspirator.”

  “I am not aware of such files.”

  “Then look again and STOP IT.” Nic’s voice thundered.

  The connection died. Hands shaking, Frank redialed but wasn’t reconnected. He tried again, without success.

  He leaned back in his chair, paralyzed as if bitten by a cobra.

  Cyberattack? The biggest act of terrorism on American soil? He being a co-conspirator? Sweat flooded Frank’s forehead. He slowly wiped it off with his hand. This was worse than his worst nightmare.

  It can’t be true, Frank tried to convince himself. But deep down he knew that it could.

  “You can stop it right now,” Nic had said. But how? How could he stop something he didn’t even know existed? The Consortium would never listen to him. If he as much as hinted at a possibility of such a conspiracy, Andreas would laugh and accuse Frank of being delusional.

  Frank sank deeper into his chair. How could a lifetime of selfless service end in the midst of a criminal conspiracy? He put his head into his hands. His career was over. His life was over.

  Injustice was laughing in his face.

  Why didn’t Nic tell him more? Frank tried to replay their conversation in his mind, but a flock of chaotic thoughts kept interrupting. Finally an actionable idea jumped to the foreground: the files on his computer.

  Yet, how was he supposed to find them? Frank had thousands of files and often couldn’t find the ones he knew he had. Where to find the fraudulent ones?

  And if such files existed, someone had hacked his computer…one of the best-protected computers in the world. Frank grabbed his desk to steady himself. He couldn’t even start imagining the consequences of such a breach. The nightmare was getting darker and darker.

  Then a question cut through. How come the cybersecurity guys didn’t detect the hack?

  Because they were ordered not to.

  Frank drew his breath in. Andreas must have corrupted them. “…the president appointed you because Andreas convinced him that the Consortium had you in their pocket.” Nic’s words cut to the quick.

  Frank never liked this president. He accepted the appointment because he thought he could deliver. Fight terrorism, hold the fort, keep the president out of it. Be the adult in the room. He would have never taken the job had he known he wasn’t selected genuinely.

  Was it all a joke from the beginning? A fake appointment? A cover-up for criminal conspiracy? Was he a puppet in the president’s and Andreas’s hands?

  Frank straightened up. NO! They miscalculated. They did NOT have him in their pockets. He’d get to the bottom of this. Then he slacked in his chair again.

  How could he fix this if the computer people didn’t work with him? Hell, they probably planted the compromising files there in the first place. At his wits’ end, Frank closed his eyes.

  Nothing made sense. Frank’s mind went blank. And then a star appeared on the horizon.

  Vanya. A smile broke on Frank’s face. Vanya was a brilliant computer scientist working for the department. Frank had worked with his parents way back when and helped them get into the country. He had known Vanya since he was a little boy. Vanya was absolutely trustworthy and more than capable of retrieving any dubious docs residing on Frank’s computer.

  Seeing the light at the end of the tunnel, Frank summoned Vanya to his office.

  The East Coast of Sardinia, Italy

  Think!

  Nic ran outside, Frank’s bitter voice resonating in his ears. The convent was a stone’s throw away from the beach, and Nic walked mindlessly alongside the waterline. The soft waves of the Tyrrhenian Sea rolled in gently, no match for the storm raging in Nic’s mind.

  Think! he ordered himself. Think facts!

  Frank claimed that he hadn’t abducted Helen and didn’t know who had.

  Someone ordered Santini to apprehend her, but Santini’s team was too late.

  Helen “escaped” voluntarily, in a professional operation executed right in front of Nic’s eyes.

  Collin Frey, who was supposed to track Helen 24/7, submitted to Frank a video of Santini’s people taking her.

  Nic stopped and replayed the events in his mind. It was as clear as day. Why had it taken him so long to figure it out?

  Frey had arranged Helen’s escape.

  Envy jabbed Nic in the gut. How did Frey get to her?

  He was there. Frey was protecting Helen as much as Nic was. In fact, it was Frey who had driven the little gun-wielding snake off the road on Elba. Nic had been right behind them on the road and had seen it happen.

  As soon as the guy pulled his gun, Frey latched on to him, pushed him to pass Helen, and kept the pressure going until the snake and his motorcycle flew out of a sharp curve on the road. Nic would have done exactly the same. He wanted to, but he was driving behind Frey.

  Second in the line. Just as in Nuoro. But he was the first one online. Helen hadn’t set a foot wrong until Elba, and Nic was proud of her and happy he had been there for her to correct the “mistake.”

  He didn’t think her little slip was really significant, but he wanted her to have a perfect record. Not that the Consortium paid attention to every detail, but they were killers. He didn’t want to take the smallest risk with them.

  And he’d keep doing that—Nic gasped. He couldn’t. Because his connection with Helen was gone. Since he left the Project, he had always connected with Helen through the Consortium. He was in on her operations, followed what she did, and felt confident he could reach her anytime through the Consortium’s apps or the dead drops Helen used to communicate with them.

  Helen broke that connection and cut Nic off with it. And he hadn’t established another way to communicate with her. His stomach contracted violently. He had lost her for real.

  He had “lived” with Helen since she joined the Project. He was there for her in all the places the Project took them. Nice, Sardinia, Amsterdam, the Azores, Elba. Helen was like his family. The only family he had. And now he’d lost the link to her.

  Nic stopped, his head down. The black hole was luring him in, offering relief from the misery.

  “Hey, Americano!” a small voice yelled from afar.

  Washington, DC

  The library

  A lifetime of aspirations. Years of planning. Months of preparations. Hundreds of hours of unrelenting discipline and mastery. Billions of dollars. All for the sake of one supreme moment. The supreme moment.

  The Consortium worked through the last details of Operation Total Power, scheduled to launch at the Global Ecological Forum in Santa Cruz, Bolivia. Andreas observed the session like a hawk.

  To achieve maximum effectiveness and avoid biases, members communicated anonymously through their Transparency Stations. Only Andreas knew who was who.

  Masters of their game, they were fast and fastidious. Left no stone unturned. Exploited options and devised contingencies for contingencies to ensure absolute success of their mission.

  Sharp and shrewd, they aimed high. Higher than most. But even they were held back by the illusion that money made the world go round. That money buys power. Andreas smirked. He aimed so much higher.

  He wanted what money couldn’t buy.

  A world driven by beauty and serenity. A world that would give him unconditional approval. And, most of all, a world in which uncertainty would be eradicated. Absolutely. Once and for all.

  He wanted to wake up knowing that he and he alone was fully in charge. That nothing and no
one could ever touch his life. The way to achieve it was through controlling others. Which was immensely satisfying in itself.

  Andreas chuckled. It was time to assert himself into the session.

  “I want to see planes falling out of the sky,” a member typed in. It wasn’t an option provided on the menu. Nonetheless, several other members voted to include it.

  Andreas smirked. They had come a long way. And it had required otherworldly patience on his part to get them so far.

  The first time the Consortium had convened to brainstorm about taking over the world, members had categorically rejected radical solutions involving physical violence. Instead, they opted for market domination. They stood one hundred percent behind aggressively promoting Total Protection, gobbling up global competitors, scooping up their best products, and exponentially increasing TP membership until they reached the tipping point and, with it, absolute control.

  To Andreas’s disappointment, all Consortium members stuck with what they had always done, which was good, but not good enough to conquer the world. He knew.

  So he took it upon himself to take them to the next level. He changed the narrative of the violent solution, focusing less on the deed itself and more on the benefits of capitalizing on fear, greed, and public outrage.

  The Consortium considered some of these options, but when they voted on it, members remained unanimously against them. Andreas had no choice but to override the voting system. The results he presented were optimistic—or false, as some would say—showing that sixty percent of members were open to using a terrorist attack as a market dominance tool.

  Without success. No one broke the mold when Andreas introduced a vote on incorporating a minor attack to their repertoire. One hundred percent were against. But when Andreas was done with “counting” the votes, the outcomes looked like only one person voted against the attack.

  Because all of them voted against and they never discussed their votes with one another, each of them thought they were the only person who strayed. No one wanted to be rejected by a group, especially if the group resided on the godly Mount Olympus. From that moment on, the vote count changed.

  Some members needed more time than others to embrace the necessity of radical solutions. But all of them had come along eventually, thanks to Andreas’s expert coaxing. Moira had been the last one to break.

  And now Moira was one of the avid proponents of planes falling out of the sky. Andreas sneered, crushing the sadness that unexpectedly shot through him.

  “Guaranteeing the ‘planes out of sky’ scenario would postpone our launch,” he typed into the system, remaining anonymous.

  “We can achieve the same fear effect by spreading rumors about planes falling out of the sky and showing fake videos,” someone added.

  “No one will be able to verify anything in the chaos anyhow.”

  The Consortium was back on track. Fast and fastidious as always, they planned the production and distribution of the fake planes-out-of-sky videos.

  Trained better than Helen’s bots. Andreas’s lips curled in disdain.

  Unnoticed, he stood up, stepped behind a dark velvet curtain, and slipped out of the library through a hidden door while communicating with the Consortium using an app on his phone.

  Everything worked according to his plan.

  Santiago, Chile

  The man looked inconspicuous at first. He strolled several yards away from Helen, hands in pockets, curly reddish hair escaping from a baseball cap pulled down over his eyes. Then in two catlike jumps, he landed in front of Helen and pulled her phone-cum-network-analyzer out of her hands.

  Shocked, Helen watched him run away.

  “Joe, go after him!” a middle-aged woman screamed. Joe took off, but the thief was too far gone.

  “I’m so sorry, honey. They warn against being too showy with our phones, but you weren’t doing anything like that.”

  It was an old phone, Helen almost said but caught herself just in time.

  “¿Qué?” she said instead, lowering her voice and knotting her brows. She turned around and walked away, her heart thumping against her chest.

  She had come too close to being discovered. One word out of her mouth in American English and her cover would have been blown. Helen hurried through the park, making sure Joe and his wife didn’t follow her, replaying the incident in her mind. Luckily the woman didn’t have a phone in her hand. And neither did Joe. The last thing Helen needed was to be caught on a video going viral.

  Only when she was out of their view, Helen took out another “phone” and turned on the network analyzer app. Her stolen device wasn’t far away. Helen watched the dot move on the screen and followed it at a safe distance.

  Was the guy a common thief, or was he one of them? Helen had come to the park because Omar had detected some rogue activity there, but all was quiet when she arrived. All she saw were a few tourists, some locals, and many large stray dogs sleeping under the benches. Surprisingly, the dogs looked healthy and well fed. A local woman told Helen that the pooches had been adopted, fed, and pampered by the community and had become a beloved part of it.

  Helen had been “photographing” the happy strays when the guy snatched her network analyzer. He had caught her by surprise, approaching her so quickly she had no chance to protect her device. She’d had to give it to him. Whether he was one of them or not, he was an accomplished thief who knew what he was doing.

  This must not happen again. Helen considered herself warned. It was an old analyzer, but she couldn’t afford to lose another one. Luckily the device would self-destruct as soon as someone other than Helen tried to operate it.

  The dot on her app stopped moving. The thief mingled with a group of men hanging in front of a corner bar. Helen was close enough to spot his unmistakable curly reddish hair. She slowed down, adjusted the angle of her camera, and tapped record. The thief was talking to another man, gesticulating wildly. He pulled a phone out of his pocket, holding it in front of the man. Money exchanged hands, and the phone followed.

  The buyer tapped the screen several times and dropped the phone like a hot potato. The phone hit the ground, obscured by smoke. A fistfight ensued. Helen turned onto a side street and walked away as fast as she could, convinced that the thief was just a thief.

  She reviewed the video and deposited it in the dead drop she had created in Monte Carlo with Collin and Omar. Her heart swelled with longing. She had insisted on traveling alone, but she would give anything to be with the team. She had spent only a few days with them in the Monte Carlo apartment, but their parting hadn’t been easy.

  Omar had put on a brave face and given her a big hug, mumbling something about being safe and seeing each other in Santa Cruz. Collin had given her a hug too, a longer one, and a heartbreaker to disengage from. It seemed to Helen that Collin mouthed “I love you” when he let go of her. She wasn’t sure but mouthed “love you too” just in case. And meant it.

  The hugs had sustained her on the nerve-racking flight to Santiago. Ironically, it had been one of the most comfortable flights ever, a private plane transporting an elite female soccer team from Europe to a chain of tournaments in South America, but the risk of having her cover blown and being apprehended in Chile loomed large.

  That and the terror of not knowing the Consortium’s latest plans kept Helen on red alert. The invisible iron hand that had grabbed her throat when she discovered what TP was really about became Helen’s constant companion, not letting her forget what was at stake.

  She hadn’t closed her eyes for a second on the flight, and now the jet lag and lack of sleep were catching up with her. She walked back to her hotel, compiling a list of things she had to take care of before heading up north to Bolivia.

  Her network analyzer spotted new action. She had barely disappeared into a small grocery store when a black shirt, black pants, and heavy boots marched by.

  She didn’t see the man’s face, but his stride was unmistakable.

  Sa
ntini.

  Boston, Massachusetts

  Logan Airport

  Tears rolled out of Phyllis’s eyes without warning. She swiped them away irritably, trying to pay attention to the road. She still felt the hugs her kids and grandkids gave her before entering security. She still smelled little Todd’s freshly washed hair. Their waves and smiles and excitement still played in front of her eyes.

  They had been looking forward to the cruise so much and spent hours and hours searching the places they’d visit, selecting attractions and excursions. They had tried hard to convince Phyllis to go with them, but she had refused. She wanted them to enjoy the cruise without worrying about her. The tears told her she had made the right decision.

  But she had insisted on going with them to the airport. And then couldn’t bring herself to leave before their flight was on its way to Miami. She splurged on a venti caramel macchiato, downloaded John Grisham’s newest novel, and disappeared in it until the selfies taken during boarding arrived and the plane took off.

  High on their happiness, Phyllis strolled through the airport to her car and got in. And then the tears came. She missed Todd terribly. And she longed to be on the cruise with her family.

  Phyllis sighed and merged onto the expressway out of the airport. Her phone kept buzzing in her bag. She almost reached for it, but none of the tones were her kids’ unique chimes, so she ignored it. Sticking to her no-phoning-while-driving rules boosted her feeling of control, although she knew she wouldn’t relax until she received a text from Miami telling her that they had landed safely.

  Three hours to go. To distract herself, she stopped in the supermarket, abandoned her customary blitz operation, and went slowly through all the aisles, inspecting items she’d never buy. Her phone kept buzzing, and she peeked at it several times, but it was all smoke and no fire. Merely social media updates she didn’t feel like clicking on.