The Project

by I C Cosmos

  Transportation wasn’t the only target, Helen recalled. Financial systems and utilities, too, relied on the super-precise, atomic clock timestamps provided by the sats. Even the tiniest glitch in timing could cause malfunctions… What would happen if all thirty-one satellites were out of commission? The entire infrastructure could go down… And the sats served the whole world…

  Helen looked at the horizon, doom scenarios buzzing in her head like angry bees.

  The scenery changed. The SUV crossed a river and climbed up along sharp hairpins. A mountain range looking like a beige and pink layer cake dominated the other side of the valley. They passed a hotel perched on a cliff.

  “We take a quick break here.”

  “How long did I sleep?” Lynne woke up.

  “A minute or so.” Helen smiled, keeping her worries hidden.

  The SUV slowed down, but the small parking lot was full. They drove up and found a spot on the side of the road.

  Helen and Lynne walked down to the hotel, their arms locked. A bus passed them and offloaded their passengers in front of the hotel’s door.

  “Oh my.” Lynne winced. By the time they reached the ladies room, at least twenty women were in the line in front of them, competing for the three available stalls.

  “I really enjoyed the sulfur springs,” one woman said. “The colors were magic.”

  “Yeah, but it was so scary. The guide said that a whole family slipped in and disappeared in one of the mud pits.”

  “People are so stupid. It’s clearly marked. Nothing can happen to you if you don’t cross the line.”

  Lynne rolled her eyes. Ten women to go.

  “The food is absolutely terrible here. Rice and chicken, rice and chicken.”

  “And pisco sour.”

  “If you are lucky.”

  “I can’t wait to get to the red lagoon.”

  “Hope the flamingos will be there.”

  Yada, yada, yada…

  Lynne finally made it. Helen almost got the next stall, but a woman pushed through and pleaded with her apologetically. “Please, let me…”

  Helen nodded and stepped aside as the woman awkwardly moved forward. Montezuma’s revenge.

  When Helen finally got out of the restroom, Lynne was gone and one of the officers was waiting for her.

  “Let’s go. We have to hurry.”

  “What’s going on?”

  “Got a tail.”

  The Altiplano, Bolivia

  A tail? Helen gasped. Andreas? They ran up to the SUV. Helen realized what a mistake it was as soon as she buckled up.

  When in high altitudes, go slow. She completely forgot about this when hurrying to the car, and the consequences followed immediately. She’d had no problems with the altitude so far, but now she felt as if her brain had gotten loose and was bumping into her skull.

  She scooped two aspirin out of her backpack and swallowed them quickly, but the pounding only intensified. That and the dot following them on Helen’s network analyzer temporarily knocked the satellites out of her mind. She zoomed in on the dot.

  It was one of the rogue units she had intercepted at the geysers. Its ID matched with the person who was supposed to “deliver” the satellites. Which wouldn’t be her uncle. Helen relaxed briefly. And then sat up straight in her seat. The pounding in her forehead quickened. What if the hacker was an assassin as well?

  She tracked the dot. It was following them, but not getting closer. Helen studied the map. If the hacker wasn’t after them but was going to Santa Cruz, the most logical way would be over Potosí and Sucre, thus going north when the road forked a few miles ahead, while they would continue east to Tarija.

  The traffic slowed down and then came to a full stop. The perfect opportunity to ambush them.

  The dot was closing in on them.

  The officers were texting furiously.

  “What’s going on?” Helen asked.

  “Not sure.”

  They inched forward in silence.

  “It looks like a broken bus,” the driver said. “Blocked half the road.”

  It looked innocent, but Helen closely observed the cars around them and the people standing on the road, checking for any signs of danger.

  The dot stopped.

  They passed the bus and sped up, increasing their distance from the dot. Helen watched it getting closer again as they reached the fork in the road. Turn left, turn left, she was repeating in her mind like a mantra.

  It did.

  “Yes!” Helen exclaimed. “We are A-OK,” she said. “He’s going north.”

  Lynne looked at her quizzically.

  “How do you know?” the officer in the front seat said. “Wait.” He scanned his phone. “You are right.” He turned around. “The boss said we are in the clear.” He looked at Helen with rising respect.

  “Tell him I said hello.” She grinned. Her brain was jumping around like an out-of-control demolition ball.

  She swallowed two more aspirin, but the pounding took no notice. Helen signed in to her supersafe incognito account to research the satellites. The connection kept breaking off, and the scant information she found didn’t tell her anything new.

  She was about to close her eyes and take a rest when a text to Anna, Helen’s moniker for Bobby’s customer service, flashed on the screen. Phyllis.

  >> They didn’t listen to me and went on the cruise. Scared out of my wits.

  Oh jeez. Phyllis’s whole family was out there. Helen sighed. The Consortium was a scourge, and she would do her darndest to take them down. A fantasy of Uncle Andreas going to jail played in front of her eyes.

  Fantasies aren’t going to fix this, she chided herself. Time was running out, and she had no idea how the satellites could be protected. She didn’t know where to start, was stuck in the middle of the Bolivian altiplano, and had no connection to her sources of intelligence…

  She was trapped in a major headache situation, which couldn’t give her a headache because she had a giant one already. Helen almost laughed out loud. She closed her eyes and focused on her breathing.

  Phyllis’s family is probably better off on the ship. Worse comes to worst, the ship could sail without GPS and they would be protected from the chaos on the ground for a while. Helen woke up her phone to text Phyllis. A question popped in her mind and gave her pause.

  How did Phyllis find out about the attack?

  The Altiplano

  Helen rolled her lips in. Only a handful of people were aware of the impending cyberattack. It certainly wasn’t something floating around on social media. Although Phyllis had gotten the alert from the anti-TP websites. Helen looked through the sites.

  The connection was on and off, but Helen got the gist of it. The sites connected the attack with the Global Ecological Forum and suspected foul play with the GPS satellites. Their warning went out two days ago, while she found out about the sats only this morning. Hm. She had been traveling, but still…

  Either the anti-TP guys had a crystal ball or someone close to the Consortium was leaking.

  “Lynne, does Bobby have any contact with the anti-TP sites?” Helen asked.

  “No, we decided to ignore them for now. Why?”

  “They have some intriguing intel. I’d like to know who is behind them.”

  “I tried to find that out when we were in Monte Carlo.” Lynne frowned. “Hit a concrete wall.”

  “Oh.” This could be a start. Helen decided to thoroughly analyze the sites as soon as they were in Tarija. In the meantime she composed a text to Phyllis and asked her to stay in touch and message if she came across anything new, no matter how insignificant.

  How will they attack the sats?

  They could jam the GPS signals or spoof them—replace real signals with fake ones—but that would result only in limited local effect. The Consortium was after a big bang, and the exchange she intercepted indicated their goal was to disable the sats. And put millions of people in danger…

  Helen felt a
nger coiling in her gut, lashing up like a mean snake, and inflaming the pounding in her head. The Project was doomed from the very beginning…and I fell for it. The excruciating headache took over her existence, and she wondered whether it would ever disappear. But she had to set things straight… Feeling miserable and defeated, she forced herself to work on a prioritized list of potential actions until feverish sleep claimed her.

  She woke up feeling exhausted, but at least the headache ebbed away as they were descending to Tarija.

  “Tarija looks like fun,” Lynne said while scrolling through an article on her phone. “They have vineyards around the town and some great dining. Oh well, some other time.” She shrugged.

  “Cheers to that.” Helen raised an invisible glass.

  The SUV stopped at the edge of a busy square.

  “Can you wait for me here?” Lynne asked the driver.

  “You are not staying?” Helen asked, unsure what was going on.

  “No, I have to keep going.” Lynne looked at Helen apologetically. “But I’ll take you to the hotel.”

  “Thanks again for doing this for me,” Helen said.

  “One day we will brag about it to our grandchildren.” Lynne winked and hooked her arm in Helen’s. “I have the key. We will go directly to the room.”

  A doorman dressed in a bright red jacket opened the door for them, and they entered the hotel’s wood-paneled lobby. Lynne waved at the receptionist and walked briskly to the stairs.

  “Here we go.” They stopped in front of a room on the second floor. Lynne opened the door swiftly and closed it carefully behind them. Then she opened a connecting door and knocked rapidly on the inner part leading to the adjacent room.

  Alarmed, Helen stepped back. Meeting someone here wasn’t part of the plan. She was supposed to stay in Tarija overnight and drive to Santa Cruz early the next morning.

  “We made it,” Lynne said proudly when the door opened.

  “Great job.” Collin grinned, filling the frame with his height.

  “That’s an understatement,” Lynne said, and gave Collin a quick hug. “All right. I have to run.” She turned toward Helen and threw her arms around her.

  “Good luck to you,” Lynne said. “Keeping my fingers crossed.” She raised both hands, fingers crossed, eyes suspiciously shiny.

  “Don’t forget. One day we will brag about this to our grandchildren,” Helen said, touching Lynne’s arm.

  “Oh, honey—” Lynne gave her another hug and slipped out of the room.

  Helen looked at Collin, a battery of questions lining up in her mind like planes on a busy runway. The tenderness in his deep gray eyes put them on hold.

  Not saying a word, he took her in his arms.

  Route 11, Bolivia

  The next day

  “I think it’s Nic.” Helen couldn’t tell whether her conclusion was based on facts or wishful thinking. She thoroughly analyzed the anti-TP websites and compared their posts with Collin and Omar’s timeline of the Consortium’s activity. The match couldn’t be better.

  The websites had to be run by someone in the know. A Consortium saboteur. Or Nic.

  Nic had designed the Consortium’s systems in the beginning, and, knowing him, he would have a back door to their data and would stay on top of their activities.

  “And I also think that Peter616 could be Nic.” Helen looked up from her laptop. “Phyllis said Peter616 is one of the most reliable people active on the sites. She also noticed that several times he shared more information than was originally posted. I went through his comments to verify it. Everything fact-checks, including the extra intel.”

  “And he is the only person commenting on all the anti-TP sites we know of,” Omar added.

  “OK. But what does it give us?” Collin asked.

  “Nothing right now,” Helen said pragmatically. “But I’d like to contact him and see what happens. We have nothing to lose.”

  Collin was scratching his cheek. Omar nodded slowly. Helen could almost see his gray matter churning.

  “Let’s give it a try.” Collin looked at Helen, his eyes a mix of hope and despair.

  They were grasping at straws. Helen was sure Nic could help them, but he had disappeared as quickly after Nuoro as he’d appeared there. Again. He’d run away from the Project, run away in Paris, and run away in Nuoro when he was so close. If he had gone to the trouble of following her on the trail, why hadn’t he contacted her?

  Helen felt irritation bubbling up and seeking an outlet. Nic was involved in creating this misery. Standing on the sidelines now wouldn’t cut it.

  That’s not fair, she scolded herself. Maybe he was fixing the satellite hack on his own and didn’t trust her enough to involve her.

  Nic and I better cut through this nonsense. Helen sighed. This wasn’t the time for it.

  She bit her lip and created a throwaway account, posted a question on one of the anti-TP sites, and repeated the question under Peter616’s latest comment on all sites.

  Patience. Not knowing what was going on was killing her.

  “By the way, why do you think Andreas was at the geysers?” she asked.

  “Because the unit that was ordering all thirty-one sats disabled communicated with Ralph Gibson a few days back. They were discussing a presidential pardon for Gibson,” Collin said flatly.

  “Ugh!” That was too much to take. Helen put her head in her hands and suppressed a sob.

  “Another reason to get them,” Omar said.

  “But how? We don’t even know what they are going to do…” Helen shook her head, desperate.

  “Actually, we know quite a lot.” Collin looked surprisingly calm. “We know their attack is scheduled to coincide with the forum, and they are after all thirty-one sats and looking for a worldwide hit, which excludes jamming or spoofing GPS signals because that wouldn’t give them the reach.”

  “So you think they want to knock out the satellites themselves.” Helen looked from Collin to Omar and back. Both nodded.

  “That’s my conclusion too.” The invisible iron hand tightened its grip on Helen’s throat. If this is true… “But to do that, they would have to corrupt the satellite command, which is incorruptible.”

  “That’s what everyone thinks. Even our most loyal supporters in DC think we are nuts to even consider this.” Collin’s eyes swam in pain.

  “Can we contact the sats people directly?” Helen asked softly.

  “That’s the thing. We did. They swear the sats are watertight. They’ve just tightened their security. And are running some major exercises right now. Taking their orders directly from the president.”

  Shivers ran up Helen’s spine.

  Orders from the president.

  Santa Cruz, Bolivia

  Nic rubbed his left elbow absentmindedly. The latest intel was much worse than he expected. Much worse. All thirty-one satellites under cyberattack. Executed by a Russian hack who’d probably butcher the job and create pandemonium not even Andreas could imagine.

  Two days. He had two days to find Helen. Or modify her cyber shield and put it up there himself before the Consortium pushed the go button.

  His phone buzzed. Nic scanned it and pushed it away. Website traffic he had no patience for right now. He considered Helen’s cyber shield again. He couldn’t count on cracking the newest version, but he still had an older copy, which would be sufficient. With a little luck he could put it up there. No, with a lot of luck. The program was complex. Nic didn’t trust himself to change part of it without triggering a malfunction in another part.

  The dark hole was beckoning him with its seductive finger. Just slip in, close your eyes, leave the misery behind…

  NO! Nic pushed his laptop away and stood up.

  “Americano!” The little voice that had grabbed Nic by the heart thundered in Nic’s ears.

  He had promised to come back. He had looked the nun in the eye, given her a thousand dollars, and sworn to be back and help more. She had brought him back
to life, and he owed it to her and the kids. He even played with the idea of adopting one of the boys. Maybe more, if all went well.

  Celebrities did it, and so could he. Hell, he had enough money to take care of a soccer team. He smiled, remembering their game on the beach.

  He had to stop the attack.

  Nic’s phone buzzed again. Frank had arrived in town, Santini’s goons in tow. Frey’s people had been here a couple of days already, surveilling the forum’s venue. Helen wasn’t with them. That he knew for sure. Nic scrolled to the previous messages.

  His heart picked up speed. Could it be?

  Mia O’Sole had asked him a question.

  >> I am in Bolivia right now and will be attending the Global Ecological Forum in Santa Cruz. What kinds of precautions should I take?

  Nic clicked on the message. It took him to what looked like a dead drop. Yes! He clicked on the link, knowing that her bots were following him already. He failed the first time he entered the password. Think!

  The artificial intelligence password didn’t do it, so he tried the one to their backup files.

  A soothing wave of relief flooded him when the dead drop opened.

  >> We need you!

  Tears filled Nic’s eyes. He responded without wasting a second.

  >> I am here for you and need you too!

  Route 9, Bolivia

  “It worked.” Helen held up her phone for Collin and Omar to see, excited, but not getting her hopes up.

  “Wow! Now we have a fighting chance.” Omar shifted closer to Helen to see the action.

  “Ask him what he needs,” Collin said, hovering over the small screen.

  Helen did.

  >> Your cyber shield has to go up to the sats. All thirty-one of them. A Russian hacker will put a virus up there tomorrow. It’s bad news—designed to mess with the synchronization of the atomic clocks. It will remain dormant until the Consortium activates it. Two days from today.