by Fiona Quinn
Oh. Good one, Lynda. Very well-played. I needed Lynda to keep my secret. If the bad guys knew I had dexterity in the ether — well, nothing good would come of it. As a matter of fact, I could project a whole bunch of bad outcomes, the very least of which would be someone forcing me to use my skills for their own ends. I crossed my fingers and hoped Lynda would stay strong — for my sake as well as hers.
Lynda’s sobs became so violent that I couldn’t hear what the Skype guy was saying anymore. One of the men walked over and grabbed her shoulders, and shook her. I used the contact to slide from Lynda into the bad guy. Normally, I’d do almost anything not to attach to evil, but there was no way I could get a location from Lynda tied and blindfolded in the middle of a room. I needed more information.
The sobbing didn’t stop, so he lifted his fist and punched her in the side of her head. I felt the concussion travel up his arm and buzz in his elbow. Lynda sat in stunned silence. The man moved back toward the computer and glanced down at his phone, then pressed the “I’m driving” auto-response.
“A call just came into one of the men’s phones. It was from 555-741-2929,” I read to my team. “Have Research find out who owns that number, and who they just tried to contact. If they call into this guy’s phone to get the GPS coordinates, you’ll have Lynda’s location.”
Striker relayed the number to our research department. The phone buzzed back moments later. The kidnapper picked it up, lifted his chin to the other men, and walked into the garage. “Yeah, what?” he hollered over the thrumming of the rain.
“Hey,” came a voice.”Whatcha up to?” This must be Iniquus; the call came too precisely timed to be random.
“Nothing. Who is this?”
“It’s me. I thought you were coming by with the money you owe me.”
I heard another smack come from inside the house and Lynda’s moans.
“I don’t owe you no money. Whatcha doing calling my phone saying I owe money?”
“Courtesy before I stop by and break your legs. Pay up by tomorrow.” The connection broke. Supremely confused, the guy moved back inside. Lynda had curved down into the smallest package she could make of herself. She was sobbing, out of control. I assumed the earlier smack was to get her to calm down, and it had the opposite effect.
The creep with the cell phone turned his head, and for a nanosecond, I hoped I’d get to see who was on the computer screen. But the display showed the Google Chrome dinosaur. “Must have lost Internet connection from the storm,” I said.
The creep said, “I’m gonna see a man about a horse. Give me a holler when the Puppet Master gets back online.”
I opened my eyes and focused on Lynda’s photo. The hell I was going to go into the bathroom with this guy. I slipped back into Lynda’s body. Her face burned, and her head clanged; with her energy sapped, she slumped against the restraints, hopeless. She couldn’t believe she made it through the drug gang’s attack just to be killed over a necklace.
I blinked my eyes open. “She’s okay right now. Since the Internet’s down. Skype guy can’t ask any more questions. Everyone’s taking a break. There are three men. Their task seems to be making Lynda available for this guy’s questioning.”
“You called him the Puppet Master?” Gator asked.
“That’s what I heard. I didn’t see him. Lynda’s wearing a blindfold. They tied her wrists together, and she’s secured to the chair around her waist. The bindings aren’t too uncomfortable. She could probably work her way out of them, but she’s sunk into a depression, and she’s not trying.”
“You know about this, don’t you?” Gator asked. “You know why they picked Lynda up for questioning.”
I knew the circumstances that put her into this situation. I’d played a role in getting her into that room. And, of course, most of their questioning was directly about me. How could they possibly tie me to the necklace? Imponderable. My role in this horror show seared my skin with guilt, leaving me feeling blistered and raw. The greater good, I told myself. Lives saved. Laws upheld—the criminals paying their debts. There were reasons that I did this job. But none of this helped. Lynda had already paid a dear price for her poor choices. Since then, she had stayed on a simpler path, one that didn’t include power and wealth at any cost, which was the wagon she had hooked herself to with Greg. She’d tried to forge her own way. And now this.
“Is SWAT on the way?” I asked, without answering his question.
“It takes time to gather a team and suit up,” Gator answered.
“How much time?” Miriam asked.
“Depends. Forty-five minutes? Could be a couple of hours. They have to assemble, suit up, deploy,” Gator said. “How’s the storm looking?”
“Radar’s clearing up. I’d say light rain now,” Miriam replied. “Lexi, if I brought you a bag of frozen peas, could you put it on your cheek? You’re swelling.”
“I’d better wait,” I said.
“How could they find out about what you’re able to do? How do they know you’ve got psychic capabilities?” Striker asked.
“There are so few people who know…” Miriam said.
Gator and Striker exchanged a whole worried conversation in silence. When they finished, Gator rubbed a hand over his blond crew cut. “I hate to doubt the integrity of anyone on our team.”
“There’s another explanation. There has to be. One step at a time,” I said. “Let’s get through this first. Like I said, there’s so much more to this than meets the eye.”
“And you’ll explain that when you’re all the way back from the Veil?” Striker asked.
“I’m so tired. I need to close my eyes.” The weight of my eyelids was too heavy to hoist open anymore. “It’s too much of a struggle to stay here and there at the same time. I’ll give you a heads up when something changes.”
“Gator, how are her vitals?”
“Not great, but holding steady.”
I came awake with a shake of Lynda’s shoulder. I could hear the voice from the Skype call was back online.
“Miss Rheas, this is not a game. I have evaluated the information you gave me earlier against our known data. You realize, do you not, that your lies will only mean that we have to break your daughter’s knees. She’s been calling for you, Cammy has. ‘Where’s my mommy? I want my mommy.’ Don’t you want her to be safe, Lynda?”
Lynda sucked in air like she had just climbed from the bottom of the ocean. “I could tell you more, but I’d be making things up because I don’t know anything more. Are you talking about the necklace? It was a prize. Take it. Are you talking about that girl, Lexi? She has a talent for finding lost animals, and it worked in finding us.”
“And your necklace? She could find a necklace?”
“No, I don’t think she can find inanimate objects. I asked her to help me find a ring I had lost, and she said that’s not something she can do.”
“So you don’t think the man who came to look at your necklace and this woman are connected. Lexi didn’t tell him to go to your house and take your necklace.”
“No. Lexi doesn’t live near here. She lives near my brother. Why would she know a thief in Miami? I don’t understand what’s happening. Please don’t hurt Cammy. She’s just a little girl,” Lynda begged. “Please. What do you need me to do? I’ll do anything.”
For a long time, the man made no response. Then he said, “You told Cammy to get in touch with her Fairy Godmother. Lexi is the Fairy Godmother. If Lexi has your picture…”
“Please, I’ll do anything you want. If you have Cammy, then she couldn’t have contacted Lexi. Lexi wouldn’t know we’re missing,” Lynda begged.
“Gag her and get her out of there now,” the voice commanded.
“Where should we take her?”
“Get the computer and the girl and get—”
A massive thud was followed by a bang that sent the men around Lynda scrambling. One of them reached an arm around Lynda’s neck and pressed something hard against her
temple. The startling light of a flashbang exploded, lighting my optic nerves on fire even through Lynda’s blindfold. Suddenly Lynda and I were deaf, dumb, and blind, dizzy, and confused. Shots rang out. I didn’t have the wherewithal to count. I choked on the smoke that filled my nostrils and lungs.
Suddenly, I could see.
Someone had pulled the blindfold off Lynda’s face. Black-clad men busily worked the knots in the ropes that bound her in place.
“Lynda Rheas?”
“Yes,” she sobbed out. “That’s me. I’m Lynda Rheas.”
“SWAT, ma’am. You’re safe now.” He pressed his radio. “Scene secured. Send in EMS.”
Slowly I walked my way back from the Veil and integrated with my body. The mood in Striker’s apartment was somber. Everyone shifted with slow, deliberate movements. No one spoke; faces were grim. Gator tucked a blanket over me and pressed an oxygen mask over my mouth. “Breathe this for a couple of minutes to keep you from going into shock, okay, Lynx?”
I nodded.
Miriam squirmed over, so my head rested on her thighs, and she performed Reiki. I could feel the healing energy flow from her palms, soothing the aches on my face. Striker painted antibiotic cream on my wrists, where the rope burns blazed red and raw and wrapped them in bandages. Then he surveyed the rest of my body for injuries. When he pulled up my shirt, his mouth formed a tight-lipped frown. He gently touched the side where I got kicked. “Is this tender?”
Shit, yes. “A little.”
Striker stood with hands on his hips, staring down at me, his mind hard at work. His phone buzzed and, without taking his eyes off me, answered. “Striker here… Shhh, you’re okay now… Yes, I know what happened… Cammy is with Dad at the army base. They’re safe… Listen to me, Lynda. They. Are. Safe… No, I need to talk to Lexi… Lynda, this is a bad time. I’ll talk to you later after the doctors check you over at the hospital… Love you, too.” He slipped the phone back into its holster. “Lexi, why did that man think you led someone to my sister’s house to steal her necklace?”
I looked miserably out the window. Saying “classified” felt like banging a nail into my coffin.
Chapter Seventeen
I hustled into the Puzzle Room; Striker had summoned everyone for a meeting. The text read, Now.
Gator lounged with his hips resting on my desk, ankles crossed, coffee mug in hand. His gaze followed me as I crossed the room. “You holding up okay?”
I sent him a thin-lipped smile and a tilt of the head.
“You didn’t go into your trance last night. That ain’t normal.”
“I’ve had a lot more practice going behind the Veil since my days in prison. I think I might have built up my endurance a little.”
I smiled and waved to my teammates as they filed in and found their seats. When I got dressed this morning, I’d picked out a white blouse with buttoned cuffs to camouflage the bandages on my wrists. While visible injuries weren’t the norm around Iniquus, people knew not to ask if someone showed up looking like a train wreck.
Gator handed me his mug and went to pour another one for himself. “You don’t look so good.”
As I took a grateful sip of coffee, a bright electrical buzzing spread over my body. I worked at not showing any signs of distress. “Thanks for stating the obvious.” I had done my best with makeup but couldn’t quite mask the swelling on my cheekbone. I ended up wearing my hair down, letting it hang in my face.
“Did Striker calm down?” Gator asked quietly.
Only one of his teammates would ever say something like that about Striker. To all other eyes, Striker would look his normal stoic self. You had to have been through a few life-or-death experiences with him to find chinks in his armor.
Before I could answer, Striker moved into the room with a man I didn’t recognize. There was a rustle of surprise amongst the guys.
“I’d like to introduce Calvin Hock. He is a communications expert with the FBI. As you know, both the FBI and Iniquus took quite a blow from the D.O.A. case. The FBI agrees that the conclusions drawn by Lynx on the morbidity is the probable sequence of events. The ongoing question is, why did in-house Iniquus comms pick up static, and who was actually communicating with Strike Force? Special Agent Hock, you have the floor.”
“Gentlemen, and Lynx, how do you do? Thank you for inviting me in. The FBI is as interested as you are in understanding what happened during your mission. You are to be commended for surviving the D.O.A. Fuller Mine event. Your actions were heroic and noted, even though the outcome looked nothing like the intended trajectory.”
Hock had a studious face that fronted what looked like a constantly churning mind — his bushy eyebrows drawn in, deeply-etched thinking lines crisscrossing his forehead. He coupled this somehow with a loose-jointed runner’s body, making a rather odd visual marriage of his outward appearance and his interior life. Sincerity permeated his words, which made me feel comfortable with him. I trusted him.
“I wanted to share with your team some of my thoughts on communications, which seems to be the centerpiece of the mission’s complications.” He crossed one arm tightly over his chest, tucking his hand under the other arm. His free hand stroked over his chin. “Strike Force was using satellite communications.” He suddenly swung his head, looking around the room, and settled on the whiteboard. He approached it and grabbed a marker.
He drew Earth and a floating satellite. “I’m not going to go over the engineering behind this, but the basics are that a signal goes up and goes into a transponder where it’s cleaned, amplified, and retransmitted.” He drew dots and arrows on the board to punctuate his explanation. “If an entity wished to mess with the satellite, they would simply need to know the location of the satellite, which is easy to find on tracker websites, and if they knew the input frequency, they could pump in more effective radiated power than anyone else. That would allow them to win control of the satellite.”
There was an uncomfortable stir in the room.
“That has widespread implications for aviation and military applications,” Blaze said. “I can see all kinds of ways a hacker could make life hell for those folks.”
“You’re right. Absolutely. All someone needs is a password and a user name, and it’s game over.”
“Do you have to be onsite? Does this have to be an inside job?” Jack asked.
“Unfortunately, no. Someone could remotely compromise the devices by using something called reverse engineering — or decoding.”
“We use secure radios that encrypt the radio transmissions we send,” Randy said.
“That’s when your enemy makes a difference. If it were a normal transmission, someone with wifi and the right antennae could hack in. To do real-time decryption, you need the right software. That’s quite advanced. But let’s say that a terrorist cell is attacking a military unit. The unit sends out a distress signal asking for assistance. The terrorists can modify the firmware in the terminals to prevent the distress call from going out.”
“What the heck?” Gator asked. “What’s the Pentagon doing about that?”
“They’re working on the problem,” Hock replied. “It’s a vulnerability. And it gets worse. The attacker could exploit those vulnerabilities and send a bogus message. That’s what we believe happened here. Some entity with advanced software set up shop and overrode the signals going to Iniquus, feeding Blaze static and taking over the communications with the team.”
“But that was Blaze’s voice,” Deep said.
“That can be modified through software. All they had to do was get samples of Blaze speaking, and the computer would transform the hacker’s voice. I’ll bet at the point where the takeover took place, communications became very short from Blaze’s end — just voice procedure and no ad-libs.”
The guys on the ground during the mission looked off in the distance as they replayed the scenario and then nodded their heads.
“We’ve concluded that there was a wealthy and well-equipped force behind
this that seems out of proportion with the task at hand. Way out of proportion. There must have been some ‘get’ that we haven’t considered in the case. I can promise you that we have lots of eyes on the case now. My team at the FBI, the Pentagon…we’re going to find answers. This would have far-reaching national security implications, especially if this was a test balloon for bigger attacks.” He carefully replaced the cap on the marker and set it on the lip of the board. “Thank you again for your work.” His eyes scanned over the team’s faces. “I’m glad everyone is recovering. Hell of an outcome.”
“Is there any way we can protect ourselves against this?” Striker asked. He leaned against the wall, his arms crossed habitually over his chest, his eyes razor-sharp.
“I can offer you two methods, but they encumber your communications and can lead to delays. In the field, delays can be deadly. But it’s a discussion worth having, and I’d include the operators with their heads sticking out, you know? My first thought was that everyone carries a code generator that they’d need to announce and verify with each transmission session.”
A general moan went up with that suggestion.
“The second idea I had was that you go through the Darknet. Host a website out there that allows comments, and send texts back and forth that way. I’m sure you can see field operations issues for having to have both hands occupied. TOR is incredibly slow for this kind of application. Maybe you could get it to interface with a voice recognition system. Of course, there’s always the possibility that your enemy is sniffing the air. And you can’t use your jammers, obviously.”
“This isn’t just us, though — this is everyone in the military, alphabets, police?”
