Simon Sees

by Ryne Douglas Pearson

She drove up and down a pair of aisles in the parking lot nearest the health club. Only a few people stood in the lot which was nearly three-quarters full, most clustered around a spot near the building’s entrance, laughing after a cleansing workout. Emily steered away from them, up another aisle, then slowed to a stop with the passenger side of the minivan facing the health club, shielding the driver’s side from view.

  “What are you…doing?”

  “Be right back,” Emily said without responding to his question. She couldn’t—she had to move fast.

  She put the minivan in park and opened the driver’s door, stepping out as the engine idled in the chill. A trio of cars next to her could not be seen by those near the entrance. She went to the first one, a sedan, and checked the interior. Nothing. The owner had heeded all suggestions about preventing smash and grab thefts, likely by securing their valuables in the trunk.

  Emily didn’t need valuables in the plural sense. Just one valuable—a cell phone.

  She’d used this very method of securing a device for quick communication while undercover, Louis having mentored her on the subject. Women especially, he’d taught her, didn’t trust the lockers most gyms had available. They’d all heard stories from friends about things being stolen from the supposedly secure storage. Many, he’d told her, preferred to just stuff their cell phone and wallet in the trunk. The glove compartment. A console between seats.

  Or, for those who trusted far too much, in the cupholder near the gear shift with something draped over the items, usually a baseball cap of some sort, or a bunched-up scarf.

  “Bingo,” Emily muttered to herself as the second car she checked paid off. Right there, where the murderous scum had taught her it would be, was a tipped pink baseball cap, the corner of a cell phone screen gleaming beneath.

  Emily reached into her left pocket and retrieved a small folding knife with a blunt point protruding from one end. She’d been unprepared when the men had invaded her farmhouse in search of Simon, having no backup weapon to defend herself. That was a failure she’d remedied as soon as they’d made their first stop for gas, choosing a knife from the supplies stashed in the minivan. Now she spun the weapon so that the glass breaking feature faced the driver’s side window of the car and tapped it with one solid blow. The glass shattered into thousands of tiny blocks, allowing her access.

  She didn’t want to chance setting off an alarm, so she leaned through the broken window instead of opening the door. In a few seconds she had the cell phone in hand and was back in the minivan, driving out of the parking lot.

  “Let’s hope they’re as careless with their phone security as they are with their car,” Emily said as she drove with one hand and held the stolen phone with the other. Her thumb pressed the screen and a collection of familiar icons appeared. “Thank God for clueless people.”

  “Maybe…they’re just trusting,” Simon suggested from where he lay, countering Emily’s caustic appraisal with one more tinged with hope.

  Emily glanced behind and nodded at his gentle words, which matched his gentle, pure manner. Then, she returned to her dual focus on the road and the call she had to make.

  * * *

  In essence, Kirby Gant was going home. To where Rothchild had done his best work.

  “You know what you’re looking for?”

  Gant nodded. “Kiwi.”

  The code that Simon Lynch had broken. It had turned into a debacle for the NSA, and for those related agencies which depended upon it for secure communications of government data. Soon after those events, Sanders had learned through Mr. Pritchard’s sources that the code had been eradicated from every device meant to use it, the software and cypher keys meant for its application locked away as one might store a feared virus in a lab. It was no longer secure, officials had decided.

  That was then. Kiwi hadn’t existed as a useful cryptographic system for twenty years. No one had any knowledge of how to encode messages using it—or decode.

  No one but one man—Simon Lynch.

  “They’ve spruced the place up a bit,” Kirby Gant said as he penetrated the first layer of security, Sanders watching over his shoulder as a cascade of symbols drizzled down the screen on one side and text from the hacker’s input appeared on the other. “They’ll know someone was inside. But I’ll be long gone by—”

  “What is it?”

  Gant sniffed a chuckle as his fingers stilled on the keyboard. He looked over his shoulder to Sanders. “They built a successor code.”

  “You expected them not to?”

  “Look at the name,” Gant said, pointing to a box in a data folder.

  “Lynchpin,” Sanders read.

  “You think it’s an homage, or did they have him help develop it?” Gant asked.

  Sanders shook his head. “It doesn’t matter. He’s officially retired from government work.”

  Gant smiled. He liked Sanders. There was a directness about him. A seeming willingness to attempt the impossible.

  “You remind me of Jefferson,” Gant said.

  Sanders accepted the clear compliment with a tip of his head, then gestured back to the laptop screen. “Is Kiwi there?”

  “Right above Lynchpin,” Gant said.

  That successor code would only have reference files stored in the database. If it was in use, the hard files and cyphers would be already be distributed. What he was interested in was the box on the screen where supercodes came to die.

  “Downloading now,” Gant said.

  Two minutes later he had a software emulator running on the laptop, with an encoding algorithm set to accept input.

  “What are we saying?” Gant asked.

  “Give her directions on how to get here,” Sanders said.

  Gant typed in the information in plain text and activated the encoder. A box appeared with Kiwi cyphertext, no more than gibberish unless you had the software and keys to decode it. Or unless you were Simon Lynch.

  “Take a picture with your magic phone,” Sanders said.

  Gant half frowned at the dig over his overconfidence regarding the security of his communication choice and brought the device up, focusing with its camera to capture a single, clear image of the cyphertext.

  “When she calls, you send that,” Sanders said. “Simon will know what to—”

  The ringing of his own phone stopped Sanders before he could complete his thought. More so, it was the type of ring. Two fast, then a pause, then two fast…

  Jesus…

  Sanders turned away from Kirby Gant and took a few steps before answering.

  “Don’t use any names,” Sanders told Emily, his voice altered just enough to strip identifying timbre and tone from it.

  “You get to hide your voice but I don’t?”

  “I’m with our mutual friend from Pittsburgh,” Sanders said, ignoring her mild challenge. “He’ll have a message for you.”

  “Fine,” Emily said. “Right now I need to talk to you.”

  Sanders turned back toward the hacker, a hint of worry plain on his face. Gant noticed and stepped away from the laptop.

  “What is it?” Gant asked.

  “What’s happened?” Sanders pressed her.

  “There’s another one,” she said.

  Had this been any other conversation, he might have needed to ask for clarification, or context. But Ezekiel Sanders did not. There was only one thing she could be referencing. And one person such a statement could come from.

  “He’s sure?”

  “You really think you need to ask?” Emily reacted.

  “No, no,” Sanders told her.

  “It’s small,” Emily said. “The size of a cell phone.”

  Sanders processed that, the extra snippet of data she’d provided pairing itself with a memory. A recent one.

  “You have to do something,” she said. “Get word to people who can deal with this.”

  He should have responded in the affirmative to her very logical suggestion, but he didn’t. Mr. Pritchard
had often praised him for having the type of mind which was quickly able to envision a plan, from inception to conclusion, with variables considered. The man had once even ribbed Sanders that he was a poor man’s Simon Lynch.

  In actuality he was nothing even approaching that level of brain power. He did, however, see things as they would, or should, play out. To him, operations were like chess games, with pieces moving, parrying, until a final burst of activity would bring victory to one side and vanquish the other. Here, as he absorbed what had just been shared with him, the mental wheels were already turning, gears shifting, as a new strategy began to form. An unseen move had now been made possible.

  It can work…

  Sanders told himself that. Not everything he’d conceived would change, but enough would that even more assurance of success could be achieved—if it all the pieces meshed together with precision.

  It will work…

  “You have to trust me,” Sanders said. “You have to do exactly what you’re instructed to do. Can you promise me that?”

  There was the briefest hesitation, but he suspected it was not because she was crafting some expression of doubt. It was, he imagined, her coming to grips with what he’d told her when they first met—that he was Simon’s only hope.

  “Yes,” Emily said. “Yes. But there’s something else.”

  “What?”

  “Something’s wrong with him,” Emily told Sanders. “He’s aware of it.”

  “I’m not sure there’s anything I can do right now,” Sanders told her, a sudden feeling of helplessness cutting through the mental symphony of actions and reactions he’d begun imagining.

  “I think there is,” Emily countered. “You’re with our friend now?”

  Sanders looked to Gant. “He’s right in front of me.”

  “He helped me find someone in New York,” Emily said. “You have to contact that person. I think they can help. He needs maintenance doses. That’s what they said.”

  Sanders knew exactly who she was referring to. He’d tracked her to Albany as she began her quest to free Simon Lynch. To the home of Leah Poole. That neuroscientist was a likely candidate for someone who’d worked at The Ranch. Emily’s oblique request would seem to confirm that.

  “I’ll take care of it,” Sanders said.

  “I need to get off the phone,” Emily said.

  “I understand,” Sanders told her. “Just focus on getting here.”

  * * *

  Emily ended the call and tossed the phone out the driver’s side window into a muddy gutter beyond the adjacent lane.

  “Leah Poole,” Simon said.

  Emily remained focused on the road, though she wanted to lay a disbelieving gaze upon the man she’d saved. “How do you know that?”

  “She would talk about her home in Albany sometimes,” Simon said. “Just to be talking, even though I wouldn’t respond. She wasn’t there when those people attacked, so she’s alive in New York. Nothing points to anyone else.”

  “And you told me her name,” Emily reminded him.

  Simon thought for a moment, trying to seize a memory of that exchange. But he couldn’t.

  “I don’t remember that,” he told Emily.

  “Someone will get to her. She’ll know what to do.”

  That was a distinct possibility, Simon knew. Maybe even a probability. But either degree of certainty depended more on the matter of time, because he was sensing, with every passing moment now, that pieces of him were being swallowed by a darkness his mind could not penetrate.

  * * *

  Kirby Gant watched Sanders hold the phone to his chest and wander away from the kitchen, stopping at the window which looked out from the dining room to the back of the property.

  “Mr. Sanders…”

  “Yes?”

  “What happened?”

  Sanders stared out to the wooded yard beyond the house. The remnants of an old well poked from the ground, as did the foundations of at least two other structures, the rest rubbled long ago and being consumed by the advancing forest.

  “What was this place?” Sanders asked, turning to face Gant. “It wasn’t just a farm.”

  Gant smiled and shook his head. “Art would be impressed that you saw it, too.”

  Sanders looked back to the woods, his mind’s eye imagining what lay out there. Beyond them.

  Nothing.

  The house was hemmed in by low hills, and to the back, across two miles of forested terrain, a road cut from east to west.

  “Rum runners,” Sanders said. “Those were still sheds back there.”

  The nation’s flirtation with forced temperance had begun almost a hundred years ago. That this place, a relic of Prohibition, still stood, did not surprise Sanders. But what else did?

  “They were skittish people,” Sanders said, looking to Gant.

  He nodded. “You want to see?”

  “Please.”

  A few minutes later they stood in the cellar, the light of a single bare bulb illuminating one stone wall as Gant shifted an old armoire, revealing the entrance to a shoulder-high cavern beyond.

  “The other end comes out in an old ice house on the other side of the hill,” Gant explained. “Art cleared it all out. He wanted to be prepared with an escape route if anyone ever came after Simon.”

  Sanders stepped toward the dark tunnel and stared into it. “We need to add something to the message.”

  “Okay.”

  He turned to face the hacker again. “And I need you to perform some more of your magic.”

  “What’s the target?”

  “Baltimore,” Sanders said.

  They moved back upstairs and Gant sat where the laptop was placed on the dining table. “What do you need?”

  “The device which exploded in Baltimore was probably no bigger than a cell phone,” Sanders said. “It was designed by a man Simon had contact with through the NSA. A Russian named Stanislaw Venn.”

  “Oh my God…”

  “So we’re on the same page as to the gravity of this,” Sanders said. “And it gets worse. The man who carried out the attack is named Damian Traeger, and he has another device.”

  Gant straightened in his chair. “That’s what she told you?”

  “Not all of it,” Sanders answered. “Simon confirmed enough, though, and I’ve never known him to be wrong.” He paced past Gant, then looked back to him. “I saw TSA footage of Traeger entering the country. He had several cell phones that he put in the security bin. Three, I think. We need to know what kind of phones.”

  “One regular phone and two devices,” Gant said.

  “After Baltimore, that would leave one remaining. I have the time and place. Can you pull the same security footage I saw and get a closer look at those phones?”

  “Won’t need to,” Gant said. He turned his attention to the laptop and logged into an anonymous file server.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Just grabbing a few things from the toy box,” Gant said, programs downloading and installing quickly over the next few minutes. “All right, let’s find that phone.”

  Sanders stepped closer, watching over Gant’s shoulder as a map appeared. A map of Baltimore. Dozens of circles were overlaid on the map, intersecting and overlapping. The man recognized what he was seeing from his very specific line of work.

  “Cellular coverage,” Sanders said.

  Gant nodded. “Let’s just see when everything went dark.”

  He played through a record of the city’s various cellular providers’ service impacts, zeroing in on when the communications network went dark.

  “There’s zero hour,” Gant said as the circles collapsed one by one. “Zero second, actually. But we need zero microsecond.”

  He homed in on connections to a pair of cellular transmitters nearest the Markham Tower, pulling data on every device connected when the network began to fail.

  “And there we go,” Gant said, using the laptop’s cursor to highlight a long s
tring of numbers listed among others on the right side of the screen. “This session number dropped off the network two hundred milliseconds before the nearest cellular node failed.”

  “That’s the device? You’re certain?”

  “I will be,” Gant said as he worked through the cascade of information, playing and replaying the demise of the communication infrastructure in downtown Baltimore like a referee trying to determine whether a pass was caught or dropped. “It could have just been a call ending, someone hanging up, but…”

  After a moment left hanging, Sanders pressed the hacker. “But what?”

  “But this,” Gant said, directing the man’s attention to a trio of cellular transmission circles. “The device attempted to connect to all three of these towers and chose the best signal. That’s how they—”

  “I’m aware how cellular networks function,” Sanders said, trying to advance the delivery of needed information.

  “Then you should be able to see what I do,” Gant said. “Triangulation of the device’s signal puts it in the Markham Tower. No other device that disconnected at that instant is within a hundred yards.”

  “Can you pull the IMEI?” Sanders asked.

  “Already have it,” Gant said.

  The International Mobile Equipment Identity number was unique to every legitimately manufactured cellular device. With it a great deal of information could be gleaned. Including the type of phone.

  “Bhozarj,” Gant said. “What the hell is a Bhozarj?”

  “It’s a small Pakistani manufacturer,” Sanders said. “Popular in eastern Europe, the middle east.”

  The IMEI number had given them the type of phone. With that, Sanders could at least envision one part of the plan he’d quickly formed working. But he needed more.

  “That session that ended, can you pull the hashes and data strings?”

  Gant paused and looked back to the man who was, in almost every respect, still very much a stranger. But he was a stranger in the know. That was for sure.

  “You know your shit,” Gant told Sanders.

  “The information, please,” Sanders said.

  Gant turned back to the laptop and extracted the relevant data from the encrypted stream of ones and zeroes, the security slowing him down only enough to make the measures seem cute to him. He’d done so much, and gone so many places in the digital realm, that barriers within that electronic world long ago became little more that minor obstacles. A low fence to hop over to gain access to a fruit tree in a neighbor’s yard.