Then I logged into the wireless tap I’d installed in room 228 and finished configuring it. The network appeared idle. I started pinging addresses in the local block and isolated which ones were video feeds. My problem was, I had no way to tell which video feed corresponded to which room. Room 129 was a suite, which should have made it distinctive, but 229 and 329 were similar suites on their respective floors. I noted the “suite” feeds, and set up Wireshark to capture traffic from those IP addresses. I couldn’t find a feed in the basement with the network room and the chemical storage area. I wondered what could be sensitive about the area.
I logged into the hotel server again. I double-checked the script I wrote to capture video when a keycard was issued for 129. It looked good. I realized there was a first floor hallway camera. I checked the login time for the last of Mr. Weishaupt’s check-ins to 129. While the front desk and lobby feeds had been wiped, the first floor hallway feed was intact. I watched two people walking down the hall to 129. The video wasn’t very clear, but one appeared to be a large man, the other more slight. I couldn’t tell if it was a man or a woman.
I fast forwarded through the video until the checkout time a few hours later. The large man exited and walked down the hall. The front desk and lobby feeds of the checkout? They’d been deleted. I still couldn’t get a good image of the man who was in the room.
I continued fast forwarding through the hallway feed. Twenty minutes later, the smaller figure exited. This time, the front desk and lobby feeds were intact. A girl, probably younger than me, walked quickly through the lobby – in a hurry to distance herself? I looked at her face. There was no purpose or passion, only a vacant look of resignation.
There were seven other uses of Mr. Weishaupt’s room in the last couple of weeks: five short-term stays and two overnight stays. I think it was the same man in most of them. The girl featured in two other visits – once by herself, once with an older woman who must have been at least thirty. The woman and the girl arrived first and checked in. A half hour later, the man arrived. I couldn’t be sure which of the men the video caught passing through the lobby was the one who ended up walking along the first floor hall. It was too crowded and busy. In one of the visits it was clearly not the same man. The man in this visit was taller and skinnier. Mr. Weishaupt was apparently letting friends use his room.
Another visit was with a girl I’d swear couldn’t have been more than sixteen. After Mr. Weishaupt checked out, she waited in the lobby until a man came in, grabbed her roughly by the arm, and left with her. And there was a boy with a dark complexion, maybe Hispanic? I couldn’t tell, because I only had the vague hallway footage of him arriving with the man. He went into the room. He did not come out. I spent another hour scanning through the video. Housekeeping came and left the room with no sign of the boy. Maybe I missed him. Sometimes the hall would get crowded and picking out individuals would get tricky. Surely the boy had to have left the room eventually. There was only one door…
I had a sick realization.
There was another way out of the room: the door to the “pool chemical” storage area in the adjacent warehouse. All those barrels of acid percolating there? In quantities far beyond what were needed to treat a pool? So strong they’d dissolve most anything? Or anyone?
I thought I’d grown hardened to the corruption of the Civic Circle and their ilk. This took it to a whole new level. I went back to the hallway video and watched the indistinct figure of a boy walk into a room for the last time in his too-short life. “You are not alone,” I wished I could tell him. “You have friends. Now we know. We may not have been able to save you, but so help me, my friends and I will avenge you.”
* * *
I dodged Special Agent Wilson again the following morning when I got up early to take my run. The man was awfully consistent in his habits, and apparently had a room at the same hotel. He must be using a new alias and keeping a low profile. I’d looked on the hotel’s registration database and hadn’t found him. Also, it was surprising he was here by himself. He usually travelled with a partner we’d never been able to identify. I was confident I’d recognize that grim face if I saw it again, but so far, Wilson’s partner was a no-show. In any event, I decided riding the bike in the hotel’s air-conditioned exercise room instead of running was the better part of valor. No sense giving Wilson any extra opportunities to recognize and remember me.
The rest of the week was a blur of activity. Mr. Humphreys put me to work on the most sensitive jobs – the ones he was probably supposed to be doing himself, but trusted me to complete the actual work while he lounged around or goofed off. I put the finishing touches on the surveillance network all over Jekyll Island. We were in and out of the smaller cottages in under an hour, usually. The larger hotels could take as long as half a day.
The Sans Souci building was particularly complicated. Each of the six apartments in the three-story building were beautifully appointed. The building was the first condominium in history, jointly owned by J.P. Morgan, William Rockefeller, and other ultra-rich magnates seeking privacy from the merely well-off crowds at the nearby Jekyll Island Club Hotel. From the look of the place, not much had changed in the past century.
Each apartment had its own firewall and connection to the island’s secure network. It looked very secure, but there were extra Ethernet cables that bypassed the switch and continued down under the building. Whoever set it up intended that it to look private, but had probably peppered the apartment suites with video surveillance. I couldn’t tell if the network connections that bypassed my switch were active, so I couldn’t risk much poking around.
If Petrel’s map was right though, this was the building on top of the Civic Circle’s secret Inner Sanctum – The Jekyll Island Club Hotel was merely a convenient decoy for the truly powerful who would assemble here.
I also managed to get into the cottage we were confident lay at the heart of the tunnel complex. I made an excuse to check on the wiring in the crawlspace. The cottage had no basement, but there was a suspicious wall of ancient tabby in the crawlspace, just big enough to contain a ladder down to the tunnel complex below. The network closet appeared to be right over the tabby footing in the crawlspace. While I was in the closet, I drilled a hole in the floor. Rob had equipped me with an endoscope. I snaked the cable through the hole. Sure enough, a ladder descended into the darkness. I turned the endoscope back up. The trap door appeared to have a simple mechanical latch with no sign of an alarm or other sensors. It didn’t appear to be locked, but it looked like it only opened from the tunnel side. I pushed the endoscope down the shaft. It terminated about ten feet down in a large room, about the size of the footprint of the cottage. A tunnel stretched in the direction of the Jekyll Island Club Hotel. Another tunnel stretched further inland. Petrel’s intelligence was correct, and now we’d found a perfect ambush point right on top of the Civic Circle’s secret exit tunnel.
We finished the week with a couple of days in the basement of the Jekyll Island Club Hotel putting the finishing touches on the network control center. The part of the basement we were in had the same ancient tabby walls as the Horton House, and could easily date to the same period. We were under constant supervision by security, so I couldn’t do much. I did steal an opportunity to add the MAC address of the wireless router I’d installed back at the Berkshire Inn to the list of authorized network devices.
Security was so tight, they wouldn’t even let us leave for lunch. That turned out to be a vulnerability I was able to exploit.
“Which would you prefer, gentlemen,” Rob asked me and Mr. Humphreys, “turkey, ham, beef, or a vegetarian sandwich?” He looked sharp in his caterer’s uniform as the guards escorted him in to take everyone’s orders. With his hair dyed and the new mustache he was sporting, I doubted even Uncle Larry would be able to recognize him.
When he brought back our orders, he slid a box out from under the cart once he’d distracted the guards with their food. It was a switch that appeare
d to be just like the ones we were using, but with a key difference. It was a network tap, capable of logging and recording network traffic, and it had a vast amount of empty storage space on several hard drives hidden inside. I slid the switch we were going to use under his cart, and he wheeled it safely away.
I had a difficult decision to make. If I tried to capture everything, I’d risk filling up the drives in the network tap prematurely. It might be a couple of weeks before we had the leisure time to hack in and retrieve the data. I’d watched as even more guards escorted a server rack through a vault door to the even more secure area beyond. The massive array of disks under such high security had to be intended for the Civic Circle’s new data vault. While I was supposed to be configuring the switch, I set the tap to record anything coming in or out of the data vault and the Sans Souci with priority override, including overwriting other data. Secondarily, it would capture traffic from within the Jekyll Island Club Hotel itself and adjacent cottages. There was no way I was going to try to capture all the traffic from the big hotel next to the Convention Center or the other hotels on the beach side of the island.
Just down the hall from the Network Operations Center, there was an old steel door placed in the tabby exterior wall of the Jekyll Island Club Hotel basement. Access to the tunnel and the basement of the Sans Souci? With all the security, I couldn’t check it out, but I was confident the cabling from the Network Ops Center headed that way.
I hardly saw Amit at all after that first afternoon nacho bar. The Civic Youth got up early, stayed up late, and I couldn’t understand what they were up to. One day, I saw them marching in unison outside under the hot sun. The matching orange jumpsuits they wore made them look like prisoners.
* * *
The day the Social Justice Leadership Forum kicked off, Kirin was summoned to attend to Travis Tolliver, and the rest of the TAGS intern crew were shanghaied into helping guests and attendees move into the cottages in the Historic District. The elite had rooms in the Jekyll Island Club Hotel, but the most elite of the elite occupied the Sans Souci or one of the historic cottages. I noted that the Chase Bank delegation had been assigned the cottage with the entrance to the tunnel complex. Attendees from Warner Brothers, Viacom/CBS, the Holy See Bank, Omnitia, and a U.S. Senate delegation occupied the adjacent cottages. I was stuck with Mr. Humphreys at the Convention Center registration desk providing Internet connectivity assistance to attendees.
As the time for the opening ceremony approached, the crowd around the registration counter increased. I didn’t see as many celebrities as I’d thought. The most important had some assistant or flunky pick up their packets. I helped a few people with Internet access, but I had plenty of time to scan the crowd. A familiar woman approached the registration desk. It was Ding.
“Ding Li” she said smoothly without a trace of the thick accent she’d had when I met her months ago. “Vice President, Asia Commercial Bank of Hong Kong.” She picked up a packet, and started walking my way.
“Miss Ding Li,” I caught her attention as she was moving past.
She recognized me. I saw a hint of wariness in her face as she approached.
“Let me know if I may assist you with your Internet access,” I offered. “The guest is expecting the fortune cookie tonight,” I added softly.
“If I need you,” she relaxed a bit and continued with a knowing smile, “I’ll bring you some tea.” She moved closer and whispered, “The waiter is delivering it this evening.” Then, Ding Li turned and seemed to float into the main ballroom.
Mr. Humphreys looked suspiciously at me. I ignored him and continued greeting customers and offering to help them with their Internet access while my thoughts raced.
There was more to Ding Li than I’d thought. Her awkward halting accent was replaced by smooth, fluent English. She was… intriguing. I thought back on our last meeting. There had been something Professor Chen wanted to tell me, but Ding Li had interrupted him to lead me out. I should have noticed it before. Professor Chen had deferred to her. She was actually ahead of him in their hierarchy. No wonder I hadn’t noticed her that first night when I delivered Professor Chen to them. She wasn’t there. Not then. She must have arrived with the big boss, this ‘Honorable Shan Zhu.’ That might even put her above Mr. Hung, who appeared to be in charge of the Atlanta operation. I couldn’t be sure of the exact hierarchy, but it was clear Ding Li should not be underestimated.
A beguiling yet familiar scent interrupted my thoughts. A red-headed woman walked by, stopping to talk with one of Amit’s colleagues. “I’m here to pick up the credentials for the Holy See Bank Corporation, London Office.” That perfume, that voice… It was definitely “Perky Girl,” the Albertian operative I’d last seen in Chattanooga.
“Ma’am,” Mr. Humphreys got to her first. “Y’all let me know if we can help you with your Internet access, you hear?”
“That won’t be necessary,” she dismissed him curtly, and walked off, without noticing me.
“I have to go to the restroom,” I lied to Mr. Humphreys.
He seemed disgusted. “Well, make it quick and get back here.”
I took off after Perky Girl.
Chapter 9: Actions Have Consequences
I caught up with Perky Girl just outside the main ballroom. I leaned close and whispered into her ear, “Investigare...” I began the recognition mantra of the Ordo Alberti.
She jerked around and looked at me, the surprise evident in her eyes. “Who…” she began. Then she recognized me and the shock in her face recoiled into contempt. “You.” She looked around and checked that no one was in ear shot. “We warned you,” she hissed at me, softly. “You let them poison her, and you let her wander off to die alone in the Great Smoky Mountains, in agony!”
“You took your time talking to me,” I pointed out, quietly, not daring to raise my voice even in the crowd. “I arrived after the reception had already started because you and your friends had to play your secret agent games and kidnap me back to your lair to tell me what was going on.”
She started to interrupt, but I kept talking.
“I did tell Professor Graf her beer was poisoned,” I shared my carefully prepared half-truth. “She thought it was funny, so she took a big sip of the poisoned beer just to prove how ridiculous I was being. It was too late. I called you for help. The best you could offer was to let her die in peace. That wasn’t going to happen with the Civic Circle’s agents watching her. I faked her disappearance in the Great Smoky Mountains to get her away from them. I made sure she was comfortable in the days that followed, no thanks to you.”
I could see the cold fury burning behind her eyes, frozen in place behind an icy mask that would not let her personal feelings slip out in public.
“You could have stopped Professor Graf from drinking the beer,” she said softly but with infinite contempt. “I saw you. You froze. When the moment to act was at hand, you froze, you coward.”
“You put me in a no-win situation,” I countered. “Wrestle the bottle out of her hand, maybe spilling the beer and contaminating everyone around? Alert the Civic Circle that someone was on to them? I’m the amateur. You’re the experts. If you were expecting me to work your miracles for you, with time running out and the Civic Circle watching, you should have come up with a better plan. I did the best I could with the crappy hand you dealt me. There’s plenty of blame to go around, and you’re trying to shift all the responsibility to me to clear your own guilty conscience.”
She raised an eyebrow. “So you’re some kind of a therapist, now, too?”
I was getting nowhere with her. “I think I liked you better when you were busy playing good cop to your partner’s bad cop.”
She stared back impassively at me. “I think I liked you better when you were tied up, blindfolded, and unable to get in trouble. You still let her die. You sat there, watched her drink that poison, and you let her die.”
I looked at her. This wasn’t going to work. Two men were approa
ching us – a big guy I didn’t think I’d want to meet in a dark alley, and an older gentleman in an expensive tailored suit. Could it be Perky Girl’s partner, Bulldog, and Brother Francis?
“You tried to help,” I told her. “I appreciate that. You failed, and so did I. Now, I have important information of use to you and your friends. See me when you’re ready to talk about it.”
Her colleagues were close enough to overhear that last message. Now that I knew who they were – or at least that they were associated with the London Office of the Holy See Bank Corporation – I could find them later… at their cottage? An idea began to form. I visited the restroom, and returned to the Internet Help Desk.
“Stop hitting on the women and get back to work,” Mr. Humphreys demanded on my return.
That was certainly safer than the truth. “Yes, sir,” I acknowledged. I continued to take the lead in working with the customers. Mr. Humphreys only helped when I was already occupied with someone else.
A few minutes later, I saw Uncle Larry heading into the opening ceremony and caught his attention, “Excuse me, sir!”
He motioned to his entourage to enter without him, and he came on over.
“I understand you needed some assistance with the WiFi access and wanted to check out the alternate T-shirt selection?”
He was quick on the uptake. “Why, yes, that’s right.”
“I’m sure I can help you, Mr. Tolliver,” Mr. Humphreys interposed himself between Uncle Larry and me, recognizing the importance of my IT support client.
“You are…” Larry began.
“Dan Humphreys, sir. Director of Information Technology for Tolliver Applied Government Solutions out of Huntsville.”
The Brave and the Bold Page 18
