Involuntary Control (Gray Spear Society) (11 page)

Both girls nodded.

"Have you had any luck penetrating White Flame's computer security?" Aaron said.

"Not much," Bethany said. "The important systems are protected by an air gap."

"A what?"

"Standard military procedure," Smythe said. "Computers containing classified information must be physically separated from outside networks. That's so geniuses like these two can't hack their way in. The firewall is literally just air."

Aaron nodded. "I've heard enough for now. Follow me, girls."

He ushered the twins into the computer room. He noticed they carefully stepped over the wires, so he did the same.

"Sit at your stations," he ordered.

They sat on chairs inside the rectangle of computer monitors. He took two sets of handcuffs from his belt and locked the girls' ankles to their chairs.

"Just a precaution," he said. "I hope you're not uncomfortable."

They pulled on the cuffs experimentally.

He went on, "I have some very happy news for you. I will permit you to continue your investigation into White Flame. Actually, I'm ordering you to do it. My entire team will be working closely with you. We're allies now."

"Why?" Leanna said. The innocence and confusion on her face were precious.

"I can't tell you. Let's just say when bad things happen to good people, it's my job to determine the cause. Get to work."

The girls turned to face their monitors.

Aaron went back to the kitchen. He spoke to Marina, Smythe, and Norbert in a low voice, "Wander around Lemonseed and see what you can find out, but be careful. We're in hostile territory. This investigation is still at a preliminary stage, which means no bloodshed. Don't draw attention to yourselves. Got it?"

"Yes, sir," all three responded.

"I'll be here watching the twins. This house will be our field headquarters for today. Move out."

His team left the house through the back door.

Aaron went back to the computer room. The twins were already lost in their digital world. Their fingers clattered on the keyboards, and their eyes darted from place to place. They didn't seem aware of his presence.

Carefully avoiding the many wires on the floor, he moved in for a closer look. There were a lot of computer monitors, but every inch of every display had some kind of information on it. The windows formed a repetitive tile pattern with exactly two pixels of "grout" in between. No window touched or overlapped another.

Aaron had a basic knowledge of computers, enough to do simple operations. That limited understanding was no help now. He could pick out some English words amid the clutter of numbers and symbols, but they didn't provide much insight.

"What's your plan?" he said.

Neither girl responded. It seemed they hadn't heard him.

He clapped loudly. "Hey!"

Both girls jumped as if startled.

"What?" Bethany finally looked at him.

"Do you have a plan?" Aaron said. "I know Kaitlin Simmons gave you a lot of information. Are you going to work on that?"

She nodded. "I'm using discrete k-means to categorize that dataset. I'm also running a battery of decryption algorithms on packet traffic we captured from a White Flame satellite transponder."

"I'm not quite sure what that means, but it sounds useful." He turned to Leanna. "What about you?"

"I'm trying to break into foreign subsidiaries of White Flame," Leanna said. "I'm hoping their security isn't as strong."

"That's a good idea. Any progress so far?"

She shrugged. "I'm penetrating many different systems, but the information I'm finding seems useless."

"OK." He nodded. "Carry on."

He looked around the room for a place to sit, but there wasn't another chair. He went off in search of one and found the twins' bedroom. Out of curiosity he checked the dresser. The only clothes he found were white shirts, red pleated skirts, and white underwear. Some articles had been worn enough times to have holes in the fabric.
Creatures of habit,
he thought.

He didn't see any makeup, jewelry, or stuffed animals. Nothing decorated the walls. The room seemed more like a prison cell than a young woman's bedroom.

He went into the next bedroom and found Haykal's old room. There was a single bed, a couch, a coffee table, and a padded recliner. Hundreds of romance novels filled a bookshelf. A very large television hung on the wall directly in front of the recliner, and satellite speakers were attached to the ceiling. A thin layer of dust covered everything.

Aaron picked up the recliner. Grunting with effort, he carried it into the computer room. He set it on the floor, taking care not to squash any wires. With a sigh, he sat down. The recliner was surprisingly comfortable.

The twin looked at him with horrified expressions.

"What's wrong?" he said.

"That's Haykal's chair!" they replied in unison.

"I know."

"You can't sit in it," Bethany said.

He looked seriously at them. "Listen to me carefully. I'm your boss now. I tell you what to do, not the other way around. Failure to follow that simple rule may shorten your lifespan dramatically. Am I absolutely, positively clear?" He raised his eyebrows.

The twins nodded.

Chapter Seven

Bethany turned away from the "boss" and faced her sister. The twins exchanged meaningful glances. As usual, they both knew what the other was thinking.

Bethany tapped out a text message on her keyboard, "I'll do the license plates." She sent it.

Leanna replied a second later, "I'll match the faces."

Using a monitor that faced away from the boss, Bethany called up the surveillance video recordings from last night and this morning. Hidden cameras were placed on the front of the house, and they provided several views of the street. She quickly found the cars that the strangers had driven. With de-blurring software she clarified the images until she could read the license plate numbers.

All the plates were from Illinois. She hacked into the motor vehicle department and looked up the registrations. The four cars were owned by four different corporations.

She smiled. She liked puzzles.

Every corporation, no matter how small, had to register itself with the secretary of state. She tracked down the list of officers for each corporation. A little more digging revealed that all the identities were fakes, but they were good fakes. She took a moment to admire the skill demonstrated in their construction.

The fake identities had real bank accounts with real balances. A financial history was an essential part of creating a credible persona, a fact that Bethany knew well. She started retrieving bank statements. The money in those accounts had to come from somewhere.

She painstakingly followed the transaction trail from bank to bank until she found herself in a strange corner of the financial world. She started seeing seven and eight figure balances. There were no names anymore, just account numbers. Enormous chunks of money moved around like icebergs in the night. The boss was obviously part of a very wealthy organization.

A single financial institution sat at the center of the dark web: the International Lenders Association. She performed an internet search and got no useful hits for that name. The bank didn't seem to have an address or even a phone number. There were no customers as far as she could tell. Yet it had assets worth billions of dollars.

She quickly sent the information to Leanna with a postscript that read, "This is huge."

Leanna sent back links of her own. She had discovered police reports for the woman with red hair and green eyes. The names were different, but the booking photos were the same. She had been arrested several times for possessing illegal weapons. Court records showed that every case had been dismissed, and she had never spent more than one night in jail.

Bethany sent, "Fingerprints. Face recognition. FBI criminal database."

Leanna replied, "Tried everything. No matches. This woman doesn't exist."

An icon on Bethany's task bar started to flash red. She typed, "Security alert!"

"I see it," Leanna muttered out loud.

Their fingers flew across their keyboards as they analyzed the attack. Somebody with a lot of expertise was trying very hard to penetrate the twins' custom built firewall. The load on the internet connection became pegged at one hundred percent.

Leanna grabbed Bethany's shoulder and forced her to look. Leanna had constructed a map showing where the hostile traffic was coming from. There were three sources in Washington, two in New York, and one in Moscow. It was a coordinated, international assault.

Bethany knew they were in big trouble. She shut down the main internet connection entirely and went to a backup line. Her heart was pounding like a drum.

"Is there a problem?"

Bethany jumped in surprise and looked up. The boss was standing in front of her.

"No," she chirped. "No problem. Everything is fine."

"You two look a little flustered."

"We're just working hard," Leanna said in a shaky voice.

Bethany struggled to appear calm. The boss's eyes stared at her from beneath thick, brown eyebrows. His brown hair was cut in a short, military style. His huge muscles were his most intimidating feature. He looked strong enough to break her in half with his bare hands.

His phone rang.

"Excuse me." He stepped out of the room.

Bethany and Leanna hugged each other until they calmed down.

"We were caught," Leanna whispered.

"We have to be more careful," Bethany replied.

"The boss is suspicious."

"I know. Work faster and smarter."

Bethany turned back to her monitors. All the police reports for the woman had come from places in or around Chicago. If she could find a connection between the International Lenders Association and Chicago, she might get useful information about the boss and his team. The problem was the connection wouldn't be obvious. She would have to solve a complicated financial maze, and that might take days to do manually.

She didn't have days.

It was time to apply the heavy artillery. She built an artificial intelligence model and taught it the peculiar transaction patterns of the International Lenders Association. She was hoping if she found the same pattern elsewhere, it would mean the same mysterious people were involved.

When her model was complete, she started hacking into every major bank in Chicago. She hijacked the banks' computers to provide the massive computational power she needed for her program. She intended to examine every transaction made in the last year by every customer.

Bethany sent a message, "Look at this."

Leanna leaned over and watched what was happening. She grinned.

Bethany sat back and waited for the results. She loved it when the computers did the hard work for her.

The software started to find matches. The largest was the purchase of a piece of property for four million dollars in cash. The transaction had happened three months ago. She looked up the address using map software and found it on the western edge of Chicago. A satellite picture showed a long, narrow building near the train tracks. It looked like an old warehouse.

"That's where I live," the boss said in a dark tone. "I'm extremely impressed, really, but you just crossed a line that can't be uncrossed."

Bethany looked up. He was staring at the image on the screen. Fear made her shiver.

He stepped back. "It's time I introduced myself properly. My name is Aaron. Glad to meet you."

Bethany and Leanna held hands. Aaron sat on the recliner and leaned back, raising the footrest.

"I'm a pretty powerful guy," he said. "I can get as much money as I want just by asking. Human laws don't apply to me. I've killed lots of people, all in the line of duty, of course. I could shoot both of you right now and never be prosecuted. Best of all, I command an entire team of people with elite skills."

Bethany noticed he had a gun strapped to his ankle under the hem of his pants. It looked like a small revolver.

Aaron continued, "In fact there is just one person on the planet who can tell me what to do. The chain of command goes from God to her to me. Her name is Ethel, and she is a very,
very
important woman. The lives of half a billion people are her responsibility. That was her on the phone, by the way. Do you know why she called me?"

She shook her head.

"It seems a computer hacker was sticking his nose where it doesn't belong," he said. "Alarms lit up throughout our organization. Critical systems were penetrated. Of course this is very embarrassing because we're supposed to have the best security. It's the kind of embarrassment that tends to have fatal consequences."

Bethany's teeth were chattering. She already knew this conversation could end in her death. She pulled her sister closer.

"The intrusions originated from Lemonseed, Illinois." Aaron narrowed his eyes. "From this room, it turns out. You can imagine how surprised I was. I had expected you would just follow orders like a couple of good girls. There was no compelling reason to do otherwise. But instead of playing it safe, you went on the attack the first chance you got. You gambled with your lives. What was the reason?"