Next History: The Girl Who Hacked Tomorrow (34 page)

Steffi Monahan is quick with her answer. “Chief, I’ve sent her vid and some stills to FR, they are working it now.” Monahan, a Senior Security Officer transported via armored troop carrier from the now-deserted U
.S. Senate Office Building in DC, is the only rested individual in the trailer. Several security officers were assisted outside to a hastily-commandeered rock band tour bus, given hot food, and a place to crash. Armored guards silently endured the hour of moaning revelry that emanated from the hulking vehicle before silence descended. It required strong determination to hold post.

With the others, Jackson watches the raven-haired woman, the girl, and the man in conversation. Audio comes through, is fed into several different voice translators, comes out garbage. The intruders still use that strange tongu
e no one is able to translate. As in a silent movie, the body language is informative. The young woman with the white hair is pacing, lots of forceful gestures as she speaks. The other two appear to listen carefully.

It is with disappointment fifteen minutes later that Monahan relays to Jackson the reply from the FBI’s FR operative
. The only hit they get on the new arrival in the courtyard is a West Virginia driver’s license. A woman who died seventeen years before.

“Shit,” Jackson mutters.

“Something the tech said bothers me,” Monahan adds. “Said they have located the same woman in other searches over the last several days.”

“That’s odd. Who was looking?”

“As you say, sir, very unusual. The Sheriff’s office in Santa Cruz, California. But the source photos they sent in are disturbing. That subject was a homicide victim, from four days ago.”

Jackson knuckles his eyes and stares hard at the monitor. “And now she seems very much alive.”

Barbara Davis, the Purdue intern, sent to Jackson in lieu of a language specialist, speaks up. “Mister Jackson sir, there is something that may be useful.”

“Wonderful. How will the occult sciences enlighten us today?”

Davis ignores the man’s dismissive tone. “The girl spoke as two individuals when she first arrived.”

“What of it?
”

“Her dual speaking is brief, but could indicate a demonic possession. If it were up to me, I would start researching the ancient languages.
The languages of occult spells. Ones you won’t find in your translation software. I’m no linguist, but you need to look at languages that are no longer spoken.”

“Interesting. What would you suggest?”

“I would start as far back as possible. Coptic Egyptian, and earlier. Some of the first ones survive in written form. For example, we have written examples of early Sumerian, but nobody knows what it sounded like.”

“Well,” Jackson says. “Maybe it is time for us to find out.”

Nancy Amelia Vaughn kneels beside her bed in nightie and slippers. Her hair is brushed and she did her teeth already. Mom isn’t home yet from her evening job at the Dixie Mart outside of Tulsa, but she’ll tell Dad goodnight in a minute, as soon as she
finishes her prayers and checks her online store. Last month there were two new orders. Several months back there was big excitement when someone in California ordered ten shirts all at once. Nancy was so proud. She sends personal thank you emails to all her customers. That one had a funny last name. Crasz.

Mom was mad at first. Nancy, being twelve, does not have her own credit card, and the form of payment came up quickly when the enterprising girl tried to purchase a domain name for her brilliant idea of opening a shop online to sell original T-shirt designs. Her mom and dad so love her digital paintings, the walls of her room are covered in her
colorful Photoshop and hand-drawn designs.

Nancy had shown her parents the website, which
then had four shirts for sale. They were proud and pleased. Since then she has added more than twenty designs. It did not occur to them at the time to ask what it cost to set up. Her dad, an unemployed printing press operator, made some suggestions about improvements to the pages, which excited Nancy. It was so wonderful to have some attention from her dad, who spends most of his time with his laptop on the sofa, watching TV news and sending out job applications.

But oh the horror when she overheard her mom one evening talking to the credit card company about two charges she didn’t recognize
! Nancy had meant to tell her mom what she’d done, but it was a hard thing to bring up and six weeks passed quickly until the bill arrived. Every penny matters in the Vaughn household.

She was able to stop her mom from canceling the charges. It would have brought her website down
, all her careful work! She told the whole story, and showed her mom a check that had come in the mail, her first, a payment of $13.02. Not having a bank account, Nancy is unable to cash it. Mom said she was proud, but Nancy did not have to sneak, the family is supposed to talk about things. Although the girl’s excited explanation did not clarify the shopping cart’s workings, she was glad for her daughter. Mom forgave her in the end. Nancy said the shirt money was for the family.

Nancy finishes her prayers and hops into her desk chair. She opens her store’s shopping cart account and looks at the orders page. There is a new one! Kicking her feet she lets go a squeal of delight. That is three so far this month. She’ll make eleven dollars.

She sends email to five of her friends with the news, shuts down her laptop. It’s an older computer her dad got used, but a window on the world for Nancy.

In the living room, she finds her father on the sofa. He’s got his laptop open on a TV tray, a bowl of chips beside him. The TV is showing some comedy talk show. The family cat sleeps on her dad’s lap, his left leg held out straight in the knee brace he’d worn since the accident. It had prevented him from keeping his job at the press, and his unemployment had run out last year. Healing is slow, and he needs another surgery.

“Goodnight Dad.”

“There’s my angel.” Hug and a kiss.

“Say your prayers?”

“Yes, Dad.”

“Tomorrow is a school day. Don’t read too late.”

“I won’t. Nite, Daddy.”

Nancy turns the night lite on, gets in her bed, and is soon asleep. She sleeps soundly when her mom comes in around midnight to kiss her on the cheek.

Nancy’s alarm goes off at 7:15 a.m. She sits up and looks at the window. Above the curtain rod there is clear sky. The day will be cold, below freezing, and windy. She switches on her computer and starts getting ready for school.

Dressed, hair brushed and tied in a ponytail, she sits at her desk, and as she does every morning, looks for any new sales. There is something wrong. The list of orders is so long it goes on for screen after screen, people’s names and mailing addresses, how many shirts they bought. Nancy makes a sad face. She’d heard of things like this happening, inexpensive online carts getting corrupted. This can’t be right! There couldn’t be so many orders for only one of her T-shirts, her design that says
Goddess Culture
on the front in the curlicue font she’d picked.

She finds her father in the kitchen, pouring his second coffee of the morning. Mom is still asleep. Her day job at the factory doesn’t start until noon. Dad’s laptop sits on the kitchen table beside a newspaper that’s open to the help wanted section. As usual, the job listings are short. His computer displays a page from an online jobs board.

“Hey angel,” her father says, “sleep well?”

“Dad,” Nancy says in a serious tone, “can you help me? My shopping cart is broken.”

FBI Special Agent Darren Hamlin is disgusted with himself. Once again, he’s found how overwork, coupled with his mild ADD tendency to rush from task to task, pays off. His boss had been after him all yesterday to get with it and deliver. But stuff just comes up sometimes.

Well, hell, he had done the work. Most of it. He’d hacked into an online shopping cart hosted by GoDaddy.com and downloaded a list of customer mailing addresses. Now Hamlin cannot recall what he named the file or where he stored it. When he’d reviewed the list of names, addresses and purchase dates two days ago there were fewer than two dozen entries. Now, the list counter shows six hundred seventy-one thousand and twelve.
How the hell am I going to find the original ones?

He saves the list locally into Excel.
Even with his ultra-fast FBI data pipe, it takes a while to download. Fortunately there is a column with purchase date. Hamlin does a sort. He pulls off the orders that occurred prior to yesterday and makes it into a separate file. He saves both. He can rescue this, and make some brownie points as well. Whew.

A chat window pops up.
Oh lord, my boss.

malcolm234
: good morning. have you located the customer list? we need those names now.

dham001
: posting it now to the SPIRS server. sending secure email now wrt findings and recommendations. you’ll be interested

malsolm234
:

will await

Hamlin tenses. Working quickly, he posts the small file and the large file to the SPIRS team server over an encrypted FBI network, and
composes an email to his boss:

Good morning, Malcolm;

I located the customer list for the item in question, the online teeshirt shopping cart. Yesterday it listed twenty-one customers from all over the US, over the last eight months since it was set up. The one which stands out for me is an Althea Marjorie Crasz in California. Her name and address are in the file. She is located in the same rural area as the Tharcia Anne Harrison subject, and four months ago ordered ten of the Goddess Culture shirts from the online shop. Because the Harrison woman is not in the customer list, my conjecture is that these two people interacted and perhaps the shirt was a gift or sale to Harrison from Crasz. In addition, there is a rap sheet on Crasz, one item to note, investigated for credit card fraud nine years ago but never prosecuted. That is attached to this note.

Of special interest is the second file
of online sales I retrieved this morning. It stood at 21 yesterday, now contains over 672,000 names, growing at approximately sixty orders per minute. Looking now for the cause of this spike.

I personally cannot see any link with the shirt vendor, who as you know we’ve identified as a Nancy
Amelia Vaughn of Tulsa, OK, to the other subjects. Vaughn is a 12-year old school girl. Field agents did not see fit to interview.

I will make a daily download of the customer file and post it to SPIRS. Kindly let me know if there is any additional follow-up you would like to see.
Cross-matching this file with our terror watch lists, etc.

Darrin Hamlin, Special Agent
Milwaukee WI Field Office
Directorate of Intelligence

Hamlin sends the mail off, sits back and waits. He clicks a bookmark to open the fbi.gov main page, and gets a surprise thrill. On the rotating slide show, right after the one that says
Beware of Holiday Scams
, there is a panel labeled
New Most Wanted Terrorists
. There, next to photos of head-scarfed and bearded Middle Eastern men with names like Omar Sheikh Agah and Ali Ben Hammami, there is a photo of a young woman with a pleasing face and long white hair. On her shirt are the words,
Goddess Culture
. Because it’s been all over FBI internal chat, Hamlin can guess where the photo was taken. Beneath the photo is a name. Tharcia Anne Harrison. Hamlin strokes his chin. He wouldn’t mind interrogating her in person.

He does a quick search for the term
Goddess Culture
. Most of the hits point back to the first entry, a recent broadcast of the Internet TV program,
Take Your Medicine
. In the last twelve hours.

Approximately ninety seconds after sending the email to his boss, his Agency phone rings. Reading quickly through the TV program transcript, Hamlin reaches for his phone. He is totally ready.

“Sure, I cause chaos
,” Lian says simply. “And I don’t need to move a finger. You mortals do all the heavy lifting. The most fun is watching you blame the Creator for your mistakes.”

Tharcia finds this funny.
She’s quite convinced her brain is that shiny round ball batted around in a pinball machine. Earlier, the unreality of her existence leaped wildly when she mentioned food, and turned to see a white pavilion with table set for three bearing coffee, croissants, orange juice and bunches of purple grapes. Her mind performed the equivalent of saying
oh fuck it
and switched off all its analyzing circuits. She was hungry. It was easier to accept a nice breakfast than wonder about how it can be here.

Tharcia
and Lian lounge at the table. She is still angry with Lillian, Lylit, who has left. Her full tummy doesn’t mask the fact she’s exhausted, but damn if she’s going to sleep
here
.

“Don’t laugh
,” Lian cautions her. “You are responsible, you know.”