Code of Honor

by Marc Cameron

  Sergeant Rodney Scott was the face of any presidential lift. He was twenty-three years old.

  The White House liaison officer—called Weelo—had notified the squadron commander that they needed a lift package prepared for Indonesia, ASAP.

  Sergeant Scott’s friends sometimes asked him how fast they could get ready and move if the President needed to fly somewhere in Marine One in an emergency. The canned answer was “that’s classified,” but the more honest answer was “as fast as he needs us.” Unlike other squadrons across the services, HMX-1 ran at full organizational staffing and equipment levels at all times. The birds were always ready, hampered only by the bounds of physics and geography—and determined Marines could bend even those if the mission called for it.

  The colonel had come to tell his crew chief personally, ordering up three UH-60s because the smaller birds would be easier to break down and load on to C-17s with all the other squadron equipment.

  Marine One crew chiefs served for a term of a year, a few more months if a replacement’s background was taking a little longer—but the time was short, a blink in a Marine’s career. Scott savored every moment, knowing he’d be involved in only a finite number of presidential lifts. It was a massive undertaking, and it never got old.

  Dozens of aircraft moved personnel, gear, two presidential limos, Secret Service follow cars, the CAT team Suburban, all the weapons, and the HMX-1 helicopters. Other Marine aircraft—big CH 53s, V-22 Ospreys—known as greenside aircraft as opposed to White Tops, might be borrowed from bases near the site, or transported. Fighter aircraft would always be overhead, and possibly a couple of RPAs—remotely piloted aircraft—depending on the location.

  It was hard work, tearing down and then reassembling the birds, but it was well worth it. Scott and his team could sleep on the C-17 en route to the site, secure in the knowledge that he had the best job in the world—and he did it well.

  18

  Being a multimillionaire was much harder than Todd Ackerman had ever imagined. His broken legs had confined him indoors for the past couple of weeks, leaving his already pale skin something akin to veiny typing paper. The neighbor’s dogs were going apeshit about something outside, but he was hiding out, so it’s not like he could call the cops and file a noise complaint or anything. Jacinda at work had called to tell him that two “creepy” Chinese women had dropped by the office the week before to see him. She hadn’t given them his home address, but one didn’t need a government database to find home addresses anymore. Twenty-five bucks and an Internet connection could hook you up with a people-finder database that would sift through reams of public records in seconds, providing a convenient dossier on virtually anyone over fifteen years old—even if you were careful, which Ackerman hadn’t had to be until lately.

  He ran as soon as he ended the call with Jacinda, stuffing a bag full of his laptops, a pile of cash, and a fake Canadian passport under the name Dillon Reese that he’d gotten off the Dark Web. Almost as an afterthought, he brought his ex-wife’s revolver. He’d never shot the damned thing—and he’d have to ditch it before he got on the plane, but it made him feel better to have it in the meantime. The walking boots for his broken legs didn’t exactly make for a speedy getaway, and he had to take one of them off to drive, but that couldn’t be helped.

  Nobody wanted to rent with cash anymore, at least not anywhere that didn’t look like it had vending machines for oxycodone in the lobby. Ackerman used a prepaid credit card—also from the Dark Web and supposedly untraceable back to him—to rent a two-bedroom cottage in a sleepy neighborhood outside Plymouth. He got one with a single floor, since he was still hobbling around on the walking casts. A car he’d borrowed from his neighbor (a deal sweetened with a five-hundred-dollar incentive) was parked out back where snoopy cops couldn’t see the plate. Chinese takeout boxes were piled on the nightstand. It was the perfect place to hide out, except for the damn dogs.

  He’d decided early in his scheme that he would go to New Zealand, and then find some island in the South Pacific where he could just disappear with hot babes, warm winds, and cold coconut water. Air New Zealand online reservations made you enter your passport number, and he’d held his breath earlier that day when he bought the ticket to Auckland. The preloaded credit card under the same name as his passport gave him additional anonymity. He hoped. There was no way to test this stuff without trying it. But it was the best he could do. If all went as advertised, this would be slick. He knew one thing: It was easier to get good quality forgeries when you had the dough.

  Dressed only in loose briefs and a pocket T-shirt, the fifty-two-year-old engineer lay propped against three pillows on the lumpy mattress. He was normally athletic and trim from riding his bike back and forth to work, but almost four weeks of sedentary living from broken legs, and nervous eating from his crimes, had made him doughy and sluggish. He kept the mini-blinds closed and the glowing screen of his laptop illuminated his whiskered face. He flicked through Wikipedia articles—using Tor and a virtual private network—looking at various island kingdoms that might turn a blind eye to a visitor who made substantial investments into the local economy.

  Outside, the dogs fell eerily silent.

  Odd.

  Ackerman held his breath, half hoping they’d start barking again. He reached for the revolver, knocking a half-eaten carton of Mongolian beef off the nightstand. Breakfast. He set the revolver in his lap, in front of the computer keyboard. The sight of it just made him more nervous. This whole thing was turning to shit.

  Noonan wasn’t answering his phone, which creeped Ackerman out as much as the Chinese women who’d come looking for him at his office. It was probably just that the squirrely little dude was scared out of his gourd by this whole affair. Hell, Ackerman was, and it had been his idea.

  The back-door screen rattled, and for a moment he thought he heard footsteps on gravel. He sat up straighter, cursing the walking boots, and hobbled to the window with the revolver in hand. A stiff breeze shook the treetops, making him relax a notch. It was just the wind.

  He stood at the window, peeking out through the blinds and wondering how long this paranoid feeling was going to last. A woman he recognized from down the street walked a little poodle—which accounted for the neighbor’s dogs going berserk. The pulsating ache in his broken bones brought renewed clarity to his situation. People who’d lost the possibility of millions—maybe even billions—of dollars had awfully long memories. He’d be running forever.

  Ackerman and Noonan had become richer than either of them had ever dreamed overnight, if you didn’t count the years spent developing the neural network.

  Ackerman’s goal was a non-player character that would actively move through the game along with the player—a character that was as excited to play the game as its human partner. When LongGame began to explore the game terrain on her own, they realized they had something. She was actively learning. Not merely working toward the win, she was making herself comfortable in her Cloud battlespace, playing because she appeared to want the knowledge that a new game would give her. She was minimizing the unknowns that made her . . . uncomfortable. LongGame appeared to understand that the more she played, the more she learned, and the more she learned, the more perfect—and stable—an entity she became.

  The men and women on the board had once been visionaries, but now they’d turned into Wall Street stooges. The fire in their bellies was hardly even a spark anymore. Barry Fujimoto, the CEO of Parnassus, had pointed out that having a computer play the game for you was no better than cheating. And anyway, having a super-brain computer the size of a desk was one thing. If Ackerman wanted to develop his idea as part of a game, that brain had to be small and portable. Fujimoto wanted the tech developed but said they’d settle on an application later.

  Ackerman had fumed about the CEO’s rebuff for a time, then decided that if someone was going to make money off his creation, it should be
him, not a bunch of stockholders. He hadn’t even intended to cut in Noonan—until a soccer mom in a Subaru Outback crashed into him while he was riding his bike to work and broke both his legs. That bitch had cost him millions—and forced him to bring the Poison Dwarf into the deal.

  Noonan would still have to come back for his family . . . or not. You could get yourself a whole new family for as much money as they had. Ackerman hadn’t told the little bastard about his own plans. Sure, he’d helped with the offshore-banking stuff, but that was just out of self-preservation. If Noonan got himself caught before Ackerman could leave, then everything was toast.

  The back door squeaked again, like someone was pulling it open. It was funny how normal sounds became monster claws when you had a fortune in stolen money chilling in an offshore bank account. He was sure he’d locked the inner door. Hell, he would have nailed every door and window in the house shut if he would have had the tools—fortify himself until he went to catch his flight the next day. No one could possibly know he was here. Surely. Probably. He was just no damned good at being a fugitive.

  He made a shuffling turn, thinking how good the bed would feel on his aching legs—and nearly swallowed his tongue when he saw two Asian women standing in his room. Completely naked but for operating-room-style hair caps, their skin glowed a dusky orange in the light of the bedside lamp. Both women were in their twenties, cut, like they were into CrossFit. He’d read about burglars who went in like that so as not to leave behind so much as a stray bit of thread as evidence.

  In any other situation, Ackerman would have found two naked Asian chicks sneaking into his room exhilarating. Now he fought the urge to throw up.

  He tried to speak but managed little more than a gurgle.

  The nearest one lifted a finger to her lips. “SHHHH,” she hissed, her almond eyes sparkling in the faint glow of the lamp.

  Ackerman’s mouth fell open but no words came out. His ex-wife’s revolver dangled impotently in his fist, the thought of raising it never even crossing his mind. The woman to his left moved toward him, snakelike, expertly kneeing him above the walking boot so he fell to the floor. She wrested the gun from his hand and took a half-step back, looming over him, tilting her head from side to side quizzically, as if to get a better angle.

  “We require the passwords to your computer,” the one who had shushed him said. She was beautiful—but cold, like he imagined LongGame would be if she had an avatar.

  Ackerman tried to push himself up, but the woman who’d tackled him pushed him down with the sole of her bare foot, snap-kicking him in the ribs for good measure. His diaphragm paralyzed, he made futile wheezing attempts to draw a full breath.

  “Stay down,” she said, almost tenderly.

  “I . . . you . . . what . . . do you want?”

  The first woman squatted next to him, arms on her thighs, her knee only inches from his face. He closed his eyes, at once enthralled and terrified at her nakedness.

  “This is very important,” the woman said. “I need you to provide for me all existing copies of Calliope. Your life depends on what you do now.”

  Ackerman groaned as his bladder gave way.

  Like a fool, he babbled an apology.

  “It happens,” the nude woman standing over him said, nudging his face with her toe. Her tiny nails were painted bright pink, incongruous to the blackness of her eyes. How could something so beautiful be so—

  She kicked him again.

  “Calliope?” the squatting one said. She slapped his face. Hard enough that he tasted blood.

  “My . . . partner . . .” Ackerman stammered through the ringing in his ears. “I don’t have any more copies.” He did not mention LongGame.

  The squatting woman flicked her wrist. For the first time, Ackerman caught the bright glint of a blade in her left hand. It was small, a straight razor she’d kept folded in her fist, out of sight until now. His stomach roiled, and he gagged as the truth fell on him like an executioner’s ax.

  The women hadn’t removed their clothes to keep from leaving behind evidence. They did it so as not to soil themselves with his blood.

  19

  Hackers hack other hackers all the damn time,” Gavin Biery said to Ding Chavez over the encrypted cell phone. Chavez had him on speaker so Clark and Adara, who were also in the rented car, could hear. Dom, Jack Junior, and Midas were in the car behind them, driving on Highway 3 out of Boston toward Plymouth. It was late evening and the divided four-lane was a river of taillights. A quick check of Ackerman’s apartment had shown he’d left in a hurry. His coworker had disappeared in Indonesia over something they’d been working on, so it was a safe bet that he was trying to lie low.

  Biery, IT director (and guru) for Hendley Associates and The Campus, continued to explain how he’d found the engineer’s possible location for Ackerman. The guy was spooky-talented when it came to all things computer. Had he been the dishonest type—a black hat—he could have been a millionaire many times over. But he was a white hat of the first order, driven to use his impressive array of skills to help the good guys. He looked for any opportunity to join the others in the field, but he was on the roly-poly side, so Clark and Ding tended to have him conduct his side of the business remotely.

  “It’s a badge of honor,” Biery said. “I mean, who doesn’t want to upload a remote-access Trojan or install a keystroke logger on one of their friend’s computers without them finding it?”

  In the car, a thousand miles away, Ding raised his hand but said nothing.

  “So back to our guy, Ackerman,” Gavin said. “The site he used to buy his fake passport was hacked about three months ago. I’m not finding any phone. I’m betting he used cash to buy a prepaid.”

  “A known fake passport,” Clark said. “So he’ll get caught at Immigration if he tries to travel?”

  “I doubt the authorities have the list,” Gavin said. “I mean, they will after I get it to them, but you have to know to look for it. A little bitcoin will buy you hacked sites on the Dark Web. To make a technical story less so, once I had Ackerman’s fake name, and Dillon Reese is a pretty cool alias, by the way—”

  “Gavin,” Clark prodded—a single word from him usually did the trick to move things along.

  “Sorry, Boss,” Biery said. “Anyway, once I had the alias, I found the prepaid credit card. He thinks he’s anonymous running Tor over a VPN, probably because he wants it to run faster, but that configuration is not nearly as anonymous. Some of the nodes are visible. The VPN host can see his real ISP and—”

  Ding coughed into his hand. “What were you saying about being less technical?”

  Biery heaved a sigh on the other end of the call. “He didn’t cover his tracks as good as he thought. It was short work to find out the specifics of his credit card, and from there, the cottage he’s renting. He used the same card to buy a ticket on Air New Zealand a couple of hours ago. Leaving tomorrow.”

  Adara drove past the address Gavin had given them, stopping a half-block down the quiet street. She wasn’t driving because she was the most junior member of the team in the car. She was a natural behind the wheel. Midas turned at the next intersection and made the block after getting a good look at the cottage, parking at the other end of the street so as not to arouse suspicion from any one group of neighbors.

  The house was dark when they arrived. It was early for Ackerman to be in bed already, so he was likely out somewhere.

  Clark and Adara went to the front door and knocked, looking like run-of-the-mill visitors—standing on either side of the door to keep from catching a shotgun blast in the chest, in case Ackerman was the touchy sort. Ding waited in the car to watch the street. Jack and Dom went to the back and quietly let themselves in while Midas pulled overwatch from their end.

  “One dead.” Jack Junior’s voice crackled over the radio. “Dom and I are clearing the house.” His face was
grim when he opened the door a moment later and let Clark and Adara in the front.

  “Midas,” Clark said. “You stay frosty out there. Ding, get in here.”

  Chavez came in to find Todd Ackerman’s body splayed on the carpet beside his bed. Dressed only in his underwear and a T-shirt, he was still wearing his removable casts. He’d been cut once on each side of his neck, like gills, severing his carotid arteries. Blood on both hands indicated he’d been conscious enough to try and stop the bleeding, awake enough to know he was dying.

  It was a professional hit, with no trace of who or how many assailants. Whoever had killed Ackerman had taken all his personal property, including his computer and phone.

  Ding took out his cell and hit the speed dial for Gavin. He spoke over the radio while he waited for the IT director to pick up. “How we lookin’ out there, Midas?”

  “All clear, Boss,” Midas said.

  Gavin came on the line.

  “Hey,” Ding said. “I need you to get me a list of every site this guy has visited on his computer. Except I don’t have his computer.”

  “I’ll get you what I can,” Biery said. “He’ll tell you where it’s at. You guys have some talent in the persuasion department if I remember correctly. If he tossed it, sunk it in water, did anything short of burn it, I can probably recover some of the data.”

  “He’s not talking,” Ding said. “Ever.”

  “Ah,” Biery said. “So someone killed him and took his computer.”

  Clark gave an absentminded nod, unseen by Biery at the other end of the line.

  “Looks that way,” Ding said.

  “Any sign the killers tore up the house?” Biery asked.