Systematic Seduction

by Ravenna Tate

  He made a soft, sexy, growling sound, then withdrew, pulling off the condom. When he turned her to face him, he kissed her, backing them under the spray once more. They kissed for long, luscious moments as the water cascaded over them, and then Oliver turned off the shower and led her out.

  He dried her like one would dry a child, and then he picked her up again and carried her to his bed. She couldn’t do anything but stare up at him. How did he have the strength to lift her after what he’d just done?

  They lay down, and he snuggled up behind her, wrapping one arm tightly around her.

  “I didn’t even think to ask if you need anything from your place to spend the night.”

  She took his hand. “I have everything I need right here.” Blair smiled and closed her eyes, letting the decadent memories from tonight chase her down into dreams. She never wanted to leave this apartment again.

  He wanted her. He wanted her, in every way. She prayed this was real, because Oliver was the man she wanted to spend the rest of her life with. She knew that as sure as she knew her own name.

  ****

  Oliver woke up to the sound of his phone, but he had no idea where it was. He didn’t want to wake Blair, but when he tried to crawl out of bed quickly to find the phone, he tripped over his shoes and landed on the carpet with a loud grunt.

  “What’s wrong? What happened?”

  Fuck. She was awake now. “My phone is ringing, but I can’t find the fucking thing!”

  She turned on the light and helped him search, finally pulling it from inside his jeans pocket.

  “I’m sorry I woke you, baby.”

  “It’s all right. Who called?”

  He glanced at the screen, then pushed the recall button. “Barclay.” Barclay wouldn’t be calling him this early on a Saturday morning without a damn good reason. When he answered, Oliver explained he hadn’t been able to find the phone right away. “What’s going on?”

  “Sorry I woke you, but I thought you’d want to know this. Sam Preston is still one of your IT team members, right?”

  The hair on the back of Oliver’s neck prickled. “Yes.” Sam had worked for him since before the company moved underground. Before he came to work for Oliver, he had worked at NSSL. Oliver sank onto the mattress, and Blair sat next to him, her face full of worry. “Why are you asking me about Sam?”

  “I know your IT team is monitoring everything from all your employees now, like the rest of us have them doing, but is anyone monitoring the emails and private messages from the IT team?”

  “That would be my job.” Only he hadn’t been as diligent about it as he should have been, because he’d known every single person on his IT team for at least seven years.

  “Yeah. Mine, too, only I’ve been as haphazard about it as it sounds like you’ve been. I don’t know, Oliver. Some days I think we’d all be better off if we fired everyone and started over with new employees.”

  Oliver ran his free hand through his hair. “Fuck.”

  “Are you near your laptop?”

  “No, but give me a second and I will be.” He put down the phone and pulled on his jeans, then glanced toward Blair. “I’ll be right back.”

  She nodded, then he sprinted to his office downstairs and retrieved the machine. He returned to his bedroom, and she handed him his phone. He took a seat at the desk, motioning her over. He trusted her completely. She should hear this, too.

  You trusted Sam, too.

  She shrugged on his shirt, which made him wish they were back in bed, snuggled up together instead. As she pulled over a chair to sit next to him, Oliver opened his laptop, refreshed the browser, then picked up his phone. “Okay. What am I looking for?”

  “Access the database. Liane put the info in there already. She’s the one who called me.”

  The database was on a separate system and was virtually impenetrable. It was now a combination of two databases that used to be separate. The project had been started by Liane, now married to Emmett, so all the Weathermen would have access to the information gathered on suspected hackers. It also contained information as they found it on former NSSL personnel who once had clearance to information on servers stored in silos near what used to be Perryton, Texas.

  The information on those servers would have been necessary for the hackers to change the code on The Madeline Project. The Weathermen had surmised that people with access to this information had passed it along either willingly or inadvertently to the hackers. The location and importance of the silos had never been made public, so there was no other way the hackers could have known where that information was stored.

  “Okay I’m in.”

  “Look at the info on SmartGuy2102.”

  Smart Guy2102 was one of five usernames identified as the hackers that they’d found on Rob Marin’s laptop. There were also thirteen other usernames they were tracking down, because those people had likely given the hackers the necessary information to do what they had done. At least two of those thirteen people had worked on The Madeline Project, based on what they knew so far.

  Earlier in the year, Liane had found the real names of five of the thirteen. They had retrieved the usernames last year from a snippet of conversation on an old weather satellite. She’d been able to uncover the five real names because Valerie Garfield, now engaged to Grayson Jensen, had finally hacked into a website called YDNNTST. The initials stood for YouDoNotNeedToSeeThis, and it was run by one of the hackers, Clyde Medici.

  When Oliver accessed the data on SmartGuy2102, he had a strong urge to punch something. “Son of a bitch. Where did she find this?”

  “She was checking cross references for the thirteen usernames, plus the real names for the ones we know, against the real names and usernames of the hackers we’ve found so far. SmartGuy2102 and SDCowboy, AKA Dante Herrera, who still works for me, worked together at NSSL, but that’s not all. They were in the same high school graduating class and did their undergrad together.”

  “But how did she find out SmartGuy2102 is really Sam Preston?” Oliver did not want to believe it was true. He could not accept the fact that he’d been duped like this.

  “She came across a letter they wrote to the editor of their online university newspaper under their usernames. The letter was in response to an administrative proposal banning the use of specific electronic devices in class, and those two cited freedom of speech and a few other amendments to try to make their point. The editor was so outraged she blasted them, but used their real names in her response.”

  “How did she know their real names?”

  “They likely traced the machine ID the letter came from. Or maybe classmates outed them. Who knows? The letter and her response were eventually retracted, but Liane found the original version.”

  “Fuck. This is fucking crazy. That’s three of us now with hackers on our fucking IT teams.”

  “I know. And if we fire them, we lose all of them. They will alert anyone else involved in this. We’ll lose all the ground we’ve gained and everyone will be in the wind once again.”

  “We don’t have that kind of time.”

  “I know, Oliver. That’s why we haven’t fired the known hackers.”

  Oliver knew that, so he overlooked the sarcasm in Barclay’s voice. They were all pissed off about this, but they were also on the same side. He needed to remember that right now. “We’re paying these fuckers good money and giving them access to inside information.”

  “They don’t have access to this database. They will never have access to it.”

  “Our IT team leads have access to it. What if we find out the last hacker is one of them?”

  “You make a good point but consider this. If InkStain works for one of us and currently has access, don’t you think he or she would have alerted the others by now?”

  InkStain was the remaining hacker’s username whose real identity they hadn’t yet uncovered. “Yeah. True. Sam doesn’t have access to this database. Mindy Tesserone never had access to
it. Neither did Dante. And Clyde never worked for us.”

  “Exactly. There’s only one left to find, and we will track him or her down.”

  “Yeah. We will. I know we will.” Oliver slammed his fist on the desk, making Blair jump. “But I fucking hate this, Barclay. I hate it.”

  Blair touched his thigh, and he gave her a tight smile that probably looked more like a grimace.

  “What do you want to do?” asked Oliver. “Have you told the others?”

  “Not yet. I wanted you to know first.”

  “Let’s wake everyone up. They need to know.”

  Chapter Twelve

  Blair listened to the Weathermen talk about the latest hacker, quickly realizing there was information being shared that impacted not only each of their companies, but pretty much everyone living underground. Coupled with Oliver’s findings that they all had three years at best to survive, the picture was grim.

  She thought about everything they’d gone through in the past seven years, beginning with the shock of having to live in a city where everything was manufactured to look like familiar things, but not to the point they felt real.

  The food they ate was real, but certain items were now so rare that she hadn’t eaten them since moving here. The sun and stars were fake. There was no moon, no rain or snow, and no wind. There were no pets, no flowers unless you could afford them, and no insects. The cars were electric, but most people walked, rode bikes, and traveled between cities by electric trains.

  Everyone knew The Madeline Project had been compromised, and what the end result had been, but only the men on this call and the few people each of them had let into their inner circle knew the whole truth.

  The rest of the people had surmised and guessed for years, and out of that came an endless stream of urban legends and theories about what had really happened. The Internet was littered with them to the point Blair wondered whether most people would believe the actual truth when it finally came out.

  Two hours later, when they ended the call, Oliver pulled her close and held her. “I imagine you have a lot of questions right now.”

  She snorted. “Only a few hundred.”

  “Where should I start?”

  “Are you sure it’s all right with them if you tell me this?”

  “Yes. If I trust you, they will, too.”

  “How about if you summarize it for me. But leave out anything you’re not allowed to tell me.”

  “There’s no reason not to tell you everything at this point, Blair.”

  Such trust had her blinking back tears. “I won’t breathe a word to anyone at work.”

  “I know you won’t.”

  Oliver took her hand and led her to the sofa in the middle of the room. They sat down, and he turned to face her. “It all started when Harper found certain usernames on websites where hackers and weather geeks hang out that were also on the public relations area of Ace’s website that Harper used to monitor in her former role for him.”

  “Her former role? Why did she change roles?”

  Oliver grinned. “That’s a long story. I’ll let Ace and Harper tell you. Suffice it to say she was an analyst for him whose job it was to monitor message boards on various areas of his site, and make sure trolls were kept out, et cetera. When she was moved to his hacker team, she noticed some of the same usernames were on both sites.”

  “The hacker team hadn’t been monitoring the other areas?”

  “No. We all had them doing work on separate systems. It never occurred to us to have them do crossover work. After that, we started building separate teams to do the crossover work, then eventually combined them into one team doing both.”

  “What were the hacker teams looking for originally?”

  “Anything that might give us a clue to who had done this. They looked at message boards, websites, anything they could find. We had bits and pieces of information, but nothing like the break we got once Harper made the connection.”

  “Where does Rob Marin fit in all this? Each of you mentioned his name several times on the video call.”

  “Ah, yes. Rob. He has a convoluted part in this but ended up being the key that broke it wide open. He was on Ace’s hacker team. He got fired when he tried to frame Harper and make it look like she had accessed Ace’s personal files, only Rob didn’t realize the log in the system he broke into couldn’t be erased or altered. Not completely, anyway. It left a footprint he didn’t realize was there, and he was caught.”

  “Why did he try to frame Harper?”

  “That’s part of the long story. But the real break for us came when Harper found one of Rob’s former usernames on her lists.”

  “So he was working for Ace but also involved with the hackers?”

  “Yes. At one point we thought he might be one of the hackers, but it soon became apparent he was only on the fringes. He surfaced again a few months later, this time with two new usernames. Angela’s team discovered those names belonged to Rob by matching machine IDs.”

  “She’s engaged to Dominic Greco, right?”

  “Yes. Then Barclay was lucky enough to be on the surface when he intercepted that data transmission from an old weather satellite. It was a snippet of conversation with one of Rob’s usernames in it, plus eighteen others. All eighteen names were in our database by that time, but we didn’t know any of their real names.”

  “Why were they using a satellite?”

  “We believe they were trying to hide their online conversation because, unbeknownst to us at the time, at least three of us had hackers on our IT teams. I’m sure they alerted the others about all the changes going on at our companies. The new databases that suddenly no one had access to except a privileged few, the way we pushed them to check for IP addresses and machine IDs, and the concentration on finding identities behind specific usernames. We think they were trying to use the satellite as a safe place to talk, but it didn’t work very long for them.”

  “It’s non-operational now?”

  “Yes. Then we caught another huge break when one of the people involved in a construction project Damien’s company was working on turned out to be an online friend of Rob’s. We found conversation that led us to the conclusion Rob had the names of the hackers, as well as information on how they had accessed The Madeline Project.”

  “That’s why you stole his laptop.”

  He grinned. “How did you know we did that?”

  She pointed toward his closed laptop. “The way you all were talking about it. You had obviously looked at the data on it. You wouldn’t have risked simply hacking into it because he’d know you’d done it.”

  “Well done, grasshopper.”

  She laughed, much more at ease now than earlier when they’d all been talking about finding these hackers and administering their own brand of justice before turning them over to Homeland Cyber Security.

  “Before I forget to ask, how are you going to have your crack at these five before HCS does?”

  “I wish I could tell you that, but I can’t. It’s kind of an inside deal that Barclay and Grayson made with their contacts there.”

  She put up her hands. “In that case, forget I asked. Tell me instead what you found on Rob’s laptop.”

  “Let me back up a bit first. Before we decided to steal it, we found out that Rob and his wife, Olivia, tried to blackmail one of Kane’s former employees into hacking into the database.”

  “But you said no one can hack into it.”

  “She didn’t know that, and neither did Rob or Olivia. A woman named Isabelle Sharpe knew Olivia from college, and apparently there’s a video featuring Isabelle that Olivia still has, and that Isabelle wouldn’t want shown around.”

  “Ah, okay. I take it Isabelle never got into the database?”

  “Not even close. HR at Bannerman Investments got the whole story from her before they fired her.”

  “So what did you find on his laptop?”

  “The reason he knows so much, how he met t
he people who have told him so many things, the real names of two hackers, plus real time test dates for The Madeline Project. He got all that from a man named Rafael Torres, who also goes by Ernest Hamilton and William Santiago. Ernest was the foreman on the project Damien’s company financed.”

  “And Rafael knew Rob?”

  “Yes. Rafael’s cousin is Dante, one of the hackers and former researcher at NSSL. Dante and Sam went to high school and college together, and also worked together at NSSL.”

  “Okay. I see the connections. But I still don’t understand why anyone would do this. Why would they hack in and send it on a course of destruction like this? They had to know they’d be forced underground as well. Why did they do it?”

  “They didn’t mean to send it on this course. It was a mistake.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “They fucked up. Once we found Clyde Medici, we also found the website with all the initials.”

  “YouDoNotNeedToSeeThis?”

  “Yes. It’s a forum run by Clyde AKA HeadHonchoYDNNTST. By poking around behind the scenes on that site, we found out that they didn’t mean to send The Madeline Project on a destructive course. It was a coding error. Someone wrote a string of code and stuck it in the wrong place. It instructed the machine to be on autopilot, if you will, instead of keeping it on manual control. Once that was done, they could no longer alter the code. They weren’t able to simply overwrite that string of code. They weren’t able to alter any of the code.”

  “I’m assuming people have tried to hack back in but can’t?”

  “Exactly. That’s the first thing we all tried to do, and others did as well. No one can get in, and no one can alter the code.”

  Blair hugged herself. “Are you saying The Madeline Project is self-aware?”

  “Not exactly. More like it’s stuck in a loop that we can’t override. It keeps doing what it was designed to do, but we no longer have control over when it does it, or how much. Do you know how it was supposed to work?”

  “Yes. It harnesses the earth’s electromagnetic fields and sends controlled pulses to clouds…” She sat up straighter. “Oh holy shit!” Her mind was racing now. “Jesus. It all just clicked, Oliver. I get it now.”