The Cost of Being Special (Survival of the Fittest Book 1)

by Shawn Keys

  Claire saw the look on his face. She believed it enough that her hands darted into the air. Aghast, she blurted out, “What are you doing? This is the FDPC office! There… there’s nothing here worth stealing! And…” She waved around her. “There are security cameras everywhere! You aren’t even wearing masks! You’re…” She grasped for the right words. “You’re crazy!”

  Kyle chuckled, and he had to admit they weren’t looking like the best of criminals right about then. For once, their notoriety was working in their favor. “I’m disappointed you don’t recognize me, Ms. Erinson. If you did, you’d understand that it really doesn’t matter. The FDPC already wants me dead. Who cares if I rob them too?”

  Claire’s eyes went flinty hard, sparks of anger coming off her. “The FDPC doesn’t want anyone dead! Whatever activist group you are from, how dare hurt what we are trying…” Somewhere in her rant, she ended up recognizing him. “…Kyle Hutchings?”

  Kyle smirked. “There it is. Going to change your tune now? For not wanting anyone dead, the FDPC has been doing a damn good job of trying for the last 24 hours. I’m not with any activist group. I’m here to get some answers. And you’re going to help.”

  “I’ll do no such thing!” Her momentary surprise faded back into professional anger. “What are you doing, young man? You were declared negative just over a day ago! Your whole world is huge with possibilities! Now you’re going to end up in jail!”

  Kyle sighed. “Probably. That would be better than a grave.”

  He paused as the door opened behind them. Dazz and Laura entered, locking the deadbolt behind them. Laura had her own weapon drawn, escorting Dazz as if she was the other girl’s bodyguard. Doing a last check of the parking lot, they pulled the shades and came into the central area to stand with the others.

  Claire recognized Dazz instantly from the news. “You! Oh my goodness, you…”

  Dazz flashed her a fierce glare. “Yeah. Me. The one whose parents were murdered by your agent-friends. You should be scared.”

  Claire’s face was a frantic mix of emotion. She still wanted to object that the FDPC couldn’t possibly be involved. That was blended with real fear at being near a dangerous fugitive. “I don’t know what you’re talking about!”

  All of them were staring at the woman, doing their best to read her body-language. This had been part of the plan. They needed to know how far this conspiracy went. So far, Kyle was unhappily worried that they were about to hit a dead-end. This woman doesn’t feel like any sort of criminal mastermind.

  He projected his gun again, hoping to get her attention. “What do you do around here?”

  Claire wasn’t immune to the threat of having a gun pointed at her. She stammered, “I…I r-run the tests! I’m the one who looks for the markers. I found out you were negative! I remember your face from the file. That’s all!”

  Frowning, he asked, “Though you were some sort of computer expert.”

  “W-what? N-no! I… I know a little more than most. We’re a small outfit. Not enough males turn 20 in this area to need anything more. We all have a few secondary jobs. I’m the sys-admin for everyone, but… but I only know enough to check a few things. Then I call central tech support!”

  That made Kyle nervous. He glanced at Dazz. “Is that enough?”

  Dazz shrugged. “Depends on how much she actually knows.”

  Claire objected, “I don’t know anything!”

  Laura smirked at her from the side. “Well, we’re about to find out.”

  Kyle appreciated her devotion to the mission, but the fiery red-head was looking a little too eager to turn this into a session with ropes, clamps and fingernail pulling. He asked, “Can you and Danielle take look-out? We have no idea when those agents might stop by.”

  The two nodded, heading back for the outer area.

  Kyle fixed his eyes once more on Claire. “But she isn’t wrong. You’re going to help us. I think you see we aren’t in the mood for games.”

  Claire pleaded, “I don’t understand. The only thing here that’s confidential are the genetic records! And there’s nothing to tell! Half the population know who is negative by looking at their phones. And you are the most recent!”

  Kyle gritted his teeth. “What about Bret Herald?”

  The scientist closed her eyes in pain. “That was a huge tragedy.”

  Kyle frowned deeper. “Your agents killed him, too!”

  “After he shot at them! He was trying to hide the fact that he was having a child with his cousin and the whole thing became a huge mess!”

  The story came out with an earnestness that felt real. Kyle demanded, “And what did they say about their move on Dazz’s place? Why’d they say they had to kill the Simmons?”

  Claire trembled, wanting to wave her arms or pace back and forth or expend some sort of energy, but she was frozen by the gun pointing at her. “They didn’t!”

  Dazz was about to storm in on her, but Kyle held her back. Instead, the punk-goth woman snarled past newfound tears, “Your precious agents gunned them down before they even had a chance to beg for their lives!”

  Claire shook her head, totally aghast at the suggestion. “No. No! That… that isn’t what they reported at all! They found them dead. They heard Mr. Hutchings might be hiding out at your place when your implant signal went dark. They showed up to find the whole place ransacked.”

  Kyle whistled. “They must have tossed your house, Dazz. Made it look like a robbery. Then they called the police in to see it like that to cover their tracks.”

  Dazz gnashed her teeth at Claire. “And how do we know she isn’t covering for them? Are you that cold-blooded that you can stand here and lie to me about this? Are you?”

  Tears were welling up in the back of Claire’s eyes now. “How can you say such awful things? I’ve never done anything to you!”

  Kyle tilted his head. “Careful, Ms. Erinson… Claire. How about I call you Claire? Maybe that will help calm things down.” Time for the good cop angle? Dazz is certainly taking care of the bad cop side, even without the gun. “You weren’t there. We were. We are not hallucinating. We’re not imagining things. Whatever else people are saying about us, that doesn’t change the fact that we heard the gunshots and fought our way past your two agents to get away. This isn’t a theory. I can describe them. I see their fucking pictures on the wall over there!” He stabbed his other hand not holding the gun at the four photos of the local team, put up on the wall in an effort at team cohesion that had never really materialized. So much for ‘good cop’, Kyle chastised himself, grabbing a hold of his temper.

  Claire darted her eyes from one to the other, not seeing any safe person to whom she could appeal. “I don’t know what you want from me. I would never want anything to happen to you. To anyone! We’re trying to rebuild the population, not kill people. You have to believe me!”

  Kyle saw his opening. “No. We don’t. And we aren’t going to.” Before Claire could panic, he added, “We’re going to trust your computers.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Kyle tossed his head at Dazz. “She’s good with them. Really good. You’re going to open the way for her. She’s going to scour your system and find out if the FDPC is hiding a dirty little secret.”

  Claire gawked at him. “I can’t do that! The damage –”

  Kyle cut her off, “– We’re not the ones causing any damage. Plus, I’m not exactly giving you much of a choice. I don’t care if you believe us. You could be part of this. If you try to stop us, well then, I guess we’ll know. But if you want to find out the truth about what is going on, then you’ll help us.”

  Claire glanced around, her gaze hovering on the few computers scattered around. “I’m… not sure what…”

  Dazz stepped in. “Which ones are the agents’ computers? I could demand to see yours, but we don’t have all night. If you really are pure as the driven snow, then nothing on your box is going to tell us squat. I know those two are dirty.”

/>   Claire pointed toward the sectioned-off space that functioned as the agents’ office. “Those two there. But I don’t know their passwords!”

  Dazz snorted. “Heaven save us…” She drifted off, letting the insult die. “Come with me. Do you remember your administrator password?”

  Claire wasn’t totally lost. “The one that tech support asks me to use?”

  Dazz tried not to be condescending. Considering she still thought Claire might have helped murder her parents, she didn’t try very hard. “Yes, that would be the one.” She shifted over to the nearest of the indicated computers. Claire went with her, goaded by Kyle’s less-than-compromising glare. She was still buying into his threat. “Enter your credentials. It’ll give you super-user access and let you see their email and personal files.”

  Claire looked close to rebelling. But their adamant claims and the threat of the gun broke past her reservations. She tapped in the information and access was granted.

  Dazz rolled her away with a push on the chair, then crouched quickly in front of the computer.

  Claire objected, “Hey!”

  Kyle decided a little more ‘good cop’ might be in order. “Sorry. Look, we’re all on edge here. We have no idea where the agents are, and we don’t want to be here when they come back.”

  Claire groused, “You don’t have to worry. They said they were going to be questioning witnesses and then headed home.”

  Kyle frowned at her. “We’ve already covered this. They might not be telling you as much as you think, Claire. Honestly, I’m hoping that’s true. You seem like a lovely woman, and I’m sorry we’ve had to put you through this. If you’re being straight with us, we’re going to walk away and let you do whatever you think you have to do. Like I said, we aren’t concealing our identities or anything.” He paused. “What witnesses?”

  Claire shrugged, looking miserable, not liking her options. “I don’t know. Wherever you might have vanished to.”

  That gave Kyle a bad feeling. He couldn’t chase it down. Not here. Not when he couldn’t allow himself to be distracted. But that gut feeling was back. The one that had saved his life a couple times before. He felt like he was vulnerable and didn’t even know how.

  By then, Dazz had slashed through a lot, but wasn’t finding what she wanted. “This is all normal traffic. Who is this ‘Sayers’ woman?”

  “Our supervisor at Division. She’s a field agent herself. You can’t suspect her of anything! She received a medal for her work in making north-west operations more efficient!”

  That didn’t impress Kyle at all. Innocent or not, some of her so-called efficiencies might have let these agents operate under her radar. “Nothing at all, Dazz?”

  She grumbled, “No. Nothing that isn’t part of everyday work. Can’t see anything in this file structure that looks suspicious. Memos. Reminders. Oh, just a sec… hold on…” She clicked on a certain file folder that was named ‘ * ’ and nothing more. That in itself was weird. It was hiding in plain sight, hoping it could be avoided. “This was accessed as recently as this morning, and the files in it are huge.” She searched for a program to open them. When that failed, she opened a few background command prompts to ping the activity around them.

  Claire leaned in, unable to help her own curiosity. Kyle let her, seeing no reason to hold her back as long as she wasn’t trying to stop them. Seeing this could only help her believe. “Those have to be genetic files, given how big they are.”

  Kyle asked, “Is it normal that the agents would keep copies of them on their own personal drives?”

  She sounded confused. “No. But… these aren’t the same file type as the ones I analyze. The sizes are large, but they’re not right either. I’ve worked on enough of them to know that. I have no idea what these are, but the only information we handle here that takes that much room are genetic analyses.”

  Dazz piped up, “She’s right. These programs are making calls to other ones on the network; the ones the doctor here created in the course of her work. These aren’t copies, but they are comparing themselves to the Doctor’s work. If these agents are involved in some other kind of investigation, that’s probably why they are here in the first place. Otherwise, they could stay secret on a different system. They had to have them on here so these files could talk to hers.”

  Kyle grimaced. “But you can’t read them?”

  Dazz scowled. “The whole process is automated. A prompt comes in from their arm computers… see that? That’s the inbound feed. Huge amount of information gets dumped in. A file gets created, then merges with the genetic files created by Erinson. It does its thing, whatever that is, and then spits out this output file.” She banged her fist on the desk. “But there isn’t any sort of reader program to open it here.”

  Kyle asked, “Can you see where they put it?”

  She nodded. “An answer gets shunted back to their arm computers. They must have an app to read the results there. That file is small. Probably just a ‘negative or positive’ result. Maybe a few details. The only time the larger files get sent anywhere is as an attachment using a web-mail server.” Working fast, she opened the internet browser and jumped to the address. She ran into a wall. The login screen for something called ‘Task Mail’ had come up.

  Kyle saw the problem. “That isn’t part of the FDPC system, is it?”

  Claire answered first, “I’ve never heard of it before.”

  Dazz added, “Neither have I. And I know pretty much all the standard webmail systems. This is something private. But it’s outside the normal system. Her administrator privileges don’t have any access.”

  “Could they have caught the password the agent entered?”

  “Not unless it was set to capture them ahead of time.” She drummed her fingers, then pushed off her knees. She shuffled past Claire, saying with some annoyance, “Out of the way, you.”

  Claire tried to keep clear of the animated, irritated woman.

  Kyle was seriously beginning to think Claire didn’t know anything. She was looking more confused than anything. Shadow files piggy-backing off her own work. A strange web-mail server being accessed when the agents had a perfectly good internal system on the desktop to conduct official business. None of that made sense. It could be innocent; maybe this agent was using this to talk to their family. Maybe they were hitching one of those ‘learn your family history’ things to Claire’s work, filching the deep analysis for their own private side-business. That wouldn’t be cool, maybe even illegal. But not a reason to kill.

  Dazz flashed up the other computer, talking as she did it. She entered the administrator password herself, having already memorized it from Claire’s keystrokes. “Whose computer is that first one?”

  “Agent Jill Niles.” Claire didn’t think it worth hiding the identity when their names and pictures were up on the wall.

  “And this one?”

  “Jack Lawson.”

  Dazz nodded, happy to put names to faces and the work she was seeing. “I’m hoping to get lucky.”

  Kyle asked, “What do you mean?”

  Dazz was already opening the net browser. “Jill clearly hasn’t checked any ‘auto-fill’ functions. A lot of people do that on their own private systems. You open your webmail, and ‘bang’, you’re already in your inbox. A few browsers capture that stuff without asking, and you have to turn it off. Niles did. She has to enter her name and password every time. But if Jack thinks this computer is secure and only used by him, and if he is just a little lazier… ah hah!”

  The ‘Task Mail’ screen went instantly into an entry screen, then popped up a unique but unmistakable view of a typical web-mail program. Inbox. Sent. Trash. It wasn’t incredibly robust, created for simplicity rather than huge additional functionality.

  Unfortunately, the only reason they knew what they were looking at an email program was because of the format. It looked like a web-mail program. It was obvious. But the language was totally incomprehensible.

  Kyle
squinted at it. “Is that encrypted?”

  Dazz shook her head. “No. Well, not by a computer anyway. What is this? I don’t recognize this language at all.”

  Kyle didn’t either. He wanted to guess it was Aramaic or Latin or another of the dead languages, but that’s only because it looked old to him. He didn’t really have an educated guess. “I have no idea.”

  Dazz brushed a finger over the USB ports on the computers, smiling to see that they were covered and sealed permanently. “Nice touch. I definitely think getting through the FDPC firewalls would have been horrible. But I’m already inside. Breaking out is far easier.” She entered a few more commends, and soon had a cloud-portal open to one of her own online storage bins. A few commands later, and she was dumping the entire contents of the Jack’s ‘Task Mail’ into the other spot.

  Kyle asked, “Got what you need?”

  Dazz said, “Give me a second. I’m going to see if I can set it up so I can read his mail from now on.” She cracked open her own laptop and tried to enter the ‘Task Mail’ address. It came back as a ‘nul search’. She frowned, then tried a few more brute force ways of getting to the telnet address. Nothing produced anything more than an error screen. “Damn. They’ve connected it to the source computer. He can access it from here. Maybe from his own personal laptop. But it won’t even let me see it.”

  Kyle sighed. “Couldn’t hope for everything. This is a good start. Close it up and let’s get the hell out of here.” He looked back to Claire. “Convinced yet?”

  The scientist gestured at the open mail system with its strange language, “I have no idea what that is!”