by Ty Patterson
The beast roared inside him and for a moment, threatened to take over. He fought for control, breathing slowly, looking at the screens, allowing the pounding in his blood to subside.
‘What’s that?’ his voice was mild, curious, when he looked at Sebastian. The team head was perspiring but didn’t look scared. He had a neatly-trimmed French beard, brown eyes and a thinning hair on his head.
He looked at the screen and then back to Zeb. His eyes darted to the left, to the right.
‘Here’s what will happen,’ Zeb continued. ‘We’ll ask questions. You’ll deny you know anything. You’ll say you were acting on orders. You’re low level. You don’t know the details.’
He raised his Glock smoothly and shot Vlad in the shoulder. The man screamed. He fell to the floor from the impact and jerked spasmodically, curling his body tightly.
‘He’ll live,’ Zeb told Sebastian who had turned white. ‘A shoulder wound. It’ll heal. But the next round…will go in you and not in your shoulder. So, why don’t we get to the chase?’
The Russian trembled. He looked at his fallen team member and then at the hard faces of the operatives. He jumped suddenly and raced to a waste bin where he threw up. He wiped his lips on his sleeve, opened a bottle of water with shaking hands and drank. His shaking had reduced when he returned to his chair. He sneaked a look at Vlad and then turned to Zeb.
‘I…’
‘Don’t say you don’t know anything, son,’ Bwana filled the room with quiet menace. ‘Don’t do that. Just talk. Tell us everything you know.’
‘It’s…a…program…’ Sebastian nodded jerkily at the screens.
Beth opened her mouth, snapped it shut when Meghan glared at her. Let him talk, the older sister messaged with her eyes.
‘What’s happening…’ his throat bobbed, his voice trailed off. He shrank in his chair when Zeb’s gun hand twitched. He raised his hands defensively and spoke quickly.
‘What you see out there…it does all that.’
Chapter Forty-Nine
None of the operatives spoke. It was a common interrogation tactic, letting silence fill a room, letting it weigh on the interviewee, making him fill it with words.
‘It identifies people who can be manipulated. Tracks them on social media, their internet activities, and when a selection has been made, it goes after them.’
He looked at them to see if they understood. Saw cold, hard faces. He drank from the water bottle again, spilled some of it on his chest. ‘It has backdoor entries to many of the social media platforms. That’s how we can go deeper on the selected men.’
‘Backdoor? How?’ Meghan straightened.
‘Hacked into them. Built tunnels that would give us entry.’
‘You have those skills?’
‘We are the top programmers and hackers in Russia.’ The pride on his face vanished when the sisters looked at him contemptuously.
‘How does this work?’ Broker pointed at the screen. ‘Run this past us, again. You make a broad selection initially?’
‘Da.’
‘Then what happens? Someone narrows that list?’
‘Da. The pakhan.’
‘Tverskoy? He comes here personally to look at this?’
‘Nyet. We message or tell him.’ He looked away.
‘What?’
‘He used to do that before. Now, he leaves it to us.’
He squirmed at the ensuing silence. Found something of interest to look at on the floor.
‘Then what happens?’ Beth asked heavily.
‘Then we send advertisements to those people. Direct social media posts to them. See how they react. Send more content. Remove those who aren’t reacting from the list, add others.’
‘The program does all that?’
‘Da,’ Sebastian nodded vigorously, gaining confidence. This was his domain. It didn’t look like the intruders were going to harm them right away. ‘We just monitor and make improvements to it.’
‘What kind of content do you send their way?’
‘Whatever’s available on the social media platforms, websites that we can email them, robotically.’
‘Examples?’ Beth snapped.
‘Once a man is reacting positively,’ he stared at her shoes, unable to meet her fierce gaze, ‘we send stuff like…ads for guns, stores where weapons can be bought, Neo-Nazi literature, hate speeches….’
‘And the program does all that?’
‘It’s a self-learning algorithm. It’s AI.’
‘My God!’ Chloe burst out, ‘and you built this?’
Sebastian shuddered at the sudden rise in rage in the room. ‘Nyet,’ he stammered. ‘Someone else wrote them. We just modify.’
Them? There are more than one?
Zeb saw it on the twins’ faces. They too picked up on that.
‘How many algos are there?’ Meghan growled.
The Russian didn’t answer.
‘Shoot him,’ the older sister told Zeb, indifferently. ‘There are four others we can talk to.’
Vlad moaned at her words. Alexei sobbed. The remaining team members shrank.
‘WAIT!’ Sebastian yelled when Zeb fingered his Glock. ‘Therearetwoprograms.ContentandList.’ He spoke so quickly that the words sounded like one.
‘Again, slowly,’ Meghan ordered.
‘Two programs. Content and List. We work with List here.’
‘List’s the one that selects people and pumps relevant content?’
‘Da. Content identifies material to be sent to these people. It keeps on adding new sources, finding ways to get to an internet user.’
‘Surely the two programs work together?’
‘Da, but we can only access List and make changes to it.’
Meghan broke off and looked at the screens, a faraway look on her face. Zeb knew that expression. She was toying with an idea.
‘Content does more than send internet stuff, doesn’t it?’
Sebastian’s eyes widened but he didn’t say anything.
‘I bet it sends songs to their headsets…ones that can fuel anger.’
Zeb looked at her. He knew his jaw had dropped. Bwana gasped. Broker stroked his chin and nodded slowly. ‘Why didn’t I think of that?’ Beth muttered to herself, exasperatedly.
‘What do you-?’
Meghan held her hand up to stop Zeb. ‘Am I correct?’ she asked Sebastian.
‘I don’t…Da, Da,’ he said quickly when she took a step forward. ‘Any internet connected device that plays music or movies. Content can drive stuff to it. Music. Movies.’
‘That’s not all, I am sure. It can insert words, lines, phrases, lyrics, to anything out there.’
He blanched. ‘How do you know?’ he whispered.
‘It’s the only way,’ Meghan faced Zeb and the other operatives. ‘I was thinking about it. Just sending hate stuff, sure that’ll make some people go out and kill. And algorithms can do that. Different versions of those that meddled in our elections. But to turn people into killers on this scale? There had to be more. People had to be living and breathing hate. The only way to do that is to feed them not just content they can read but also movies and music. Content, that AI, has got hooks into wireless headsets. Those internet devices that control people’s homes. And I’m sure the program has a dictionary of phrases, words, sentences, that it inserts into audio and visual media.’
She flashed a look at Sebastian who couldn’t help nodding in agreement.
‘You’re telling them everything,’ Eldar hissed at the team leader. ‘The pakhan –’
‘You should worry about us,’ Chloe cut him off grimly. ‘You should be thinking of what you can tell us that will help you live.’
The engineer fell silent. He wiped his forehead and looked away.
‘Who wrote these programs?’ Meghan resumed her questioning.
Sebastian looked at his team members and then back at the operatives. ‘We didn’t,’ he admitted. ‘We were given List when it was ready. The pakhan asked us to wor
k on it.’
‘What about those? What do those mean?’ Bear pointed to the screens, at the three continent labels.
Sebastian turned even more pale. His lips worked but no words came.
‘We might as well tell everything,’ Eldar said bitterly. ‘There are three teams,’ he addressed Meghan. ‘We are responsible for Europe. Another team for Asia and a third for America. Each team maintains its version of List. That’s how we keep track.’
‘This is a game to you?’ Roger hissed, his hands instinctively going to his HK. ‘Y’all keep score on which team kills most?’
‘We’re engineers,’ Eldar replied defiantly. ‘We don’t do any killing.’
‘You’re in a fricking mafia gang. You’ve been doing this shit, destroying lives for long enough. Your hands are just as bloody. You-’
Roger swore? His team rarely did and it was a measure of the Texan’s anger that he had let the curse slip. Zeb stopped him with a look. ‘Where are these other teams?’
‘And who or what is Hyde?’ Broker added.
‘Hyde?’ Sebastian frowned. ‘We don’t know what that is. The other teams…we don’t know where they are.’
‘He doesn’t know anything,’ Bear looked at Zeb. ‘Why should we keep him alive?’
‘WAIT!’ the team leader panicked. ‘One List team’s in Asia, another in the US.’ He looked at Zeb, ‘But we don’t know where exactly.’
‘What about Content?’ Beth asked him.
‘That’s like a master team, the engineers who wrote it. They wrote List too. They too are in the US, separate from the List team in that country. We’ve no idea where any of them are.’
A shadow crossed the glass windows before they could question him further.
‘GET DOWN!’ Zeb yelled in warning and dived to the floor. His HK came up and chattered just as the door burst open. The figure at the door, whose AR15 was up and firing, staggered back from the hail of bullets. His weapon fired harmlessly in the ceiling.
Zeb was moving before the man had crashed to the floor. He brought down goggles over his eyes, raked the windows with his rifle and threw a stun grenade through the shattered glass. More flash bangs as the rest of the operatives followed his cues. The hallway reverberated with explosions and lit up with bright, intense light. Someone outside, screamed in agony.
He crabbed quickly across glass shards and felt a presence behind him.
‘I’ve got you,’ Bear, his eyes on the door. Zeb fast-changed his magazine and snapped a quick glance into the passage.
Five men in the passage. One on the floor. Two leaning against the wall, three others staggering aimlessly, all of them clutching their ears, tears streaming through their eyes.
Zeb crawled into the hallway.
And two of the hostiles spun towards him, their AR15s chattering and then they were shuddering and flailing when he and Bear returned fire, cutting the men down.
Two minutes to check the Russians. None of them alive. All of them from the night shift. He stopped in his tracks when he returned to the computer room and saw the engineers on the floor.
‘All of them, dead,’ Beth said, bitterly. ‘They were our only lead.’
Chapter Fifty
Zeb breathed easily, his face reflecting none of the crushing disappointment he felt. Sure, the engineers had given them vital intel…but they had no names, very broad locations. None of it is actionable.
Broken screens in the room. One of the server racks, leaning dangerously against a wall, its contents spilled to the floor. No bodies. They had been dragged out and dumped far down, in the hallway.
It was still but for the soft breathing of his friends. He looked at the sisters hoping they would come up with a miracle, and then shook his head at himself. He should know better. No mission ever went to plan. He was expecting too much.
Nevertheless, Beth and Meghan turned back to the screens, their fingers dancing over keys, as if they sensed how he was feeling. Broker joined them, his jaw firm, determined.
‘We don’t have much time,’ Zeb warned them. ‘There could be other shooters coming. We don’t know how many Tverskoy’s got in town. Get whatever you can. The rest of us will check out any more shooters. Exfil’s when we return.’
‘Copy that,’ the younger sister answered without looking up.
Zeb went outside followed by Bwana, Roger, Chloe and Bear. They checked bodies and cell phones.
‘No signal, no missed calls,’ he said. ‘These men weren’t warned from those inside.’
‘They must’ve seen the balloons,’ Chloe surmised. ‘Came to investigate. There must’ve been some entry protocol that we don’t know of. That alerted them when they arrived.’
Zeb nodded. There was no other plausible explanation. They split up and went through each room again. No hostiles in any of it. They checked out the front, the back and the sides. No change to the barren farmland around them. They returned to the computer room and sensed a change.
Brighter faces. Beth jiggling that foot the way she did when she had found something.
‘There’s too much here,’ she said, ‘we need to dig into these programs in detail.’
‘You got access?’ Bear asked suspiciously.
‘Keyloggers…and yeah, those dudes hadn’t locked their screens. Probably figured no one else would be at their machines.’
‘We know how awesome you are,’ Roger, holding back his impatience, ‘but can you get to the meat please?’
‘Software engineers, they are a community. They talk to each other, hang out virtually. We figured this team would be in touch with the others. In addition, they got their programs from another team. We figured Sebastian and his people would find a way to communicate with those engineers. And with the teams they compete with.’
‘And?’ Bwana asked with barely restrained impatience.
‘The bad news, first,’ she said, though she didn’t seem unduly concerned. ‘There are no addresses, no names, on any of the machines. At least the ones we looked at.’
‘Don’t these tech people communicate with each other?’
‘They do. But this isn’t a normal office. What they’re working on was criminal. Their comms tool was a realtor’s website.’ She whirled to a screen and brought up an estate agent’s page as they crowded around her. A messaging tool on it.
We’re renovating the lounge. Should be good for viewing in a week’s time, Nevis, USA.
Gotcha. Will call, nearer the date, Cheryl, USA.
More queries from users, replies from Nevis who seemed to be the realtor.
‘We figure Nevis is the Content team, Cheryl was this team in Chernihiv.’ She scrolled down the page and pointed to two more queries. ‘Indoor Girl, USA and Colonel March, USA, are the others.’
‘How did you make that connection?’ Zeb asked after a heavy silence. Bwana and Bear nodded as if they too had the same question. Only Broker had a small, knowing grin on his face.
‘Simple,’ Beth exclaimed. ‘This was one of the two most visited sites on Sebastian’s internet history. Why would a team based in Ukraine be interested in US homes?’
‘I still don’t –’
‘Using such sites for comms is common enough in our world, Zeb,’ she said impatiently. ‘Heck, we’ve used them ourselves.’
‘Yeah, but –’
‘Cheryl is Chernihiv. Indoor is somewhere in Asia, like Sebastian said. Meg and I think they’re somewhere in Indonesia. And Colonel March…somewhere in Colorado.’
More silence, broken when Bear grabbed a chair, turned it around and sat, his chest to its back, the seat creaking under his weight. ‘Talk us through that. Slowly,’ he growled.
‘Jeez,’ Meghan sighed. ‘Alright. There are four users who are the most frequent on this site.’ More scrolling and highlighting of names. ‘All of them have the first three or four letters of Nevis, Cheryl, Indoor, or Colonel. This one, for instance,’ a polished finger nail tapped the screen. Neville. Or this one, Cherelle. Nevis, Nev
ille, all other Nev variations, posted at the same time, which is why we think they’re the same person. The same with the others.’
‘IP addresses?’
‘Nyet,’ she shook her head. ‘No location details.’
‘Tell them about the other stuff,’ Beth’s foot jiggled faster, her face bright with excitement.
‘Sebastian was checking out this,’ Meghan brought up another web page. ‘Recognize the city?’
‘Jakarta,’ Zeb breathed. ‘But…he could’ve been following the Yunus killing.’
‘He wasn’t. Look at that circle, Cakung. That’s not where the killings took place. There’s no link between Yunus and that neighborhood.’
I know that area, Zeb thought. Less development. Higher crime. A cyber-criminal gang could be operating out of there and no one would know.
‘What about Nevis?’
Another web page. A US state they were familiar with.
‘Nevada,’ Chloe hissed. ‘The main team’s there?’
‘That’s what we think. There’s no other reason for Sebastian and his crew to check out these places. We figure they were trying to locate where the other teams were.’
‘These dudes,’ Beth nodded in the direction of the hallway where the bodies lay, ‘They weren’t allowed to go anywhere. No cell phones on them. They played games online to while away the time, but how long can one do that? We think they were trying to find out where the other teams were. It was like a challenge to them.’
‘You said they communicated with the other teams?’
‘Yeah,’ Beth went to a dating site. ‘That’s how they communicated. Chernihiv, Colorado, Indonesia, again similar system. But these messages were less frequent. They were usually just to brag. Saw that killing? That’s down to us. Stuff like that.’
‘There’s something else,’ Beth’s voice was tight when she brought up another screen. Faces and names on it. Two in Britain, three in France and Germany. One in Spain.
‘Are those who I think they are,’ Chloe gasped.
‘Yes. The next killers.’
Chapter Fifty-One
They acted swiftly. Zeb made calls to Alex Thompson, Pierre Gurtin and Eric Schmidt. Passed them the names. Didn’t explain how he’d gotten them. Another call to Clare, to whom he told everything.