Darknet

by Matthew Mather

  “No way,” Eamon replied. “We’re sticking together.”

  “Anna!” Elle screamed, her voice echoing. “Anna, baby, are you here?”

  “Okay, let’s check this floor first.” Jin pointed to a corridor that led to the left.

  They started running across the lobby, but stopped when a loud whirring whined from one of the hallways. A small four-prop helicopter buzzed out of a hallway to their right. They crouched, Eamon raising one arm to shield Elle while getting out and pointing his gun at the drone with his other hand. It ignored them and whizzed through the lobby, circling around to disappear into a hallway to their right.

  “What the hell?” Eamon muttered, still watching the hallway the drone disappeared down. He put his gun back in his pocket.

  Jin nudged him. “Let’s keep moving. Those are delivery drones, I think.”

  They walked past the empty reception desk, looking through the glass walls to the interior courtyard. It was lush, overflowing with palms and flowering plants, and vines hung from the balconies. It was also empty of people.

  “Anna!” Elle yelled, crossing down the hallway to the left.

  They entered a large rectangular office space filled with cubicles, all of them devoid of people.

  Jin pointed forward, and they continued down a hallway toward the back of the building.

  Elle cupped her hands to her mouth. “Anna!” she screamed.

  “Anna!” Eamon yelled.

  Elle was about to call out again, but…

  A shuffling.

  “Mommy?” came a faint reply, barely more than a whisper.

  “Anna!” Elle shrieked.

  “Straight ahead,” Jin said, pointing down the hallway.

  Elle broke into a sprint, pushing past Eamon.

  “Elle, be careful!” he yelled, trying to grab her.

  But she was already running. “Anna, where are you?” she called out.

  She ran and ran, past empty offices, empty corridors.

  “Mommy? I’m here,” came a reply. Louder now.

  Elle burst around a corner.

  And there was Anna.

  Holding a teddy bear. Standing alone in the corridor with one glass wall open to the interior gardens.

  Elle burst into tears and fell to the floor, scooping Anna into her arms. “Baby are you okay, did they hurt you?”

  Anna started crying too, wrapped her arms around her sobbing mother. “I’m okay,” she squeaked. “But I missed you. Where were you guys?”

  Flashing lights, red and blue and white, reflected off the chrome and glass interior of the Bluebridge headquarters. Police cars.

  Eamon knelt down beside them, hugging Elle and Anna. “Come on, we have to go,” he said quietly.

  49

  Department of Homeland Security

  New York

  “So, what, are you the FBI, CIA, SEC, some other three letter acronym…?” Jin looked around the bare concrete room. She inspected the camera pointed at her from the corner of the ceiling, then looked into the one-way glass mirror on one wall. Her second interrogation room in as many weeks.

  “We’re asking the questions, Ms. Huang.”

  “Am I under arrest?”

  “No.”

  “Am I free to go?”

  “No.”

  “Can I call a lawyer?”

  There was a pause this time.

  “You only need a lawyer if you’re hiding something.”

  “That doesn’t answer my question.”

  “It’s funny you should say that, because that’s exactly what we need.”

  “What?”

  “To get some answers to our questions.”

  Jin shifted in her metal chair. It was bolted to the ground. Elle, Eamon and herself had been arrested after finding Anna. The police had been watching Bluebridge headquarters.

  “We’re trying to protect you, Ms. Huang.”

  “Trying to protect me?” Jin laughed at Special Agent Thomas. “You want to protect me?”

  A few weeks ago and she would have been trembling in fear. Now, she felt defiant. She wanted to laugh at them. They were the ones that had no idea what they were dealing with. She was the one with the knowledge.

  Agent Thomas opened a file on the metal desk that was bolted to the floor. “You were arrested in July four years ago for four counts of wire fraud, two counts of computer fraud and one count of illegally intercepting a wire communication.”

  “That was a misunderstanding. The company I was working for asked me to do some intrusion tests—”

  “And the terms of your release by Judge Atlee indicated that you were restricted from using networked computers in America for a period of five years.”

  “It’s my constitutional right to have access to computers.”

  This was one the agents hadn’t heard before. “And how’s that? Not sure the Founding Fathers mentioned computers.”

  “The Second Amendment, the right to bear arms. The most powerful weapons to fight oppression aren’t flintlocks anymore. Bits of code, Perl scripts—if the Founding Fathers were around today, that’s what they’d want protected under the Second Amendment.”

  Agent Thomas slammed closed the file folder on his desk. “Let’s get something straight. We know it was Sean Womack who paid for the lawyers who got you off four years ago. And we know Mr. Womack was a close associate of Jake O’Connell.”

  “If you know so much, why are you asking me questions?”

  “Because Sean Womack is dead, and Jake…well now we can’t talk to Jake either, can we?”

  “What happened?” Jin sat up in her chair. “What happened to Jake?”

  Both officers remained silent.

  “Ms. Huang, we know there were other people in that room, who were they?”

  Agent Sears sat on the side of the table and looked Jin straight in the eye. “More importantly, where are they?”

  ▲▼▲

  “Double mocha latte, no fat,” said Wutang to the girl behind the counter.

  “Do you even know what’s in those things?” Sheldon sniggered. “Why don’t you just get a coffee?”

  “I like sweet stuff when I get nervous,” Wutang replied, handing over a ten-dollar bill. “Bad habit.”

  Sheldon nodded at the girl behind the counter. “Another regular coffee, please.”

  “Put it on my bill,” Wutang added. “My turn this time.”

  Five hours they’d been waiting here. They’d left the apartment building early in the morning so Jake could set his trap. He was working with Sheriff Ralston, whose men had been watching Cormac Ryker as he planned what he must have thought was his own trap.

  Jake had used himself as bait.

  To be on the safe side, he didn’t tell Ralston about Sheldon and Wutang. Sheldon was pretty sure the old sheriff knew Jake wasn’t working alone, but Jake and Ralston had a history together, some bond Sheldon didn’t quite understand. Like a father, or an uncle.

  At noon, all hell broke loose. Police cars and fire trucks still ringed the building, but the ambulances were gone. The police had carted out stretchers and body bags, people in handcuffs. Sheldon ran over, trying to see something, anything that would indicate the outcome. The police kept everyone back, saying it was some kind of gang fight. One with casualties. Sheldon would have insisted and run under the tape, but he couldn’t risk it.

  Something more important was going on.

  In addition to the message pinpointing Anna’s location, they received a second one. Login credentials. For Bluebridge.

  Jin had immediately run off to help find Anna, racing up the East Side Highway on the motor bike she’d recovered from Union Square to meet Elle and Eamon. She’d insisted Sheldon and Wutang should be the point people for Bluebridge, in spite of Wutang’s objections.

  So Wutang and Sheldon had settled in for the long haul at a coffee shop across the street, opening their laptops and logging into the Bluebridge network. Whatever Jake did, whatever deal he made—it
seemed to work. For now. Sheldon had patched in Dean to make the connection with MOHAWK, and then downloaded the old Bluebridge core, using his super-user access to start overwriting the system directories.

  Sheldon and Wutang didn’t have phones that connected into the cellular networks. Too risky, even turned off. So they used voice-over-IP only, devices communicating through the WIFI, setting up their own secure end-to-end encryption. A hundred gigabytes needed to be transferred through the linchpin of the coffee shop’s wireless at 1.3 Mbps. It would take five hours for that much data to transfer securely over the connection.

  That whole time, they’d completely swamped the data stream in and out of the coffee shop. Sheldon had hacked the router to give them priority. There wasn’t even enough bandwidth left for him to make and receive calls himself. Customers were complaining, and the employees had called tech support. But Sheldon would be gone by the time they got here.

  He hoped.

  As he took their steaming coffees back to their table, Sheldon’s computer pinged.

  He sat. “It’s done. The file transfers are complete.”

  “The key is money in your pocket, isn’t that what Sean told Jake?” Sheldon said to Wutang. He sat beside him, both of them staring at the screen, the login cursor for Bluebridge flashing, waiting for instructions.

  Sheldon’s hand trembled.

  Sitting in this tiny coffee shop, he was about to take over a trillion dollar global empire.

  “What do we do?” Wutang asked.

  Sheldon’s nerves calmed. He cracked his knuckles and smiled at Wutang. “Time to turn this ship around.”

  SEPTEMBER 2nd

  Friday

  50

  Department of Homeland Security

  New York

  Sixteen hours in this interrogation room. How long could they keep her?

  Jin ached from sitting in the chair. Her head throbbed. No idea what was happening. Exhausted. She’d expected to hear from Jake or Wutang or Sheldon by now.

  But nothing.

  “You came into the United States under false documentation,” Agent Sears said. He’d stayed in the room with her all night, needling her for information.

  “You can’t deport me,” Jin replied. “I’m a US citizen. Born and raised in Boston, as American as apple pie and baseball.”

  “But you can go to jail. Section 1028 of Title 18 of the USC gives up to fifteen years in prison for using false documents to enter a port or defraud the government. With your prior, plus the evidence we have of you hacking into government databases, you could be looking at twenty years to life.”

  The defiant expression on Jin’s face slackened. She closed her eyes. “What do you want to know?”

  “There was some sophisticated radar sniffing gear in the Two Bridges apartment. How do you explain that?”

  “I have no idea what that stuff is.”

  “So you’re sticking to your story?”

  “Officers, I honestly don’t know what’s going on. If you’re not charging me with anything right now…” Jin held up her hands. “What are we here for, really?”

  Agent Sears nodded at Agent Thomas, who nodded back. “We think the Bluebridge Corporation is behind a slew of digital autonomous corporations that have flooded the internet, impersonating humans. This is a brave new world we’ve been thrust into, Ms. Huang, and we’re trying to protect it.”

  So the feds had some idea after all. “So what are you guys?” Jin asked. “The Turing Police? Hunting artificially intelligent escapees in cyberspace?”

  “Only ones that break the law.”

  Jin couldn’t believe Agent Sears managed to say it with a straight face. “Are you serious?”

  “We know you were appointed to the Board of Directors of Bluebridge Corporation this morning.” Special Agent Thomas pulled out a paper and held it in the air. “Whatever game you think you’re playing, this is dangerous. You don’t know who or what you’re dealing with.”

  It was the first Jin heard of it. Maybe Jake’s crazy gamble had worked. “You’ll have to talk to Mr. Henry Montrose about that.”

  Agent Sears laughed. “Are you kidding?” He sat on the desk in front of Jin. “You’re not getting out of here. With your arrest record, we now have you on wiretapping, conspiracy to—”

  “No you do not!” a voice thundered from the hallway. The door to the interrogation room swung open.

  Jin could hardly believe her own eyes.

  It was Henry Montrose. He pushed his way into the room, followed by four men in suits. She assumed they were lawyers. “Take those handcuffs off Ms. Huang right now.”

  “Who the…” Special Agent Thomas started to say, but then he recognized Montrose and stuttered to a stop.

  One of the lawyers opened a briefcase on the desk. “You have been holding my client, Ms. Jin Huang, illegally for nearly a day without granting her a lawyer. Release her now. We’ve filed a motion that everything in this interview be suppressed.”

  “What?” a dumbfounded Agent Sears asked.

  “Our client was not read her Miranda rights upon arrest.” The lawyer handed the papers to Special Agent Sears.

  Agent Sears scanned the document, and then reread it. Somebody had a video recording of the arrest. “Goddamn it,” he muttered, but he fished the handcuff keys out of his pocket.

  “All charges have been dropped,” Henry Montrose said, stepping forward to put a hand on Jin’s shoulder while Agent Sears uncuffed her. He looked Jin in the eye. “This has all been a huge misunderstanding. It was a rogue computer system that got way out of control. I’m sorry, Jin. I’ll be assuming full responsibility.”

  “Let’s go, Ms. Huang,” said the lawyer who’d handed the papers to Agent Sears. “Now.”

  Jin got up, wringing her wrists. She didn’t need to be told twice.

  “It is only through the actions of this young woman,” Jin heard Henry Montrose say to the agents as she left, “that we’ve been saved. You should be commending her, not arresting…”

  ▲▼▲

  Sitting alone together in the interrogation room, Agent Sears looked at Agent Thomas. “What the heck just happened?”

  “We got railroaded, that’s what happened.”

  Agent Thomas studied the court documents in his hands. All charges against the O’Connells were dropped, everything signed by a Federal judge that morning. The papers included a sworn statement from Sheriff Ralston saying that he wasn’t going to press charges against Jake O’Connell, if that even mattered anymore. “We have Ralston getting assaulted by O’Connell on video, and the sheriff was eager enough to hunt him down yesterday. How the hell did they get to Ralston so quickly?”

  “I don’t know. I checked out Sheriff Ralston. Clean as a whistle, even led the anti-corruption division in the Albany police force for ten years.”

  “At least they got that nut job Cormac Ryker.” They had twelve murders linked to him. He’d died in the fall down the stairwell shaft.

  Thomas and Sears collected their files. It was a long day for them, too.

  “I don’t get it, this Sheriff Ralston.” Agent Thomas shook his head. “I guess you can buy anyone these days.”

  ▲▼▲

  Jin followed the lawyers out of the DHS/NYPD building at 1 Police Plaza and looked up at the Two Bridges apartment buildings in front of them. She saw the window of the apartment where they’d spent the last week, clearly, on the top floor. Behind her, Henry Montrose came out of the building with the lawyers. A black limousine was parked at the curb.

  The driver waved her over, holding the back door open.

  Jin slid inside to find Wutang and Sheldon sitting on polished black leather seats opposite her. They had grim expressions on their faces.

  “You okay?” Wutang asked. “Did they hurt you?”

  “No, I’m fine,” Jin replied.

  A second later, Montrose slid into the seat facing them. The door closed with a solid ka-chunk.

  “What’s wrong
, Wutang?” whispered Jin. “Sheldon? What happened? Where’s Jake?”

  Wutang looked like he was going to cry. Sheldon’s face was impassive. Glancing at Henry Montrose, Jin felt fear bloom inside her. Had they miscalculated? Had they jumped from the frying pan into the fire?

  As the limo pulled away from the curb, Wutang burst out laughing, joined by hoots of laughter from Sheldon. He wiped tears from his eyes. “You should see your face!”

  “What?” Jin was stunned. Had they lost their minds? She glanced at Henry Montrose, but now he was the one who looked like he was about to cry.

  “I’m never doing that again!” Henry Montrose blurted, his face crimson. “It’s one thing to do a charity ball, but deceiving federal officers? I could go to jail for the rest of my life.” His hands trembled. “Never again, no matter how much money.”

  “Relax, Frankie.” Sheldon reached forward and grabbed his arm. “You won’t have to. You did great.” He looked at Jin. “And if you haven’t figured it out, this isn’t Henry Montrose. This is Frank. He body doubled for Montrose for years, but quit when things got weird. I tracked him down bartending in Yellowknife last night, flew him in on the Bluebridge private jet this morning.”

  “Something wasn’t right about that place.” Frankie reached for a bottle of whiskey in the side cabinet of the limo and poured himself a glass.

  “I think this calls for champagne, no?” Sheldon sat and reached into an ice bucket. “And don’t worry,” he added, pausing once he’d fished out a bottle of Cristal, “Jake’s okay. Or at least, he’ll be okay. A few broken bones, concussion, but he’s awake this morning.”

  “Is Elle okay? Anna?” Jin asked, looking back and forth between Sheldon and Wutang.

  “Everyone’s fine, all released this morning.” Sheldon popped the cork of the champagne. It bubbled over, and Wutang grabbed some glasses. “We’re going to the hospital now. They’re waiting for you.”