by Ravenna Tate
“It harnessed the earth’s electromagnetic field and concentrated the pulses into targeted clouds, at varying times and strengths. The programmers were working on adjusting those particulars to achieve the results they wanted when the program was hacked.” He frowned, staring at her computer screen. “Why?”
She moved the screen so he could read the conversation. “Because I found out how Rafael and Rob met. They were debating the possibility of the very concepts you just explained to me.”
Chapter Fourteen
Barclay resisted the urge to call all of the Weathermen now. He knew it would be better to wait until he had the chance to finish reading everything Rafael and Rob had said to each other in the past ten years. About two hours into their work, neither one could keep their eyes open, so they returned to Barclay’s bedroom.
Rissa lay on her side, and Barclay molded his body against hers from behind and wrapped his arms around her. He could get used to this. Very used to this. As he finally drifted off to sleep, he let images of Rissa living here with him fill his mind. The same images chased him down into dreams.
****
Tuesday morning, Barclay crawled out of bed slowly so he didn’t disturb Rissa’s sleep, still smiling from the erotic dreams he’d had about her. He went down to his office to make sure his company was still standing. He’d emailed everyone who needed to know where he was, and told them it was likely he’d be working from home all week.
Then he emailed all the Weathermen and told them the same, and outlined the plan he and Rissa had made to go through everything on Rob’s laptop. He was relieved not to hear that Rob had caused any trouble yet. Barclay had no doubt he would eventually, but he prayed it would be after they’d had a chance to sift through all this data.
About an hour into his work, Rissa came downstairs, looking good enough to eat in jeans and a t-shirt. She was barefoot, which nearly drove him back upstairs with her. “Did you sleep well?” he asked.
“Better than I have in years.”
He kissed her. “It’s all the sex.”
Her sweet giggle drove his willpower straight to the edge. “If only we could bottle that and sell it to cure insomnia.”
“No way. I’m keeping that secret to myself.”
She eyed the open laptops. “Speaking of secrets, we have more important matters than curing the world’s insomnia.”
“Yes, we certainly do. How about some breakfast?”
As if on cue, Sandra poked her head into the office and asked if they wanted something to eat. He really needed to ask her to keep some distance now that Rissa was here. Barclay was used to her hovering, but he knew it unnerved Rissa.
“Please,” said Barclay. “And coffee. Lots and lots of coffee.”
****
Wednesday morning, Rissa found a text from Mindy that she almost showed Barclay.
Why haven’t you been at the office? You should hear the gossip going around the teams. Word has it you and the CEO are working on something top secret. What’s going on?
She debated nearly an hour while Barclay was still sleeping. It was easy to imagine that by now it the gossip machine had circulated the fact she was working with him on a project. So why did this text message bother her so much? Was she merely being paranoid because of all they’d learned from Rob’s machine?
Finally, she saved the message instead of erasing it, just in case. She was composing a neutral answer to Mindy in her head when Barclay woke up, and Rissa decided to wait for a better time to bring it to his attention and ask his advice before texting Mindy back. This was too important of a project to risk gossiping about.
She was so busy the rest of the day and into Thursday that she forgot about Mindy’s text message.
****
By Thursday afternoon, he and Rissa had finished reading the first six years’ worth of messages, and by that time Barclay was so wired he might as well have ingested the coffee intravenously. He and Rissa had worked non-stop through Tuesday and Wednesday, eating all their meals in his office. They’d barely slept Tuesday or Wednesday night, so not only was Barclay over-tired, he was horny as hell.
They opened up a new document, and Barclay went back over what they’d read the past two days, rattling off highlights while Rissa typed. His idea before they went forward was to organize all the information into manageable chunks he could then attach to an email.
They’d quickly realized this was too much data to give to the others in pieces. There was no rhyme or reason to it so far other than the time stamps. Unless they could make sense of it, it wasn’t useful.
The amount of data in the private conversations alone was staggering. Would they find this much on the rest of Rob’s hard drive? Barclay was still blown away by how rewarding this venture had proven to be.
“I want to organize my thoughts before I send all this to them.” He’d said that about ten times in the past hour, but couldn’t seem to stop making that point.
“You’ve had six emails from them in the past two hours.”
He paced around the office, printed conversations in his hands. “I know. They want to know what’s going on.”
“So tell them.”
“It’s still too fractured. They’ll start asking questions I can’t answer yet, and then we’ll end up veering off course to find what they want to know.”
“We aren’t done with all the years yet. It might be next week before we’re ready to give them a list of bullet points. Tell them that much at least so they have a time frame.”
He nodded. “Yeah. Okay. Good idea. I’ll do that.” He glanced at the sheets. “Next bullet. Rafael is his real name. The other two are aliases he took on after everyone moved underground. We know this because Rob asked, and Rafael told him he uses the other names for his various companies because of tax purposes. Rob asked what other companies, and Rafael summed it up in one word—construction. Rob then asked how a dude in construction knows so much about weather control, and Rafael answered by telling the story of his cousin—”
Barclay stopped and faced her, frowning. “Did we outline that point yet? The fact that Rafael has a cousin who lives in the US and is a programmer?” The cousin hadn’t been mentioned by name yet, had he? Barclay couldn’t remember.
“Hang on. You’re mixing up the years. Rob didn’t ask about Rafael’s other names until six years ago.” She shuffled the printed pages, looking for something. “The conversation about a man in construction knowing so much about weather happened shortly after they started talking online, but we don’t have that outlined on our sheet yet.”
Barclay ran his hands through his hair. “Maybe we need more sleep after all.”
The corners of Rissa’s mouth turned up. “It’s only four in the afternoon, and we’ve been drinking coffee since five. We’ll be up for a while yet.” She scanned her bullet points. “Back to your question about his cousin. Let me look ahead and see if there’s current info on him. No point in mentioning him at all unless it’s still significant.”
“He worked for NSSL at one time.”
“So did a lot of people.”
She shuffled through the printed pages once more, and Barclay couldn’t help but smile. She’d actually color-coded the pages she’d read so far, but right now he was glad of that. She knew where every piece of information was on them.
“Here it is. Dante Herrera, graduated from MIT, currently works for…” Rissa’s voice trailed off, and Barclay’s pulse raced at the look on her face. Shit. What had she found?
“Barclay, he works for Grayson Jensen. He’s a programmer at Jensen Software and Web Development, but that’s not the worst part.” She thrust the page at him and pointed toward two paragraphs, separated by several others. “Look at this. This is from two years ago. He and Rob are discussing the fact that both Rob and Dante work on secret hacking teams. Rob was on Ace’s team by then, right?”
Barclay nodded and sat down because he was suddenly dizzy. “Yes. Yes, I believe he was.” Barclay
had no fucking clue how long Rob had worked for Ace. He’d had less than twenty hours of sleep in the past five days, and had drunk way too much coffee since Sunday. He hoped like hell the dizziness was because of what Rissa had just found, and not because he was about to have a heart attack or a stroke.
“How long has Dante worked for Grayson?” she asked. “Do you have any idea?”
“No. I can find out, but let’s back up first. Let’s finish outlining the story of his cousin so they understand who he is. For now, we’ll put the info we know about his current status next to the bullet point where Rafael and Rob are first talking about Rafael’s interest in weather. Even though Dante might not have started working for Grayson until after that conversation, I don’t want to lose track of this information.”
She nodded. “Got it.”
“Once we find out when he started working for Grayson, we can make that a separate bullet point.”
“Okay. Good idea. Makes sense.”
“So where were we?” He scanned his own sheets until he found the place he’d left off. “Okay. Rob asked why Rafael was interested in weather, and Rafael answered by telling him about Dante, who at the time worked for NSSL as a researcher. Dante and Rafael were close, and Rafael told Rob that Dante would always talk about his work, even when he wasn’t supposed to, and over time Rafael became more interested in the subject.”
Barclay stood again and began to pace one more. “This was the time when Rob and Rafael began to talk shop every day. The more they talked about weather control, the more questions Rafael asked, and the more information he fed Rob from Dante.”
“Rob is such a slimy person. Why did Rafael keep talking to him? I mean, the longer these two go on, the closer they seem to grow.”
“Two peas in a pod,” said Barclay. “Rob needs to be heard, and he’s fucking bizarre. Rafael … who knows? Maybe he got a kick out of Rob’s reactions? Maybe the more he fed Rob from Dante, the more he enjoyed watching Rob eat it up like gold? Who the hell knows why these two clicked.”
“It bugs me that Dante worked for NSSL and now works for Grayson. Do you think Grayson knows?”
“I’m sure he does. More than one of us employs people who used to work for NSSL.”
“Do you all know the original architects of The Madeline Project?”
“Yes. We have a list. No one we’ve identified yet as a possible hacker is on it, so we know it wasn’t one of the original programmers.”
“But there were more people working on the project than the main programmers.”
“There were over fifteen hundred people working on it in one way or another.”
She shook her head. “Holy shit, that’s a big list.”
“The worst part is that we don’t know where all of them are now. About three hundred of them are missing. We don’t know if they’re still alive and working in another field, whether they’re among the unidentified dead, or worse yet, if they’re hiding on purpose.”
“So theoretically, any of the people aside from the original architects could be the hackers.”
“Absolutely.”
“This is massive, Barclay. Much more so than I ever realized.”
“It really is.” He sat next to her and tapped her color-coded papers. “But look what we have here. This could finally crack everything wide open.”
“It’s daunting and exciting at the same time, isn’t it?”
“Yes. Yes, it is.”
“Do you want to keep working through the night?”
Barclay had stayed up all night routinely in his younger days, but he hadn’t done so in well over a decade. This was too important. If Rissa could do it, so could he. “Yes. Let’s try to get through the rest of the years as soon as possible. We still don’t know what names and dates Rob was talking about when he said that to his wife in the bathroom, and we don’t know the identity of the inside person at my company.”
“We also don’t know what info he has on each of you. He said he has that, too. Do you think that’s in these conversations?”
“No clue, but at least once we get through these, we can start in on the other stuff. This is the lion’s share of it. We’ll have tackled the largest chunk first.”
She smiled. “That’s how I like to approach projects. Get the hard part out of the way first.”
“Me, too.”
As soon as they started going through the seventh year, the nature of the conversations changed. Rob and Rafael were no longer talking about weather control. They were talking about hacking into secure sites, and the differences between pre and post world disaster cyber security.
“Holy shit.” Rissa saw it the same time Barclay did on his copy. “This doesn’t really say what I’m reading, does it? I’m pretty punch drunk from no sleep and too much coffee.”
“If you are, so am I because I’m seeing the same thing.” Barclay took a few deep breaths because his heart was racing once more. He needed to give up caffeine or get a physical. Maybe both. “Rob made contact with three of the hackers on a message board. That’s what he told Rafael.”
“I’m seeing the same thing.” Rissa stood and walked over to where he sat. “And he names them. Or rather, he gives their usernames along with dates he claims they planned this thing. Are these usernames in the databases? Are they on the list of eighteen you have from that satellite intercept?”
Barclay pulled his laptop over and accessed the combined database all the Weathermen now used. Then he brought up the list of eighteen names. “Fuck me sideways. There they are.”
The hell with proprietary information. Rissa was his partner on this project now. He pushed the laptop closer to her so she could see the screen. “TornadoTess, InkStain, and SmartGuy2102.”
“What if these are the only three? We have them!”
“It’s fractured information.” He was certain he’d puke any second now with the way his stomach was doing somersaults. When had they both eaten last? “We don’t know their real names, or how many more there are, or what the dates mean.”
“Why would they admit to Rob they had hacked into the program?”
“I don’t know.”
Her eyes were wide as they stared at each other. “And why are there so many dates?”
“We don’t know that yet, either.”
“Barclay, we have to keep going.”
“I know.”
She glanced at the clock on his computer. “It’s six in the evening. Do you think the east coast Weathermen are still awake?”
“I’m sure they are. Should I call them now? Without complete information?”
“Your decision.”
Barclay had always wondered which one of them would crack this open, and what it would feel like when one of them found something significant. Would the others be elated, or would it make them realize they still had years of work ahead of them? He wasn’t sure what he felt right now. Impatience, for starters.
He wanted all the fucking information, right fucking now. He wanted names—real names—and he wanted all of them. He wanted motive, and he wanted to know where each of them were right now.
He wanted to have the first crack at them to ask why the fuck they had done this. What possible reason could there be? Had they not intended for the program to take on a life of its own, or were they sick bastards and hadn’t cared if it would?
“Barclay?” Her voice shook slightly, and when he glanced into her beautiful eyes, he glimpsed apprehension.
“I’m all right. Just imagining what I’m going to do to these assholes when we find them.”
“Do you want to keep working?”
“Yes. I want to get through the conversations. This can’t wait now. Deal?”
Relief filled her face. “It’s a deal.”
Chapter Fifteen
Rissa felt like she was in college again, cramming for a test. Only the sweet ache in her pussy reminded her that she’d been part of something far more erotic than study sessions all week. She was so ex
cited at what they’d found so far, but knew there was still a long way to go.
They finished going through the next two years by midnight, and decided to keep going. As they read through the last year, Barclay let out a war whoop, then shoved the paper in her face.
“Holy fuck. Did you read this part yet?”
He pointed toward a paragraph she hadn’t reached yet. Rissa read it, then read it again. She had to blink back tears. “It’s too easy.”
“It’s not easy, but it’s exactly what we were hoping for.”
“But it’s all here. Confirmation there were five hackers, complete with usernames. Is this the part of the conversation you found that prompted you all to steal his laptop to begin with? This part, where they discuss how the program was supposed to work, who had access to it, and where the real time tests…” Her voice trailed off, and then she grabbed the sheet where she’d color-coded the dates. “Holy shit.”
“What?”
“Barclay, do you have a list of the dates the real time tests were supposed to take place?”
“Um, probably.” He pulled his laptop over and clicked around, then finally brought up an email from Ace. “Yes. Here it is.”
Rissa put the paper up to the screen. “How the fuck did Rob get this list?”
“From the hackers. No other way.”
“But where did the hackers get it? You said only people who had access to the program would have this information, right?”
“Yes, and likely not all of them would have it. Only those with a business need to know.”
“Who would have had a business need to know these dates? Do you have that information?”
“I don’t, but Ace and Emmett do.”
“Do you think they’re still awake?”
Barclay was already calling them both via his computer. “Doesn’t matter. This is too important to wait.”
Once Barclay told Ace and Emmett what they’d just found, both men encouraged him to include all the Weathermen on the call. Rissa sat back and grinned as she listened to and watched twelve grown men, each of them millionaires if not billionaires by now, laugh and talk like excited college boys out for a night on the town.