The Child Thief

by Bella Forrest

  From what I’d studied of history, the death sentence hadn’t been doled out so freely in the past. That was something that had changed over time, as administrations argued that it would save lives in the long run, because people would become more afraid of committing crimes in the first place. Be heavy-handed with the few to save the many was the logic.

  And the system worked, to a certain extent, I supposed. Crime was down overall in our country compared to previous decades. At least, per the reports I’d seen.

  It just wasn’t so marvelous when you were potentially on the wrong end of it.

  Anyway, I was glad today was Saturday. I didn’t have any plans to go out. My mind and emotions needed a break from the stress of the last few days.

  Leaving the animals, I went back indoors and got myself some breakfast, then sat down at the table with my tablet. I logged in to the portal to find my inbox spilling with more voting requests, and was just going through them when I noticed a message from GabbySails with just a subject line in all caps: “CHECK THE POLL SECTION!”

  My heart skipped a beat as I navigated there. It had finally populated, with over a dozen submissions, and I almost choked on my milk when I saw whose was right at the top.

  Mine and Gabby’s.

  With ninety-two votes. That wasn’t far off 100 percent of the platform’s members. I gaped at the screen, stunned, and wondered for a moment if my eyes were deceiving me. I’d hoped our proposal would get a good response—at least enough to make it onto the poll list as an option—but I hadn’t been expecting this.

  It brought a renewed surge of hope in me for the people of this platform, knowing that they’d voted ours above the more sensational and instant-gratification ideas, which revolved around coming out of the gate by directly attacking the CRAS and its elements.

  And it was also humbling, and a little bit off-putting, to feel so many virtual eyes on us, sitting up there right above everyone else’s ideas.

  Submissions were still coming in, so I guessed it was possible we would be overturned before the poll closed to new entries by the end of today, but at least for now there seemed to be no danger of that happening. The other submissions had received substantially fewer votes; the one in second place—a suggestion to organize an online petition for the end of the CRAS and try to get it to spread virally—only had fifty-four.

  Honestly, that didn’t sound like a terribly difficult thing to organize and would probably only take a small team of techies to put together. I couldn’t really see it having legs, though, given that most people didn’t take online petitions seriously, especially as many would choose to sign anonymously. And even if it got up to a million signatures, what would happen, exactly? I was sure there had been petitions of that sort before that hadn’t gone anywhere. Still, there was no harm in making it a side project if we had the people and resources, especially as it was probably the least risky idea possible.

  It seemed that others agreed with me, though, that we had to strike a balance between safety and risk in order to draw the kind of attention we needed to stir people. We didn’t want to come off as reckless, but we also had to show that we were ready and willing to make things happen, and weren’t just a bunch of dreamers.

  And hopefully, the idea Gabby and I had presented would be a good starting point for that.

  I clicked on our submission and read it over again:

  “1) Hack into an auction site run by child kidnappers and trace the ringleaders.

  2) Capture evidence of their activities and rat them out to the government.

  3) Somehow record proof of our actions, so we can submit evidence of our involvement to the media and leak it on other online channels, to begin seeding public awareness of us as a group. (We will obviously need to think of a better name than OH to go by, for the public. Maybe RAM, Reform America Movement, or something along those lines?)

  4) All while keeping ourselves safe, of course.”

  My eyes lingered on my last point. The advantage of a mission like this as our “opening statement” was that we were not putting ourselves directly in the line of fire from the government. Things were bound to go wrong during our first project working together as a group, and I felt like this would minimize our risks, while still allowing us to achieve meaningful results.

  We would be helping the justice system do its job, in fact, by rooting out a band of heinous criminals. It was an act that would also be universally supported by the public, regardless of political views. The main thing we’d need to be worried about, safety-wise, was retaliation by the criminals themselves. Which, as a collective, I was pretty confident we could handle. Especially with the resources we’d managed to gather during the past couple of weeks.

  We’d still need to keep our identities carefully hidden, of course, when ratting the criminals out to the government, because the RAM (or whatever we ended up calling our movement) would not be doing this kind of “non-offensive” work forever. Our ultimate target was the CRAS, and soon, we were going to be focusing all our efforts on taking it down hard.

  Which was basically the equivalent of prodding a nest of wasps.

  I sank into contemplation for the rest of the day, watching as new poll submissions came through and monitoring our submission’s status in the list. Over a dozen more trickled in, making thirty in total by the end of the day, when a notice was put up informing us that submissions were now closed, but voting would remain open until the end of Sunday. So there was still a chance late voters could topple our position.

  But by midnight on Sunday, that still hadn’t happened, and ours emerged as the winner by a long shot.

  Barely twenty minutes after midnight, all of the threads in the main forum relating to other ideas were shifted over to a new “off-topic” section and a new thread was created by one of the admins stating that the main discussion area was now specifically designated for talks relating to the winning poll idea.

  Which meant, I guessed, that the first stage had finally begun.

  I felt nervous, knowing that if anything went wrong during the course of our actions, I would feel responsible. Half of it was Gabby’s idea, but half was also mine, and I was the one who’d packaged and submitted it.

  Someone had to shoulder that responsibility, though. And since my submission had caught the most wind, I guessed it might as well be me.

  26

  The next few days went by in a blur of discussion and activity on the OH+ platform, which contrasted starkly with the other half of my life—the monotony of the factory.

  On Monday, I woke up to several PMs from my group, congratulating me on getting my submission selected as our first project. They were all enthusiastic about it, to my relief, and it gave me an extra boost of confidence that things would work out.

  Then I noticed a message had come through from Jace, too, and my pulse spiked a little as I clicked it open.

  “Hey Robin, good job. Couldn’t have thought of a better idea myself.

  X.”

  A smile immediately unfurled on my lips and warmth burgeoned in my chest, my brain unable to miss the absence of the dash he usually put in front of his initial… And then I mentally slapped myself.

  Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. We’re not going there again.

  It hadn’t been difficult to find distractions over the past week, given the tension and stress it had brought us, and luckily, they were only going to increase now that the ball had gotten rolling.

  There was definitely an “unluckily” in there somewhere, too, but I chose not to focus on that for now, my immediate gratitude being not having to deal with those exhausting emotions.

  I just needed to keep keeping things together.

  Which thankfully wasn’t too difficult, because beginning Sunday night, people started discussing the first step: hacking the site and trying to trace an IP location. If we couldn’t find an address, or some other clue that could lead us to the criminals’ location, then our plan would basically fall flat. At
least, in terms of PR. Yes, we could figure out a way to pass on the site’s direct link to enforcers, but we could hardly claim involvement in busting them, or gain the kind of public exposure we needed for that basic act.

  We had to take things a lot further for that.

  Which was why I was praying that the team of six hackers that had formed by Monday morning—including Nelson and Gabby (who had somehow convinced her mother to let her be involved)—would figure it out. Nelson had been nominated the leader of the IT team, and I found myself glued to video chat for the next couple of days, keeping in constant contact with both Nelson and the rest of the team, so I could get immediate updates whenever they made any progress.

  Honestly, I was frustrated that I wasn’t a hacker myself and couldn’t be more directly involved. I knew this was only prep work, and that I was going to be knee-deep in the actual mission soon enough. But still, it made me impatient, because most of their updates didn’t mean much to me, since I didn’t understand the ins and outs of coding or hacking sites. And I probably started getting on their nerves with all the questions I was asking.

  But their general mood remained optimistic over the chat, and I almost squealed with excitement when Wednesday evening came around and Nelson finally announced that they had managed to find an IP. Which I took as a good first sign. The fact that they’d been able to figure out the security pretty quickly might indicate that these were cowboy-type criminals who didn’t have either enough resources, brains, or patience to do things thoroughly. Which could mean the chances of them being a serious threat to us for the latter part of our plan would be smaller.

  The IP pointed to a location in the suburbs of Belmore, which was a prosperous city farther up north, toward central America, and about a three-hour flight from my group’s general area. Further investigation narrowed it down to an actual address.

  Which left the next step clear: scouting and schematics.

  We had to be sure that the property was real, and if so, get an understanding of the place. Because even if it was real, we still had to retrieve evidence that whoever lived there was definitely behind the criminal activity. Nelson informed us that the group we were hunting might have used the IP of an innocent person, which was why, after verifying the address, we were going to have to send in a ground team to breach the actual property.

  But first things first.

  Given that Nelson already had access to an aircraft, and we had the equipment required to draw up schematics remotely, she put our group forward to handle it, and Julia, Marco, and I ended up leaving together on Wednesday evening. It didn’t really require two people to do the aerial scans—Julia could have managed it alone—but I needed something to do with my fidgeting hands, so I offered to play assistant.

  It took us just under three hours to reach our destination, and by the time we did, it was pitch dark, which was our plan. It made it easier for us to fly undetected. Once Marco gave the go-ahead, I helped Julia deploy the drone, and she navigated it over what was, indeed, a real property.

  It was a long, rectangular building with a corrugated roof, and when Julia began capturing snapshots of it with the drone, they automatically flashed up on the little screen fixed to the passenger cabin wall, revealing more details. From what I could tell, the building seemed to have once been some kind of factory or processing facility but had now been repurposed as an office.

  It was also set back from the road, enclosed in its own small compound, and surrounded by what looked like a high barbed wire fence, outside of which was a large parking lot that seemed to be shared by several other office-like buildings in the vicinity. Beyond that was a field, a bit of forest, and then farmland. Nothing too interesting.

  My eyes were quickly drawn back to our target property, when Julia pointed out movement around it, suggesting multiple security guards. Which was disappointing, to say the least. Based on how relatively stress-free our IT team’s probe of their online site had been, I’d been hoping that security around their physical site would also be relatively lax.

  But perhaps they were old school like that.

  Still, we returned home that night with a lot more clarity about our target than we’d flown out with, and I woke up on Thursday to find a new post in the forum started by Julia titled “STEP 2: Accomplished.” She’d included all the aerial photographs and the X-ray schematics from our trip in the post, and there was already a flurry of activity as a result.

  I clicked it open and scrolled down to begin reading the responses, and saw that Nelson had replied first:

  “I and the rest of the IT team tried to get intel on the owner of this property, but we’re coming up blank. Can’t see any records other than it’s owned by a corporation: IIC Holdings, which we can’t find info on.

  That said, for the purposes of the ground mission, I suggest we operate on a ‘guilty until proven innocent’ basis. We go in looking for, and expecting, evidence. And if we find none, then, well, we go back to the drawing board.”

  I nodded to myself in agreement. There was a chance the criminals could have been spoofing the IP, but I figured it was just as likely that our IT team had found a loophole in their cyber security, and this was their real base of operations. It was going to be a tricky job, and we had to go in there like hound dogs, with clarity and single-minded focus. Mission: search for evidence, regardless of whether or not it existed, rather than having our minds clouded by doubts of their potential innocence.

  I scrolled farther down the page to view the other responses, and saw people already leaping on Nelson’s advice and discussing the next step: infiltration and retrieval of evidence. Which was understandable. Everyone was eager to push on and get our first success under our belt. But I wasn’t done re-absorbing the information Julia had posted yet, so I set my pad aside for a moment, needing some space to think.

  Judging by the size of the building, and the fact that it was encircled by high fences and monitored by security guards, we ought to arrive with a largish ground team, just in case things took a turn for the worst and we needed backup, or extra people to create a diversion. We also didn’t know what hours these kidnappers kept—whether the office was even guaranteed to always be empty of workers at night—so we had to account for the possible presence of people within the building, too, not just outside it. Which made things even more tricky.

  But not impossible.

  I believed we’d managed to gather a smart and varied pool of people together over the past couple of weeks. Now it was time to put us all to work.

  We hashed out a plan over the rest of the week, including discussing the various types of evidence we might find there, and consequently, the sorts of things the ground team needed to look for when gathering volunteers. I, of course, threw my hat in the ring, along with Jackie, Abe, and Ant.

  And then I found myself absently scanning the rest of the list for Jace, to see if he had volunteered as well. But I couldn’t find his name there, which I found a little odd. I’d been under the impression that he’d wanted to be in on this project, from start to finish, given his heavy involvement in recruitment. I hadn’t seen him around the forum all that much over the past couple of days, either, now that I thought about it. But maybe he was just taking some time off before the big day. He’d been under a lot of pressure recently, too, with our visitations. Arguably more so, since he’d been our team leader.

  Anyway, I reminded myself firmly, it wasn’t exactly my business. So I put it out of my head and focused on things that were.

  Once our plan was more or less solidified, I posted a brief summary of the main points in a new thread, and one of the admins pinned it to the top of the forum, so everyone could easily get a bird’s eye view of it while we continued to hash out details.

  It read:

  “Step 1) Ground volunteers arrive at the site at designated time.

  Step 2) Split into two teams, one frontline and one for backup/decoy purposes, and approach building.

  Si
de note: Front line will approach building from the roof, by aircraft; backup by foot.

  Step 3) Frontline team begins recording footage and gets in undetected. (Cameramen: Ant and Abe.)

  Step 4) Stay undetected (with help of decoy team, if necessary) while retrieving evidence that proves the property’s connection to the shadow site.

  Step 5) Get out.

  Step 6) Submit evidence/address to enforcers ASAP (IT team) and then leak edited footage to press + every online news/viral social channel we can think of (again, IT team).

  Note: Ant/Abe are also in charge of video editing and will brand the final footage with the name RAM (Reform America Movement) and block font logo we agreed on in the branding poll.”

  I exhaled as I finished reading. It didn’t seem like all that much, when broken down into simple steps, but I knew this was going to be anything but easy. Each of these steps was crucial. If we failed at any one of them, the best-case scenario we could hope for was our plan blowing up in our faces and all of our work being for nothing.

  Worst case: we’d pay with our lives.

  The frontline team, which I was going to be a part of, needed to include at least one tech, since whatever evidence we found was unlikely to be written on stray pieces of paper. It would be in the computer systems. I’d been worried at first that Nelson was going to volunteer herself—I always got jittery at the thought of her being in the line of fire, given that she had always been (and still was) the only person I knew who’d made any progress with the archives—but four others from our IT team stepped in quickly instead, including Gabby. (Gabby’s mother was quick to shoot that down, however, leaving us with three options.) Which meant Nelson was going to be part of the remote team.

  Once we had discussed every other detail we could think of on the forums and analyzed every resource that was available to us in the gradually populating Resources and Facilities section, we came to the next obvious step: meeting each other.