Damn, she’s good. I expected her to crack the code I sent, but not this fast–
“Caesar, what’s up,” said a voice from behind him. Caesar quickly minimized the image. He toggled over to the feeds from the Morgan Library, now showing police and security guards holding court in every available camera view. He turned to find Sean holding an extra cup of coffee extended his way.
“I’m due out on a flight later this morning,” Caesar said, taking the coffee with a nod. “But I’m still trying to get my head around what went down yesterday. It’s bugging me.”
“Don’t worry about it,” Sean said. “We got those two guys at the door; they should be able to tell us something. The reports from Agent Blue are starting to trickle in. Sounds like it was a young woman that grabbed the document? Can’t be anyone we had on our radar.”
“Let me ask you something,” Caesar said, lowering his voice. “Do you guys do operations like yesterday’s all the time? Is that normal stuff around here?”
“It’s a mix of different projects but that’s what makes it interesting.” Sean cocked his head slightly, with a glint of mischief in his eye. “Hey … do you want to see something cool?”
Caesar, excited at the thought of thinking about anything but the Morgan for a few minutes, nodded back. Sean pulled his laptop from under his arm, laying it down on the table and cracking it open. He turned the screen in Caesar’s direction, showing a document that held a photo of a man in his fifties, a line drawing of property lines, and a report titled ‘Case 545: Harold Bussinger, Pri2, Status: CLOSED.’
“What’s this?”
“This is Harold Bussinger,” Sean said. “He’s a dentist in Sydney, Nebraska. Not much there, really. Just a farming community and some small businesses in the downtown area. Anyway, he was targeted by a group of hackers a few weeks ago.”
“A dentist?” Caesar asked. “What the hell are you talking about?”
“It’s a project I’ve been working on; I finally wrapped it up a few weeks back. A group of Ukrainian hackers have been targeting dentists and doctors in a series of small communities. The hackers take their computer systems hostage; their medical records, payment systems, vital equipment, scheduling systems.”
“Hackers are targeting doctors?” Caesar asked. “What do they do once they have access?”
“Nothing. They hold it for ransom,” Sean said. “Five-hundred dollars a piece. Small change for me and you, but not for someone trying to run a business in a small town. With payment, the doctors get a guarantee that they’ll never be hacked again. For everyone that has paid, the hackers have kept their word to stay away.”
“That’s crazy. How many have paid?” Caesar asked.
“A lot. What else can they do? Doctors don’t know anything about network security. They know so little that they are a bit embarrassed when this stuff happens, won’t go public with it. The only people they tell are the other docs in their towns.”
Caesar connected the dots in his head. “That’s why they target multiple doctors in the same area. If the hackers keep their promise to stay away after being paid, the first wave of targets will advise the others to pay them and just get on with their lives.”
“Exactly. Smart plan, but not smart enough. I tracked down the hacker cell where the attacks are coming from and took out their machines. And then I had their apartment buildings surrounded by local police. They’re all done,” Sean said, smiling and obviously proud of his work. “And that’s a good thing.”
With a look around the room, Caesar noted all the different projects live on each screen. He could make out maps of buildings, live feeds of ocean freighters, employment rate projections. He pointed to Sean’s screen. “This … this is what you’re doing here? I thought you were working on bigger stuff.”
“This is a test case. Once The Project begins, we pretty much get to do whatever we want. I want to make people’s lives better once the lights come back on, you know? I’ve got about thirty more projects lined up, each one better than this. Before The Project was formed, we couldn’t touch groups like this. Wiretapping laws, privacy concerns, risk of pissing off a diplomat from whatever country,” Sean said. “But once we’re rolling, those restrictions will be history.”
“That can be dangerous,” Caesar said.
“In the wrong hands, sure,” Sean replied. “But we’re the good guys. People always paint a picture of big brother turning into an evil regime—abuse of power and hidden agendas—but that’s not what we’re doing here. In my last gig, I worked eighty hours a week trying to figure out how to get more people to click on ad banners, and now I get to change the world for the better. For real.”
Caesar watched the room, not believing what he was hearing. This is a chance to actually make a difference.
“The people in this room, they’re building the tech that’s going to run the planet for the next few decades,” Sean continued. “We get to hit the reboot button on the whole damn thing. Just think how great this world would be if the people with power were actually … good? If their agenda was just to make the whole thing better? People like us?”
As Sean turned to fist-bump a passing engineer, Caesar exhaled, his eyes blinking rapidly as he processed his options. Suddenly, everything clicked. He knew what he had to do.
“People like us,” Caesar replied.
Feeling heat on his heels, Caesar turned to catch the sunlight stretching through the window and across the floor, lightly dusting his feet. The room buzzed around him as he paused and nodded his head.
“Tell me everything there is to know about The Project,” Caesar said, his eyes back on the control room’s monitors. “I’m in.”
“You’re just in time,” Sean said with a smile. “Tonight is the night we flip the switch. Get ready to have some fun.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
Covent Garden - London
March 11th, 10:04AM
For the last three blocks, Haylie had been trying to figure out if she was lost.
She paused, nestling against the door of a corner shop. She toggled back to the Google Maps app on her phone and spun in a semicircle to follow its compass. I think I’m headed in the right direction. She worked her way back into the flow of foot traffic on St. Martin’s Lane and pushed north into the crowds, her jet lag weighing on her steps like a sandbag tied to each foot.
The streets of London were laid out in a crisscross web of curving roads that seemed to only find the next intersection by blind luck. The arteries twisted through the city, sharp lefts and rights around ancient landmarks long disappeared. As Haylie tried to stay on track, she longed for the logical right angles of Austin. She traversed a five-way intersection, dodging a stew of taxis, bicycles and pedestrians, all politely nudging for right-of-way.
The city was foreign to Haylie, but she began to see patterns as she took in more information on each block. She could pick out the finance men easily; they wore gray suits, alternating white and blue shirts on every other chest. The older men still wore ties, but the younger ones left their collars loose. Black taxis on every corner. Dark colors on everyone: indigo jeans, short black topcoats with collars up, gray scarves. Crisp shirts and shined shoes. It was the only place Haylie had ever been where the men dressed better than the women.
Motorcycles and mopeds whipped past her as she cut through passing clouds of cigarette smoke that hung in the air. As she trekked up the sidewalk, languages from every corner of the globe drifted with the crowds. A French couple, arguing about God knows what. Chinese tourists, headed south with maps clutched in their hands.
Haylie squinted past the crowd to see St. Martin’s Lane coming to a Y-intersection. I must be getting close. After a few more blocks, Haylie came across the dark facade of a corner coffee shop and stopped in front of the light wooden benches laid out under its windows.
Haylie walked in and ordered an Americano. Her nerves were on high alert for this morning’s meeting, and the butterflies bounced off her gu
ts as the barista sprayed and grinded out his remaining orders.
It’ll be fine … just be yourself.
She grabbed her drink and followed signs reading ‘More Seating Downstairs,’ pacing slowly down the steps and into the depths of the basement.
The underground seating area contained a network of tables with only a few patrons littered here and there. Almost everyone sat in pairs, chatting over closed laptops. But one man sat alone, far in the corner, staring Haylie directly in the eyes.
She carefully made her way towards his table, holding the coffee mug and saucer in both hands as she felt them begin to tremble. She studied the man on approach; he was dressed much nicer than she had anticipated—khaki pants, a tucked white oxford shirt, matching belt and expensive, shined shoes. His thick, sandy hair waved back, framing a slightly devilish smile.
No way. Vector is … kind of cute?
He stood with a graceful swoop, grinning and gesturing to the chair across the table. They kept eye contact as she sat down, resting her coffee on the table to steady its shake. He titled down his computer screen and they sat in silence for a few beats.
“Hi, Crash. It’s nice to finally meet you … in person,” Vector whispered. “I feel like we have a lot to talk about.”
“Yes, same here,” Haylie said, pulling her hair back behind her ear. “And thanks for your help in New York.”
“That was a close one,” Vector said. “I’m pretty sure we just got lucky there. A few more seconds and … well, you know.”
Haylie checked each corner of the room. “Is this a place you come to a lot? Is it safe here?”
“The last time I was here was a few months back, and really just that once,” Vector said. “But it should be safe for us to talk.”
Smart—don’t meet other hackers in places you go every day.
“I’d love to catch up at some point just to talk about … everything,” Haylie stammered, “but right now, I’d like to hear what you’ve found out about Raven—anything that can help me find my brother.”
Vector looked up and snapped his head a bit, appearing to flip his brain over into work mode. “Right, yes, of course.” He cracked his laptop back open. “I was able to locate the engineer I worked with on that Raven puzzle with a few years back. I pinged her and she—she calls herself Margo for projects she takes on—was able to tell me some very interesting tidbits.”
“What kind of … tidbits?”
“Right. Well, Margo said she was contacted by the same person that posted the Raven job for a follow-up job. It was consulting work for a think tank out of Italy. They do studies around population analysis, that sort of thing. But she quit the project about six months back after a few strange requests freaked her out.”
“Like what?”
“They asked her to build out a model of global population growth,” Vector said. “Basically, given a set of conditions—economic factors, disease, wars in certain regions—what different countries and territories would look like year over year. She built the model to forecast two hundred years into the future, based on conditions that might exist at that time.”
“Okay, so what’s weird about that?” Haylie asked. “Think tanks do stuff like that all the time, right?”
“The strange thing wasn’t that they wanted a model, it was something else. It was the actual scenario they were trying to predict. Once she heard the details, she got spooked. She bailed.” Vector hushed his voice back to a whisper. “They wanted her to model what would happen if the world lost all power and connectivity for six months.”
Haylie, her coffee cup at her lips, paused. “The entire globe losing power?”
“Yes, everyone. And the ‘for exactly six months’ part, that’s what freaked her out. She knew they weren’t asking her to model some sort of random natural disaster; it was much more specific than that.”
“So you said that this model went for hundreds of years? What year did they want to flip the switch?”
“I asked the same question. These models that data scientists build, they are very precise. So when there’s an event they want to forecast, they don’t just ask for a year. They plug in a date and time, down to the second. They asked her to model what would happen if the power went out on March eleventh of this year, at midnight.”
Haylie’s heart raced. “That’s tonight.” She gazed down at the table and tried her best to find her composure. “So what if she’s wrong? All we know is there’s a group down in Italy doing doomsday projections … that doesn’t mean anything, right?”
Vector shook his head. “So that’s the other thing—the guy asking for this model was pushing her timetable, needed it for a big meeting that started a few days ago. I did some checking and it turns out he was headed to Bilderberg.”
The wheels spun in Haylie’s mind for a minute. The word sounded familiar, but wasn’t registering. She shrugged her shoulders back.
“Bilderberg is a meeting, a big meeting,” Vector said. “The kind you wouldn’t actually believe exists if it wasn’t real, you know? It happens every year … top secret stuff. The world’s most powerful people. Even the list of attendees is kept under guard. This year it happened right here in England, just a few days ago.”
“So you think this Bilderberg group … they’re the ones behind Raven?” Haylie said, leaning across the table. “You think they have Caesar?”
“What I think is that Caesar solved the Raven puzzle, and that he ended up finding a hell of a lot more than he thought he would. I think these guys are recruiting hackers to help them turn off the power to the rest of the world. All while millions of people die. No power, no anything for six months. You remember Iceland last week? Even the power going out in one country for a few hours caused a few hundred deaths.”
Haylie’s eyes grew wide as she hushed her voice. “Oh my God. Iceland. The power, the Internet routers, the phone networks were all taken out. That was a test. These guys were testing their code.”
Her anger ratcheted up as she thought back to each Raven step. Cecil Rhodes—so certain that his money could bring the elite to Britain, and that he could reshape the world to a place of his design. The Bohemian Grove—all standing together in a tight circle, cloaked in secrecy, repeating the same words and chanting in unison. She pictured J.P. Morgan sitting comfortably at the Zodiac dinner table, laughing with the chosen few and chewing on a thick cigar, while butlers and maids rushed to bring fresh rounds of drinks.
Her eyes narrowed as she tried to imagine Caesar, wherever he was: in a room, or a cell, or a dark basement. Just waiting for his captors to throw him a piece of bread or slide him a cup of water, out of the goodness of their hearts. Being strong-armed. Being forced to make an unthinkable choice.
Everything makes sense now.
Raven wasn’t created by outsiders trying to warn people about these men in power; it was created by the Bilderberg Group to celebrate these men. It was there to prepare hackers as they solved the puzzle. They were grooming Haylie, and people like her, to join a group so drunk with power they believed that they could rule the world. That they deserved to sit in that place. Raven was about a power that the world had never seen before.
Vector’s face grew heavy. “This isn’t about solving puzzles anymore, Haylie. This isn’t even about finding your brother; this is bigger than all that. We can’t let them get away with this.”
“We?” Haylie said.
Vector smiled. “You’re damn right.”
> > > > >
Titanhurst - London
March 11th, 10:41AM
Walter Sterling walked a straight line, exactly as he had been instructed. The guard with a pistol stuck into Walter’s lower back hovered directly behind, muttering directions as they moved through the depths of the mansion.
Through a whirlwind of activity over the past twenty minutes—transfers between guards, handoffs from room to room, in and out of elevators—Walter was having a difficult time figuring out how long he had been on
the move. Sneaking a quick check to his wrist, he saw only empty flesh and quickly remembered that the guards had confiscated his phone, wallet, and watch hours earlier.
“We stop here,” the guard said, nudging the barrel of the pistol into Walter’s flesh to make his point clear.
“Sounds good,” Walter replied, mimicking the man’s accent back to him. “We stop here.”
The guard cracked the door to Walter’s left and let it swing open. Inside the office, Walter saw his brother huddled on a plush leather couch at the middle of the room. Walter stumbled towards him, seeing no one else in the room.
“You wait here. He come soon,” the guard said, closing the door behind him.
The brothers took a quick inventory of each other without exchanging as much as a word. Getting his bearings, Walter’s eyes fell on the impressive desk at the head of the room. He took one step in its direction when suddenly a voice boomed from behind him.
“Gentlemen. Let’s talk about why you are here.”
The brothers turned to face the voice and immediately recognized the man standing before. Prime Minister John Crowne looked both brothers up and down as a hidden door, flush to the wooden paneling of the wall, closed behind him. The PM sat down in the chair next to the couch, hinting with an extended palm that the brothers should sit as well.
“You were at the Morgan Library. At the door of the Reading Room, banging on the glass,” Crowne said, slowly. “Tell me why.”
Exchanging glances, the brothers both froze, each expecting the other to take lead. Benjamin sat up, drawing the lapels of his jacket in together, and spoke. “We have spent the past few months trying to locate you and your team, Mr. Prime Minister. We’re interested in the value we can add to The Project.”
Squinting with a hint of disdain, Crowne tried his best to keep his composure. “The Project. Which project? I’m sure I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
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