by Dean Murray
"Is that why you're so determined to back Alec's play?"
"There isn't a simple answer to that question, but yeah, that's part of it. I made a promise to him that I'd join your pack in return for his help saving us from Anton, but if that was all that was going on I wouldn't have taken some of the risks that I've taken trying to support him.
"The truth is that my ancestors were probably the reason that the monarchy fell. They were so concerned with trying to protect their power base that they let the Coun'hij take over everything. It was the worst decision they could have made. Alec's ancestors weren't perfect—if they had been they wouldn't have lost control in the first place—but they're good, fair leaders. It's like it's in their DNA."
"Alec has made his fair share of mistakes."
"I can't argue with you there, Isaac, but when he does something wrong it is because he's made a mistake rather than because he's some kind of despot who views the rest of us as disposable pieces that exist solely to serve him."
That hit a little too close to home. Once upon a time I'd backed Alec as far or farther than anything Ash had done so far. I'd done it for different reasons, but I'd done it anyway. I'd backed him against James—kept him in power inside of our pack dozens of times after he'd pushed too hard and left himself exposed—and I'd done it with a pretty minimal amount of complaining.
The problem was that I'd done it at least partly because it had been the easiest way to keep my life from taking a turn for the worst.
"I'd like to believe that, but I'm not sure I can give Alec quite that much of the benefit of the doubt. Not after he let Agony's group do what they did to us. Even declaring war on the Coun'hij was suspect. He should have waited, gathered support and then moved against them later when it wasn't as much of a risk."
"It's easy to second-guess the person in the big chair when you're not the one who has to deal with the ultimate consequences of the hard decisions, Isaac. That's something I didn't realize until after I left home. I gave my sister a lot of grief over her policies, and I always felt justified in doing so until I was on my own. That changed my perspective."
"Maybe you're right, but it's going to take more than just a pep talk to convince me to get religion again where Alec is concerned."
"Fair enough. You wanted to know why we're headed south and I only partially answered your question. The lamias…know things. Their queen is supposed to be able to see into the future. It's not as clear as what Kristin gets from her dreams, but they get a much broader picture than she does."
"That doesn't make me feel any calmer where these snake people are concerned, Ash. No wonder nobody knows about them—if the queens know everything that is going to happen in advance then it's a wonder that they haven't taken over the world already. All of the Aztec sacrifices aside, they don't happen to be a bunch of tiny scaly pacifists do they?"
"No, not according to my family's records at least. They're six and a half feet tall and incredibly violent. There's a reason that there aren't many werewolves in Louisiana. The lamias hunt them down—not in packs, singly—because the queen's consorts like the challenge of killing werewolves in single combat."
"You're going to give me a whole new set of nightmares."
"Yeah, that's not the worst part though. One of my ancestors was convinced that the only reason that the lamias hadn't tried to take over the world was that their queen had decided that it wasn't time yet."
"And you're going to just stroll up to the queen and ask her if she can tell us where Dream Stealer is hiding?"
"Something like that. It will have to be Kristin who asks though. Under the right circumstances they'll treat visiting females as honorary queens. You and I just have to convince them that she deserves a hearing. By defeating one of the consorts."
Chapter 6
Isaac Nazir
I-55
Western Tennessee
Our conversation lapsed into silence and we drove for hours in our own little worlds, Ash focused on the road and me continuing to make notes on my tablet. It felt more than a little pointless to continue planning the largest single hacking operation in history now that I knew it probably wasn't going to happen, but I kept grinding away at it regardless.
There was always the possibility that we'd survive combat with something that was capable of bringing down a werewolf by itself. It wasn't a very good possibility, but it might happen, and if it did then we'd need a backup plan in case the lamias didn't know how to find Dream Stealer. Besides, the problem of simultaneously launching attacks on so many different places had captured my imagination.
As I continued working I realized that cracking all of those government and corporate databases was only part of the problem. Given enough time and effort, just about any system could be hacked, but you couldn't guarantee access for any extended period of time.
The real question was what to do with the access once we had it. We needed to conduct the world's biggest data-mining operation, which meant that we needed a data repository where we could store everything we stole.
That was easy enough, but if we just sent the data there then the Feds would be able to track the electronic trail from their systems to the warehouse. We needed a physical cutout, a spot in the process where the data could be copied onto some kind of transportable medium and then physically moved to a new location, preferably a location that didn't have any kind of connectivity to the rest of the world.
The last thing we needed to worry about was some kind of Trojan horse leading the authorities to us the first time that we copied the data over. We needed processing power and we needed a massive storage array, something that could handle petabytes of data and still resolve data requests quickly enough to keep the rest of our infrastructure busy.
That wasn't a trivial task, but now that I'd identified the problem I'd just use more of Ash's money to solve it. The one thing that couldn't be outsourced was figuring out our approach to analyzing the data once we had it.
Banking data could be picked through looking for large cash withdrawals, but I knew that wasn't likely to reveal anything, not with the level of scrutiny that kind of information was already under by the IRS. It took me a while, but as we crossed over the Louisiana border I started to hit on some approaches that might succeed.
Rare art sales might get me something—members of the Coun'hij had been known to occasionally liquidate art that nobody had even known existed—but my money was on gas station data. Coun'hij enforcers tended to travel to and from operations in big SUVs so as to avoid the paper trail that flying unavoidably left behind.
It went without saying that they were using either cash or anonymous prepaid credit cards to buy fuel for those cars, but that was probably something I could still work with.
"Hey, Ash, how long do you think it would take to put together a comprehensive list of times and places that the Coun'hij or their people have made an appearance in the last fifteen years?"
"Normally I'd say we could have something pretty solid in just a day or two. I'm pretty sure that the Chicago pack has been religiously taking notes on that very thing since even before Ulrich came into power."
I sighed. "Alec said that Shawn and Ulrich have gone off of the grid. For all we know there isn't a Chicago pack anymore."
"No way. They might have been forced to scatter, but Ulrich is way too cagey not to have seen that coming. He'll have had contingency plans in place. Even under a worst-case scenario he'll manage to get a good chunk of his people out."
"Maybe, maybe not. Even if he gets out, there's no guarantee that his records will make it out too. Most of the old guard is overly attached to paper records."
"I guess we'll just have to wait and see what he's got access to when he or Shawn resurface. What do you have in mind?"
"I want to track them back using point-of-sale data from the gas stations. If we figure out the range of a typical SUV and then look at all the fuel purchases in that radius around each appearance, one of those purcha
ses will be the guys we want to track."
"They'll be using something untraceable."
"Yeah, I'm actually counting on it. I'll ditch all of the transactions made by regular credit cards, which will get my data set down to something more manageable, and then I'll start massaging the data. If you've got a large enough data sample then you can find all kinds of patterns in there. If we can get a pretty comprehensive list of visitations by guys like Agony and the rest, the data we're looking for will eventually pop up; it will just be a matter of wading through the false positives."
"There's going to be a lot of false positives in that much data, Isaac."
"Yeah, you're right there. I can do a lot to fine-tune the pattern-recognition algorithm, but the real key is going to be getting our hands on the data showing buy times and locations for prepaid credit cards. I'm betting that something will pop up there."
"That just might work. Whoever is bankrolling the Coun'hij's operation isn't going to be buying those things one or two at a time. They'll be picking up dozens of them at once."
"Yep, and they probably won't just stick a hundred bucks on them either, which means that they'll get used to refuel the vehicles more than once before they are depleted and thrown away. By cross-referencing the point-of-sale data and the instances of multiple cards being purchased, we're bound to be able to track them back. Even if they are smart enough to issue each enforcer multiple cards and tell the line grunts to rotate them I'd still bet that some of them get sloppy about that kind of thing and there will still be a pattern there for us to find."
"Sure, that works if they are using prepaid cards, but it doesn't do anything for you if they are using cash."
"Except that if they are using cash then it will still tend to create a pattern. That would mean that I could disregard every electronic payment and just focus on cash transactions above, say, fifty bucks. With search parameters that narrow I just may be able to track them all the way back to their home base despite cash being the perfect anonymous payment method."
Ash looked doubtful. "I know trying to track the Coun'hij down by running a team of hackers was my idea, but if it's really that easy then why hasn't someone already done it?"
"It's not easy. You're going to have to hire a ton of really top-level talent to get the data we need, and that isn't going to come cheap. Credit card companies spend billions every year to make their systems as close to impregnable as possible. At the end of the day we may have to hire someone to physically break into some of these facilities—actually, it wouldn't surprise me if we had to send a team of shape shifters in, normal humans would have an easier time breaking into Fort Knox. Whoever tries to go in there is going to need a serious edge."
"I can make that happen. I know people who specialize in that kind of thing, we could pose as IT auditors from their accounting firm. All of those types of companies are publically held and their external auditors are the one group of people that pretty much have to see every security measure they have in place."
I found myself nodding. "That's not a bad idea, actually, but to answer your question, I don't think that this would have been possible even just a few years ago. Most of the current pack leaders are at least eighty or ninety years old. There are always exceptions, but it's pretty unusual to have someone as young as Alec running a pack. That means that they don't tend to think in terms of cyber-threats. Sure, they hire people to keep them in the loop about the threats that they are most likely to face, but that isn't the same as really understanding the threat yourself.
"Even more than that though, up until recently our national economy was a lot more cash-based than it's become over the last few years. We had a lot of small, independent gas stations who used actual cash registers rather than big national and regional chains that have fancy digital point-of-sale devices that instantly send every transaction off to a central database for long-term storage."
"I see. It wouldn't have been feasible before now because to get the data we need we would have had to find and steal paper documents."
"Right, and even if we managed to get all of the data that we needed we'd still be faced with the impossible task of manually analyzing them, which would have taken decades."
"I'm impressed, Isaac. Alec really was right about you."
"What, that I spend too much time behind my computer?"
"No, that you're the kind of guy who always comes through in a pinch, the kind of guy who can be depended on, which is a lot less common than most people realize."
It was suddenly hard to talk, but I forced my question out. "When did he say that?"
"Right before we all split up in Nevada. I managed to get him off by himself and told him that things were getting a lot worse with Kristin. He told me to bring you along, but I wasn't thrilled by the idea, not after how tense things got between you and me the night of the attack."
"Yeah, you pissed off a lot of people that night. I wouldn't turn your back on Grayson anytime soon."
"I wasn't planning on it, but it's nice to have some independent confirmation of the fact that he's carrying a grudge. It's hard for me to get a good read on that guy most of the time."
That wasn't a line of conversation that I wanted to pursue. It was a short trip from Grayson to Wyatt and Jess.
"So Alec told you to take me and you said no, but he overruled you and here we are."
"No, Alec suggested I take you, I said no, and then he told me that there was a storm coming, the kind of storm where I'd need someone I could trust at my back, someone like you."
"I…thanks. I appreciate the vote of confidence, from both of you I guess, but I especially appreciate you letting me know he said that. It means more than I expected it to after some of the things that have happened lately."
We lapsed back into a silence that was mostly comfortable until Kristin started screaming in the back seat. I bailed out of the passenger seat and back to the rear seat before Ash could even open his mouth to ask me to check on her. Ash flipped on the interior dome light as I reached her.
She was still asleep, but every single muscle in her body was tensed up like they were trying to rip themselves free of her bones. She was screaming nonstop—I wasn't sure how she was keeping it up without stopping to breathe, but she was doing it.
She started thrashing and I pressed down on her shoulder to hold her in place, but it was like pushing an oak tree.
"Get her awake!"
Ash and I had both been screaming her name since the attack started, so I did the only other thing I could think of. I slapped her. Not as hard as I could have, but hard enough that I was riding a fine line between shocking her awake and simply giving her a concussion.
Kristin's head rocked back and to the side and then her eyes snapped open. "Get off of the main road, Ash."
"What?"
"I just had another precognitive dream. Dream Stealer was trying to keep me there so that I couldn't warn you. Get off of the main highway, they know we're driving down this road and they've got a description of our vehicle."
I looked forward at Ash as he looked up at me in the rearview mirror. I could see the same doubt in his eyes that I was thinking of.
"Guys, we really need to get off of the road. I'm telling you, this dream was the real deal, the details were too crisp to be anything other than another prophetic dream."
"This isn't the first time that Dream Stealer has done this to you, Kristin. He knows how your power works now. He knows the mistakes he made back in Sanctuary when he tried to counterfeit one of your dreams."
"I can't believe we're having this discussion. I have no idea where we are or even where we're headed. Ash had to have changed directions when I fell asleep. How could Dream Stealer possibly lure us into some kind of ambush?"
"If he's got satellites under his control and he knows roughly where we were when you fell asleep, then he just looks for a vehicle that exits the interstate shortly after you wake up and tell us about the ambush. One time probably wouldn'
t be enough, but if he can cross-reference that data with a knowledge of where we are when you go to sleep next it might be enough to narrow his list of suspects down to something he can have his people in the area manually run down."
"That's crazy. Dream Stealer wants me at large for as long as possible in the hopes that you guys will slip up and tell me something he can use. That satellite thing doesn't even sound possible, there's too much area to cover for it to work."
I bit my lip. I didn't actually know whether or not it was possible. Alec had other guys he turned to when it came to the satellite stuff. I needed time to think, but Ash only gave me a couple of seconds.
"Call it, Isaac. You're the expert and you're the one who's back there with her. If she's right then we need to move sooner rather than later if we're going to have any chance of avoiding the net they are setting up for us."
Kristin shot Ash a dirty look, but she didn't say anything before she turned back to me and met my gaze. Her scent wasn't off, at least no more than you'd expect from someone who was convinced that we were just seconds away from being jumped by a superior force. That was the problem, all of the signs that might have told me that she was lying would have been masked by the fact that she was worried about us.
I had no way of being sure. Even if she was telling the truth, Dream Stealer might have figured out how to counterfeit her precognitive dreams.
"Go ahead and get off at the next exit, Ash. We'll have to ditch the car somewhere in New Orleans first thing once the sun rises. If we can do it under an overpass or inside of a parking garage again that should make sure that Dream Stealer loses our trail if this is some kind of trick. Given that we'll be right smack dab in the middle of your old pack's territory, it's a big risk though."
Ash nodded as he pulled onto the off ramp. "Yeah, all it would take is one phone call for him to have Onyx turn out the entire pack to look for us. If they know what we're driving we won't have any chance of getting away."