by S L Shelton
“Traffic cam from the bridge. I turned it around and have it at maximum zoom.”
“You hacked the traffic grid?”
Jo shook her head. “Storc did, weeks ago when he and Scott set up this remote hub.”
Nick sat next to her and stared at the Homeland Security team as they went about their work securing the site. “How important was that site?”
Jo shrugged. “We have others, but this one was pretty major. It’s about five percent of our computing power.”
“How’d they find it?” Nick asked.
“Scott made a call from one of the relays earlier.”
Nick leaned back and rubbed his face. “It’s not like him to expose resources for no reason. I wonder what made him do that?”
“Well, we can see what the call was,” she said, pulling up the log on the phone Scott had called from. “Oh…there’s a text here, too.”
She clicked on it, and they both read: “Safe house compromised. 2 dead. 1 wounded. No longer operational. Coming to you.”
“Oh no,” Jo whispered.
“It’s not as bad as it looks, but it’s bad,” Nick said. “Two attackers, both dead. One of our guys dead. No mention of wounded.”
It was Jo’s turn to be confused. “How do you get that?”
Nick sat back and stared at the screen. “It’s a five-part open-coded message. The first sentence announces an operational update, followed by opposing force casualty report with an actual number and update. Then comes team casualty report with a one-off description, wounded means dead, rallying means wounded, nothing means no casualties. It’s disinformation for anyone who might intercept the message while still relaying an update.”
“So, they’re out of business?” Jo asked.
“No. They’re on task. The operational status and directive at the end are the opposite of their actual status,” he said with a troubled look on his face. “This really says they’re still on plan and not to send anyone to intercede.”
“Then why do you look like you ate bad sushi?”
He shook his head. “There’s no reason for him to call out on an unencrypted line if they’re still on task… Pull up the voice call.”
She double clicked on the cloud-stored call. Scott’s voice sounded tense, anxious. “Don’t come here. I don’t have the resources. You’d be better off just handing yourself over for court-martial at this point… Do you understand? Don’t come here.”
Nick sat back abruptly. “It was one of the SEALs who died. They’re going ahead with the plan but are going with only the clothes on their backs.”
“How do you know?” Jo asked.
“Listen to his voice…do you hear anything odd?”
Jo nodded. “He sounds stressed, big time.”
“Right. He wouldn’t have put that inflection in his voice unless it was about the casualty. And the reference to court-martial means the tone is for a military asset…one of the SEALs.”
“Why would he waste a relay center to send a coded message when all he had to do was encrypt a file and post it on the Craigslist drop box?”
Nick shook his head and pointed at the screen. “He wanted Homeland Security to think he was in Clearwater. It means he knows they’re looking hard for him, and he needed a thick cloud of smoke to disappear in.”
“He can’t get out of the country. They’ll be screening every male face at every airport.”
Nick shook his head. “Not every airport. Not military.”
Jo felt the blood leave her face. “He wouldn’t! If he’s caught, there’s no way—”
“He’ll be fine,” Nick said, pushing the chair back and standing. “I’ve deadheaded on military transports before. If you have anything like a written order, no one even looks twice.” He stared at the screen for another beat and shook his head. “I’m more worried about who died. Morale is already low. Having casualties before he even gets out of the gate is going to hurt.”
Jo tipped her head down at the realization that she would never again see the face of someone she had shared meals with for the past two months. Their little family had just grown smaller—again.
A question dawned on her as Nick turned to leave the room. Jo reached backward and grabbed his sleeve. “If you knew about the coded message, won’t others know it too?”
Nick smiled. “Not unless they’ve worked on a John Temple Op…and only then if he trusted you enough.”
“But—”
He patted her arm and attempted a supportive smile. “They’ll be alright. Scott wouldn’t still be on plan if anything catastrophic had happened.”
The sentiment seemed so foreign breaking across his face that it only made her feel worse. She pasted on a thin smile of her own and nodded. “Okay.”
“Now get back to work on those hacks,” he said. “None of it means anything if we can’t crack the backups.”
He turned and walked away, leaving her with a sinking feeling. Her fingers hovered above her keyboard, but she couldn’t focus on her next task—faces of all who she had known and had died in the attack on TravTech began to fill her mind. When Bonbon’s smiling face surfaced, Jo closed her eyes tightly, squeezing a tear onto her cheek.
She remembered the day she had met her team at TravTech. Scott, the handsome, Asperger’s savant who had somehow, unlike her, mastered the art of charm and likability.
Bonny Little—Bonbon—that filterless, ranting, social butterfly with the green and blue hair. Her first friend at TravTech had become a sister.
On the day Jo was hired, Scott Wolfe had just told her the job was hers when Bonbon rushed over and gave her a hug. It had made her feel uncomfortable yet strangely at home. Jo had been able to offer little more than a brief tap on Bonbon’s back in return.
Bonbon had said, “Awww. How cute! You blush.” Which only made Jo blush more.
“Bonbon. Maybe Jo has boundaries you need to recognize,” Scott had said, no doubt sensing her discomfort with that damnable, nearly clairvoyant ability to read people.
“It’s fine,” Jo had replied shyly.
“Yeah. See! It’s fine. Everybody likes to hug,” Bonny had said, setting the tone for their relationship.
More tears streamed down her face at the thought of Bonbon, torn to shreds by the blast that had destroyed TravTech. If not for the lucky act of her pursuing Scott outside to chastise him for his treatment of Bonbon, she too would be dead now. She and Storc would not be a thing—whatever that was. And Scott…
“Poor Scott,” she muttered. He had taken the brunt of the burden.
Her fingers launched into her program, tapping fleet lines of elegant code—pristine forgeries to persuade the National Intelligence Data Collection Center that her virus belonged there among the analyst data and surveillance recordings; that the seductive lines she typed would be embraced as part of the system.
“Fuck you,” she whispered, as she tapped a hard return, then two more, striking the key harder each time. “Fuck you, fuck you.”
She stopped and stared at the flashing cursor, beckoning her to continue, but taunting her with the optimism stealing reality; there was no way to activate a program within the system and she knew it.
It didn’t matter how clean her code was nor how native it appeared. There was no way to activate it in the cold, icy, frozen out repository of the National Intelligence backup. They’d need the system to reboot before anything they wrote could take effect. And there was no way to force a reboot from the outside.
She rested her head on her arms and rubbed her eyes across her sleeve. She knew she had gone too long without sleep, too long without a good meal—her head pounded with anxiety too extreme to focus on either.
“What kind of hack could force system restart?” she asked quietly.
Heavy footsteps approached from down the hall. “Talking to yourself?” Petty Officer Cooper asked, leaning through the doorway.
“Why are you up?” Jo asked, deflecting.
He shrugged. “I hea
rd voices…just being nosy I guess.”
“Ah.” She began typing again.
“You know, sometimes it’s not what you do that wins a battle, but what you convince your opponent they have to do,” Cooper said.
She turned and looked at him. He was one of the older members of the SEAL team. She wondered why he hadn’t made Chief yet. He was right—she’d been working so hard on trying to code a way to force a reboot, she hadn’t considered making them want to restart the system themselves.
“How is it you’re not a CPO yet?” she asked.
He grinned broadly. “I started late. To me, this is living my frat fantasy. Why would I fuck it up by goin’ and getting myself promoted?”
She stared at him a moment longer, realizing there was more to it than that, but not wanting to pry. People share what they are comfortable sharing. He winked at her and left. As soon as his footsteps had faded to nothing, she pulled up the interface to generate an encrypted message and started tapping out a message to Storc:
“Tall Bird,
Clearwater is down. Sacrificed by Monkey Wrench. Nothing we can do about it but have an idea for getting into the vault. We need code samples from the guy who almost killed Monkey Wrench at summer camp. And I need something from you: I need the signature callout routine for every Russian, Chinese, and North Korean virus currently in the wild.”
She sat, poised to send, but a wave of warmth flowed through her. The memory of the night before they went their separate ways with their respective teams enveloped her like a hug. She smiled and typed one more sentence.
“My pillow still smells like you.”
She grinned more broadly and clicked send, encrypting the message and automatically posting it in pieces across fifty Craigslist ads in ten cities.
The house began to make noise as security shifts changed. She lingered in front of her screens, fighting the weight of her eyelids as she waited, hoping for an immediate reply.
After fifteen minutes of no activity on her screen except for the flashing lights of emergency vehicles arriving on the scene in Clearwater, she turned the traffic camera back to its proper position then closed the feed. She carefully removed all trace of her presence in the log file and backed out of the system.
With one last, hopeful click, she refreshed the Craigslist reader. A new message appeared.
She smiled and clicked on the notification then set her script in motion to screen-scrape the replies from Craigslist. The segments of the seventy posts churned through three rounds of decryption and revealed the message. Her heart swelled at the codename he had given her:
“DarkWish,
I saw the Clearwater raid. Was that you with the EM pulse? Beautiful. Laughed my ass off. I figured it was bad if MW burned the site. I hope they are okay.
“I pulled the code from BRE that Eric the Joiner wrote before the Farm. He was prolific…tight code, too. Cloud drop ready when you are. Why you need it?
“Chinese, Russian, North Korean code will be in cloud drop inside of three hours. There’s a lot of it. Some of the new stuff is stealth AF…maybe we could use it.”
Though she was excited to have Joiner’s code waiting for her in the joint cloud drive they utilized, she felt disappointment threaten her enthusiasm with no personal sentiment in the message. She was about to reply when a new message chimed. She decrypted it.
“DarkWish,
I wish this was private. But we both know rogue eyes will see each message. You taunt me with talk of your pillow when I already ache to return to it. There are many reasons for me to will an end to this shit-show we’re fighting. But the one thing that makes me impatient for that end, beyond all others, is a certain Dark Wish that lingers ever present in my heart. There is not a second that passes when I don’t feel that wish tug at my mind. My soul still smells like you.”
Corny, sweet, and touching beyond anything expected, she felt she could crawl through the screen and wind herself around him. She pulled up her messaging interface and wrote a new reply:
“Tall Bird,
Re: Joiner…need a fall guy. Re: EnemyState code…need fall guy’s awesome code to detect and flag something threatening enough to force a reboot. Follow the code down the rabbit hole and you’ll see everything seeks the sunlight eventually.
At the risk of sounding pathetic, you take my breath away…don’t stop. :o)”
She sent the message and leaned forward on her elbows, waiting for the reply. A moment later, after six screen refreshes, it arrived. She decrypted it.
“DarkWish,
Re: Joiner—you’re a fucking genius! Re: Your breath—it’s only fair I take your breath. You took my heart.”
She giggled and felt a blush rise to her cheeks. It astounded her she could feel like this. Emotions were never her friend—they were annoying sideshows distracting her from what was important. This was different.
She got up and went to her foldout bed in the corner of the room. As she lay down, she pulled her pillow close to her and inhaled deeply. Then a disturbing thought occurred to her. For a moment, she wondered if the intense emotion she felt for Storc was born solely of the crisis they shared.
She flopped onto her back, holding her pillow across her chest and turned that thought over in her mind for a moment.
“Fuck it,” she muttered. It’s irrelevant. This is how I feel, no matter the cause.
She wanted this man more than she had ever wanted anyone. And if Bonbon’s death had woken something in her to let that happen, then she would honor Bonbon that much more for the loss.
She sat back and stared at Storc’s words. “Well, I’ll be damned,” she whispered. “The little dark robot has feelings after all.”
**
7:05 p.m. on April 30th—Local Time, Near Metz, France
WOLF heard Mac stir in the backseat of their borrowed car.
“Where are we?” he asked.
Wolf turned to see heavy perspiration clinging to his face and running down his neck.
“We’re almost to Metz,” Wolf said, reaching back and wiping the big SEAL’s face with a T-shirt. “Your fever broke again…that’s a good thing.”
Mac turned and saw the man next to him, unconscious, his face resting against the back door. “Who’s this?”
Wolf smiled. “That’s Sergeant Huck Gantz… This is his car.”
“Huck? As in Huckleberry?”
Wolf chuckled. “I asked him the same thing before he passed out. His mom liked the nickname from Huckleberry Finn, but only the nickname. So, it’s just plain Huck. No berries involved.”
Mac coughed a weak laugh. “I don’t remember getting off the transport. Did I cause any problems?”
Wolf shook his head. “You were a zombie, but you got up, shouldered your bag and walked off that plane under your own power.”
Mac nodded and closed his eyes. A second later they popped open again. “Why did my fever break?”
“It’s temporary.” Wolf pointed to the IV bag hanging from the back clothing hook. “Tylenol and IV fluids. You were burning up. We had to do something.”
“So, I’m not getting better.”
Wolf shook his head.
“So, what now?” Mac asked.
“There’s a small clinic in Metz with a surgical suite. After twelve free shots of peppermint schnapps, Huck there was good enough to let us use his car to take him back to base.”
Mac laughed again. “I wondered why it smelled like toothpaste in here.”
“Yeah. He yacked on the floor a while ago. It’s a good thing he didn’t have a big dinner.”
Seifert looked at Mac in the rearview mirror. “We’re going to get that nicked bowel fixed, partner.”
Wolf put his hand on Seifert's arm and shook his head almost imperceptibly. Badassery might run in SEAL DNA, but there was no need to bring up unpleasant details while in transit.
Mac looked down at his clothes. “Hey! How’d I get changed into civies?”
“I changed you bef
ore we went into the bar,” Wolf said. “Kudos to you, by the way. Impressive.”
“Don’t tell him that,” Seifert said. “It’ll go to his head.”
Mac chuckled again and then coughed a ragged rattle. “So—” he coughed again. “So, I went into a bar?”
Wolf shook his head. “No. We left you sleeping on a bench. We needed to find someone like Huckleberry here who had a vehicle and was on his way to being three sheets.”
Mac nodded. “So, you got him tanked, then stole his car.”
Wolf smiled. “It’s not stealing if he’s with us.”
“No. It’s kidnapping,” Seifert said with a broad grin.
“He’ll wake up in a few hours in his back seat, and wonder how he got to Metz,” Wolf said dismissively. “I’ll bet it’s not the first time he woke up in a strange place and wondered how he got there.”
Seifert shrugged. “We still have to—”
“Why don’t you start drinking that schnapps,” Wolf said, interrupting Seifert’s disclosure of what was coming next.
Mac looked at the bottle sitting between him and Huck. “Why?”
Wolf turned around and faced forward. “Because you’re going to want to be drunk for this next part.”
Seifert looked at Wolf with a knowing grimace as they entered the city of Metz.
“Why? Why do I want to be drunk?”
Seifert looked up at Mac in the reflection of the rearview mirror again. “Because it’s gonna hurt.”
Mac rolled his eyes and grabbed the bottle. “It had to be peppermint schnapps…couldn’t have been Jack Daniels.”
“Sorry, brother. Huck Finn back there would only drink schnapps.”
Mac shook his head and took a swig of liquor, scowling in disgust. He slapped the cork back on the bottle. “Goddamned Army snowflake.”
Wolf grinned. “Be nice…he’s giving us a ride.”
They wound their way through town and found the clinic. Seifert turned at an alleyway half a block further down from the entrance.