by S L Shelton
John stared at him for a moment, and Wolf saw something akin to admiration briefly flit over his face.
“Why not just have Storc and Jo hack the information out of the servers?” John asked. “It could save lives.”
“That is certainly an option. But I’m expecting the data to be pretty well locked down,” he replied. “It took months to hack into the banks and trace the path of the funds in the holding accounts. We don’t have the luxury of time this go-around.”
John looked down at his hands, absently tapping his fingers on the table as he processed the information. “If Combine puts the accountant in hiding, or kills him—and killing him is the more likely response—we’ll never get to that data.”
“That’s why I have to go back out,” Wolf said, leaning forward. “Right now it looks like revenge. Bloody, violent, brutal revenge. If Harp thinks for one minute that’s stopped, he might begin to wonder if BeauLac is really dead…we can’t afford to let that happen.”
“What do you think we should do about Nick involving himself and team two in the Secret Service insurgent issue?”
Wolf looked at the message on the screen. “Nothing. He’s right. If a traitor ends up in the White House, he’ll have the entire infrastructure of the US government at his disposal to thwart removal. We’d never get Combine out of the house.”
“He’s requested access to funds.”
“Storc knows what to do. He’s probably already moving money from feeder accounts so Nick can access it.”
John nodded, something akin to amusement in his eyes. “Do you know who you’re going after next?”
“I was going to ask BeauLac for a little direction on that decision. He might shed some light on who’s remaining loyal to Combine and who’s being forced to.”
John nodded. “Okay. Let’s go talk to BeauLac.”
**
6:35 a.m. — The Sheraton Grand Hotel, Panama City, Panama
M.C. GOUGHIN tossed in uneasy sleep, his sheets tangled around his legs and a cold sweat coating his newly tanned skin. The chirp of his cell phone yanked him from the phantoms in his dreams and sent him upright, panting.
With the blackout curtains drawn tight, he had to look at the nightstand clock in order to adjust his mind to the time. His shaking hand reached for the glass of water beside him, and he sipped, then swallowed purposefully before grabbing his phone.
“Goughin,” he answered, his throat dry and rough.
“They’ve got a hit on the feeder accounts. It’s happening right now.”
M.C.’s feet hit the floor and he stood, suddenly charged with adrenaline. “Don’t do anything to spook him. Follow the path of the accounts only until I can get cryptography on the connection. Send me a text with the account number.”
“Yes, s—”
He ended the call and quickly scrolled through his contacts list for the BRE fast response number. The number had sat, unused on his phone for months, waiting for this type of break. As the line rang, a tone alerted him to a text message.
“Fast Tracking. Access authorization please.”
“Martin Caldwell Goughin. Prince-Underthall. G, four, D, T, nine, nine, R,” M.C. replied. “Account sweep and trace.”
“Thank you. Account type, origin, and account number please.”
M.C. pulled the phone from his ear and swept the display down, toggling to the text his assistant had sent. “Cayman Account, Banco Sanctumi DDG. Origin unknown. Routing; zero, five, five, five, nine, one, two, seven, nine. Account; zero, zero, zero, two, six, two, three, seven, seven, five, one, zero.”
His foot tapped nervously as he listened to the click of keys on a keyboard on the other end of the line.
“Nature of query?” the woman asked finally.
“The account is currently active. I need to know the geographic location of the operator making the account update.”
“Acknowledged. Is this number a good contact for the query results?”
“It is,” M.C. replied, his anxiety rising.
“Thank you. Disposition will be reported to the number you are calling from regardless of the outcome,” the operator said in a calm, soothing tone. “Is there anything else I can help you with?”
“No. Just get me that address.”
“We’ll do our best, sir. Someone will be in touch soon.”
He tossed the phone on the bed after ending the call and dressed in haste. He knew it would do no good to be present at the bank, but the emotional satisfaction of being in the presence of the account tracking computers moved him as if it were key to his success. He wanted a front row seat.
After rushing to the lobby, he realized he hadn’t called ahead for his driver. His impatience mounted as he stood in the already moisture laden tropical morning air, waiting for the sedan to arrive.
His urgency caused his driver to navigate at unsafe speeds once they were on their way, and his foot tapped out the silent rhythm of his anxiety throughout the short trip to the bank.
A uniformed guard awaited him, opening the door as he ran from the car to the building.
“Good morning,” the man said in a thick Spanish accent, only to be ignored by M.C. as he blasted by.
The tap, tap, tap, of his shoe against the elevator floor echoed until he became self-conscious about it and stopped—only to begin again as soon as the thought was pushed from his mind by the specter of the hunt that even now closed in on his thieves.
The door of the elevator had scarcely begun to open as he pushed through sideways and sprinted to the makeshift forensic accounting command center.
“Are they still online?” M.C. asked as he ran into the room.
Around the conference table were more than a dozen workstations. Only three were in use, but M.C.’s assistant, Jim Garfield, a tall, imposing man of quiet reserve, stood behind one of them, watching the screen.
“No. He just logged out about two minutes ago,” Garfield said. “The funds were moved from thirty-eight accounts, bounced through more than twenty bank hops each, and then deposited at their final destination. Each transaction was less than ninety-five-hundred dollars.”
“You didn’t try back trailing him, did you?!”
Garfield shook his head without looking up. “No, sir. We just monitored. None of these accounts would have shown up without the new software Treasury had installed in the bank’s tracking systems. The amounts were too small to draw any attention.”
“Smart little bastards,” M.C. muttered as he stepped behind the woman at the keyboard. “We should have been doing that.”
“Our amounts were too great,” Garfield replied.
“No. Our software was too clumsy,” M.C. snapped with no visible response from his assistant. “These sons of bitches have obviously found a way to automate the transfers, keeping the currency amounts low enough to avoid triggering any red flags.”
Garfield made no indication he’d even heard, much less had an opinion about M.C.’s brilliant observation. It irked M.C. for a moment, but then his phone rang.
“Mister Goughin?”
“Yes. Tell me you got the bastards.”
“I have coordinates of three cell towers, a radius of fewer than twelve miles each, overlapping in a single zone of less than eight square miles.”
M.C.’s heart rate jumped. “Send it to me.”
“Sending via text to your phone now,” the woman said with cheerful inflection.
“That’s perfect. Thank you.”
He began to end the call when she added, “Would you like the branch and name on the account in Washington DC the money was transferred to?”
A rush of euphoria surged through M.C. and he had to steady himself with the back of the chair. “Yes. Please.”
“Sure thing. Sending now.”
The chime on M.C.’s phone produced a nearly sexual stimulus in him. “Thank you.”
“My pleasure, Mister Goughin. Is there anything else I can do for you this morning?”
“You’ve done more this
morning than we’ve managed in the last two months. We’re all set.”
“Excellent. Have a good day.”
M.C. steadied himself, gripping the back of the accountant’s chair as he scrolled through the data that BRE had sent him. After he had examined all the information, he held the screen up to Garfield. “Call Mr. Harp’s assistant. It’s too early for her to be in the office, so call the after-hours number. Tell her who you are, what you have, and then forward this information to whatever number she gives you.”
Garfield took the phone. “Yes, sir.”
“And then use the origin codes on those transfers to start looking for our money,” M.C. said, turning and walking out. “We have a lot of cash to count.”
“Your phone, sir,” Garfield called to M.C.’s back.
“I’ll be upstairs in my office. Bring it to me when you’re done.”
The door closed behind him, ending the interaction before Garfield could respond. M.C. walked past the elevator and pushed through the door of the staircase. He walked up half a flight and stopped.
After a moment, he sat on the landing and stared forward, seeing nothing but numbers floating past his inner eye. He breathed in deeply, then, after holding the breath until his lungs burned, he let it out in a slow purposeful stream. He’d done it. He’d done what so many had failed to do. A buttoned down little masochist, with weak arms, and a well- hidden speech impediment, had found Combine’s money—and more importantly, he’d found the thieves.
He shivered in arousal at the idea of them being captured, bound, and forced to talk. And when the money had been recovered, he would take his .3 percent bonus and pay a lifelong procession of men and women to smack his back and ass raw.
He closed his eyes and smiled at the thought. When the sound of a door opening below shook his attention away from his fantasy, he stood and resumed the course to his office. Tonight, he would hire two escorts to come to his room. They would take turns lashing him, letting one rest while the other beat his body raw.
“Heaven is a tight leash and hot flesh, warmed by the flick of a strong wrist,” he whispered, bracing against his arousal at the thought. “Purity through pain.”
**
1:25 p.m. (Central Daylight Time) — Rebel Team 3 Safe house, Goodway, Alabama
STORY “STORC” CARSON felt as if Christmas had arrived without warning. He busied himself cleaning his sleeping area in anticipation of Jo’s imminent arrival. For a moment, he forgot about the war they were fighting. The thought of covering tracks, erasing digital fingerprints, and Wi-Fi range, left his mind like clutter swept into a junk drawer. Jo would arrive in a matter of hours.
“Your computer is making a noise,” Ensign Thompson said walking past Storc’s room.
Storc barely registered the comment. “Okay. Just a minute.”
He stripped the sheets from his bed and bundled them into his dirty laundry before whisking them to the mudroom off the side of the kitchen where the washer dryer hummed with one of the SEAL’s clothes.
As he passed the computer room, he heard the noise Thompson had mentioned and the blood left his face, making his ears cold. The sensation poured into his gut as he dropped his laundry in the hallway and ran to the system, waking it with a touch of his mouse.
Two-hundred-eighty automated fund transactions had failed in the past hour—all Latin America and Caribbean.
He dropped into his chair and began searching the logs for the cause. Had the script failed? Their internet connection? The bank trunks? No. Too many banks for that to be the case.
He opened a string of collapsible proxies and probed one of the banks. Everything seemed to be in order. The money, however, in all of their accounts at that bank, had vanished.
Am I running an obsolete script? Are these accounts I’ve already cleared out?
He pulled up the database of accounts, hundreds of thousands of them, updating constantly as money was bounced and rerouted. No. There should be money in those accounts.
His fingers flashed furiously, digging deep into the logs of the banks’ systems, seeking an answer, and hopefully, a solution to the missing funds. He reached a new line of audit control calls in the banking system and froze.
“No,” he whispered.
In a frenzy of coding battle, he wrote a series of camouflaging scripts, decoy connections, and brute force assault programs, all aimed at the new code seemingly constructed to target rapid transfer accounts with amounts between seven thousand and nine-thousand nine-hundred ninety-nine dollar amounts—all originating from a call list, adjusted off system.
He set the scripts in motion, attacking the very software that had tracked the account changes.
“Mark!”
Fast footsteps echoed down the hall and stopped behind him. “What’s wrong?”
Storc nodded toward the screen as his fingers flew across the keyboard, pounding a furious path to the unknown source of the call list. When finally he emulated one of the banks and cracked the access, the contents spilled out onto his screen. Lines of flow charts, tracking accounts from their Combine origins.
“That’s impossible. I erased the logs behind me every time.”
“Explain to me what’s going on,” Mark said, trying to assert calm in his tone.
Storc shook his head. “Somehow, they followed…it’s impossible. There’s no way they could have followed that many transactions with no logs.”
“What?!”
Storc turned to Mark. “They have all our Caribbean and South American transactions from the last transfer…every single damned one. And they’re tracking us with them.”
Mark turned and ran out the door. “We’re burned. Everyone pack up. We’ve got to get out of here now.”
A flurry of activity ensued as if a bomb had dropped. Storc isolated himself in his task, writing scripts and uploading them at a pace he’d never achieved before. He hoped that by bombarding the bank programs with false positives, he could salvage the remaining funds and remove the logs of their passing before recorded.
Then a thought occurred to him. How could they have tracked the funds through so many changes, through so many banks, even after the logs and the backups had been expunged of the evidence?
His fingers hung motionless over the keyboard as a sickening compression worked its way up his gut to his chest. There was only one organization on the planet that could even possibly harvest that much electronic data as it occurred—but even this was beyond their capability. Isn’t it?
Storc pushed the other windows from his screen and started a new script—a special script. It would follow a string of data, and ping back to him at the firewall. Whoever is doing this still has to use IP addresses, servers, trunk lines.
While the frantic sound of feet beat throughout the house in the background, Storc wrote the elegant, Slip-Knot code to insert in a transaction. When he was done, he loaded it to one of the remote servers and then executed.
He watched as ping, after ping, returned a string of IP addresses. There would only be one, he knew. No one would be able to follow his code but the group he targeted. As the stream of IP addresses narrowed, a sudden branch flared out, sending IP addresses from a new source, as if being spoon-fed by the attacker.
It was no surprise when the origin IP block revealed itself as a BRE subgroup of the NSA. He shook his head, his fist curling in anger as he watched the second branch populate with data.
It was a smaller stream of data than the first, but it was unexpected in its geographic location. “Panama,” Storc whispered.
He waited.
“Storc. Now. Burn the systems and let’s go,” Mark said from the doorway.
“In a second.”
“Now!” Mark stormed in and grabbed Storc by the arm. “We have to go!”
Storc turned, red-faced and angry. “The BRE servers, running on an NSA platform sniffed us out. But they’re feeding data to Panama.”
A confused crease formed between Mark’s brows. “Panama
?”
Storc nodded. “And if you’ll give me a goddamned minute, I’ll tell you where in Panama, how many servers, and the login of the person they’re sending it to.”
Mark looked back into the activity of the house, SEALs packing weapons, and tossing equipment chests into the SUVs now pulled to the front of the house. He nodded. “You have five minutes. Then we have to go.”
Storc turned and went back to typing. “More than enough time.”
As the sound of doors slamming and rooms being cleared echoed in the background, Storc watched the tick of IP addresses flow in front of him. As he hunted, another sound began to seep into his awareness—another alarm on his computer.
He shook his head, frustrated because he thought he had shut off the alarms for the accounts.
The final IP clicked into place on the screen. The 31st floor of Gigan Tesco Bank, Panama City, Panama. “I got you, you piece of shit.”
He saved the server addresses to a pocket drive that housed his account databases and reached over to disconnect the server’s internet connection when the flashing red border of a partially hidden window caught his attention. He took the mouse pointer and slid the window out of the way.
For the second time in less than an hour, his gut felt flooded with ice water.
“Mark! Drones incoming!”
**
2:45 p.m. (Eastern Daylight Time) — The Lincoln Memorial, Washington DC
NICK HORIATIS stood next to the massive central pillars of the monument and looked down over the National Mall. In front of him, the Washington Monument rose from the end of the reflecting pool like a rocket, ready to launch. Even midweek, the tourists crowded the walking paths—those who had scheduled their vacations around the cherry blossoms arrived to trees that had reached peak nearly a month earlier.
The forlorn visitors wandered the mall looking disappointed, mild expressions of apathy instead of wonder at the burst of color that had snuck in early, then vanished before their day had arrived. If that were the extent of Nick’s disappointment, he’d be a happy man.
He turned and walked into the memorial, looking from side to side, being ever mindful of the security cameras. As he approached Lincoln, a shiver worked its way up his back.