The Project

by I C Cosmos

  Enough points would buy her an upgrade to a VIP suite offering elite games, prime quizzes, and much, much more. Hm… Someone was taking advantage of people’s hunger to learn about themselves.

  Or were they? The site looked squeaky clean, no ads in sight. What’s their business model? There had to be a hook somewhere.

  Helen tried a few more quizzes, feeling giddy. And guilty.

  The doorbell rang, making her jump. Who? She hadn’t ordered anything. The ring screeched through her condo again, violating her space. Someone banged on the front door.

  Helen checked her surveillance apps and slowly moved toward the door. She looked outside through the peephole and jumped back as an angry eye met hers.

  “It’s the house manager.”

  Helen peeped out again. It was the house manager, standing farther from the door now, looking furious. Ugh… The guy gave Helen the shivers even when he was at his friendliest. Did he work for them? She had caught him once inspecting her front door and jumping away guiltily when she stepped out of the elevator, mumbling something about people reporting an open door on her floor.

  Helen opened up.

  “Your plants were all over the place,” the house manager complained. “We aren’t here to clean your mess all the time.”

  “I cleaned it up,” Helen said. “The wind must have blown the plants over. They aren’t mine, by the way.” She stared at the guy.

  “It’s not the first time this has happened,” he said menacingly.

  “I understand it upsets you,” Helen said. “Please take it up with my neighbors.”

  Not taking her eyes off the guy, Helen closed the door and engaged the security system, her heart pounding. She leaned against the wall in the hallway.

  Her secure phone vibrated. A new assignment.

  The Azores. Helen’s heart fluttered with joy.

  Palo Alto, California Washington, DC

  Bobby scrolled through the offending spreadsheet and read out several numbers, anger coloring his voice with raw urgency.

  This wasn’t how he wanted to run this business. They were leaving money on the table, and the bottom line suffered. All profits made by his gaming empire, 7’Heaven, went to financing Total Protection, which left Bobby without capital for innovation.

  “No one can survive in this business without new shiny objects,” he yelled at Frank Crawford, his only contact with the board of directors controlling TP, the new company created when Bobby’s 7’Heaven merged with DEI.

  “Focus on maximizing the membership, Bullock,” Frank replied. “We take care of the rest.”

  “Well, I’d like to discuss it with the board,” Bobby said. “I can fly to DC anytime this week.”

  “That won’t be necessary,” Frank said coldly.

  Bobby’s shoulders tensed. Their unapproachability irritated him to no end. He got it—this was the digital age, and people worked together just fine without ever meeting in person. Still, normal guys would kick off a business this big with at least a lunch. But from day one they had been hiding behind Frank, and Frank did only phone calls. Wouldn’t even video.

  “Frank Crawford,” he had introduced himself sharply on their first call.

  “The Frank Crawford?” Bobby had asked, making small talk, amused that his new business partner had the same name as the counterterrorism czar.

  “What do you think?” Frank said and laughed. The laugh had come a tad too late, but Bobby hadn’t paid enough attention then. He took in every detail now. And he didn’t like how Frank cut him off.

  “OK. You call the shots, Frank. But I’d like to ask you a favor.”

  “Shoot.”

  “Let me know the next time you visit our plant in China.”

  “Why is that?” Frank replied.

  Bobby noticed a slight quiver in Frank’s voice. Time to push him out of his comfort zone.

  “Because I could have told you that the new specs you gave them would cause trouble with our servers,” Bobby said confidently. “And the problem with the handheld units isn’t yet fixed. They have too many rejects. Someone has to look into it.”

  “As I told you, focus on maximizing the membership, Bullock.” Frank hung up.

  Bobby drew his breath in. Nice try, Bullock, you’ve just shut down your only communication channel. Frank was definitely afraid of something.

  What’s wrong with these people?

  ~~~

  Frank put his phone on a pile of memos, droplets of sweat sliding down his back.

  From the beginning, Frank didn’t feel comfortable about licensing parts of the Project’s technology to a civilian venture. He had grudgingly agreed to it only after Andreas convinced him that the government would collect enough money to recover their initial investment in the Project and pay for new developments. And the licensing fees would be paid by gamers.

  In Frank’s book, gaming was a colossal waste of time. Gamers were spending days behind their computers contributing exactly nothing. But they expected to be protected by their government anyhow. Let them pay.

  Still, no matter how much Andreas stressed that Frank was the most qualified person to oversee the collaboration from the government’s side, Frank knew that he shouldn’t get involved. Sticking to his principles, he had refused.

  Until the president had said in a meeting that the collaboration model with civilian projects was the way of the future, and praised Frank for championing it from the get-go. Frank had capitulated.

  Now he wished he had not.

  Bobby’s points were right on. The Consortium was leaving money on the table. It was alarming, but the least of Frank’s problems. Because in spite of what Bobby suggested, Frank hadn’t visited their factory in China lately and never gave them any new specs.

  He picked up his phone again. With twelve hours’ time difference, it was seven o’clock in the morning in Guangzhou. His man should be in the factory by now. Frank clicked on an icon and held his breath while the call was connecting.

  “Yes?”

  “Hey, I hear we still have a problem with rejected units.” Frank spoke slowly.

  “No problem.”

  “We don’t have a problem?”

  “No. Big boss is satisfied with rejects production.”

  “When did he tell you?”

  “Last Friday. He was here. Very satisfied.”

  “OK.”

  Frank slumped in his chair. The fear he was pushing away for months burst through.

  “We detected counterfeit units operating in the wild,” Nic had informed him from Sardinia.

  “If you are referring to the operation I am thinking about, Ralph Gibson and Paul Santini are making millions of dollars as we speak,” Collin Frey had said in Dallas.

  Frank had filed these early warnings under “unproven” and had forgotten about them when no other reports regarding counterfeit units came in. Forgetting about it was no longer possible. The evidence was clear. The rejected units weren’t really defective, but skimmed off the production line and sold illegally. Frank’s stomach clenched. Someone had infiltrated the factory and sabotaged the Project.

  Who?

  The only thing Frank was certain about was that Santini wasn’t in Guangzhou last Friday. And neither was Bobby.

  Nic? Nic had threatened to destroy the Project if the Consortium “misbehaved.” Distributing the units to the wrong hands could take the Project down faster than a speeding bullet. Still, Frank couldn’t believe that Nic would do that. He wanted to take down the Consortium, but not at the cost of supporting terrorists. Besides, Nic had visited the factory many times, and the Chinese had never called him “big boss.”

  Frank winced as another name crossed his mind.

  Horta, Faial Island, the Azores

  April

  Peter’s Café was Helen’s favorite place in Horta ever since she visited it for the first time with her family. She had spent many happy moments there listening to the stories of sailors from all over the world or perus
ing the yachting memorabilia given to the café by crews of boats that stopped in Horta on their way across the Atlantic Ocean.

  Going to the café was an adventure in itself because generations of sailors had decorated the pavement around the marina with colorful paintings of their yachts.

  Yet Helen barely registered the art and the bright blue facade of Peter’s Café. She walked deep in thought, challenging her mind to recall every step since she entered the quinta she was staying in.

  She had registered, taken the stairs up to her room, unlocked the door, put her trolley on the luggage rack, and opened the curtains. She enjoyed the ocean view for a few moments, then decided to explore the quinta’s vast gardens, and went down and walked through the different garden “rooms” while testing several op-code exercises for the training she had been asked to give on the Azores.

  Then a light rain broke through, and she walked back to her room, put her phone on the desk next to the window, and saw the note.

  Be careful!

  The note was written on a blank piece of paper that had been stuck into the Official Visitors Guide to the Azores. It was the first thing she had noticed when she looked at the table.

  She was missing something.

  Helen went back to the moment she entered the room and replayed her moves step by step, trying to recall every detail.

  The luggage rack, curtains, the Atlantic, her eyes brushing over the desk, registering the old lamp and the guide. There. She had scanned the desk and the guide before going outside. And hadn’t seen the note. Helen frowned.

  Could she trust her memory? She had been excited about being back in the Azores, in the quinta owned by the parents of her childhood friend Jorge. The stay in Horta wasn’t part of her official assignment, and she hadn’t paid much attention to the room. Maybe she had overlooked the note and her mind was playing tricks on her, Helen thought, frustrated.

  A few rogue bleeps disrupted her ruminating. She turned on her apps. A group of loudly speaking Americans entered the café, and with them a rogue unit communicating with another unit near the marina. The tag of the second unit popped up. Helen bit her lip.

  It was the same unit that directed the terrorist to drive a car loaded with explosives onto the ferry in Olbia.

  The Americans ordered beers and spread out at a table not far from Helen. A large guy took a phone from his pocket and tapped the screen.

  “Paul says the goods will be on Flores tomorrow,” he said, repeating what Helen’s app displayed.

  Helen suppressed a shocked giggle. The guy had received a message on a super-secure phone and then announced it for everyone to hear.

  A short, wiry man, the quietest member of the group, looked around the café surreptitiously.

  “Who’s Paul?” he asked.

  “Paul Santini. He runs the show. He’s gonna be here in a few minutes.” The large guy raised his glass and gulped down half of his beer.

  “I thought our orders are coming from DC.”

  “Paul’s taking over now.”

  Displeasure tightened the wiry man’s face. His nose twitched, drawing attention to its broken line. Something about the guy unnerved Helen. He looked smaller than she, but she wouldn’t want to meet him in a dark alley.

  She had been looking forward to spending a few days on the Azores, but all of a sudden she wished she were back in the safety of Amsterdam and the easy routine she had settled into over the last months. Running in Amstelpark or practicing yoga early in the morning, working on the Consortium’s programs during the day, cooking a light dinner while watching the local news, then working a few hours on her own cybersecurity enterprise, and finishing the evening by doing a couple of relaxing quizzes on Total Protection.

  Her Saturdays were free for explorations of the city. She would walk along the canals to the farmers’ market on Noordermarkt, visit a museum, or explore P. C. Hooftstraat, Amsterdam’s chicest shopping street.

  Pulled in by the nostalgia washing over her, Helen switched to Amsterdam on her weather app. Raining cats and dogs. She wouldn’t be walking anywhere today. Helen refocused on the Americans, letting go of any hope for a free weekend.

  The second rogue unit, a moving dot on Helen’s network analyzer, stopped in front of the café. The door opened, revealing heavy black boots, all-black outfit, aviators.

  “Hey, Paul,” the large guy yelled, and waved Paul to their table.

  If Paul Santini, a.k.a. the aviator man, noticed her, he didn’t show it. He took out several phones and distributed them to the group.

  “These are the super-secure units you need for the training. Turn them on.”

  Helen froze. Six new dots popped up on her network analyzer. Legitimate units. She checked their IDs and compared them with the units assigned to her training. All matched. These yahoos were her students.

  “Don’t bother with the training. She’ll put you through some stupid exercises, but all you need to know is how to put the units on autopilot. It’s this icon.” Santini pointed it out.

  This wasn’t how the training had been planned. It was modeled on the field trials in Stockholm. All participants, including herself, should remain anonymous and unknown to one another. But Santini knew that “she” was the trainer, and the “students” arrived together.

  “So just put your unit on auto. It’s the perfect cover,” Santini explained.

  Cover for what? Helen thought angrily. Did they think she wouldn’t detect they were on auto? Why would the Consortium ask her to prepare the training if the students were ordered to fake it? And how did Santini fit in? Was he legit? Or did he hijack the training? Helen took a deep breath to calm herself.

  “We were supposed to learn codes for real-world ops,” one of the guys said.

  “Don’t worry about that. Just engage auto so that we can go about the real business.”

  The real business?

  Be careful!

  Flores Island, the Azores

  The next day

  Something was wrong.

  Helen sensed it as soon as she pulled up in front of the picturesque cottage serving as the resort’s reception area. She hoped the man was working on something, but his body language sent another message. Helen got out of the car. The man didn’t move.

  As she walked closer, Helen noticed that he was cradling the upper body of a large German shepherd in his lap. The dog was foaming at the mouth and had torn paws. Tears ran down the man’s cheeks. Helen squatted down in front of them.

  “Can I do something for you?” she said softly.

  The man looked up briefly and shook his head. “He was my best friend… We started the resort together… Twelve years ago…” The words came out in spurts mixed with sobs.

  “I am so sorry,” Helen said.

  “Someone poisoned him… Who would do that?” The man’s voice broke.

  A shiver ran up Helen’s spine. She had an idea who. Last night she had intercepted an exchange between Santini and his goons. Santini had bragged about having the goods in his possession and ended with a sentence Helen didn’t understand at first.

  “Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow, 1080 here we go!”

  She had assumed that 1080 was some kind of code, but an hour later she jumped out of bed, remembering a lecture mentioning compound 1080, one of the deadliest poisons. A few searches later she had enough information to scare the living daylights out of herself.

  Compound 1080 was an odorless, colorless, and tasteless poison, highly toxic to warm-blooded animals and humans. It caused a protracted, agonizingly painful death. Nonetheless, 1080 baits were still used to reduce populations of pest animals, with aerial application being one of the distribution methods.

  Let it snow!

  The horror of 1080 in Santini’s hands had forced Helen to change her plans, catch the first flight out of Horta, and arrive on Flores one day earlier than scheduled. She had driven immediately to the resort because her apps had detected activity there last night and in th
e morning. Seeing the poisoned dog confirmed her worst fears.

  “Do you want me to call the police?” Helen asked.

  “My daughter called.”

  “Please be very careful and don’t touch anything—”

  A young woman ran out of the cottage. “They will be here in a few minutes. Said not touch him.”

  Helen stood up.

  “Do you have a reservation, madam?”

  “No, I was hoping—”

  “Please come in with me.” The woman ushered Helen in.

  Helen looked back, hesitating to leave the man alone, but he was saying something softly to the dog, and Helen didn’t want to intrude on the last minutes they had together.

  “I am so sorry this happened,” she said when they were inside.

  “It’s terrible. They were always together.”

  Helen nodded, suppressing tears. Another friend lost.

  “How many nights?”

  “Just one,” Helen said apologetically.

  “That’s OK.” The woman took out a map of the resort. “We have an individual cottage available. It’s here.” She made a circle around a spot at the far end of the property. “Or a suite in this cottage. Living room, bedroom, bath. No kitchen.”

  “The suite, please.”

  “It’s right down the hall.”

  Helen took the key and walked to the suite, shaken. She opened the door and immediately ducked into the bathroom.

  The wiry guy from Peter’s Café stood on the terrace in front of the suite, smoking a cigarette.

  Flores Island

  Hidden in the bathroom, Helen took out her phone. Her apps burst with activity. Two units were lit up next door, one of them in contact with a unit on Horta. Helen tuned in but caught only the last sentence.

  >> Let it snow. LOL.