Don’t do this. Not now. You’re so close.
Anthony closed his eyes and focused his mind back to the only place he felt at home.
I have been here before; I will be here again.
I have been here before; I will be here again.
He could feel the light and dark sides of his mind swirling, bubbling like oil into water.
I have been here before; I will be here again.
It’s going to be all right.
You have a job to do, Anthony.
You have a job to do, Endling.
His eyes popped back open and he smiled, throwing his neck back against the chair with relief. He had found what he needed, whatever it was, somewhere in there. He just needed a little time.
Turning back to his screen, he sluggishly tabbed over to a browser to check forums—anything to make the time pass by faster. He clicked on a few of the top links to open multiple tabs and watched as his laptop struggled to keep up, displaying circular “loading” icons in each of the new tabs.
A file transfer shouldn’t be taking up this much memory.
Why is this so slow?
>>>>>
“He’s lagging,” Haylie said, fixed on the live feed, shaking her head. “The virus must be weighing down his processor.”
“So, maybe it will slow him down,” Agent Hernandez said. “Give us more time.”
“That’s not the problem, Einstein,” Haylie said. “If he checks to see what’s wrong, he’s going to see our webcam process running in the background. Best case for us is he just shuts it off.”
“What’s the worst case?” Agent Hernandez asked, looking over to Agent Wilcox, who already knew the answer.
“Worst case is: he’ll know we’re watching him,” Wilcox said.
>>>>>
Hitting Command-R to refresh each browser tab, Anthony’s huffed as he felt the heat from the laptop’s casing creep into his palms. This is taking too long. Too long. With a few keystrokes, he brought up his network monitor tool to check the Wi-Fi connection speed.
Not great, but seems right for a public router.
Tabbing back to his browser, he refreshed the forum page again with a harder keystroke—as if that would help—watching the different elements of the page load at a snail’s pace across the screen.
Slowly, painfully.
>>>>>
“I’ve got a match,” Mary’s voice yelled over the speaker.
Haylie watched as Mary brought up a live feed of a new desktop background—a cluttered collection of file icons strewn across the screen, arranged on top of the bright-pink desktop wallpaper.
“This doesn’t look like the desktop of someone who hides their IP,” Mary said. “I’m checking the location—it should at least get us close.”
The group watched as Mary brought up the user details from the Roar-4 interface, grabbed the IP address, and did a quick lookup.
“Looks like the north side of the river,” Mary said. “Somewhere in the area of LaSalle and Ontario.”
“Go!” Agent Wilcox yelled up at the driver, who hit the gas with a screech of rubber. Everyone in the van flew back towards the corner as the vehicle twisted to the right and sped away. “What’s the name of this place?”
“Don’t have that,” Mary said. “We won’t get it from an IP address, just general area location. Keep watching that screen, let’s see if they self-identify with any chats or searches. I’ll keep looking for more infected machines.”
>>>>>
With a quick combination of Command-spacebar keystrokes, Anthony brought up a search dialog box.
Let’s fix whatever is slowing this thing down.
>>>>>
Agent Wilcox pinned herself into the corner of the van, clutching her phone with both hands and typing furiously.
“I’ve got positive hits on four different coffee shops near that intersection,” Wilcox said. “That’s close enough, we can go one by one if we have to.”
Haylie grabbed both sides of the screen and watched as Mary ran the image processing script, updating the settings, searching for patterns. The van took a sharp left and Haylie grabbed the steel equipment rack bolted to the frame, bending with the curve. As they sped forward, she looked over to check the feed from the Endling’s screen. A new window popped up.
Oh no.
“This isn’t good,” Haylie yelled, holding on to the steel rack as the van accelerated. Wilcox and Hernandez leaned in closer to see the Endling typing into a search field at the center of the screen.
Search: Activity Monitor
“He’s checking to see what’s slowing his machine down,” Haylie said, backing away from the screen and reaching for the phone. “Mary! We need his actual location. He’s checking his process log; he’s going to see the Roar-4 virus running. We’re about to run out of time!”
“I’ve got a new match,” Mary said. “I won’t wait on any others. I’m bringing it up now.”
“How far away are we?” Haylie yelled to the driver.
“Two minutes,” the driver yelled back, swerving through traffic. “One, if we’re lucky!”
>>>>>
Anthony raised his eyebrow as he selected the Activity Monitor program from the list of results. He scanned the list of running programs, sorting by the percentage of CPU in use. Switching over to check his download progress for the OPM files, he cracked a smile.
File download in progress
Estimated completion: 0min 39secs
Tabbing back to the application list, his eyes grew wide as he focused on the process running hot at the top of the list.
>>>>>
“Get ready to move!” Agent Wilcox said, putting on her bulletproof vest and double-checking her sidearm was in place.
Haylie stared down at the floor of the van, trying to fight the adrenaline coursing through her veins. She took deep breaths as the agents put on vests and checked their firearms. She looked up to see the Endling scrolling through the Activity Monitor.
“We’re not going to get there in time,” Haylie said, defeated. “He’s going to find it. It’s only a matter of time.”
“We’ll just need a minute or two,” Agent Wilcox said. “To get into each of the locations. We know what he looks like, it should be in and out each time.”
“Haylie,” Mary’s voice rang through the van, over the speakerphone. “Buy them more time. Think. Work the problem.”
Haylie closed her eyes, picturing the Endling sitting in the coffee shop, surrounded by strangers. Feeling alone. Feeling nervous. Wanting to be someone, wanting to be known.
When he finds the virus, he’s going to panic. He’s going to run. What would keep him from running?
She pictured the first calling card: the passenger pigeon. Staring back at her with deep, black eyes. Dead eyes, pixelated, never to be seen again.
Step back.
She imagined the Endling placing the image file on the Xasis server. Checking to make sure it was perfect. Then checking again. Quickly running over to check the forums. To see if it was time yet; time for him to be famous.
Of course.
She jumped to her feet, the van’s movement almost knocking her right back down. She grabbed the laptop, bringing up a new window in the NSA’s Roar-4 control interface, fighting to maintain her balance.
“What are you doing?” Agent Wilcox yelled.
“I’m buying you some time,” Haylie said. She scrolled through the command window, finding access settings for the Endling’s machine.
>>>Create new alert:
>>>Create new email:
“You want to be famous, asshole?” she whispered as she typed. “I’ll make you famous.”
>>>>>
Each entry in the activity monitor refreshed, dancing across the screen and reordering every few seconds. Anthony struggled to keep up, locking his eyes on a listing and then having it quickly disappear.
He slid his cursor up to sort by CPU usage.
I’ll find
you, wherever you are.
As he pressed down to click, an alert popped up in the top right corner of his screen.
Email
From: [email protected]
Subject:
If you are who I think you are,
I think we should talk.
The Endling would make a great cover story.
Anthony froze, quickly surveying the rest of the coffee shop for anyone looking his way. He leaned in towards the top right of his screen, studying each word, reading the subject line again and again. The alert faded away as Anthony sat back, heart pounding.
It’s happening. It’s finally happening.
He heard another ping from his laptop as he saw a fresh alert, this time the notification service he had set up to monitor forums. The summary appeared in the same place, then followed by another directly below it.
New hit on: HackPalace forum
Subject: What I’ve Learned from the Endling
New hit on: ExploitWorld forum
Subject: Why the Endling’s Tactics Change Everything for our Industry
He laughed out loud, wringing his hands together, eyes wide.
They see what I’m doing. They know my name.
He clicked on the notification, bringing up a web browser to show him the full view of the message. As he leaned in, he forgot all about the Activity Monitor and the download progress. He forgot all about everyone else in the coffee shop.
He had arrived.
As the browser window rendered, still running slow, he waited for the full text to pop up, the browser thinking, spinning its progress wheel. Waiting for what seemed like minutes, waiting to read every juicy detail.
As the window spun its wheels, another notification popped up—this one from a hacker on the Rockyrd hacking boards, notorious for being skeptical of anyone but the most elite from across the globe.
I knew it would happen. I just didn’t think it would be so soon.
He flipped back to the browser window loading a white frame. It finally quit, flashing the words:
Page Not Found.
The content you’re looking for doesn’t exist.
His eyes darted around the screen. The new notifications had both disappeared, leaving him with only a blank page. He brought up the Wi-Fi monitor to make sure his connection was still—
“Whoa, there, fella,” he heard a woman’s voice over his right shoulder with a thick Texas drawl. He turned, seeing two men in bulletproof vests flanking a woman at the center, all with pistols out. He clicked a few keys and then sunk back away from his machine, his face dropping.
“How about you and me go for a ride, what do you say?”
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
NSA Field Office, Second Floor
Chicago, IL
October 30th, 11:50AM
Haylie had seen a few interrogation rooms after her activities back in London, but she had never been on this side of the glass. The back of the one-way mirror was tinted, casting a gray film over the image of Agent Wilcox, Agent Hernandez, and the Endling from the next room. It had been a few hours, and Haylie felt herself starting to grow antsy. Or maybe just bored.
After grabbing the Endling from the coffee shop, the team had made their way back to the NSA field office, near some town called Naperville out in the suburbs. The office wasn’t as new as the San Antonio location and featured cheap wooden-veneer furniture pushed into a few dusty corners of the waiting area. Hernandez and Wilcox had been in the interrogation room for quite some time now, asking Haylie to watch and wait in the observation room.
“Take notes, and don’t say anything,” Agent Wilcox had said. “And for God’s sake, don’t tap on the glass. You never want to remind the zoo animals that someone’s watching.”
It was clear to Haylie that the agents weren’t going to get anywhere with this guy, not today. Every question had been greeted with either dead silence or a dismissive laugh. The Endling just stared at the wall, twitching his nose occasionally, ignoring the entire scene in front of him.
Haylie perked up as the agents stood, firing off a final volley of words as they made their way towards the door. Anthony didn’t even acknowledge them as the door shut, just continued staring straight into the glass. Right at Haylie.
“He’s not talking,” Agent Wilcox said, rubbing her eyes. She asked the agent in the room to run and get her more coffee. Hernandez asked for a fresh cup as well.
“I can see that,” Haylie said. “What happens now? You’ve got to have experts that can get something out of him, right? Like in the movies?”
“Sure,” Hernandez said. “But all the local guys are tied up with other cases. We’ve got a pair of agents on a plane from New York, but it’ll be a few hours.”
“He wants to say something,” Agent Wilcox said with a shake of her head. “I know he does. But his attitude in there is bigger than Dallas. So damn proud of what he’s done, he must be dying to tell someone all about it.”
“At least we stopped the final hack,” Haylie said. “That’s something, right?”
“Yes and no,” Hernandez said as he flicked through messages on his phone. “Our analysts think he may have been moving the files to somewhere other than his laptop.”
“Where are they?” Haylie asked.
“A cloud server location,” Hernandez said. “We’ve confirmed that most of the data made it there, and that someone other than the Endling accessed the files a few minutes after.”
“So it is bigger than just this guy,” Agent Wilcox said, gazing back through the glass. “How bad is it? How many records?”
“They’re still tallying everything up,” Hernandez said. “But it looks like somewhere over twenty million.”
“We need to find the guy he’s working with,” Wilcox said. “Or working for. We need him to talk. But he’s got to want to talk to someone. He’s got to…”
Wilcox looked up as her finger pointed slowly in Haylie’s direction.
“You,” Agent Wilcox said under her breath. “He’ll talk to you. He’ll go all fan-boy or whatever you call it on you. Once he sees you in the room, he’ll be stepping all over himself to go and tell you everything.”
Haylie took two steps back, her hands raising to waist-level and pushed out towards the agents.
“In there?” she pointed into the room. “Me? With him? No, no. Not happening. Just observe and consult, remember? That was the deal.”
“You’ll be fine, Haylie,” Hernandez said. “Just talk to him. Like a friend. No agenda—he’ll see right through that. No script. Hacker to hacker. Just get him talking—something will come out.”
“What if he comes at me?” Haylie asked.
“Those cuffs will hold him,” Wilcox said. “Legs are in shackles. The worst thing that can happen is that he jumps at you, scares you out of your boots.”
Well, that’s reassuring.
She bit her lip as she looked past the glass.
What would I even say? Do I just walk in and let him do the talking? And what if he doesn’t even know who I—
“Ms. Black,” Agent Wilcox said, stepping in towards her. “Let me remind you about the details of our agreement. I’m willing to get rid of the rest of your probation if you give us material help in this case. So far, every break in the case has been due to Mary’s involvement, not yours.”
Haylie’s heart began to race as her eyes flicked back and forth between Wilcox and Hernandez. Oh, hell no.
“That’s not true,” Haylie said, pointing her finger in Wilcox’s direction. “The background pattern matching: that was my idea. We wouldn’t have found him … without—”
“It was a good idea,” Hernandez interjected, “that Mary coded up and executed. You were just sitting in the van with us, a spectator. Agent Wilcox is right, Haylie. But now, you can help us out. You can help yourself out.”
Haylie stared back in silence, fire in her eyes. She paced the room, pulling her hair back behind her neck and letting it fall down past her
bowed head. Hernandez began to speak, but Haylie held her hand out with a “don’t even think about it” motion as she continued to walk, weighing her options.
This is ridiculous. This isn’t fair. I should have known better—should have known they’d pull something like this.
She walked to the window, pulse pounding, shaking her head.
But now I don’t have a choice.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
NSA Field Office, Second Floor
Chicago, IL
October 30th, 12:04PM
The door closed behind Haylie with a soft rush of air and a firm clunk. The silence of the room filled her mind as she shifted her weight back and forth between her feet, trying her best to maintain control over her heartbeat. She remembered the last few instructions from Agent Hernandez and Agent Wilcox: “You’ll be fine. If we want you to stop, we’ll tap on the glass. That’s your sign to back off.”
Haylie watched the Endling carefully, watching his eyes stay locked on her every move. She could barely breathe. The room felt different from this side of the two-way mirror: more sterile, more dated. The smell of industrial-strength cleaner didn’t help; it filled her nostrils, making her nose sting like she had just walked in to a hospital ward. She paced across the room with careful steps, gliding into the empty chair across the table from the Endling. He stared at her as a sinister smile made its way across his face.
Crash Into Pieces (The Haylie Black Series Book 2) Page 14