“We safe here?” Caesar asked as he approached.
“We’re good,” Sean replied, not bothering to keep his voice down. “An old friend from school runs this place. We’ve got it locked down, at least for the next few hours. Longer, if we need—just say the word.”
Sean pointed up at the newscast on the small television in the corner, showing two news anchors recapping the previous night’s presidential debate.
“Your buddy up there is growing more excitable,” Sean said, taking a sip from his ice water, eyes following the closed captioning on the screen. “It’s getting worse, believe it or not. Just about a week to the election and Hancock is upping the ante for a ‘Cyber-Secure America.’ It’s basically all he talked about during the debate last night.”
“I can’t believe that anyone is buying it,” Caesar said. “Who made him a security expert? And who says cyber anymore?” He took a few peanuts from the bowl on the counter and popped them in his mouth.
“There’s something else—you have to see for yourself. It’s been on loop, it should come back around in a minute.”
“What is it?”
“He’s building a team. A few ex-generals and network security guys from the private sector have joined him to advise.”
Caesar waved his hand with a dismissive push. “That’s nothing we can’t get around. It’s all just window dressing.”
“There’s more,” Sean said, eyes locked on the television. “Wait for it.”
The two sat silently, waiting for the video. Sean gestured over to the bartender for the remote. He clicked the volume up a few notches.
Following last night’s debate, Senator Hancock continued his push towards a cyber-secure nation by announcing an elite task force, the first, Hancock claims, in United States history.
Joining Hancock as full-time advisors on cyber-security are a collection of intelligence professionals from across the sector, but more surprisingly, a former leader of a hacker collective.
In Hancock’s words: “If we’re going to catch these people, we’re going to need to think like them.”
“Who’s that standing next to him?” Caesar asked, boosting himself off his barstool and peering towards the monitor. “He looks familiar.”
“That’s our problem,” Sean said. “Mason Mince. Calls himself Rancor?”
Caesar felt a chill come over his body as he processed the name. He sank back down.
“Rancor? The Rancor?” Caesar said, his jaw dropping. He stumbled to find the right words. “That guy is out of his mind … He takes out a critical system every few months, just to get headlines. Like, serious infrastructure hacks in major cities, just for his own ego. I can’t believe a senator would stand next to him on a stage.”
“Well, he’s on the Hancock train now,” Sean said. “Looks like he’s going mainstream—maybe he sees the tide turning and he’s trying to get ahead of it. If I had to guess, I’d say he’s bringing the top hackers from the Nam3less organization with him.”
Caesar sat back, watching the screen as the newscast cut between shots of Hancock—on his campaign plane, at the podium, hugging a small child somewhere in rural America. He lost a moment as his pulse raced, then forced himself to breathe again.
Nam3less? All working for Hancock? That’s impossible.
“Nam3less has done worse stuff than we’ve ever done,” Caesar said. “They’re one of the biggest hacking groups out there. The Area 51 exploit, the power grid up in Oregon. I always figured they’d be the first to get arrested in if Hancock got elected.”
“They were probably thinking the same,” Sean said. “Instead of running away from Hancock, they’re sliding in beside him. Getting joined at the hip before he gets elected—pretty smart, actually.”
“He’s not going to get elected,” Caesar muttered, watching the video of Rancor standing at the podium, tugging at his shirt collar, taking questions from the crowd.
“You and Rancor—you two have a history, right?” Sean asked with a cautious tone.
“Back when I was at Brux,” Caesar nodded. “He kept trying to get in our systems, breaking in to make us look like idiots.” He gave Sean a sideways glance. “He turned a bunch of his Nam3less script kiddies against us to find any weakness they could. But they never got in. Never. That didn’t stop him from lying, telling everyone that he had.”
“We’ll need to watch ourselves,” Sean said. “We have to assume that Hancock is bringing Rancor on board with an agenda. If Nam3less was first on Hancock’s hit list, then we’ve just taken that spot. We’d be a hell of a first pet project for Rancor—tracking down the guys who stole the keys to the world.”
“If someone catches us, it’s not going to be a bottom-feeder like Rancor,” Caesar said with a sneer. “Besides, they don’t have time—there’s no way they know what we’re up to. If we stay on track, Hancock will go away soon enough.”
“Well, there’s the good news. I put together a master database of all the information from the Eagle hacks. Looks like we’ve got enough to work with, as long as this last transfer comes through. With one more hack, the math checks out. We should be able to generate enough votes to push the election against Hancock, just by a bit.”
“And the Federal Election Committee servers?” Caesar said. “The target—our access is still working?”
“Of course it is,” Sean laughed. “We’re the men with the keys to the world, remember?”
“The keys to the world,” Caesar said, popping another handful of peanuts into his mouth. “But with no place to hide.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Littlefield Hall, University of Texas
Austin, TX
October 31st, 12:12AM
Vector paced the room, wringing his hands. “I’ve never even heard of anyone hacking something this big—this is mad. I don’t even know where to start.”
Haylie and Vector had spent the last hour running through every way that Caesar might be trying to hack the election. But without detailed knowledge of the systems, it was useless.
“Let’s try working backwards,” Haylie said. “Figure out what he’s building. We know he’s gathering data. He’s going to use that to impact the voting somehow.”
“Break into the voting machine network?” Vector asked.
“You’d have to do that on a local level,” Haylie said, her fingers on her temples as she worked through the logic. “You’d need hardware at every polling place in the country—at least the important ones. He doesn’t have the manpower to pull that off.”
“So, what if he worked the other direction?” Vector asked. “Alter the votes in the central database after the votes have been collected?”
If I had that data, what would I do?
“You don’t need personal data to change a database field,” Haylie said. “If he had access to that server, he could just do whatever he wants. I don’t get it. We have to be missing something.”
“I’m sure we are,” Vector said. “Your brother’s a genius who’s had months to plan an attack with some of the best access in the world. We’re outgunned here.”
“We can’t just give up,” Haylie said. “Think.”
“I don’t know,” Vector said. “Maybe it’s best to just let this play out. Step back a bit, you know? Forget we ever came across this mess?”
Haylie stared at Vector, waiting for the punchline, for him to say he was just kidding around. But he just looked at her with hope in his eyes.
“Just let this play out?” she said. “Are you out of your mind?”
“I don’t know, maybe I am. Your brother’s a big boy, he’s quite aware of what he’s doing. I don’t know about you, but I’m enjoying my time here at university and I think that maybe—”
“Oh, are you comfortable?” Haylie said. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to get in the way of your vacation. Sure, we could just sit here and ignore what’s going on, but maybe we should be better than that. Maybe if more people in this world stopped be
ing so comfortable all the time, we’d get a lot more done. Sometimes to get something, you have to give something else up. You’re smart enough to know that.”
“Give something up?” Vector blurted out with a raised voice, gesturing wildly around the room. “What do you think this is? You pretty much dragged me here from London—where I was doing just fine, thank you very much—and got me on every government watchlist in the world. Yes, of course, where are my manners? Sometimes I forget to say thank you.”
A stale silence filled the room as they both looked down to the floor, taking deep breaths. After a long chasm of silence, Haylie was the first to speak.
“My brother is in trouble,” Haylie whispered. “He’s not thinking straight. I can’t look the other way. You know that.”
“We have other options,” Vector pleaded. “We can go to Hernandez. And that other agent—the one from the NSA. We can tell them what’s going on. They’ll have all the tech we need to track him down. Who knows, you might even get on their good side.”
“And rat out my brother?” Haylie spat back. “They’ll lock him up. Or maybe something worse. I can’t risk that.”
“So, there’s another option,” Vector said, lowering his voice. “If Caesar pulls this off, would it really be that bad of a thing?”
“What?” Haylie shot back.
“Just hear me out—Caesar does whatever he’s doing. Throws the election. Hancock loses, Ortega is the new president. I mean, anyone with half a brain knows that Hancock is a nutcase. If Ortega gets elected instead, the country gets a leader who’s not a complete idiot, and maybe the feds never figure out that Caesar was behind the whole thing. You jump in now, and you could be helping to elect a man who will vilify hackers—people like us. If you think about it, our next four years could be a nightmare if Caesar doesn’t succeed.”
“I don’t care if it’s convenient; this is wrong,” Haylie said. “I can’t sit by knowing this is happening. We don’t do stuff like this … and Caesar knows that. He taught me that. Our skills can’t be used to play God, no matter how much we want to.”
Vector sat back in the windowsill, looking out into the night. “Then the only choice left is…”
“We find him ourselves,” Haylie said.
Vector crossed his arms, his brow furrowed. “I can’t help but notice you keep saying we.”
“What do you say?”
“You’re doing it again,” Vector said, pointing at her with a shaking finger. “Sucking me in to a pet project. You haven’t exactly been the best friend recently, I’ll have you know. And now I’m meant to jump in and help you out, again. The last time I did something like this, I got a bullet to the shoulder. That hurt.”
“I’m sorry,” Haylie said, trying to process everything running through her head. As the pieces clicked together—her brother, the hacks, the Endling, the election—the pressure spilled over. She felt tears welling in her eyes as she fought her body’s urge to shake.
“This has been tough,” she said between sniffs. “Being disconnected, being alone—it’s awful. It’s worse than I thought it would be. And now with Caesar in trouble—I actually have a chance to help. I need to stop him, and I have the skills to do something. So that’s what I’m going to do. With or without you.”
“I know you’re miserable,” Vector said, shaking his head. “Any friend worth having could see that. I’ve tried to help—”
“I know you have, and the truth is that you’re right—I’ve been terrible to you. But you’re still my friend. My only friend.” She wiped her tears, doing her best to regain some sort of composure and chuckled. “Besides, wouldn’t it be fun to get back into action? Crash and Vector out in the world, causing trouble again?”
Nodding, Vector rubbed his temples and looked over to the TV. The banner on the bottom read ‘HANCOCK SET FOR BATTLE WITH ORTEGA IN PENNSYLVANIA.’ The screen showed the candidate in the brisk autumn sun, his hair flying in every direction, shouting down at the crowd from his podium high above. His face grew redder with every word, jabbing a finger from each hand into the air as he screamed. Shots of the crowd showed faces smeared with blind faith, cheering and clapping, adorned in red, white, and blue.
“We would need to find him,” Vector said. “Figure out where he is. Somehow convince him to change his mind. No angle of this is going to be easy.”
“I just need to get back online,” she said, wiping her tears away and sitting to attention. “If I can get back online, I can stop him. I know I can.”
“That’s the bigger problem,” Vector said. “We can’t do this with the government looking over your shoulder.”
“Well, then, we’re just going to get the hell out of here.”
“Right,” Vector exclaimed, perking up with a subtle clap of his hands. “Lots to do tonight. Where do we start?”
“I’ve got a meeting in San Antonio tomorrow morning,” Haylie said. “Hernandez and Wilcox want me to debrief with Mary, talk about my time with the Endling, see if there’s anything she can pick up on. I need you to start doing research.”
“What kind?”
Haylie pulled up the leg of her jeans, showing the black ankle bracelet with its small LED light, blinking green.
“How to get this thing off without sending every agent in Texas our way,” she said.
“Brilliant.” Vector smiled, his eyes growing wide with anticipation. “I’ve been waiting months for you to ask me that.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Fleming’s Hotel Deluxe
Frankfurt, Germany
October 31st, 4:51PM
The elevator churned and rattled as it went to work. Caesar could feel the shift in altitude, all the way down in his stomach—the wheels grinding through the floorboards as the car crept up and up, his ears threatening to pop. The elevator was moving too slowly, too sluggishly for him; the walls began to close in as he reached to the side, bracing himself. He felt a mist of sweat build across the top edges of his forehead, no draft or breeze or oxygen to whisk the beads away, as his pulse started to—
Ding.
The doors peeled open as a wave of cool air flooded the compartment. Caesar took a deep breath.
Amsterdam, which Caesar was hoping could become their new headquarters, had quickly turned into a bust. A few minutes after their Rancor discussion, Sean had picked up a wave of activity on his police scanner app. Without asking any other questions, they had quickly and quietly made their way out of the Netherlands via a quick train ride to Frankfurt.
Caesar wasn’t sure how the police had found them, but being in his second city—hell, second country—in a single day no longer even registered as strange to him. He had grown cautious of every stranger—every waiter, hotel clerk, and passerby. Every phone he bought—and he bought a lot of them these days—was another opportunity to stay hidden, but at the same time, another chance to get caught. He preferred to-go meals, even if Sean kept insisting they eat out in the open, “to keep them sane.” Caesar was smart enough to realize that the rising tension was beginning to drag him down more each day: his mood, his work, his sleep. He could feel himself growing coarse, some days not even wanting to leave the hotel room. He could see that weight in the mirror every morning.
Caesar trudged through the scattered tables, wincing at the sunlight as it blasted through the windows, and continued on to the sundeck. As he stepped outside, he was greeted with a view of Frankfurt’s skyline—a mix of mirrored glass from new financial high-rises and the old, faded castle tower marking the corner of the old city wall. The clouds led his eyes to the right, where he found Sean sitting, facing the scene, with the tower’s silhouette reflecting back from his sunglasses.
“I hate Germany,” Sean said, trying to decipher the menu. “The people here are just too damn serious.”
“It’s not that bad,” Caesar said, stretching and admiring the view. “Think of it as culture.”
“I’m tired of this, you know,” Sean said.
“Then pick another restaurant,” Caesar replied with a forced smile, taking his seat. He plucked a menu off the table and scanned the lunch offerings.
“I’m serious,” Sean said. “This morning was too close. If we can’t stay in one place for more than a few days, how are we ever going to get our momentum going?”
“We keep our focus,” Caesar said, trying to take on a tone that would project confidence. “That’s all we can do. We’re in a sprint right now, that’s all—we’ll get through this. A few months from now, we won’t even remember what it was like being on the run.”
“How do you think they found us back in Amsterdam?” Sean asked.
“I bet it was that bartender,” Caesar said. He pictured the man at the end of the bar, listening with one ear, pretending not to be paying any sort of attention at all. It had to be him. Caesar wished he could be back there right now. The delicate amber lamps lighting his view as he pushed his boot down on the throat of the bartender, watching him struggle for air. Watching him beg for his life.
Caesar snapped back to reality, drawing a sip of water from his glass and checking his watch. “Eagle is rolling from my side, we’re on schedule. What about our next side project? Did you take the call this afternoon?”
“No.”
You’ve got to be kidding me.
Caesar sat back, fighting the urge to scream at his friend. But even through his anger, he knew better than that.
Stay calm. Stay in control.
“We agreed that you were in charge of the meeting,” Caesar said, picking his words carefully. “Just because we’re in a different city—none of that changes. This guy is being blackmailed, he needs our help—”
Crash Into Pieces (The Haylie Black Series Book 2) Page 16