Crash Into Pieces (The Haylie Black Series Book 2)

by Christopher Kerns

  Caesar sat back and let it flow over him.

  >>>>>

  FBI Command Center, NYC

  “I’m seeing rogue data beginning to come in,” an FBI analyst said from the other side of the table. “We never would have thought to look for this.”

  “Is our plan working?” Hernandez said, running over to the analyst’s side. “Can he tell we’re on to him?”

  “No, sir,” the analyst said. “The data is hitting the servers, just like he’s expecting. But he doesn’t know they aren’t the right ones—as of an hour ago, they were the right ones.”

  After analyzing the structure of every state’s voting database, Haylie could see only two attacks that Caesar could pull off: either write records before voters got into the booths, or just take down the whole damn system. The second option would throw the country into chaos, but wouldn’t solve her brother’s end goal, which was to keep Hancock out of office. She knew that Caesar was smart enough to know the same thing.

  Hernandez had been right—over the past few minutes, the room had grown into a buzzing command center filled with analysts and tech of all shapes and sizes. There must have been thirty suits—some huddled over laptops, others standing in groups of three or four, discussing God-knows-what—working to coordinate efforts across every key state in the election. All looking older and grayer than they probably were, and all keeping one eye on the pair of eighteen-year-old hackers sitting at the center table.

  “And the real records?” Hernandez asked. “The real votes?”

  The analyst double-checked a second laptop. “I can confirm that he’s hitting the dummy server locations,” the analyst said. “The real votes are coming in from each state and appear to be valid.”

  The room buzzed with a series of fist pumps and handshakes. Haylie felt a hand on her shoulder and looked up to see Vector, relieved. “Nice work, Crash. Not every day you get to outsmart your own brother.”

  Haylie sat back and gave herself a moment to breathe. She had used the Endling’s Trojan horse exploit to gain access to Caesar’s system, checking the scripts he planned to use. From there, it was easy to figure out his plan. The last thing they wanted was for Caesar to realize what was going on, so she let him go ahead with his attack, but moved the real targets to another location.

  What that had taken was a whirlwind of planning and coordination over the past five hours. Each state had to build out new servers and redirect all voting systems to the new, secure environments. Haylie and Vector also wrote a collection of scripts to fill the old servers with votes—the last thing they wanted was for Caesar to see empty database tables as his scripts pinged away.

  “Where’s the traffic coming from?” Agent Wilcox asked. “Can we get a location?”

  “I said no location,” Haylie said sharply. “That was the deal.”

  “No, Ms. Black,” Agent Wilcox said as she walked through the double doors. “We agreed on no location from you. If I can find your brother’s location myself, you’re damn straight I’m going to use it.” She walked over to an analyst to hover over his shoulder. “And we’re still not sure this plan is going to work, anyway. We haven’t elected a new president yet, not that I can see.”

  The NSA analyst looked back over her way with a smirk. “His traffic is coming from a number of nodes—a distributed network from all over the world.”

  “So we can track him?” Agent Wilcox asked.

  “Negative,” the analyst said. “He’s bouncing it all over the place. It’s like he set up his own private Tor. We’ll be able to find him eventually, but it’s going to take time to trace back to the origin.”

  “He’ll be gone before you get that far,” Haylie said. “He’s smart enough to know that.”

  Haylie looked down at her screen, watching Caesar’s scripts continue to fire, shooting votes at the East Coast locations. Florida. Pennsylvania. New York. She pulled the laptop towards her, angling herself to the corner of the room where no one else could see, and tabbed over to another view. A blinking dot pulsed on a map, a curving road heading north to south down her screen.

  72 Via Vittorio Veneto, Roma, Italy

  CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

  FBI Command Center

  New York City

  November 5th, 7:25PM

  “Coming up on thirteen hours now,” Vector said, stretching his arms above his head with a long, drawn-out yawn. “His scripts are still running, still hitting every state that we expected. Turnout is usually pretty high in the last few hours, so it makes sense that he’s still going.” He checked the results of a SQL query giving a summary of the votes by hour. “This is really smart—his patterns map to local historical voting times down to the minute. We’re lucky we got ahead of this.”

  Haylie stood at the back of the room, arms crossed. She shifted her weight, staring down at the floor. The wait was killing her, slowly.

  “Relax, Haylie,” Agent Hernandez said. “Looks like you just stopped the biggest hack in United States history. That has to feel good, right?”

  “It’s not this hack I’m worried about,” she said, turning to Hernandez. “I’m worried about what he does next.”

  “What do you mean?” Wilcox asked from the table in front of them.

  “I’m trying to put myself in his head,” Haylie said in a hushed tone. “Caesar’s been on the run for months. You’ve captured or killed his entire team. He thinks he’s doing the right thing, and getting away with it, too. But soon enough, he’s going to figure out his plan didn’t work. What happens then?”

  “I hope he doesn’t freak out,” Vector said in a monotonous, hushed voice.

  Agent Hernandez looked over to Agent Wilcox. “Well, I can’t predict that,” Wilcox said. “All I can do is try to find him before he gets himself killed. Maybe when this is all over, he gives up … does the right thing and turns himself in.”

  Haylie jumped as the doors flew open behind her. An agent in a charcoal suit trotted to Agent Wilcox’s side and whispered a few words in her ear. Wilcox nodded and looked up to face the room.

  “The first round of results are coming in,” Wilcox announced. “All major TV networks will start calling states in the next one to two minutes. All the East Coast swing states: Florida, Pennsylvania, New York, are a landslide; they’re going to call them all for Hancock.”

  Vector turned back to his machine, checking the totals between the dummy servers and the actual voting data. “Caesar’s system shows all of those states as going to Ortega. He’s going to know something’s wrong as soon as those announcements go live.”

  Haylie shuffled her feet as she pulled her hair back behind each ear and pushed her glasses up onto her nose, whispering to herself under her breath.

  “He’s going to freak out.”

  >>>>>

  Grand Palace Hotel, Rome

  “The first round of results should be in momentarily, and crowds at both candidates’ headquarters are anxious to hear where their candidates stand in this historic election.” The news anchor straightened his tie and stood before a large video wall, complete with eight different views of live coverage from around the country. The broadcast began to jerk and stall, and Caesar hit refresh on his live stream to try and get a better feed.

  He had no emotion left. No opinion. Just the dull buzz of nothing.

  He pulled his knees in close to his chest, watching as his scripts flew. Rolling through each command just as he had planned—as if they had meant to find their way back to each system, firing with precision, perfectly synced as they sent each vote to their destination. Everything was working flawlessly.

  “Breaking news coming from a few states right now as we’re ready to call a number of races.”

  Caesar’s eyes shot open as he edged closer to his laptop, minimizing his script windows and bringing the broadcast to full screen.

  “Florida. Pennsylvania. Virginia. New York,” the voice blared over his laptop speakers. “We’re calling all of these crucial states fo
r Senator Hancock. It’s beginning to look like we’re in for a landslide of an evening.”

  Caesar stared into the screen, his pulse thumping through his eardrums, coursing through his neck. He could feel his face flushing as adrenaline seared through his veins.

  That’s not right. They got it wrong. They got it all wrong.

  He tabbed over to his database view, running a query to get the totals from each state. Scanning the list, then back over to the state results being reported by the news report, his hands began to shake.

  “This is wrong,” he said with heavy breath. “Their numbers are all off. They’re making a big—”

  He took a step back, watching his script run in silence.

  They knew. They knew I’d be coming.

  He jumped forward, feeling his body take control as his mind raged. He pounded the table with both fists, sending the laptop flying end-over-end into the wall as he slammed the tabletop again. And again. And again.

  He gripped the chair, blood rolling down his knuckles, and whipped it across the room into the corner, shattering two of the legs into a cloud of shards and splinters.

  “No! No! No!” he yelled, feeling his throat constrict and his vocal chords burn with the hard edge of every scream.

  He turned to see his laptop flipped on its side, the screen cracked diagonally, silently flashing a news report. Caesar stumbled towards the machine, flipping it over onto its base and hitting the volume key.

  “We’re just getting reports that even Senator Hancock was surprised at the early results. He has jumped on a private plane with one of his advisors and is heading back to his home state of New York. He should be landing there shortly and making his way to campaign headquarters. Here we have some footage of them boarding the plane about thirty minutes ago.”

  Caesar’s eyes went to slits as he focused on the screen. The camera zoomed in to show Senator Hancock and Mason Mince turning to wave before ducking through the doorway of the private jet. As the camera lingered on the scene, he could see the plane’s tail number off to the side.

  He gnashed his teeth, tasting blood. Dusting off his laptop, he tabbed over to his applications folder and scrolled down to the “Commercial Airlines Systems Access” folder.

  Caesar typed into the command line as he hovered over his machine. He searched the FAA’s database of active flights and saw the number he was looking for.

  He exhaled and typed out a few, solid keystrokes.

  >>>TMS CLB 440 / STR N9898E

  He switched over to the flight dashboard that showed the aircraft’s current position, heading, and turn indicator. He watched as the numbers rose steadily, grinding his fist on the top of the desk as he seared.

  This is for my sister.

  >>>>>

  FBI Command Center, NYC

  The makeshift command center boiled over with activity as analysts rolled in and out, shouting breaking news from the election coverage. Haylie could see Caesar’s rogue data still hitting the dummy servers on a live feed up on the main screen. A few more analysts had been brought in to speed up the location tracking efforts, but still with no luck.

  “What do you think he’s doing right now?” Vector whispered to Haylie.

  “I don’t know,” Haylie said. “I hope he does the smart thing—just packs up and moves on.”

  “You really think that’s going to happen?” Vector said, looking down at a fresh round of results. Over the past ten minutes, South Carolina and Alabama had been called for Hancock. One network had already called the entire election for him.

  “We haven’t had a lucky break since I can remember,” she said. “Maybe this will be it.”

  All around, phones began to sound—texts, ringtones, and vibrations across tabletops. Haylie looked back to Hernandez, and his reaction as he listened to the call told her all she needed to know.

  Analysts ran in and out of the room, phones at their ears, as Haylie and Vector stood to back away from the commotion.

  “What is it?” Haylie yelled.

  “It’s Hancock’s plane,” Agent Wilcox said. “The pilot is reporting that he’s lost control.”

  “What does that have to do with us?” Vector asked.

  Haylie slumped back in her chair, keeping her eyes locked on Wilcox, waiting to hear the words she already knew were coming.

  “It’s not a mechanical failure,” Wilcox continued. “Someone has taken control of the plane’s flight navigation systems.”

  >>>>>

  Private Jet N9898E

  The plane’s mood quickly shifted to panic. The screams from the flight attendants echoed up the aisles as Senator Hancock’s bourbon on the rocks tumbled onto the floor, the glass rolling clumsily, the ice sliding in every direction.

  The senator stood in the aisle with his knees bent and each hand grasping a headrest on either side, flashing a nervous smile at Mason Mince sitting two chairs away.

  “Well, now,” Senator Hancock chuckled. “It seems the road to the White House might not be as easy as we—”

  The plane shook again, now pulling up and rolling to the left, throwing Hancock sideways into a bench and sending Mince’s laptop flying through the air. A crash of breaking porcelain mixed with screams as two overhead compartments flipped open, straining under the force. Warning buzzers sounded and lights flashed as a voice came over the intercom.

  “All passengers get to your seats,” the pilot yelled, the audio kicking in and out. “Seat belts, now!”

  Oxygen masks fell from the ceiling as the plane veered sharply to the right, knocking Hancock to the floor. Mince, lucky enough to have been buckled in, held on with tight hands, gripping both armrests with white knuckles, as the cabin rotated back to the left.

  Glasses smashes against the side windows—now directly below them—as they held on for their lives.

  CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

  FBI Command Center

  NYC

  November 5th, 8:09PM

  “Ground control is reporting a red status. The plane isn’t responding to commands,” the FBI analyst shouted, holding a finger to his other ear. “I’ve got a lock on the network traffic coming into the FAA system. I can’t stop it, but we’ve been able to trace it. It’s coming from Europe, that’s all we know for now.”

  “Give me his location,” Wilcox yelled at Haylie, her phone dangling from her hand.

  Haylie slapped the lid of her laptop down and away from Agent Adam’s grip. “No, that wasn’t our deal!” Haylie stood, pacing towards the monitor, watching the voting data continue to hit the servers.

  “It’s our only chance,” Agent Wilcox yelled back. “Haylie, you know as well as I do that Caesar is out of control. He has to be stopped.”

  Haylie crouched down, her head in her hands.

  “Haylie,” Agent Hernandez yelled back. “You need to give us his location. Do the right thing.”

  “I am doing the right thing,” she yelled back, darting back to her laptop. She opened the lid and searched the NSA’s application list.

  “There’s got to be some tech, something you have that will stop this,” she said, scrolling frantically. “The Trojan I have can’t access that part of his machine, but if we can serve up another—”

  “We can’t stop him,” said Vector, his hand on her shoulder. “I think—I think they’re right, Haylie.”

  “No, I can do this,” she said, still searching. “I know I can.”

  She closed her eyes, feeling the keys with her fingers, as she searched her mind.

  Suddenly, she heard Mary’s voice in her head. Your voice is the most powerful weapon you have. Sitting in her prison jumpsuit, pulling her hair back behind her ear. Your voice is the most powerful weapon you have. She pictured Mary grinning, clad in her prison jumpsuit, repeating the words over and over.

  The lights, the alarms, the sounds throughout the room were drowned out as she stared down at her connection to Caesar’s machine.

  She knew what she had to do.

&nb
sp; >>>>>

  Private Jet N9898E

  Senator Hancock turned to stand on the row of windows, his face smeared with blood, straining with all his might to hold on with both arms. He could feel the seams in his suit jacket beginning to rip as he hugged the seat back tighter while cushions flew across the cabin. The dangling oxygen masks smacked against his face as the cabin spun, bringing new shrieks and shouts with each turn. He couldn’t tell if the screams filling his ears were from his own throat or from someone else’s. The sound of breaking glass filled the brief moments of silence between gasps.

  The plane was losing altitude as the pilots fought to regain control, pulled down by gravity, buckling and shaking. Hancock closed his eyes tight, whispering to himself through the chaos, trying to remember how to pray.

  >>>>>

  Grand Palace Hotel, Rome

  The dashboard readout showed numbers flying in every direction. Caesar reached out with a steady hand to check the plane’s location. Four miles off the coast.

  I want you to bleed. I want you to burn.

  He stood back from the desk, balling his hands, his fingernails pushing into his flesh, trying to flush the rage out of his body. Trying to find a release. But with each breath, it only grew.

  He walked the room, stomping across the floor, envisioning the plane hitting the water. Cartwheeling, splitting into a million pieces. The survivors left stranded in the middle of the cold ocean, gasping for air, crying out for help that would never come. And Hancock, sitting on the bottom of the ocean floor, still buckled into his seatbelt, helpless.