Chapter Thirteen

Numbers and letters flew across the screen at speeds that could be dizzying. Keiji was using an algorithm to track specific keywords in isolation or in combination on Saber’s hard drives based on the interrogation. They were trying to dig out any additional information or hidden files related to Saber’s supposed NSA work. Keiji was inclined to believe the man, but he knew King and the others required this little thing called evidence. While prosecuting Saber was now off the table, tracking his interactions was critical to identifying whoever was giving him the orders. While his program did its thing, Keiji was extracting the data that was in Saber’s hidden file and passing it along to Rick and the others for analysis.

They’d returned stateside and were held up in Keiji’s Batcave, as Rick had named it. He’d gotten a few raised eyebrows at his interior design and King had to wipe the drool from his mouth when he got a good look at Keiji’s setup. They had decided that his space was the best place to work since it was still off the radar from Blackraptor and their respective agencies.

There was something niggling in the back of his brain. Something Keiji was missing or an idea that was just outside his grasp. He closed his eyes and tried to follow the threads of thought through his brain. It was like tracing computer code. He just needed a quiet space and time, but his office was currently occupied by more bodies and big personalities than ever before, and it was harder to clear the mechanism.

Keiji startled when Rick appeared beside his chair. He gasped as a possibility came to him. He met his gaze and gripped Rick’s hand. “Memex.”

Rick groaned. “Of course! Why didn’t I think of that?” He bent down and kissed Keiji. “You are a genius.”

“Want to share with the rest of the class, Rebooter? By the way, I just wanted to assure you that your temporary assignment has gone through. You officially work for me now,” King announced.

“Thank you, sir.”

“Wait, isn’t Memex that hypothetical World War II device? I vaguely remember learning something about it at The Farm.”

“Tate, I always wondered, why do you spooks call Camp Peary ‘The Farm’?”

He looked over at BB, “Because it’s like some huge amount of land in rural Virginia that the government has left mostly undeveloped.”

“Are there animals? Crops?”

“No, they just keep developing the next generation of super spies,” Linder said with a frown.

“Oh, is that jealousy I hear?” Tate teased.

“Please, your little farm has nothing on SRT training at Fort Moore.”

“I have to agree with Linder,” Rick said. “SRT is the most technical and highly trained unit assigned to the LEC and acts as the primary advisor for all things OEP.”

Keiji stood. “Yeah? Well seeing as how the VP is such a VIP, shouldn’t we keep the PC on the QT? ’Cause if it leaks to the VC he could end up MIA, and then we’d all be put on KP.”

“Did he just….”

“Yep.”

“Can we please just focus on the mission at hand?” King growled.

Rick almost snapped to attention. Keiji was sure now that King was his commanding officer, Rick had a Pavlovian response to the authority emanating from his voice.

“Sorry sir, DARPA launched the Memex program in order to develop software to advance online search capabilities. Think real sci-fi level stuff. The military and other governmental agencies want to use Memex software to share info and organize search subsets relevant to their respective investigations. As far as I know though, they only have theoretical technologies. I didn’t think they even had something in beta trials.”

Keiji placed his hand on Rick’s back and tried to smooth out the tension. He smiled at King trying to diffuse the scowl on his forehead. “I just happen to have a friend who works for DARPA. They have an archived project that was showing some promise using historical IP addresses of targets to try to link terrorist networks.”

“Why did they archive the project?” BB asked.

“They couldn’t prove that the users behind the IP address were actual members of the organizations.”

“So how do we make it work for us?” King asked.

“We have the numbers for the three burner phones Saber used to communicate with his handler. We can use the cell phone numbers and the software my friend developed to look for a nexus. Then once we have an established network, we’ll run a geotag trace on those numbers going back a designated period. Say… six months?”

“Criminals are stupid, right? Someone, at some point took that phone with a live battery somewhere they weren’t supposed to. If we can find a pattern between the players, we can identify at least one of them. Then the dominos will fall.”

“So like using forensic accounting to trace expenditures, only we are using cell phone numbers?” BB asked.

“Something like that. Contact this friend of yours. Let’s see if we can get our hands on this software.”

Keiji nodded at King and stepped back over to his workstation. As soon as he sat, the monitors came to life again.

“That is so fucking cool. It’s like some kind of neural network worming its way into his brain so it knows what he’s thinking and then poof, information appears.”

Rick’s laughter made him smile. Keiji was happy to purport Tate’s belief that he had magical computer powers. He needed to have some kind of advantage over this super group.

“Just how good of a friend is this guy?” Rick said softly next to him.

Keijis heart ached a little as it always did when he thought of Drake. “We had a thing back in college.”

“A thing?”

“Brief thing.”

“I sense a story.”

“I fell hard and fast. We had very different definitions of our relationship, and when he confronted me about my misconceptions, it hurt.”

“But you’re still friends?”

Keiji sighed. This wasn’t a conversation he wanted to have in a room full of people. Even if they had saved each other’s lives.

“He was right. My family raised me in a unique culture and even though my father had told me all these stories of life in America, I still didn’t get it. Not really. Culture shock is a real thing.”

“Truth,” BB added.

Keiji glanced over and saw in the man’s eyes the experience of another who had worked to assimilate into a new world.

“Drake and I were not right for each other, but we shared friends on campus and a love for all things software. It took time, but us freaks and geeks have to stick together, so we built a good friendship from the ashes.”

He felt exposed and focused on his monitors. Software never judged him or pitied him for poor choices. He didn’t think he could look up and face the fact that people like Tate, Linder, BB, and King lost respect for him. While part of Keiji recognized BB had on some level a kindred immigrant spirit, the man was a former French special forces operative. He was a mountain of confidence and a fortitude of self-worth.

“Now is not the time. But tonight I’m going to hold you in my arms and we’re going to talk about everything I see swimming in your eyes.”

He blinked rapidly, trying to cleanse whatever Rick saw, but one touch and soothing words from his lover had all the muscles in his body releasing their tension. A notification went off on his computer.

“Drake says since they archived the project the intellectual property is now open source. He has a copy and can meet us at our location of choosing.”

“How did you get ahold of him so quickly? Did you tell him who you’re working with or why you want the software?”

Keiji rolled his eyes at King. “Look, I know I’m new to this whole spy/investigator role, but I’m not an idiot. You think I used something like a personal SMS? We were communicating on DARPA’s Polyplexus social collaboration platform. Experts from across all kinds of disciplines post crazy stuff on there all the time. Believe me, some NSA basement troll will not blink twice at user Area51 asking for a collaboration to investigate the feasibility of rats understanding Japanese backwards.”

“I’m sorry, what?” Linder asked.

“It’s kind of our little SOS. Since we both work in areas of… let’s say, less than public transparency, we wanted to set up a way that we could reach out for help without our superiors being the wiser.”

“A bat signal for your Batcave.”

“Sure. He clearly saw the post and responded with our designated code phrase ‘meet at Rick’s Cafe’ so I knew it would be him.” He looked over at his boyfriend. “Coincidence I swear.”

“Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world….”

“So where and when do I tell him we actually meet?”

“Where is he?”

“Arlington.”

Linder looked to King. “Bob’s place?”

“Yeah.” He turned and faced Keiji. “Tell him Bob and Edith’s in Alexandria. It’s a 24-hour diner on King Street. We’ll meet him at 2100 hours.”

“You got it. I’ll bring a secure laptop so we can run the program right there. Something is telling me that with Vlad being taken out the people behind this are getting nervous because they know we are on the trail, or they took him out because he was a liability and we were just in a bad place at a bad time.”

The room was silent as none of them knew the answers. This entire business of saving the world had turned out to be far more complicated and slow moving than the movies made it out to be. At this point, Keiji expected to have identified the bad guys and be staging a raid on their fortress with his smokin’ hot personal bodyguard. He looked over at Rick, well he guessed one out of three wasn’t bad.

Rick looked around the nearly deserted diner assessing all the exits. Blue and yellow swivel stools lined up like soldiers in front of the counter. Black and white checkered tiles and stamped aluminum covered the walls and kitchen surfaces. There was a permanent smell of breakfast mixed with greasy burgers. It was comforting and yet nauseating at the same time.

King and Linder may know and trust this place, but he didn’t. And, while Rick collectively trusted the team to look out for Keiji, ultimately the responsibility of guarding his life was Rick’s. He reached for Keiji’s hand and gave it a squeeze. “You feeling good about this?”

“I trust Drake. I don’t know if we’re going to find some case-breaking clue, but we were at an impasse. Saber kept detailed records of his interactions with his handlers, but there was no identifying information.”

“So how did he think that would be a smoking gun?”

“My guess is that he kept his data segmented. Identities in one file, evidence in another. Given enough time, I’m sure we could find it all. He gave us a big clue when he showed me his method of encoding data, but we are talking about terabytes of data that needed to be analyzed.”

“I feel like this entire process has been one step forward and two steps back.”

“What do you mean?” Keiji asked.

“I find the evidence of the polymorphic virus in Oracle and try to take it to my superiors, only to end up in the stockade. You bust me out and we find the author of said virus, only to have him blown to pieces right before he gives up critical intel.”

“What’s the saying? ‘No easy day but the last.’”

Rick shook his head. “I think you just made that up… but it seems applicable.”

The bell over the door jingled and Rick and Keiji looked over to see who had joined the party. So they didn’t give away their numbers, they scattered the others as either singles or pairs around the diner. Keiji waved and Rick assumed the young man who entered must be the infamous Drake. He studied him and from a purely aesthetic viewpoint Rick supposed he could see what had attracted Keiji as a young man.

“Stop glaring, you’ll scare him. I promise, you are my everything.”

Rick met Keiji’s stare and fell into the dark gaze. Keiji spoke of everything, but Rick envisioned an eternity. “This is true love.”

“You think this happens every day?”

He knew Keiji was trying to get him to smile, but Rick had lived long enough not to laugh at a gift such as what they’d found together. “No.”

“Keiji? Who is this?”

Keiji stood and gave Drake a one-armed hug. “Thank you for coming. Do you have it?”

“Yes. What’s going on?”

“I’m afraid we can’t tell you, but we are grateful you answered Keiji’s bat signal.”

Drake stared at Rick for several seconds, undoubtedly trying to determine if he was friend or foe.

“You can trust him, Drake. He’s one of the good guys.”

“If the way the two of you were staring into each other’s eyes is any indication, then he’d better be explaining his intentions toward you.”

“I’m everything to him you weren’t.”

Drake nodded. “Good.” He sat down and handed Keiji a flash drive. “I don’t want to know. Now, I’m starving. How’re the fries?”

He was going to order food? Really? Rick saw King headed for them and sat back against the cushion of the booth.

“The fries taste like they seasoned them with rat poison. Zero stars.”

Drake jumped and whipped his head around. “Holy shit, dude! Private conversation. Go creep on someone else.”

“Actually, this is very much my business.” He held out his hand. “Special Agent King. Your friend Keiji is working for me.”

Drake shook King’s hand then turned back to Keiji. “What in the world have you done now?”

Keiji shrugged. “I’m just helping them out. You said you didn’t want to know but unfortunately we don’t have the luxury of polite social conversation before testing this out.”

Drake stood and held up both hands. “Say no more. But hey, maybe when it all shakes down we can get together for a visit? It’s been a minute.”

Keiji stood and hugged Drake. “It has. Things have been a little crazy and I’m sorry for not reaching out.”

“It takes two.” He glanced over at King. “You didn’t say what you’re a special agent of.”

“You’re right, I didn’t.”

“Okay then. Assuming the world doesn’t go into a deeper circle of hell than it already has in the next few weeks, call me.”

Drake left and King took his place in the booth. Linder joined King in the booth while Tate and BB pulled some chairs up to the table that they straddled backwards.

“So, is that a no on some fries, ’cause I could go for some food.” Tate said.

Rick took the flash drive and plugged it into his secure laptop while Tate and King debated the food situation. Personally, he was with Tate because using brain power required fuel and they’d been going non-stop for days across too many time zones to count.

The first thing he needed to do was run a full scan on both the jump drive and any files it contained. He pulled out a portable external drive from the backpack they’d brought with them. Once he activated the built-in hot spot he logged into the VPN for cyber command. He inserted the jump drive into the USB port on the external drive. He never trusted the operating system’s ability to find all the nasty little bugs people could hide so he opened a specialized software that he had access to through the DOD. The screen came to life with all the directories and he selected the external drive; the attached jump then requested a full scan. It seemed like Keiji’s buddy only loaded one file on the drive, so it didn’t take long before Rick was satisfied that the hardware itself didn’t contain any malware. Now he needed to check the file itself. He wasn’t familiar with this software and he could only imagine the hellfire that would rain down on him if he didn’t verify every nuance on this software before executing any commands on a government computer. Granted, this machine had more firewalls than the Pentagon, but it only took one idiot to fall for some clickbait and wreak havoc on systems that contained their national secrets. Rick would not be that idiot. Not today. He was so focused on his screen that the sound of the team’s voices drifted over his head and while he caught an occasional word, he wasn’t really paying them any attention.

The scan showed the file was free of malware, spyware, and viruses. “We’re clean. Even though the scan shows no sign of suspicious code, I’m going to run it from an external hard drive. Call me paranoid, but I just don’t want to take any chances.”

He opened the software, and the screen went black for a moment. “Fuck!”

Keiji placed his hand on Rick’s forearm. “Give it a second. I know Drake and the way he codes, this is normal.”

From one eye blink to the next, the screen came to life. The end-user interface was pretty basic, with no flashy graphics or colors. There was simply a flattened world map with data entry point at the bottom of the screen.

“So this is it?” King asked.

Rick jerked his head up at the disruption. “Yes.”

“How are we going to convert the search parameters from IP addresses to cell phone numbers?”

“I think the most expedient way is to use a dependency walker. Then I can determine which runtime library the program is loading.”

“Then we can determine which language it uses,” Keiji added.

He nodded. “Or try to, anyway.” He caught the scent of freshly cooked food and his head jerked up to find the source of the heavenly smell. He looked around at the table and everyone was stuffing their faces. As if on cue his stomach growled and Keiji nudged a plate full of multigrain hotcakes and bacon closer to him. “Thanks.”

“Of course. It looked like a breakfast for dinner kind of night.”

He took a huge bite after smothering the hotcakes in syrup and moaned as the flavors exploded over his tongue.

“Pretty sure I heard similar sounds coming from their bedroom the other night.”

Rick stuck his middle finger up at the table while he ate with one hand, and simultaneously operated the laptop.

“That looks like C++.”

Rick hummed assent.

“You know, we told developers to stop using C++ last fall,” BB said.

Rick looked over at Keiji, who shrugged. Then he turned to meet BB’s gaze only to watch the man stuff a huge bite of veggie sandwich into his mouth. Rick lifted one of his eyebrows as he waited with what he thought was a paragon of patience for the man to finish his bite of food.

“We know the language provides a lot of freedom and flexibility in memory management, but it also relies heavily on the programmer to perform the needed checks on memory references.”

“It’s true.” King confirmed. “I went to a conference last year that talked about how there are all these vulnerabilities in C and C++ codes because of memory safety issues. Hackers can exploit these vulnerabilities for remote code execution.”

“Like Oracle. But Oracle doesn’t use either of those languages.”

“What does it use?”

“CID or not, I’m not at liberty to say.”

“You realize I can find out on my own, right?”

“Sir, with all due respect. Go ahead.” He refused to drop his gaze from King’s.

He may work with this team whose clearance level far exceeded his own, but without a direct order from IO Command he would not divulge classified data. Especially already compromised data. Fool him once, shame on them. Fool him twice, shame on him.

God, was it really just a handful of days ago that he’d been running across the base with what he thought were the answers to months of frustration? Now was not the time but Rick had every intention of logging into Oracle tonight and seeing just what had been happening in his absence. King said they’d shut it down, but Rick still had questions. The polymorphic virus Saber had created had somehow transformed the predictive analytics of Oracle into behaving like machine learning. He wanted to know how.

Rick continued to work with the software, food forgotten now that he’d dropped enough calories into his system to make it stop yelling at him. He worked his way through the syntax until he found the executable command referencing an entered IP address. He made some changes so that instead of geolocating the network address, they wanted to create a nexus of connected cell phone numbers based on cell tower pings. Now the pings still wouldn’t tell them the user information, but with King’s connections at Army CID they could hopefully get a subpoena for registered users or purchase information based on the connection to Saber.

“I have a question. Is this legal, semi-legal, or not happening?”

King looked at Tate who looked at Linder, who then looked at BB, who looked back at Keiji.

“Right. Well, this is a new definition of ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’.”

Rick placed his hand on Keiji’s quad. He was out of his depth with all the legal ramifications too. But he had to believe that what they were doing was for the greater good. He lifted his fingers from the keyboard as it occurred to him he was most likely justifying his actions just as Saber and the men behind the curtain of this operation had done. Were they any better just because they thought they were on the right side? When the world went to shit and people were just trying to survive, how blurry could lines get between good and evil? Was it all simply a matter of perspective? And if that were true, how far down the rabbit hole could one travel with their philosophical ramblings?

“You okay?” Keiji asked softly.

“Yeah, no, I don’t know. Second thoughts, I guess. This is all a lot.”

“It is, but we’re in it together. And we have these guys backing us up now.”

He let out a long breath and navigated back to the software’s main screen. He entered the cell phone number for Saber’s handler that they’d found in his file. “Okay, hold on to your butts everyone.” He hit Enter and watched as nothing happened. He sighed and thought he needed to go back into the software structure and find out where he’d missed a command, but then lines started bouncing across the globe like airplane trackers. It was going all over the place.

“What’s it doing?” King asked directly behind Rick’s ear and he nearly jumped out of the chair. He hadn’t even heard the man get up from across the table.

“It looks like someone connected the number to a VPN that masked the receiver’s geolocation.”

“Fan-fucking-tastic. So we’re back to square one. We don’t have the bandwidth to analyze all of Saber’s data. How are we going to—”

“Hang on a second,” Keiji interrupted. “Look, there’s a pattern,” he said, pointing to the screen.

Rick squinted and sure enough the lines were bouncing around the globe, but they were doing so in a pattern. It started on the Eastern Seaboard, then bounced to Moscow, over to Paris, Prague, Damascus, Islamabad, then down to Aléria and over to Columbia, made a few stops in the U.S., then back to the beginning. The next time it seemed to go in reverse then start in a new city but always the same. It was like somebody tried to make the pattern look random but wasn’t quite smart enough to make it work the way they intended.

“So where do we tell it to look?”

“That’s the beauty of the software,” Keiji said. “We don’t need to. As our little scribble friend here is playing Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego? it’s running a trace on the background of any numbers registered in the call history of the device that was assigned this number. If we had used any other method, the VPN would work, but Drake’s little baby is smarter. It can identify if they placed a call from that location or if it’s a smoke screen.”

“How?”

“You’ll have to ask him. This is not my area of expertise and, like myself, he couldn’t talk about his work when we got together.”

The bottom of the screen filled with numbers. Ten in total. It even made a notation of how many times the number was called and the average duration of the call. Then another pattern emerged. Each of those ten numbers had another list under them. One by one the numbers faded in and out until there was only one.

“Holy fuck. It worked,” Rick whispered. “That’s it. That’s the nexus between all the numbers.”

“The man behind the mask.”

“But is the mask the mastermind behind the attack, an NSA handler, or somewhere in between?” Tate asked.

“I would assume that step one is figuring out the who, then we can work on the what.”

“It says someone initially activated the number using an area code for Washington D.C. So roughly five million possibilities.”

“One, actually.” King growled.

Rick turned to look over his shoulder. Carved stone had more warmth than King’s face, but his eyes burned with a fury hotter than Rick’s strictest drill sergeant. The tips of his fingers blanched white, and Rick imagined the half-moon creases embedding themselves into his palms. He dared not take a breath for fear of disrupting the tension coming off their team leader in waves.

“Rouch.”

“You lie!”

Linder had toppled her chair over in her haste to stand up and come view the screen. Her hot breath washed over Rick’s neck and made him shiver.

“Who is Rouch?”

“Another CID investigator. Sort of. He currently works in documents but has applied multiple times to the investigative branch.”

Linder turned and glared at King. “It’s not him. It can’t be. He wouldn’t hurt a fly.”

“Do you remember how he came to work for us in the first place?”

“Yes, but that was years ago. He’s passed every polygraph and security check since.”

King pinched the bridge of his nose. “Look, I like the kid too. But I caught him a few months ago at a terminal in cyber.”

“So? People use other terminals all the time. He would have still had to log on, and we can trace anything he did back to him.”

“Except there is no record. I checked.”

“Have nothing better to do?” Tate asked.

“I didn’t like it, okay. So I ran a backlog trace on his credentials, nowhere in the system is it registered that he worked from that machine on the day I saw him there.”

“So he’s guilty of treason? That’s quite a gigantic leap.” BB frowned.

King held up his hands. “I’m not convicting him yet. But that number is the one I’ve called when he was working from home.”

“A government issued phone?”

“No, he said it is a backup that he keeps just for arranging… certain liaisons.”

Tate snickered. “He’s got a fuck phone?”

“Bigger question, why are you calling his fuck phone?” Keiji added.

King glared at Keiji and Rick didn’t like it one bit. It was a reasonable question when this whole situation seemed to have jumped off into an extra dimension of the twilight zone.

“I had to contact him about a case. He was working from home, as many of us do now, but said he left his regular phone charger at work. In the email he said to call him at that number.”

Linder crossed her arms and raised her chin, “And you remember the exact number you called one time?” She looked right at Rick. “I don’t know about you, but my ability and/or interest to memorize people’s phone numbers stopped in about 2002.”

He twisted enough in the chair that he wasn’t looking over his shoulder anymore. “It is unusual. Admit.”

King whipped out his phone, sliding his finger around on the screen for a minute then he turned it so everyone could see the screen. “Call it. Right now.”

Rick took the phone and tapped the number listed on the screen and hit the Call icon. He made sure to have the speaker turned on so everyone could hear.

“Hot Mess Assess, they kill ‘em, we clean ‘em.”

“Who am I speaking to?” Rick asked.

“This is chief crime scene cleaner Damion Menendez. What do you got? Homicide? Roller Derby catastrophe? Oh, wait… trunk full of floaters?”

Rick looked at Linder as she was familiar with their target’s voice. She shook her head.

“Sorry. Wrong number.” He hung up then handed the phone back to King.

King took the phone and slid it back onto his belt clip. “He must have ditched that phone.”

“Look, I don’t know about everyone else, but it’s late and I need some sleep if I’m going to be of any more use.” Tate stood and tossed a handful of bills on the table. “Dinner is on the CIA. I say we meet up tomorrow back at the Batcave and try to think of another angle.”

Rick disconnected the hot-spot and the external drive before shutting down the laptop entirely. He put everything away as the others slowly stood and made their way out the door of the diner.

“Where are the two of you sleeping?” King asked.

Keiji put his hand on Rick’s biceps, giving it a slight squeeze. “I was thinking we’d get a hotel room near the office. That way is more convenient. We’re both way over in Maryland.”

“Right. You’re out near Annapolis aren’t you, Davis?”

“Severna Park.”

King whistled. “Pleasant area. How did you swing that on an E-9 salary?”

“As I’m sure you investigated, I’m renting a garage apartment. I don’t need much.”

“That’s right. Sorry, it’s been a long few days. I’m only about twenty minutes from here so I’m going to crash in my bed tonight. See you at 0700?”

“Yes, sir.” Rick answered.

Rick turned to Keiji and the frown on his boyfriend’s face probably matched the one on his. “Was that weird to you too?”

“Totally. Now, how about we go back to my place?”

He gathered his backpack and guided Keiji out the door. “I thought we were getting a hotel?”

Keiji shrugged. “I didn’t want to advertise my home address. I’m sure King could find it if he wanted to, but if he thinks we’re in a hotel close to the office why would he look for it?”

“What makes you think he doesn’t know it already?”

Keiji sighed, and Rick felt a little bad. “Sorry.”

“No, you’re right. I don’t know. Something just feels off.”

“With King?”

Keiji shook his head. “With… I don’t know. Everything.”

Rick put his arm around Keiji and kissed his temple. “You’re tired. We both are. Let’s get some sleep and I’m sure things will be clearer in the morning.”