“Plus he was saddled with the ‘felon’ label.”
“Right. No one wanted a felon near their computers, and computers were all he knew.”
“Let me guess: He kept on hacking via the dark web.”
“What choice did he have? Anyway, somewhere around the first of the year, NRO sought him out and made him an offer he couldn’t refuse.”
Hari held up a hand. “NRA I know. But NRO?”
“National Reconnaissance Office—one of the Big Five intelligence agencies. They run all the satellites and, as a result, their computers are under constant attack by the Russians, the Chinese, the North Koreans, Iranians, you name it. They were putting together teams of white hats and black hats to shore up their firewalls. Russ loved the work. And not only was he getting a steady check, but they promised to deep six his felony record.”
“They can do that?”
Now Donny gave her an are-you-kidding? look. “The federal agencies have been totally off the hook for years. You wouldn’t believe what I hear in the dark-web chat rooms. It’s the wild west out there. But the thing is, the felony was never deep-sixed because Russ was suddenly dead. Coincidentally, another hacker from my chat room, who dropped the news that he was doing something similar but wouldn’t say who for, has stopped saying anything. We haven’t heard from him since early February, which was when Russ drowned.”
“And you think he and Russ suffered a similar fate?”
“Let me lay out what I’ve put together: Russ told me their job was to take the most virulent worms and trojans the Russians and Chinese had used against the NRO’s computers and make them even worse. Then they were to develop defenses against them. Once they’d done that, they were to find ways to breach those defenses. And then build a firewall to block that attack. Russ said NRO referred to their group only as ‘the Operation.”
“Banal as can be.”
“Russ called me a few hours before his supposedly accidental death, all psyched because the Project was closing down and he was going to meet with some NRO people that night about making his felony go away. Coincidentally, I found regular ‘grants’ in the Septimus Foundation’s books to ‘the Operation.’ I don’t know when they started—I only went back to the first of the year—but they stopped right around the time Russ drowned.”
Donny was building a very thin circumstantial case. Normally Hari would delight in shooting something like this down in flames, but the pain in his eyes stopped her. He was hurting for his brother.
But he seemed to have left out one major point that she couldn’t let pass.
“Motive?”
“Isn’t it obvious?”
“Not to me.”
“Okay. Follow my logic: Shorting the Internet stocks shows that Septimus knew the crash was coming; most likely they were intimately involved in making it happen since in all Art’s research he couldn’t find anyone else making similar bets. In order to wreck the Net, they posed as the NRO and hired a bunch of hackers from the dark web to perfect intrusion software. When the work was done, they had to eliminate them because they’d recognize their own work in the worms and trojans that helped bring down the Net.”
It made a queer sort of sense, but…
“Again: motive? You’ve given a motive for killing your brother, but not for bringing down the Net. I can’t buy that they’d go all through that just to clean up on the crash.”
“We may never know the real reason, but the fact remains that they did clean up. And instead of reinvesting that money, they’re cashing out. So Art’s big question remains: What else do they know?”
Hari tapped her fingers on the counter top as she stared at the two dark monitors.
Finally, she said, “We’ve got work to do.”
“Damn right. How do we divide it up?”
“I’ve got an idea…”
2
Hari worked out a system whereby she would ferret out the dates of large expenditures and Donny would match them with emails—both the deleted and undeleted kind—in and around the same date.
The deleted emails turned out to be the key. The foundation obviously didn’t want to leave a record of its cash investments, so it used deposits to and from intermediary banks to hide the transactions. But the deleted emails gave it all away when they mentioned the purchase target by name.
“So they bought Sirocco Trucking in Albany,” Hari said. “That was the last thing I would have expected.”
“Yeah.” Donny swiveled his chair back and forth. “Why a trucking company of all things?”
“Obviously they’re planning on shipping something—lots of something.”
“But what?”
“The ‘what’ will probably answer Art’s question. Keep looking.”
Hours later they’d determined only that the foundation had bought a distributor, but a distributor of what remained a mystery. Without a name, or address they remained in the dark.
“At least we know the trucking company,” Hari said finally. Her eyes burned from staring at the screen. “I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that whatever they’re shipping, its source will be their distributor.”
Donny gave her a frustrated look. “Big help.”
“After all this research, we’re left with two nagging questions: What are they shipping and to where are they shipping it? I can think of only one way to find out.”
“What? We’ve gone through all the emails and spreadsheets. What’s left?”
Hari rose and gave a single clap. “Road trip!”
“What? To Albany? That’s, like, a hundred-fifty miles.”
“It’s an hour flight, non-stop. I’ve done it countless times—United’s nine-thirty out of Newark. You’ve got the credit card. Get us seats for tomorrow morning. We’ll have Sirocco Trucking under surveillance by noon.”
MONDAY—MAY 15
ERNST
Belgiovene stepped into Ernst Drexler’s office at precisely 9 a.m. Ernst appreciated punctuality.
“You have work for me?” he said in a surprisingly deep voice for such a slim man.
He stood five-ten, wafer thin, with a small, blue-black mole in the center of his chin. No one seemed to know or remember his first name, or if he had one. Or if Belgiovene was even his
