“There really is such a thing?”
“For sure. I can’t exactly advertise my hacking services on Craigslist, so…anyway, last fall your name came up in a chatroom about getting too close to piercing a legend some powerful folks would have preferred you leave alone. They were talking about making a move against you if you kept poking, but apparently you stopped. They were pretty impressed with how far you’d penetrated, but they weren’t going to let you get any deeper.”
Last fall…she remembered being hired by a guy named Stahlman to check out the defunct Modern Motherhood Clinics and—coincidentally—the foundation behind them. She’d discovered that the foundation was a shell and the woman who had fronted the clinics was a bogus identity with a skillfully constructed legend. Hari would have dug deeper had Stahlman requested it, but apparently that had proved enough for him.
“How would they have stopped me?”
“The dark web is a gathering place for hackers like me, but also less savory types—like pedophiles and bomb makers and, well, hitmen.” Donny held up a hand. “I know you’re going to try to laugh it off, but there are more button men out there on the dark web than you want to believe. It’s perfect for them. They don’t know who hires them, the contractors don’t know who they hire, the hitters have no connection to the victim, and they’re paid with bitcoins or some other cryptocurrency.”
They were talking about making a move against you…
A chill rippled along Hari’s back. At least she was long past that investigation, but still…she’d had no idea…
“Sorry you had to hear that,” he added, “but you insisted.”
“I did, didn’t I.” She shook it off. “Whatever. Let’s get back to these emails.”
“Right. For two months now these Septimus Foundation folks have been obsessing about ‘signals’ and ‘frequencies’ and ‘wavelengths’ and stuff like that.”
Hari swirled her cooling coffee and watched the screen. Emails flashed by too fast to read.
“Slow down.”
“Most of these are complete bores but they’re available if you want to go back later. I rewound to the first of the year and started from there. Nobody mentions signals or frequencies until February—right after the Internet crash. That’s when you start seeing mentions like these.”
The stream stopped on an email with a yellow-highlighted excerpt.
“The signal frequencies are changing again!”
Followed by another.
“Synchronization is coming!”
and
“Soon-soon-soon!”
“Look at all those exclamation points,” Hari said. “They sound excited. Could ‘synchronization’ and ‘frequencies’ be code words?”
Donny shook his head. “I’m not getting that feeling. But whatever they’re talking about, it petered out a week later when the Internet started coming back to life.”
“I thought you said they were obsessed.”
“Stay with me here. The mentions come back in a rush at the end of March. All of a sudden that’s all they’re talking about. And they keep on talking about it. It seems they were getting some sort of report on the signal frequencies every month, but then last month it switched to weekly, and just last week it went daily, and that made them totally giddy.”
“The high frequencies are slowing more and more!”
“Is it wrong to say they’re slowing faster? ;-)”
“Not too long before they synchronize with the Prime Frequency!”
“I almost wish they’d take more time! We’re behind schedule!”
“We’ll be ready when synchronization comes, don’t you worry!”
“What signals?” Hari said.
Donny shrugged. “Beats the hell out of me. All I can figure is their weekly reports on some kind of mysterious signals say they’re changing their frequencies, getting closer and closer to matching their wavelengths to some ‘prime frequency.’ And when they synchronize—bam!—it happens.”
“But we don’t know what ‘it’ is.”
“Not yet. These emails are like listening to a sibling conversation. I used to have friends who were brothers. They’d have conversations using reference points that they knew and assumed I knew. But if I came half a minute late to the conversation, I’d have no idea they were talking about.”
“Where are these frequency reports coming from?”
“That’s what’s been driving me crazy. They don’t make any sense. Just locations and numbers in megahertz and the like.”
“But the emails have to have a return address.”
“Yeah: [email protected].”
“The Allard? That big old apartment building?”
“I’m guessing. And the numbers in those emails show all the wavelengths getting closer and closer to their so-called Prime Frequency.”
Hari leaned back and stared at the screen. “Do you get the feeling that whatever comes with synchronization will be good for them and bad for us?”
“I do,” he said, nodding. “Very much so.”
She sighed. “I still don’t see how I can help. Especially if, as you say, they’re being very sloppy with their bookkeeping. I can ferret out false entries and double entries, but there’s not a lot to be gleaned from no entries.”
Donny stepped over to the bottom of the stairs and looked up. He seemed to be checking to see if the door was closed. He returned to the bench and cleared his throat.
“Look,” he said, lowering his voice. “There’s something else I’d like you to look into besides where the cash is going.”
Now we’re getting to it, Hari thought. Here’s what he’s been hiding.
She kept her expression neutral. “Shoot.”
“The foundation was funding a hush-hush operation for months before the Net crash. And then, right before the crash, they shut it down.”
“You’re thinking they found what they were looking for—what they needed to cause the crash?”
“Maybe. But it’s a little more personal than that. Okay, a lot more. I think my brother was involved in their operation.”
“He’s a hacker too?”
“Taught me everything I know. The day after the foundation shut down their project, Russ was found floating in the Hudson. The coroner ruled it an accidental drowning. But I know he was murdered. And I know the Septimus Foundation was behind it.”
ERNST
“Was I exaggerating?” the agent said. “Was I?”
“Not in the least,” Ernst Drexler said, tapping the manuscript before him on his desk.
The agent—Ernst was having the damnedest time recalling his name—Kushner, was it? Yes, Richard Kushner, successful literary agent. He was dressed in an expensive three-piece suit and
