Page 79 of Beyond the Rules
Tanner frowned. “How the fuck did you figurethatout?”
“I hacked into the architecture firm that designed the building and pulled up the blueprints. Servers in a bathroom? Notstandard.”
“Way to go, Aiden.” Nina rubbed her palms together and grinned at me. “What are wewaitingfor?”
“I was waiting for you.” I positioned my fingers on my holographic keyboard and began typing. “Are youcoming?”
Six hours and three root tool kits later, we broke into Dimayev’s mysteriousservers.
“They’re mirrors of each other,” Nina’s forehead furrowed in thought. “Backups?”
“No, not backups per se.” I looked through the information streaming on my screen. “Server one generates the information, server twodistributesit.”
“Redundancy enhances security, but take a look at this.” Nina’s fingers flew over her keyboard. “He only uses this server for communication purposes, email, social media, Instagram, Snapchat, that sort ofthing.”
“He inputs in server one, transfers and outputs onservertwo.”
“Server two is a proxy server.” She scowled at the screen. “It also acts like an information multiplier, replicating each communication thousands of times and distributing it to otherservers.”
“Can you get in to see the specific messages?”Tannersaid.
I pulled a few messages on the screen. “They’reencrypted.”
“I got this.” Tanner sat down at his computer, selected a few lines and began to run his encryption programs. “It could take a while.” As if in disagreement, his computer beeped. “What do wehavehere?”
A message appeared on the large screen, unintelligible gibberish shifting into letters and coming together in words andsentences.
Light the ground beneath the American infidels, the message said.Kill them on the streets, in their backyards, in their ownhomes...
“Hang on,” Tanner said, scrolling through his files. “I’ve seen this onebefore.”
“Me too.” I clicked open a file of similarly hateful messages and scrolled down, until I found the same exact message, copied from a now deleted account on Twitter. It hit me like a kick to the nuts. “Oh,shit.”
Tanner slapped his forehead at the same time. “You’ve got to befuckingme.”
Nina’s eyes rounded into saucers. “Dimayev and Calamity are one andthesame.”
* * *
Nina
I was too hyped to sleep. Not three hours ago, Aiden, Tanner and I transmitted the complete trail of evidence to Josh Lane’s super secured server at Phoenix Prime. I’d never met Josh Lane before, but his attitude, demeanor, and intensity reminded me oftheguys.
Josh Lane had been as stunned as we’d been by our findings. It wasn’t every day that one of Silicon Valley’s most successful executives turned out to be a criminal against humanity, a terrorist embedded among us. The ball was in Josh’s court now. It was his job to take the information to the FBI’s Cybercrime Division while preventing leaks. I didn’t envy him the task. He didn’t appear to be a man liberal with praise, but he shocked the hell out of me when he addressed medirectly.
“Ms. Leon,” he’d said. “Your work has been highly praised by Vazquez, Black, and Flint. We could use people like you. I’d like to extend you an offer to work for Phoenix Prime’s cybersecurity unit full time, at your earliest convenience, ofcourse.”
My jaw dropped. My gaze shifted to Tanner and then to Aiden. The smiles they beamed at me were full of pride. I couldn’t believe it. Josh Lane had just offered me a job, a verylegitone.
I had to clear my throat and push out the dreadful words. “You do know I’m a convicted felon,don’tyou?”
“I’m aware of the troublesome inconvenience.” His face was as blank as the beige wall behind him. “Flint has some defined thoughts on the subject. But I’m at liberty to hire whoever the hell I please. So the offer stands. I’m happy to discuss the terms of your employment. Until then,Laneout.”
Even now, as I laid in my bed, naked and satisfied from a night of love making with Tanner, I couldn’t come down from the high of the day. Tanner stretched on his back, snoring softly as I cuddled against him, my head cradled in the crook of his shoulder. The hunt was drawing to a close, but neither Tanner nor Aiden considered it done. They maintained that the threat would continue until Dimayev was behind bars. I longed for the peace of mind that came from knowing that all of my guys were safe and no longer endangered by my presence. Until then, I wasn’t likely to get any goodsleep.
My guys. I glanced at Tanner. When had I started to think of them as mine? I didn’t deserve Tanner, Aiden, or Zar, or the affection, joy and pleasure I got from them. They were smart, skilled, accomplished and focused, while I was just a third rate ex-con hacker meandering through life without purpose. And what would happen once the case wasclosed?
I’d leave, of course. That had been the end-game all along. They wouldn’t be mine anymore. Reality check: they’d never really been mine. They’d been on loan from the universe, a little gift to get me from point A topointB.