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  She surveyed her desk one final time—all clear for the moment, and nothing left to be done until she met with Eric on Monday. With all the extra hours she’d already put in, her team scrambling to find details, and now, the fresh stain of coffee—she mentally winced at the imagined reaction she would receive when she presented the cream suit to her favorite dry-cleaners, she’d have to stop there—she could leave early, take the small bit of time necessary to recharge and resharpen, especially since next week promised to be brutal.

  “What do you have in mind?” Anna asked from behind Ben.

  Charlie slung her case with her laptop over her shoulder. “I’m calling for an audit of all the sends and receives on accounts active within the last twenty-four hours. But right now?” She grinned at Anna. “Charli’s gonna surf.”

  Starting program: /hacking/$ ./vuln-test

  Code Calling

  * * *

  SECURE ENCRYPTION – SECURE ENCRYPTION – SECURE ENCRYPTION

  * * *

  15:10:04 Austin: Four days for you to wrap up.

  15:10:05

  15:10:06 Pendleton: It’s not her.

  15:10:07 Austin: Can you prove it?

  15:10:08 Austin: She wrote the code.

  15:10:09 Austin: Do you have a drop source yet?

  15:10:10

  15:10:11 Pendleton: Not exactly

  15:10:12 Pendleton: she called for audit.

  15:10:13 Austin: She’s covering. Prove it –

  15:10:14 Austin: or get out of the way.

  15:10:15 Austin: We move in Tuesday –

  15:10:16 Austin: she’s going down.

  15:10:17

  15:10:18 Pendleton: Need more time.

  15:10:19

  15:10:20 Austin: You’re done.

  15:10:21 Austin: You have until Tuesday at

  15:10:22 Austin: 0900 hours. Clean house.

  15:10:23

  15:10:24 Pendleton: Done.

  Session Terminated

  * * *

  SECURE ENCRYPTION – SECURE ENCRYPTION – SECURE ENCRYPTION

  * * *

  *

  Once upon a time, the settlement of interbank payment obligations often involved the physical delivery of cash or gold to counterparties, which was both risky and costly. Theft took place at gunpoint, on horseback, at remote train stations and lonely wayside stretches of highway by outlaw gangs and desperadoes that were the stuff of American legend. But technology changed that. The advent of Morse code created a system that connected the twelve Reserve Banks, the Federal Reserve Board, and the United States Department of the Treasury and gave them the ability to transfer balances held at the Reserve Banks using a secure communications network. This was the foundation of Fedwire operations.

  Of course, this improvement in exchange was not done out of a simple goodhearted and generous desire to protect the hard-won gains of laborers, orphans, and pensioners; protection had its price, and the Fed made sure they got paid.

  As men with saddlebags, armored trains, and trucks were replaced with higher and more complex levels of technology, criminals got smarter, too, and although many aspects of the Reserve Bank’s payment services had been centralized, individual Reserve Banks remained responsible for maintaining relationships with institutions and for limited operational processes such as updating account profiles. This meant that organizations with ties to the Reserve—such as fund, income, and asset management companies—were on their own when it came to their equipment as well.

  It was super-criminals, the most elite of thieves, who attempted to crack into that, looked for the loopholes, the systems without redundancy, older operations, cracks in the hastily patched and connected network that would allow for hacks, malware, viruses, and worms that would redirect funds.

  Clearly the Treasury was in an uproar on the rare occasions something affected them, incoming or outbound; not only was it theft, but each transaction that went through the wire earned interest for the Fed and its investors every moment it sat in their system, and the high number of transactions per day generated enormous revenue—average daily volume ran into the trillions of dollars, and the percentages on that alone resulted in income to the federal government almost staggering to contemplate.

  Anna understood all of that. What she failed to grasp was why the Treas didn’t really examine the destinations. Theft from the wire—despite the short-sighted assurances from her superiors within that agency—required more than just someone having written a code that took non-transactable denominations, a third of a cent, or a thousandth, dumped them into an interest-bearing account, then redistributed funds again once numbers were again transactable for each and every client. This was the code Charli had originally conceived of, the one she had written to show it could be done, the reason why she was considered a person of interest to Anna’s supervisors.

  She shook her head and breathed out the frustration she felt over their lack of cooperation as she slipped the disc into the slot that would deliver new data and allow for a new, one-time encrypted session to open.

  * * *

  ONE-TIME-PAD – DESTROY SOURCE DISC AFTER USE

  * * *

  15:11:03 field-op3: Treas. moving Tues. at 0900

  15:11:04 field-op3: we’re gonna lose him.

  15:11:05 field-op3: 90% certain on inside guy

  15:11:06 field-op3: Have soft evidence,

  15:11:07 field-op3: getting hard data

  15:11:08 field-op3: Treas. has wrong target

  15:11:09 field-op3: Orders?

  * * *

  ONE-TIME-PAD – DESTROY SOURCE DISC AFTER USE

  * * *

  She closed the session. The Treasury Department couldn’t see past its own navel, she thought with a resigned sigh as she removed the disc; as a government agency—a subdivision of which was the Secret Service—the Treasury focused on financial crimes, but not the motivators behind them, which was why Central Intelligence had moved its own operatives in there. Of course what the Treas did was important, she reminded herself as she magnetically wiped the disc, then fed it through a shredder. But they were wrong about the who, and they were wrong about the why.

  No. Someone had to be inside and on the network to know when the exchanges happened, and someone had to be outside to receive it, to make use of it. She reviewed what she knew, the puzzle and its missing pieces as she mentally built its frame. A person or persons had gone through the trouble of hitting one of the largest, if not the largest, funds transfer systems globally. This revealed things in and of itself: it spoke not only of hubris, and of contempt for the government that supported this particular system, it also plainly showed a need for cash on a level that implied still more possibilities for motivation. Of those, only a very few were highly likely: a greed so hungry that it had no boundaries, or, more importantly and probably more accurately, a need for liquid cash—easily accessed funds in large amounts.

  Her mind continued to follow the trail. The need to move cash that rapidly signified a quick exchange and in the world she operated in, those exchanges—usually clandestine and pre-arranged—involved something difficult to acquire through normal channels at best, and at worst illegal, either under U.S. law or international treaty.

  This made whatever the acquisition was something those in the Company euphemistically referred to as “exotic,” and that covered a short and lethal list. This included smart, high-tech bombs, deadly toxic gasses, and fighter jets, when thinking large and more visible as well as violent scales of destruction. But there were also small nuclear containments, exclusive hacks, viruses both virtual and real, toxins, radically redesigned and malignant bacteria. These small, hidden killers were easy to transport, simple to deploy and—unless someone had inside information, claimed responsibility, or left a traceable chain of evidence—provided the perpetrators with a level of invisibility.

  She suppressed the shudder that naturally arose when she made a quick estimation of how much damage any of those things cou
ld do, globally or locally. Quite a few had no defense, and worse yet, others had no cure.

  The Treas had no clue of what was truly going on, she concluded, no knowledge whatsoever of what their moving in would mean to the real operation behind what they thought was merely a matter of theft—they thought they had a smoking gun in hand, they thought it was Charli, when all they really had was smoke and Charli was the screen. She was close, knew it, could feel it, closer than she’d ever been to her true objective.

  Why Tuesday, why not Monday, or even now? she wondered, but the answer came almost immediately: they needed the system up and running—because money had merely been temporarily diverted, not stolen outright.

  The crime itself was elegantly simple: the invested money earned interest. That interest would be temporarily redirected back to the wire to earn even more interest, and then the original earnings were sent where they belonged, while the new earnings went…somewhere.

  The Treas, not wanting to lose even the tiniest fraction of the fees that would have been generated by that exchange, was going to attempt to back the funds back in, recoup what they considered to be their lost interest. The rest was simple: once they’d recovered their perceived loss, they’d move against the person they thought had done it.

  Well, doesn’t that just figure, she chuckled sarcastically under her breath. When a corporation took money and invested it, keeping the profits before giving the initial investment back, it was called banking, and they collected a fee for the privilege of making money on customers’ money. If and when an individual did the same thing, it was a crime. Of course, that was an oversimplification. For a person to do that, they needed access to all sorts of information and equipment, proprietary things owned by the financial institution they more than likely worked for. And of course, they needed access to the funds to make it all work.

  But it was clever as all hell. Romello, she thought. Her handlers had known exactly what they were doing when she’d been sent into the Treas, known what he’d need. It had been no accident that she’d found him.

  When the Treas had put her into the dot-com, it had been routine. The contract the group of engineers were under required they hook up the then-small Whitestone to the Fedwire. Because the financial services company was an unknown entity at the time—it had been less than a year ago, she realized with a touch of surprise—the plant of an agent and the surveillance from the Treasury was standard operating procedure, especially given the current national and global situation.

  As Whitestone continued to grow and absorbed the dot-com as their technical lynchpin, there was no need to pull her. She was in the perfect place to observe—that was part of her job, or at least the surface of it: to observe and report. She was considered a researcher, an analyst, and of a medium level at that, able to receive and pass on potentially critical intelligence. There were no expectations that she would play any sort of role in the actual arrests or confrontations, and in fact it was quite discouraged, since it would blow the cover the Treasury wanted her to maintain.

  But there was so much more going on beneath that seeming-secret surface, because there was quite literally a higher power that pulled her strings. She was one of the new breed of agents, younger, savvy in the new technology, the blend of operative and technician, and while she didn’t know it, one of a very few to receive the “I” designation.

  And so she was to perform her role for the Treasury, using a name that was familiar and comfortable for her, with a cover history close enough to her own that she couldn’t be startled into unexpected revelations or inconsistencies. Not that the potential for that really concerned her; she’d never blown an op either as a run-of-the-mill field agent or as a team lead.

  From this vantage point, she was able to pay attention to the flow of the new cyber frontier that was led by geniuses and madmen, idealists and demagogues, the perfect place for someone to hide, to grow, to create a very valid, new threat, the parameters of which finally now, several years after its birth, were first being evaluated.

  Only two government agencies even ventured to guess what the nature and scope of those threats might be and had taken steps to attempt to discover and prevent the now-here future: the National Security Agency and the Central Intelligence Agency.

  And the CIA knew that Romello was smart. The Fox was one of the best operatives the Company had ever had.

  He’d gone from inside to outside, was the first to point out the potential of the new technology, had been an enthusiastic adaptor, or so said the files her group had been given to read.

  She didn’t know what had changed for him, and she didn’t care. What she did know and care about was that he’d gone from loyal soldier to sworn enemy, espousing an ideation that she found chilling. She had, along with the other agents similarly deployed, read his philosophy, if one could accurately call it that, his prose ringing with pronouncements such as,“You the inferior, with your ability to breed like rats, have held sway over the world for too long, due only to your strength in numbers, and the misplaced charity of your betters—but no longer…”

  The rest of the manifesto that Romello had sent to his former supervisor—copies of which had been made available to the team—had contained further details of his plans for what he called “the true people.”

  She knew, because she’d already been told that they were all to operate on a need-to-know basis, that what she’d read had only been one part of it, but the part she’d studied she found repugnant.

  Romello, among other things, believed in eugenics—not the sort based on the vagaries of culture, of ethnicity, of physical appearance, but one based on intellect. It seemed that his true aim was to create a society wherein those under certain threshold IQs were either eliminated or subservient to what he referred to as “real humans,” at least until those “superior intellects” created enough machines to completely replace those he considered undesirable.

  She wasn’t entirely certain why she’d been selected for this particular assignment. But as an operative who was both a qualified engineer as well as a communications specialist, she was, her superiors informed her, “a natural fit,” even before the testing and the new training. And when she was advised of the scope of the position, she’d been told that this was the perfect place for her true specialty: the forecasting of trends and behavior based on presented information, the source of her explainable-after-the-fact decisions. Communications as metric, indeed.

  “True analytics are wasted in the field,” her new handler had said. “Anyone can dodge detection, throw in a couple of incendiaries, and shoot straight, but not everyone can do what you do—paint an accurate picture of tomorrow based on today’s data.”

  Her new assignment and designation appealed to her on many fronts, despite her initial misgivings. On one level, it allowed her and her peers within the Company to truly demonstrate the value of the new frontier and their skills within it. But on a personal level, it had brought her to Charli.

  All the intel they’d begun with had very directly indicated that Romello was using the electronic medium for recruitment, and with her ideals, skill set, and enthusiastic use of it, she threw herself into the investigation.

  That was both metaphorically and literally true. She’d jumped into the ocean, surfed the Internet and chat rooms, raves and beaches, all with one single-minded intent: find something—anything—that would put her on Romello’s direct trail.

  Millions, perhaps billions, would suffer if even part of his plan came to fruition, and through no fault of their own other than having been judged unworthy by one man who had decided that intellect was the only true God.

  He could not be allowed to slip away, to even begin to put his machinations into motion. She debated her options. She could let the Treas move in, with every single point of circumstantial evidence leading in one direction—a false one—and maintain her cover. There were lies, she reminded herself, and there were nested lies. She knew, because she lived one.

/>   Beneath her role at Whitestone, she was a Treasury agent, but beneath that, she was Central Intelligence, and she balanced them all perfectly. But even with the outer deceptions, she couldn’t lie to herself. It was integral to her ability to maintain her cover, a cover she knew she’d risk blowing sky-high come Tuesday morning.

  If she even hinted to the Treas another agency was running an operation within theirs, there would be hell itself to pay when this thing blew up in all their faces and traveled up to the executive branch. And, she reminded herself, while all the territorial pissing went on and internal investigations and committees blustered at one another, Romello would slip away with the money, and that much closer to whatever he thought he needed to gain his ultimate objective.

  *

  * * *

  To: [email protected]

  Hey Gorgeous,

  Just home. Mushy at Plum, but better than nada, right? Check the LOLA report—looks like it’s rippin’ for the next few days Jersey or LI. Shame I’ll pass, though. Ping me when you’re free—we’ll talk.

  Hey, if you’re going bring your rubbers—the 8 mm ones—the water’s still way cold.

  C

  * * *

  Charli reviewed the options before her while she showered after her late afternoon spent off the Brooklyn shore, not far from Plum Beach. It was early in the season yet, and definitely cold, but definitely worth it, if only to get out into the water, let the issues that weighed on her head be beaten away by the pound of the surf, the green-glass glide, the occasional swallow of seaweed, she joked to herself as she removed a bit that had managed to get under her hood of her wet suit—military issue 8 mm “rubbers”—and into her hair.