William Tyree - The Fellowship

She crossed herself. Then she jumped.

Eurostar Express Train

The Eurostar running from Verona to Rome sped past a vast field of grapevines that were heavy with fruit and ready for harvest. On the right, a hill town came into view. A citadel-like village surrounded by ancient stone walls and topped with medieval architecture. Completely unblemished by billboards, high rises or neon signs, it had hardly been the first jaw-dropping scene they had passed so far. But unlike his fellow passengers, Nico was oblivious to the bucolic scenery. He was about to boot up a beautiful new machine.

He savored the feel of the round power button on the sleek computer Carver had purchased for him. He grazed his finger over the button several times before finally depressing it, savoring the satisfying whirr of the processor flickering to life.

During the 13 months spent hiding on South Africa’s Eastern Cape, he had kept his vow to Madge. No computers in the house. No web-accessible phones. No temptations. Except for the occasional trip down to the hotel, where the night manager had obliged his indulgences.

It had been for his own good, he knew. After all, it had been his inability to control his urges that had put him in lockup in the first place. But in a world where bills were paid online, customers paid for access to entertainment rather than owning it, and paper maps were relics of the 20th century, going web-free had been a difficult promise to keep.

He had managed the inevitable inner conflict mostly by immersing himself in the Xhosa and Afrikaans languages. Becoming fluent in both languages, as well as taking on the challenge of teaching himself how to fish the Transkei riverways, had proven to be surprisingly rewarding. In recent months, the old impulses had nearly died off.

He had lapsed just once, after finding a discarded phone in a Transkei garbage dump. Rooting the phone to steal free web access had been more than the Internet-starved hacker could resist. For three nights in a row, he had pretended to fall asleep, only to get up in the dead of night to explore the ever-changing universe of net security on the phone’s tiny screen. With Nico increasingly ragged and temperamental from his all-nighters, Madge finally recognized the warning signs and demanded that he hand over the contraband device.

Now the familiar rush of adrenalin returned to him as he logged onto the hotspot provided by Carver’s satphone. The encryption key was impossibly long, which only intensified the pleasure when the first site appeared before his eyes. But once he got started, the download speed was blazingly fast. Incomprehensible compared to anything he had ever experienced before.

Carver placed a Limonata and a pastry on the tray before him. With the train worker strike apparently still on, Carver had bought ahead, making sure they wouldn’t be hungry or thirsty on the trip to Rome. Nico set the food and drink aside and continued his bonding session with the new machine.

Before boarding in Verona, Carver had explained his immediate objective. Going on the presumption that a hidden relationship between Senator Rand Preston and Sir Nils Gish existed, he was to use any means necessary to expose any possible connections. For now, they would leave the mysterious case of Mary Borst’s disappearance aside, although he could tell that whether he liked it or not, that some portion of Carver’s brain was still working on it.

He would start by analyzing the two politicians’ itineraries, both private and public, looking for any overlap in destinations or meeting places. He would then pull a full social graph for the two men, working up a full profile on any first and 2nd second-degree contacts that the two men had in common.

Virtually any tactic was fair game. They had already received Preston’s personal email data from the FBI, and Carver was working on getting Gish’s. That was about all the risk-free help they were going to get. They could not reach out directly to private companies for account access, for fear of exposing the investigation.

The quickest way to discover who these men were, and where they had been, was to follow their money. That meant breaking into their credit card accounts. Nico salivated at the thought of it. In the old days, he had favored bringing down financial networks through denial-of-service attacks. He had formed cyber gangs of users from different geolocations to overwhelm networks with the number of simultaneous requests needed to bring them to their knees.

Unfortunately, that type of offensive was no longer an option. He hadn’t maintained his contacts in the hacker community during his exile. And even if he had, involving them would be too much of a risk. The sensitive nature of the operation required extreme discretion. As an alternative, he could enslave a great number of machines, masking the IP of each through a randomized spoofing process. In the past, his favorite targets had been large American state universities like Penn State. Any institution with a hefty on-campus population, where large numbers of students would create and eventually abandon accounts, was perfect. Nico would simply revive those accounts and use them for his own means.

He wasn’t yet privy to the details of the case, but he figured that Carver wouldn’t have come all the way to South Africa if the stakes were small. And that was just fine by him. High stakes suited him.

Now he felt alive in a way that he had not in ages.

He thought of Madge. Poor lonely Madge, who had left her good home and good job in America to hide from the law with him. Who had, even before that, written him dozens of letters in prison because she wanted to reform him.

And then, as quickly as he had felt high on adrenaline, a wave of guilt washed over him. Damn , he thought. I don’t even miss her.

He shrugged and opened the can of Limonata.

Nathan Drucker Residence

Haley Ellis streamlined her body slightly as she sped toward the small patch of blue reflective water below. Less than a second later her three-story jump was broken by 39 inches of bubbling Jacuzzi water. She landed in a crouch, breaking the fall as much with the flexibility of her knees as with the water’s bubbly buoyancy.

A hand gripped her arm and pulled her toward the steps. She looked up, expecting Speers, but was instead eye-to-eye with a frightened spa-goer in soggy swim trunks. She smelled vodka on him, and was immediately aware of three other spooked residents with cocktails in their hands.

Now Speers hobbled toward her. His suit was dripping wet and he was holding the pack.

“Are you guys okay?” someone asked as Ellis found dry land.

A ferocious blast ripped the wall away three stories up. Ellis acted before she thought, shoving the spa-goers out of the way just before the water was deluged with scorched wood, glass and insulation.

Speers was suddenly over her, pulling Ellis up from the cement walkway. Her forearms were scraped up and bleeding, but she barely felt them.

“Get out of here,” Speers shouted at the residents as they scattered. “Call the police!”

The intelligence chief was hobbling now. Ellis grabbed the pack containing Drucker’s work and steadied Speers as they made their way toward the parking lot. Now she knew these bastards wanted Drucker’s book. She was willing to do just about anything to deprive them of it.

Speers opened the doors of his SUV and slid behind the wheel. “You are about to witness some serious psycho driving.”

He pulled into the late-night traffic, then stepped on the gas and powered past several dozen cars. He took an abrupt right turn, then navigated down an alleyway and through to the next street, where he came dangerously close to mowing down some pedestrians while merging into more traffic. It was some pretty fancy driving for a government exec.