RETALI8ION: The Cobalt Code (6 page)

“Bad guys wear black.  We never lag and won't turn back.  You see us coming, and all together you will run for cover,” Artemis chimed in.

“We take over this town,” Thomas sang.

“Aimed at you.  We're the console cowboys from hell,” Regina said as she opened her eyes.

“We ride!” yelled Grendal as he hit his armored suit in the leg.

Amina and Grendal shared a quick fist bump, and then started climbing into their armored suits.

“Divers dive,” Yosha said as they sat down in the rig's chair.

“Just don't get fried,” Regina said, finishing the group’s pre-dive ritual.

Artemis slid into his rig chair and started making connections.  “You're my favorite girl, Galatea.  Don't let us down.”

“Have I ever?” Galatea asked.

“Never,” Artemis replied as he pulled a keyboard into his lap, and lowered his headset into place.

“Net access is now live,” Galatea announced.

Regina watched as Amina and Grendal took off through two separate exits, then turned her attention back to her rig.  Her's was set a little taller than the other two to accommodate the standing room she would need to move around in the dive suit.  As she approached the rig, she reached up to grab the primary connection cable, pulled it down a few feet, and connected it to the dive suit's interface connector, on the opposite side from where her headset was connected already.  She pulled her headset down over her eyes, and pressed the initialization button on one of the keyboards.

A visual flood unleashed itself.  The loading screen quickly changed to that of a watery blue virtual location, and a few dozen program icons presented themselves as floating buttons an arm’s length away that she could tap to initialize when she needed them.  A semi-transparent server list popped up on her right.  She quickly read through it.  It seemed Yosha and Artemis had already assembled all the connections they could find for her.  Including a few private ones, which based on the device ID and net location code, looked like they might be for personal storage.

“I'm going for servers twenty-five through thirty-one on the list,” Regina said as she tapped the twenty-fifth entry on the list.

“We figured you would.  Good luck,” Yosha replied.

Regina watched as several screens opened in front of her.  Quickly looking them over, she started working her way through family photos, and well-labeled files that mostly contained family vacation and birthday party videos.  A few minutes later, she'd scrolled through most of the folders, and hadn't found anything other than the person Regina was sure he wanted his family to see him as.  There was one folder that was password-protected, though.  Regina pulled it to the front and reached to her left and tapped open her personal password cracker.  “Galatea, let me know when that folder is open.”

“Certainly,” Galatea replied.

Regina swiped all of that server info to the side, and reached over and tapped on the server list to open up number twenty-six.  This one already looked more interesting, but much more secure than the first.  After about fifteen minutes of prowling through the data stream, she found the data for several permanent cell phone connections linked to this server.  Reaching up, she tapped open another program.  This one would let her into a cell phone if it was using an open source operating system.  “Anyone got a phone list for Mr. Daniels and the people who work for him?”

“It's the file named politipoison on your desktop.  Or whatever it is you're looking at,” Amina replied.  “Traced them all last night when I was playing Who's Who.”

“Thanks,” Regina replied.

“No problemo, girly,” Amina said.

Regina pulled the file up and opened it up on a screen, sitting it just above the server list.  She tapped her left thumb and forefinger together and dragged her hand across all the numbers, highlighting them.  She then tapped her middle finger and thumb together and tapped on the cell phone program she had opened a moment earlier.  All the numbers appeared in the program.  She quickly shifted her right heel to the left to initiate the program.  “Galatea, any luck with that folder on server twenty-five?”

“Not yet,” Galatea answered.

“That's fine.  I need you to let me know when program66 finishes running,” Regina said.

“Okay,” Galatea said affirmatively.

Regina slid the server twenty-six files out of her way, and left them next to the ones from twenty-five.  She reached over to the server list again, and initiated the connected to the next server on the list.

“Hey, Regina,” came Artemis's voice in Regina's headset.

“Yo,” Regina responded as she started sifting through the new server's files.

“Well Mr. Daniels wasn't at Nobu's sushi place, but he did go to Edo restaurant last week.  Nice call.  And it turns out that he wasn't with a Russian hooker last night, he was at a fundraiser with a quarter of the region's millionaires,” Artemis said excitedly.

“Connections of connections of connections,” Regina said.

“Looks like it,” Artemis replied.

“That's good though, because it looks like at least one of these servers might be a dummy server set up to slow someone like me down.  Whoever is running the security for this guy’s operations isn't half bad,” said Regina, frustratingly.

“It's Gold Z Corp,” Yosha responded.

“Nice,” Regina said.

“Yeah.  You had any luck on those phones?  I've got a slew of posts queued for his primary campaign's social network feeds, but I'd love a head start on his personal accounts,” Yosha asked.

“One sec,” Regina said as she re-opened the phone program.  “About two minutes left.  Galatea, send Yosha a copy as soon as that's done.”

“Roger,” said Galatea.

Regina went back to the latest server she was working on.  But the more she worked her way through the files, the more it looked like a fake.  Almost like someone had just copied an old hard drive to it.  It was a mix of file types that didn't even run on the same operating system together.

“Program66 done,” announced Galatea.

Regina quickly pushed the files from server twenty-seven out of her way, and pulled sever twenty-six back in front of her.  “We have access to nine phones.  I'll start at the top.”

“I'll come from the bottom,” said Yosha.

The first phone Regina opened appeared to be Mr. Daniels’ secretary based on the Giggle e-mail and file storage account it was linked to.  She checked through a few more programs and apps that the phone was logged into.  “First one is the secretary's.”

“Ninth one is his personal assistant's,” Yosha announced.

Regina paused for a moment and turned to her left to look towards Yosha, even though she couldn't actually see Yosha with the headset on.  “The asshat who made the drop?”

“The one and only,” Yosha replied.

“Pass code found,” Galatea said excitedly.

Regina looked towards the server twenty-five files, and could see her program blinking a success message for her.  “Yosha, I have some video to look through.  Let me know if any of these phones has any kind of open connection to any of the servers we haven't gotten into yet.  I'm especially interested in number twenty-six.”

“Will do,” Yosha replied.

Regina pulled the server twenty-five files towards her, and after a few finger taps on her dive suit's gloves, a new screen opened and started playing the video.  It started with Mr. Daniels looking into the lens as though he was trying to position the camera's angle onto something.  As Daniels moved out of the way, and a bed with his wife laying on it, came into focus.  Disappointed, she slid the video to the side a bit to let it keep playing at the edge of her field of vision, then reached to her right and opened up the next server on the list.  Looking over the primary folders, this new server looked like it was another decoy, or at least wasn't being actively used since there didn't appear to be anything but an operating system loaded on to it.

“Anything interesting on the video?” Artemis asked.

“So far, it's just him and his wife having a boring fuck,” Regina said.

“Another woman joins them just after the twenty-second minute mark,” Galatea said casually.

“Sounds like my kind of home movie,” Amina said over the comms.

Regina reached up and moved the video's slider to the right, and let go of it at the twenty-two minute mark.  She watched closely, and a few minutes later she saw another woman join Mr. Daniels and his wife on the bed.  "And here comes a new girl."

"Is it a Russian hooker?" Grendal asked curiously.

Regina laughed.  "No, I think she's either Austrian, or... Wait!  Is that Falinda Schwann?  The underwear model for Vickies?”

“One moment,” Galatea said.

Regina waited patiently while continuing to watch the now-intriguing video continue.

“Ninety-four percent match.  The video is somewhat grainy, so I cannot get a one-hundred percent match,” Galatea announced.

“Looks like money can buy happiness,” Grendal said with a laugh.

“I'm sure his highly conservative constituents would love to see this.  Here we have Mr. Traditional Family Values himself having a bit of a romp with two women who, at this point in the video, look to be tying him up for some submissive fun,” Regina replied as her smile got wider.  “Galatea, go ahead and post this anonymously to a few popular file sharing sites.”

“No problem,” Galatea replied.

“Why would he leave that on his own home server?” Amina asked.

“Most guys think they'll never get caught,” Grendal replied.

“I've got some more good news,” Artemis announced.

“Let's hear it,” said Yosha.

“We've all been paid today,” Artemis said confidently.

“I do love payday,” Regina replied.

“Not just that, but I have more spreadsheets, accounting documents, receipts, and routing numbers than I thought I'd find.  A ton of money has been moving through just a few shell corporations.  I don't know where it was ultimately going, but I know where it's going now,” Artemis said, happily leaning back in his seat.  “We can really screw the
fakku
out of him now.”

“Hell yeah,” Regina said.

“Got a present for you, Regina,” Yosha said.

A second later a new file popped into Regina's virtual environment.  She reached up to tap it open.  It was a single phone number.  Regina picked it up and dropped it into another program icon.  A new screen opened and she watched as her program started opening a phone emulator.  When it opened a few minutes later, an emulated phone screen appeared before her.  The phone’s background was a picture of Koto Daniels, his wife, and his two kids.  “It isn't.  Is it?”

“Sure fucking looks like it,” Yosha replied.

Regina opened up the first of four e-mail apps running on the phone.  Scrolling through and reading several messages, she was more than satisfied that this was his personal e-mail for communicating with friends and family.  She opened the second.  This one was his official 'dot gov' email address.  “Holy shit, this is gonna be good.  Galatea, go ahead and copy the last thousand e-mails from these first two e-mail accounts I have open, and share them anonymously to the code kitties and wannabe data thieves on Net3.”

“You hoping a few newbies put a few corrupt pieces together for us?” Artemis asked.

“I sure am,” Regina stated.

“CGN has just started a breaking news segment about the video,” Galatea announced.

“Put it up in the background of my environment for me, please,” said Regina.

“Roger,” replied Galatea.

A video feed opened up a few meters away from Regina.  She couldn't help but smile when she saw the headline that was scrolling across the bottom of the screen.

“The Market Marble and The Necronomicron have both posted stories about the white supremacist comments made on the social network accounts of Mr. Daniels re-election campaign,” said Galatea.

“Ah, the tip of the iceberg has come into view,” Yosha said proudly.

“You wanna go ahead and drop the package to MPHarm?” Regina asked.

“It's done, of course.  But I thought you wanted to drop it later?” Yosha questioned.

Regina shrugged.  “No time like the present.”

“Dropping now,” said Yosha.

Regina turned her attention back to the virtual phone, and opened up the next e-mail account.  Reading through the first few messages, she got the driving sense that this was the one she was after.  Keywords like 'package' and 'the job' were common in this e-mail account's recent activity.  “Found you, you son of a bitch.”

“You find what you need, kid?” Grendal asked.

“I think so, and I think this goes real deep.  Looks like the chief needed a big boost before some upcoming event or another.  There's a timeline and some bullshit I'm gonna have to work through,” Regina replied.

“Get 'em all, kid,” said Grendal.

Regina opened the fourth e-mail account Mr. Daniel’s phone was linked with.  This one appeared to be used for online gambling and porn mostly.  “Galatea, go ahead and share this fourth one, as well.”