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“This house is owned by a company,” I said. “That probably means it isn’t like a normal house, and it might just be used for company events, right? Maybe no one really lives here. It’s just a party house. So if it’s a company party, we can check the company newsletter or something for information.”
Brandon caught my chin, and then squeezed my face, giving me fish lips. “Look at you. All this thinking smart. Someone’s getting the hang of this.”
I talked through my squished lips. “I’ll cut you if you call me cute.”
Brandon tugged at my arm, dragging me across the sand. I held onto my boots and hurried along, about to curse at him for pulling, but he cut me off.
“We don’t have a whole lot of time,” he said. “We’re not totally sure this core is here. We’ll have to work out our plan B, and try to get details on the owners before we crash the party.”
I stomped to keep up with him as we headed back. “If this is the core, Alice is watching from somewhere. Did Eddie know about a house on Kiawah?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “He was more focused on me tracing numbers connected to the core, and trying to work out how to break the security code while the information streamed. He didn’t seem to want to break into where the core was to access it after our first conversation. I think something changed his mind from that way of thinking.”
“Was it Alice?”
“Who knows,” he said. “Maybe. I don’t know anything about her and he didn’t talk about an Alice.” He checked his phone, reading text messages. “Corey has the videotapes and wants a description of her. If you recognize her face, he can run that image through some data scanners and find out a lot about her. Her real name, for one. If she has a driver’s license, a police record, or if she walks into any major airport, we can track her via facial recognition. It’ll take time, but the sooner Corey can start working with her image, the better. That’s our next step right now.”
“She had red hair,” I said, feeling a swell of hope at this realization that computers could eventually help us track her down. I wanted to get to work right away, to relay information that might be relevant to Corey finding the right person. “Blue eyes. Bitchy personality.”
Brandon shook his head, then motioned to the bike and further to the road. “We should get out of here, and get to a safe location to talk it over. And maybe grab some coffee.”
PLANNING A DATE
Brandon and I ended up in a small cafe on the road just outside of Kiawah, next door to a local grocery store on John’s Island. The café was tiny and the area was surrounded by trees, with a good view of the lot and the road so no one could sneak up on us. There was one old man server, and no customers.
I’d ordered an iced mocha, which was more burned coffee than mocha. I swallowed as much as I could quickly, before taking a bite of a sugar doughnut from a box we shared. The doughnut only just covered the bitter coffee taste.
Brandon had downed a hot coffee and was working on a second, all the while texting his brother, typing in my descriptions, asking me detailed questions about Alice and exactly what she had said.
Corey eventually came back with a few photos. They were still shots of the aquarium from various angles. The photos were focused on crowds, particularly women with longer hair like I’d described.
I thought at first we’d never find them, but just when I was about to complain that we were wasting time, Alice appeared in one of the pictures. She wasn’t wearing the coat, but just the pair of slacks and a loose blouse on her thin frame as she entered through the main doors. Corey followed up with photos of her journey through the aquarium before she disappeared behind an employee door. She walked in alone, with that smug smile on her face but the camera didn’t reveal the sheer contempt and malice in her cool eyes.
“That’s her,” I said, sitting up quickly and nearly spilling my mocha. I stilled just long enough for my cup to stop shaking. I reached over, pointing my finger at the phone Brandon held up. “That’s Alice. She was wearing a lab coat when she came in. Like she was trying to trick me that she worked there somehow. She seemed to know a lot, like my name and Axel’s.”
Brandon nodded, then studied the picture and sent a message on to Corey. “Since Eddie was trying to save his life and his crew, he might have given her a lot of information. It didn’t bug him to tell her about us. We were no one to him.”
“We’re doing the same thing, you know,” I said. “We’re giving up this core to Alice, and might be giving her the lives and livelihoods of...well rich snobs. But we don’t know who this might affect in the long run. And she said she’d blame Eddie for the murders that have already happened.”
“We’ll have to worry about it after we get Axel and Marc back,” he said. “The goal right now is to prevent any more deaths. Eddie and his team have been trying for a year to get at this core. We have to figure out how we’re going to get access to someone else in less than a day.”
“I don’t know what she expects even Corey to do for her. For us to unlock the doors and let them in? It’s not like we could steal the hard drive...or whatever it is the core works from. Wouldn’t that defeat the purpose if we shut it down by trying to move it?”
“I get the feeling we’re supposed to break in, shut down the security, and let the system keep flowing. But then anyone could read it.” Brandon picked up his coffee, took a couple of long sips, and put it back down again. He puckered his lips, and grimaced. “Why did it have to be Marc that got kidnapped? I’ve been spoiled by his coffee.”
“Not like he could make you one now, even if he were free,” I said. “He’d be with us chasing after Axel.”
“And chastising the people here about their coffees, giving them the lecture about beans and brewing.” He sighed, and stretched himself out a bit, his bones cracking in different spots. Long, lean arms and legs flexed out made him appear to be super tall. He relaxed again, a frown at the corner of his mouth. “The Academy won’t be happy about this, you know. I’m avoiding them to save Axel, but they won’t like being in the dark. As far as Corey knows, we’re laying low just to seek out information.”
“I figured they didn’t like it when their people get kidnapped and would want us to do whatever it took to get them back,” I said. I may not know that much about it, but I couldn’t imagine the group would like two of their guys getting tortured and possibly killed over an illegal cell phone scheme.
“They won’t like this business about Corey’s security packet, either. They’re not going to like that he’s got software out there that people are interested in and can trace back to him. Or that he resurfaced his old hacker name for something new he’d been working on. He’s made himself a target.”
I wondered if it was the new game Corey was working on. “How?” I asked. “I mean, what did he do? How did these bad guys find him? So he left his name in the code? That’s a thing?”
“He learned it when he was younger.” Brandon pursed his lips and then bent his head down. He rubbed at the blond bits of hair at his temples and then across his eyebrows. “He’s way too smart. With the way our parents are, they wanted us to be on athletic teams and it was his way of rebelling. If he could be exceptionally good at something else, maybe our dad would give up demanding we participate in sports all the time.”
I bit my lip, sitting back, and crossing my arms across my chest. I’d not heard about any of their parents or any other relatives. They all knew about mine. “So your father was mean?”
“He wasn’t abusive. He was going to turn us into sport stars,” he said. “The Henshaw Twins. The trouble was neither one of us cared. We didn’t want to be recognized as a pair. We wanted to be individuals and we didn’t like him telling us what to do and what to participate in. Corey didn’t like sports. I didn’t like the sports my father picked out as money-makers. I prefer surfing over basketball or football or hockey. And you can’t really succeed at a game unless you really want to be there.”
I
couldn’t imagine Corey playing basketball for a living. Not that he wasn’t athletic in his own way. He was really strong. I’d watched him lift hundreds of pounds of metal, roofing material, and wood in the couple of weeks we’d spent fixing up old homes in the North Charleston area. For a nerdling, he had an admirable body. “So how did he end up with this security packet thing? Why did he even make it?”
“It probably happened a while back,” he said. “During high school, we spent nearly all of our time in athletic departments, playing different sports. He didn’t have time for normal classes he wanted to take that required extra computer hours and homework. He focused on what he could learn on the Internet when he got a chance, staying up all hours and sleeping through class. He ended up in chat rooms with hackers who taught him tricks. At first, he did small kiddie hacks, like taking down a website, or discovering access to private corporate emails. Once he started, he said he was hooked. He said it was like figuring out a puzzle, but each one had a surprise inside. Sometimes the result harmed, or it could help. He choose to help...most of the time.”
I pressed my lips harder together, biting my tongue to stop myself before I admitted knowing what I knew. They’d been criminals once. Maybe they weren’t now, but they’d all been arrested, in one way or another. Did their arrest record say something about wire fraud? “And the rest of the time?” I asked.
“Well, he was with hackers,” he said. He looked up, frowning. “I didn’t even know anything about it at first. I just thought he was playing computer games so I didn’t bug him about it. Then one day, I found him with some really odd computer supplies. He’d kept a number of gadgets out in the garage, where I’d stored some motorcycle parts. I asked him about the equipment, and about what he needed them for. He told me about writing security code, and then asked if I’d help him with a project. He said it would help other people. I believed him.”
“He lied?” I asked. It seemed ludicrous, and I didn’t believe for a moment Corey would ever intently harm anyone else.
“He didn’t lie,” Brandon said, his voice a little deeper with the resolve behind it. “He simply didn’t realize it could be illegal. I didn’t either. The police department called it fraud, but they were pressed to define what it was we were actually doing to the judge.”
“What were you doing?”
“We were finding money that didn’t exist,” he said. “He found a way to access accounts in banks that were of companies that didn’t exist, I should say. So they weren’t really supposed to be there. Small accounts with no name, no address, no identifiable source. They were old, with no owners. Some were just numbers. I don’t really understand the logistics now, but he told me they were forgotten, dormant accounts. Pockets of money lost in the system of banks. Some, he said, were criminal accounts. Criminals funneling money through places to get the money clean sometimes left these ‘chump change’ accounts open with a few hundred dollars leftover. And criminals would never report their stolen money to the police. So we could take it, and keep it, or use it to give to charities or whatever. The biggest part was, the accounts were super old, and so it was even less likely these people even knew the money was there. Corey said it was wasted money collecting mild interest automatically over the years in the banking system. We were simply taking care of it.”
Stealing. He was trying to make it sound like money found on the street that you couldn’t find the owner for, but really, it was money in a bank. They were stealing from a bank. “And someone reported the stolen money?” I asked.
“Some hacker got nosy, found Corey’s signature and traced him,” he said. “That’s the thing. Most hackers leave a signature, their trademark. Corey developed his own trademark and used it in every single piece of hacking and software he’d ever written. It’s like using spray paint to tag your name on a train or wall. I don’t really understand it but that’s how he explained it. Anyway, this hacker left a little anonymous tip, and the FBI tracked him down, found out what we were up to, and then tried to charge us with everything they could throw at us. Mostly they didn’t want us being able to hack into bank accounts. They were going to lock us away for life, if they could.”
This story sounded familiar. Axel had once told me his own, about how he had caused an accident, and his father had him locked away. That was mostly understandable. Now Brandon was telling me they were picking up forgotten dollar bills on the street, essentially, and trying to play it off like the FBI were the bad guys. I made a face, sat up and shook my head. “Seriously,” I said. “You were taking money without working for it. You had to know it was stealing. If you kept the money for yourself, that’s wrong. It might have been money without an owner, but it was money that didn’t belong to you. You didn’t earn it.”
Brandon’s face twisted into a scowl. “No, you don’t understand. We didn’t use the money for ourselves. We knew keeping it was wrong, but we didn’t see the harm if we were just putting the money to some use. It was tempting to keep it, but we always put the money into charities. Specifically, though we didn’t know it at the time, the Academy’s local charities.”
This was an interesting twist. “The Academy has charities?” I asked.
He nodded. “A few. They’re mostly for redeveloping neighborhoods, like you were participating in. Or sometimes school programs. It’s really open. Whatever the city happens to need. Anyway, the majority of the money went to those. It’s how the Academy found us, really. When it came out in court about what we were doing with the money, Academy lawyers stepped in. It was a good thing. Our father had hired us a lawyer, but he wasn’t any good. He kept kowtowing to the prosecution. We were almost sentenced to prison. Instead, we got community service...for the Academy.” He blinked, and looked down at his phone as it lit up. “Corey’s got the photo of Alice circling. It’ll take time to track her, if she’s anywhere traceable. We’ll find her.” He picked up his phone, and his coffee and I picked up my cup and the now empty plate of doughnuts. “We need to get ready.”
“What are we doing?” I asked.
“Reliving our first date, apparently,” he said with a smirk. “Corey found access to that company, and there is a party tonight. An electronic invitation went out. Guess who it’s for?”
“Who?”
“A Mr. Murdock,” he said.
I jumped up, nearly knocking back my chair. “Coincidence?”
“Corey thinks he might live at that house. He’s trying to dig up details, but he’s not exactly the most notable of the CEOs. I mean, he’s on the board, but he’s not in news reports where the company is mentioned. In fact, he can’t find out that much about him or his family at all.”
“And he’s alive? I thought the owner of the core was dead. That’s what…didn’t Eddie say that?”
“Maybe there was a second owner. We’ll have to find out. Anyway, we need to go shopping for clothes.”
I had a mental freeze as to what he was talking about, but when I thought about it, I realized our first date had been a party, where I was supposed to steal a wallet, and then replace it.
I cringed. I’d have to wear a dress.
MISTAKEN IDENTITY
Hours later, at twilight, we approached Kiawah Island inside the back of a town car. The driver was part of the Academy. I only caught the name, North Taylor, apparently the same one who was supposed to give Avery a car. I hadn’t said a word to him nor had I gotten a good look at him, but he picked us up outside of a strip mall, and his brother drove Brandon’s bike back to his garage for him. Brandon said he called in a few favors, and some Academy people would be helping us out from this point.
I was in the back seat with Brandon. The plan was to get dropped off for the party giving us the appearance of being guests. North would have to drive off, preserving his safety. When we were finished, we would meet another driver in a different car by walking the beach and heading to the gift shop parking lot.
Corey, in the meantime, had himself and a security team at the hospit
al working to scour the city for this Alice and anyone associated with her. We weren’t sure if it was her real name, or who she was, but they were searching local driver’s license photos, and then extending those to national databases when that was unsuccessful. It would take a few more hours.
Our only goal was to confirm the core was here, and to possibly learn as much as we could about Mr. Murdock. Brandon and I needed to figure out who really owned the core and gather as much information as possible. It would be just in case we couldn’t find Alice and her goons before time was up. We would have to negotiate. Brandon said the Academy would have us put a tracker on anything we handed over to Alice, if we did exchange for Axel and Marc, and that proper negotiators would be in place to make the trade with us.
“Corey says if this core is anywhere, it’s probably in a room with the highest security. So look for doorways with control panels in the wall next to them.” Brandon fiddled with his suit jacket buttons, buttoning and then unbuttoning the coat. “This thing doesn’t fit very well. If it’s undone, it feels like it’ll slide off my shoulders, but then when I’ve got it buttoned, it’s too tight around my chest.”
“Try wearing a dress,” I said. I had on a short red dress with spaghetti straps. It was a cold night, too, and I didn’t have a jacket to wear. It was hard enough finding a dress I’d actually wear. It was the last one I looked at, and had rejected offhand before Brandon yelled at me that we were wasting time, and who damn well cared what I wore, and that the last twelve dresses I tried on had looked fine, and to just pick one.
“You look good in your dress,” he said in a monotone. “I know you don’t like them, but you really can wear a dress, you know. You’ve got the body.”
I ground my teeth to bite back a retort. It wasn’t that I didn’t appreciate the compliment, but I was completely uncomfortable. I knew he was trying to be nice, and I didn’t need to overthink his comment. “You look pretty good in a suit,” I said. “But I think I like it when you dress down better.”
