Dark Web (DARC Ops Book 2) (5 page)

There was a quick round of laughter from the audience.

“But seriously, sneaking into a squad car is not exactly a cakewalk—that is, being able to leave once you’ve gotten inside. And to leave without cuffs around your wrists.” He waited for a few chuckles to fade away. “Hackwise was first able to get around this by compromising the car while it was getting repairs. While it was at the shop. That’s the first level of hacking. And that’s one hack we’ll give away for free. So you’re welcome, LVMPD. Make sure to vet your mechanics. And make sure the garage’s computer system has Hackwise protection.”

Tansy walked to a table at the side of the stage. “But we were able to find other ways, other options that we won’t mention right now. And these are strategies that only Hackwise can protect against.” He bent over a laptop and began working, typing, his hands feeling a little shaky on the keys. Why, he didn’t know. He was confident that everything would work out. It always did.

But what if it didn’t?

Unlike the previous experiments, he wasn’t at the controls.

“Okay, if you’ll just direct your attention to the screen here. . . .” The projected slideshow turned off and was replaced with a live video feed from the hotel’s parking lot. “What you’re seeing is a live shot of the hotel exterior.”

There was a sudden commotion from the audience. Tansy squinted through the bright lights to see several large groups of people, mostly photographers, getting up and heading for the exits. Probably on their way to check out the parking lot. At least, he hoped that was their reason for leaving.

He looked back down at the computer screen, unhappy with what he was seeing. A red blinking dot meant his team had lost contact with the vehicle.

“Before we go any further,” said Tansy, trying to buy some time, “I’d just like to clarify that LVMPD
has
designated a specific off-duty car for us to attempt this on. We’re in no way hampering or obstructing law-enforcement officers in the line of duty. Also, for reasons of road safety, the car has been parked somewhere in the parking lot. They said if we drove it on any actual roads, they’d charge us with a whole slew of things, so. . . .”

Buying time, buying time. . . . What the hell was taking them so long?

Tansy had tested out the exact experiment, himself. He’d done it countless times, all of them working without a single hitch. He looked off the side of the stage to Mr. Greco, who had insisted that Tansy—er, Stanton Morse—be the front man. The face, with someone else taking over the role of keyboard jockey. Now it seemed the old man was regretting his decision. From the stage, Tansy could see him nervously picking at his cuticles. Tansy was about to start doing the same. But instead he brought his fingers back to the keyboard of his laptop.

If it was necessary, he’d take over the operation and perform it manually from the stage. It wasn’t ideal. But he could probably make it a seamless transition, like it had been planned that way all along. After all, he was the face of the operation. Right, Mr. Greco?

Tansy looked over to Mr. Greco, who had now disappeared. Maybe he’d fled back to his room, scrambling around to find his heart meds.

“Okay, we’ve made contact with the vehicle,” said Tansy. It wasn’t an outright lie because they
had
made contact with it. An hour ago.

“And we’re using our, um . . . our technique.” He cleared his throat. “So, another aspect, um. . . . So, Hackwise not only protects against cyber attacks, but it logs each attempt. Right as the attack occurs, information about its type and source gets logged onto an SD card for later inspection. Which means that law enforcement will finally have a sense of—”

The blinking red dot turned solid green, and Tansy could finally breathe and talk normally again. “Alright,” he said with a big grin. “It looks like our team is ready to rock.”

The room went quiet. An awkward quiet as if the audience expected the whole experiment to implode at any moment. There were sounds of coughing, and a few chuckles. And then the room descended into complete quiet once more. In the silence, Tansy could almost feel the audience’s attention focusing in on the screen. His attention had certainly been focused on the screen, and maybe a little too intently, as his left eyelid began twitching uncontrollably. Luckily, the audience was too far away to notice.

But what about the cameras? DEFCON was recording each presentation to add to a DVD. Shit. Everyone would see his fucking eyelid and how—

Fuck. They’d all see how miserably he’d failed in getting the—

The car!

Finally!

It began like the crack of thunder, the spreading applause of a satisfied audience as they watched a police cruiser roll onto the screen, its lights flashing brilliantly against the flashbulbs of an unseen mass of photographers.

It worked.

Hackwise looked great.

Mr. Greco, if he was still alive, would be happy.

Tansy bowed to the sustained applause, enjoying a wave of relief. And then a different kind of relief washed over him. The knowledge that he could now get the hell out of Vegas.

H
er favorite
Sunday mornings used to be the ones that began in an eighteenth floor executive suite. She’d wake on 1600-thread-count to the glint of sunlight on the shiny silver lids of room service. She’d wake to eggs Benedict with fresh tomatoes and lemony kale, a full carafe of espresso, last night’s roses standing in a champagne bucket, and then Bryce Johnson, him leaving the bathroom with a smudge of shaving cream on a freshly starched collar.

“Sleep well?” he’d ask, patting her blanketed foot as he walked around the edge of the bed, his hand dragging up to her hip, his weight pressing on the bed, and then his hand under the covers, stroking her bare thigh.

It used to get her hot, his touch. Anywhere.

But on that last Sunday morning, she’d felt as cold as her room-service breakfast. As empty as the champagne bucket.

“It’s probably best that we don’t drag this on,” he’d said softly, sitting miles away at the foot of the bed. “We had fun, I know. Good times.”

The fun times began after his guest lecture at UC Denver, at a little campus cafe, a chance meeting which somehow blossomed into a job opportunity. His eagerness should have been a red flag, but she hadn’t looked past his flattering comments and intimate touches.

“Things are just getting way too serious right now,” he’d said. “And I need to focus all my efforts on the investigation. And on my family.”

He was on tour, the college circuit of an academic rock star, having just published a scathing history of US foreign policy in the Baltic region. He was older, smart, sophisticated, and utterly professional. No mention had been made of his being married when they first met. No hints at first that he’d wanted Carly for anything more than web programming, either. And for two years, conferencing about web programming was the extent of their interactions.

Oddly enough, it was the programming that had first led them into trouble. Not the conferencing, or the type of relationship they did or didn’t have. It was the work itself, which had become increasingly unethical since he’d discovered her true talents as a hacker. It was a resource he’d claim he needed since becoming the US Ambassador to Croatia. Dirty politics required dirty protocols, and all that. In reality, all it really had been was a slippery slope.

Everything changed once they’d entered into a relationship centered around dirty work. The more he requested gray-hat solutions to his political problems, the easier it was for both of them to break free of the only other remaining professionalism. It stayed that way for several months before their last hotel morning, when it was clear that everything—the work and the play—had become one single catastrophe.

“I just need some time,” he’d said, still sitting at the foot of the bed, still pretending to ignore her tears. “And then maybe we can pick up from there. After. When everything blows over. The press is all over me.”

The odds of such a major scandal blowing over were slim to nil. More improbable were the chances of his ever sharing a hotel room again with one of the scandal’s lead architects. Even more improbable was his office keeping her on the payroll—especially now that she was officially finished with the cover-up efforts. What possible use could he have for her?

Especially now, in the hotel, after she’d already given away her ultimate gift.

But what about him? What would be his parting gift, aside from a broken heart? She’d already felt his hot, suffocating neediness. Now he could only seem to offer cold, inhuman logic. He’d been talking to her so carefully, so sweetly. And so much like a lawyer, as if he was already aware that she would become a liability. Would she? He definitely considered any relationship they had to be over. Especially after this talk, her “use by” date having expired in a flash, an immediate transition from asset to liability.

God, he’d still kept talking.

“I won’t forget all the amazing times we’ve shared, Carly. That would be impossible. You’re a really cool girl. And you’ve been so amazing to me, in all sorts of ways. How could I just . . . forget all that?”

At the time, she’d never imagined that setting up a private email server would get anyone in so much trouble. It was a
little
shady. Of course it was. Just like their secret, sinful life together. But Carly was willing to accept the risk—both of them. And it was exciting for a while, providing the ambassador with a second life, his escape from a frigid marriage, his second chance at love and happiness.

“I just hate that this whole thing has blown up like this. . . .”

But the excitement quickly faded when rumors began swirling about not only the ambassador’s secret server, but what kind of material he’d been storing on it. All of which was illegal.

“You’ve got nothing to worry about,” he’d said. “It’s hidden. Buried.”

But it was her participation in its cover-up that would come back to haunt her.

“So, in case we don’t talk for a while . . . I just want to thank you for that.”

Luckily, it had only haunted her in dreams, the cover-up so far succeeding. She had someone else to thank for that. A nameless, faceless internet persona. Someone she’d met in an online hacking collective. He was probably the only bright spot to have come from Bryce’s mess. But even that was eventually ruined.

Yet another little misery was Carly’s losing her only real friend in the scandal. Collateral damage. She couldn’t stay in touch with him once she realized what Bryce—no what
she
—had done, what she’d unknowingly dragged him into. It seemed like anything that came into contact with the original sin would end up getting burned.

“I won’t hang you out to dry. If things get too heavy and they start looking at you, I can get you a top-notch lawyer.” Bryce had patted her foot with the touch of a father. And it still repulsed her. But he still wasn’t finished, asking her if she understood. And if she could forgive him. If she could be patient. Could she just be willing to try?

She felt sick.

“Next year, we’ll probably be laughing about this in Cancun,” he’d said, his face struggling to smile. “I want you to think about that, okay? While you’re waiting? Think of the ocean, the palm trees. Think of that if you get lonely. Okay? Just close your eyes and I’ll be waiting for you there. I promise.”

Years later, he was still waiting there for her, but like a ghost, moving through the shadows of her daytime subconsciousness. Bryce Johnson was always in the background of thoughts, festering there, slithering around like some dying animal in an oil spill. Only at night would he materialize, as an intruder rummaging through the background scenery of her dreams until he pounced out from somewhere to take center stage. He was always doing that. Always there, always haunting. There were never any palm trees or Cancun beaches. Just the dread that one day he might actually resurface, that she’d get a call from a federal agent, or a question from some nosy journalist.

Crap, now she was worrying about the journalist again.

Where did she come from? And where was she now?

How did she know about Carly’s past?

And why?

And then Carly woke up.

In a van.

With her bandmates and all their gear.

And with a sore neck.

She’d been sleeping in an almost horizontally reclined passenger seat, curled up to one side like a wild animal preserving its own warmth. It took a moment for her to get her bearings, to see straight and remember that she was still in Utah. And it took some courage to reach down and tug at the lever which straightened up her chair, and which also triggered an immediate explosion of pain from her neck. It was the usual symptom of a tour that wasn’t profitable enough to deserve a nightly hotel. A situation that should have been changed last night.

It was supposed to have gone differently, their extracurricular dealings just about guaranteeing a good night’s rest in an actual bed. Wasn’t that the point of last night’s side deal?

So why were they still in their van? And why was it parked in the middle of nowhere?

Were they really still in Utah?

Carly looked out of the windshield to the distant white peaks of mountains, and above them, to the dark blue morning sky that slowly brightened before the sun could crest the horizon. The view from the passenger window was that of a vast wasteland, a sea of dull whiteness that stretched out in a perfectly flat plain, stretching all the way to the dark and blurry smudge of mountains that lay hundreds of miles away. If it hadn’t been for her previous visits to the great salt flats, she would have assumed the worst: that the van had been picked up and transported to some distant planet.

Careful not to wake anyone, Carly creaked open the van door and slid out into the cool morning air, her feet landing on the hardpack salt stone with a gentle scuffling sound. And that was all it took, just that little hop down from the van, to make her head throb with the dry tightness of a hangover. Which also might have explained why they’d spent the night in the Salt Lake flats, their drunken rationale having done the navigating.

She took a few aimless steps away from the van, warming up her body, letting the events of last night trickle back into her memory. They arrived slowly, the little fragments of clues, slivers of situations. Moments of drunken hilarity and then black nothingness. Time gaps all along the way, from the punk bar to the salt flats, from campfire to sleep. She could think back to where it began, a somewhat successful show at Changez, then talk of an after-party, plus more drinks, and then somehow driving out of Salt Lake City with Wolf Taffy and a small caravan of merry partiers, leaving the interstate somewhere and speeding out into the flatness of a dried-up sea bathed in moonlight. She remembered the full moon, its brightness guiding the way of the revelers, its illumination helping the search for stray beer cans and lighters in the backs of cars. The illumination of faces. Newly discovered friends. Moments and conversations that were mostly useless and in the process of being forgotten. And then what?

There was a heavy blurriness to the moments—or perhaps hours—leading up to her sleeping in the fetal position in the passenger seat. Through her heavy fatigue and the intoxicated remains of her thoughts, it seemed possible that she’d only been asleep for thirty minutes. It certainly
felt
that way.

There were markings in the sand around the van, which suggested it had once been the site of a frenzy of activity. Countless shoe prints, tire tracks. Everything circled around a central dark smudge that used to be a campfire. Carly walked near it, inspecting the carnage of half-burnt beer cardboard and broken camping chairs. Somewhere by the fire, someone had strummed on an acoustic guitar. She remembered that, and the guy who had to be restrained after he’d doused himself in beer and attempted to walk through the fire.

Her thoughts drifted to memories of the people they’d partied with, almost panicking when she couldn’t remember if Simone and her questions had found a way to their after-party. Had there been any drama, or was it safe to presume that the night was at least journalist-free?

Had it really been drama-free, though?

Carly checked her phone for any drunk dials or texts, and was relieved to find she had no service. Given how little she remembered of last night, it was probably a blessing in disguise.

She squinted as she looked up at the horizon, where the sun looked just moments away from appearing. Aside from the stale haze of drunkenness that still enveloped her, and the grime she felt on her body from living in a van, this morning here in the salt flats was perhaps the most enjoyable yet of recent weeks. The quiet, the isolation. The peacefulness. The calm was like the eye in a rock-tour hurricane.

On her way back to the van, Carly grabbed some of the unburned refuse from their campfire. She’d hate to leave a mess in such a beautiful place. Maybe they could find a dumpster for it at the next gas station. When she dragged the lawn chair to the van and leaned it against the side panel, she heard someone inside, Megan, calling her name.

“Where the hell are we?” Megan asked, her voice sounding as groggy as she looked. “And please tell me I didn’t drive us here, because I don’t remember a damn thing.”

Carly climbed back up into the passenger seat. “Don’t worry, I think it was Taylor.”

“Thank God,” Megan said, groaning as she turned over in her seat to face Carly, “I feel like there’s wet cement in my head. Every time I move I can feel it, this pressure sliding around.”

“I’m hurtin’ too,” said Carly. “My neck is like. . . .” She very tentatively rotated her neck, just to check whether the pain was still there.

Yep. It was definitely there.

“Well, damn,” said Megan. “Maybe thirty is the cutoff point for being a rock star.”

“It’s hard to say. Don’t most rock stars die before thirty?”

“Speaking of which. . . .” Megan leaned her head back and yelled, “Hey, Taylor, you still alive back there?”

There was no answer.

“Maybe she became a rock star overnight,” said Carly, struggling with her sore neck to turn around. All she could see were Taylor’s sand-covered sneakers.

“So were you able to see the interstate?” asked Megan. “Or do we have to follow tire tracks out of here?”

“No, I saw some lights behind us. We should be okay.”

“Wait,” said Taylor, sounding tense. “What the hell is that?”

“What? I can’t turn around.” All Carly could do was watch the fear wash over Megan’s face. She was looking at something in the rearview mirror. Something horrible. “Meg, what is it?”

“Fuck. . . .”

Carly craned her neck to see in the side mirror, getting a good look at an approaching police cruiser.

She forced herself to take a deep breath. No problem. They’ll be fine.

“Fuck,” Megan muttered again.

“Don’t worry,” said Carly. “It’s cool. Everything’s stashed away. I remember doing that last night.”

“You sure?”

“Totally sure.” She’d stuffed their contraband inside the back panel of her bass amplifier. It was one of the only things she distinctly remembered from the night before. “Just act normal.”