Chapter 48
Drake
“Is this it?” Reed asks, sounding shocked and unsure.
“Yep,” I say as I pull up to my friend’s house.
Vulcan’s property is at the end of a quiet street, distinguishable from its neighbors by the array of satellite dishes and antennas sprouting from the roof. Security cameras track our approach from multiple angles.
Before we even reach the front door, it swings open.
“Drake, my bro. Long time no see.” Vulcan stands in the doorway, backlit by the glow of multiple monitors visible behind him.
He’s exactly as I remember, with his perpetually rumpled dark hair and eyes that seem to process information faster than most people can speak.
“Come in. Come in. You must be Reed. I’m Vulcan. ”
They shake hands.
“Thank you for agreeing to see us,” Reed says as we go inside.
The interior of his house looks like mission control mated with a gaming den.
Monitors line every wall, some displaying code, others showing what appear to be security feeds from the cameras around his property.
The air hums with the sound of cooling fans and hard drives spinning.
Fiber optic cables snake across the floor in organized chaos, and I count at least six different keyboards within arm’s reach of his workstation.
“Jesus, Vulcan,” I tell him. “You’ve upgraded just about everything since I was here last.”
“Don’t you know it. And I cleared my schedule as soon as you called. You said you need me to crack a cellphone?”
Gratitude swells in my chest. “Yes, and I owe you for this.”
“You don’t owe me anything.” Vulcan’s expression turns serious, his usual levity fading. “I only hope I can help out. That I can find something on that cellphone. Or your trainee will get into big shit. I hate that they’re trying to get rid of you, dude. It sucks!”
My throat tightens. Of course he knows. Vulcan makes it his business to know everything that happens on this island. Besides, big gossip like this moves like wildfire through a small island like ours.
He holds out his hand to Reed. “The phone, please.”
Reed passes it over.
Vulcan turns it over in his hands, examining it with the eye of someone who’s done this countless times before.
“Alright, the good news is that even though the physical call log has been deleted, the data doesn’t just disappear.
It gets marked as available space but remains on the device until it’s overwritten by new data.
” Now he’s connecting the phone to one of his computers via a cable I don’t recognize.
“I’m going to create a forensic image of the device’s memory, then use recovery software to scan for the deleted entries.
Should take about twenty minutes, maybe less. ”
He pulls up a chair, and his fingers fly across the keyboard. Lines of code scroll across one monitor while another shows what appears to be a visual map of the phone’s internal structure.
It’s impressive to watch.
Reed and I position ourselves behind him, watching but trying not to hover. The minutes crawl by with agonizing slowness.
“Come on,” Vulcan mutters, eyes fixed on the screen. “Come on, show me what you’re hiding.”
A progress bar inches across the monitor. Seventy-three percent. Seventy-four.
Then it stops, and there’s nothing for what feels like a long time.
Reed and I exchange a look.
“What’s wrong?” I ask.
“I think there’s encryption I wasn’t expecting.
” Vulcan leans closer to the screen, his fingers already typing new commands.
“Someone put a secondary lock on the deleted data specifically. This isn’t standard phone security.
Interesting, indeed.” He makes a humming noise.
“This is custom work. Someone really didn’t want this information recovered. ”
“Can you get through it?” Reed asks.
“Yes, but it’s going to take longer.” He’s already pulling up a different program. “I need to run a decryption sequence. Give me…ten minutes, maybe fifteen.”
I check my watch. Time is going fast. I hope we get this done in time for the vote.
“Do what you need to do,” I tell him.
Vulcan nods, his attention already back on the screen.
Reed looks at her watch too, her brows raised, but she doesn’t say anything.
The decryption program runs through thousands of combinations per second, each attempt bringing us closer to the truth. Failure isn’t an option.
There is so much at stake here.
“Almost there,” Vulcan says, his voice tight with concentration. “The encryption is sophisticated but not impossible. Whoever set this up knew what they were doing, but they’re not at my level.” He laughs, sounding like an evil dictator.
Despite everything, I almost smile at the complete lack of ego in that statement. It’s just fact.
“Got it,” Vulcan announces, a note of satisfaction in his voice. “Pulling the call log now.”
A list of phone numbers appears on screen, each with an associated date and timestamp. Vulcan scrolls through them, and my chest tightens with each entry.
“Multiple calls to Mainland numbers,” Reed observes, leaning in closer.
“Look here,” Vulcan says, highlighting a particular number that appears again and again and again. “This local number shows up consistently, starting approximately three days after this year’s Tributes arrived on the island. Multiple calls per week.”
A local number. Someone on Draig Island has been in regular contact with whoever gave Harlow that phone.
“Can you trace it?” I ask, my voice rough.
Vulcan’s expression turns grim. “I can try.” His fingers dance across the keyboard again, pulling up databases and routing information. After a few minutes, he shakes his head. “It’s an unregistered burner phone. No name attached, no billing information, no service contract.”
My stomach drops. “So, we’ve hit a dead end?”
“Not necessarily.” Vulcan pulls up a different screen, this one showing a map of Draig Island overlaid with what appear to be cellular tower locations.
“Every time a phone connects to the network, it pings the nearest cell tower. Those pings leave a record – most people don’t know that.
If I can access the tower logs and cross-reference them with the times of these calls, I should be able to triangulate the general location where this burner phone was being used.
It won’t give us an exact address, but it’ll narrow down the search area significantly.
Could be within a few hundred meters if we’re lucky. ”
“How long will that take?” Reed asks.
“Honestly? I don’t know. Could be thirty minutes, could be longer. The tower logs aren’t exactly organized for easy searching, and I’ll need to cross-reference multiple data points for accuracy.”
I check my watch again. Shit! We don’t have much time here. It’s less than an hour before the Council convenes.
“I would appreciate it if you could try. There isn’t much time, though. Please, can you hurry?”
Vulcan meets my eye. “I’ll do my best,” he tells me as he pulls up another program.
Reed gets to her feet and starts pacing. She sits and then stands and then sits again. I tap my hand on my thigh.
For the next twenty minutes, I watch him work with an intensity and focus that borders on obsessive. He pulls data from tower logs, cross-references timestamps, and eliminates false positives. He slowly builds a picture of where that burner phone has been.
When Reed sits, I get up and pace, my eyes on Vulcan.
Every few minutes, I check my watch.
Shit! Shit! Shit!
We’re almost out of time.
“Getting there,” Vulcan says, eyes still on his screen.
I look at my watch again.
“Drake,” Reed says. “We need to leave in five minutes, or we’re going to be late for the meeting.”
“I know.” But I don’t move toward the door. I can’t. Not when we’re this close.
Vulcan’s typing becomes more frantic.
“I’m close,” he says. “Really close. Just need to confirm a few more data points.”
“Maybe we could go, and you could send me the data,” I tell him.
“No,” Reed says, her eyes on mine. “I need to be here.”
Oh yes. Crap! She needs to watch everything to be sure he isn’t grabbing the info from another phone. Or putting information onto this phone that wasn’t there. Reed is my witness.
I nod. “Yeah, of course.”
The minutes count down.
We need to go, and now.
We’re officially going to be late.
Reed stands up, her face apologetic but firm.
“We need to go now, Drake. If you’re not there when the Council convenes, it won’t matter what we’ve found. They will go ahead and vote without us.”
“One more minute,” Vulcan says, his eyes never leaving the screen. “Just one more minute. Come on. Come on.”
“Just one minute. One minute won’t make any difference,” I beg.
She takes a step toward the door, but waits, her foot tapping on the floor.
“Got it!” Vulcan shouts, spinning his chair around to face us. “I’ve got the location data.” But his expression isn’t triumphant; instead, it’s confused, almost shocked. “But it doesn’t make any kind of sense.”
“Let me see,” Reed says, moving quickly to look over his shoulder.
She gasps, her hand flying to her mouth.
Reed looks at me, her face pale, her eyes wide with disbelief.
“Can you come with us?” she asks Vulcan.
“Um…sure.” He shrugs.
“We’ll explain in the car,” she tells me. “We need to go right now.”
I don’t need to look at the screen. I don’t need either of them to explain anything. I know already.
I’m right.
I’m fucking right.
Now, I just need to nail the real spy and prove that Harlow is innocent.