Chapter 13 - Ranger
RANGER
It killed me, leaving her behind like that. She peeked out of the bundle of blankets I tucked around her, and she looked so… cute. Like a little doll. Her eyes smiled at me before I saw the blanket moving a bit underneath, and I knew she had to be waving at me.
I gave her a soft wave back before the sound of my bedroom door closing snapped me back to reality.
Fucking hell, this church meeting was going to suck.
“Ranger, what the fuck!?”
“The hell has happened to our shit?”
“How did they do this?”
“How did they get past your defenses?”
The instant I walked downstairs and tore through the door into our meeting room, the questions began. They piled one on top of the other until the sound was nothing but a blurred cacophony of angry voices.
“Hey!” I barked.
“Silence!” Cap exclaimed as he lifted his hand into the air.
That got everyone’s attention, and they settled down.
I cleared my throat. “Let me just rattle off what’s in my head, and then we can go with questions from there. All right?”
The sea of heads nodded, so I cleared my throat.
“First of all, I want you to know that I police the internet daily in order to make sure our information isn’t leaked somewhere we don’t need it.
We run on a closed-circuit internet network that I have locked down up to a three-mile radius around this place.
And even then, I’ve constantly got our I.P.
addresses being scrambled. That’s not taking into account the firewalls I’ve got built around our technology, nor does it take into account the auto-lock-outs that I’ve got programmed onto all of your devices that we hand out just in case I have to remotely wipe information. ”
“So our shit’s on lockdown is what you’re saying,” Cap said.
I looked over at our president. “I’m saying that in order to even think about hacking into us, it would take a fuckton of mobile power and a lot of time.” I shifted my attention. “Brutus. Ghost. What did you guys find on the desktops?”
“We haven’t checked yours yet,” Ghost said, “but outside of your setup, it looks like none of the computers in the clubhouse got sent the video.”
I pointed at him. “That’s what I figured your answer was going to be. I’ll get my computer checked when I go back up, but I didn’t have anything dinging at me signaling that I had an unread email waiting for me.”
“So that’s good?” Scout asked. “That the physical computers didn’t get the video.”
I grinned. “It’s very good actually. Means that they don’t have sophisticated enough equipment to get through anything hardwired in. That tells us a lot.”
Wrecker piped up. “Would that have anything to do with the tire tracks that we keep finding around all sides of this place?”
I pointed at him. “I was just about to get there. In order to hack into mobile devices, you usually have to do things like exploit outdated software, or find a way to upload some kind of penetrative virus via Bluetooth or a hacked wireless network. And what does that require?”
When no one answered, I smiled.
“It requires trial and error,” I said.
“Fucking hell,” Cap groaned as he slid his hands down his face.
“Well, that explains why we’ve found tire tracks multiple times,” Wrecker muttered.
“When they chased Marla to us, that is most likely when their attempted attacks began,” I said as I pulled all of the pieces together. “They’ve probably been coming within teasing because they know we’ve got a witness that can tie them to all of this shit.”
“You think Marla’s being chased by faces she has seen,” Doc said.
Wrecker scoffed. “It’s not like those bastards wear masks or anything.”
“He’s right,” Cap said. “None of the people me and Ariel encountered were masked up.”
I nodded. “But my systems are robust. They’d have to come back time and time and time again in order to find a vulnerability to exploit. My assumption is that’s what they’re doing. Seeing how far out, or even how close, they can get to us before exploiting our systems.”
“But you said you have us locked down,” Scout said. “What vulnerabilities are they exploiting?”
“I’ll have to dig,” I said as I folded my arms across my chest. “But here’s the kicker. If I can prove that our systems were compromised?”
Cap finished my thought. “We can pass that onto our contact at the DOJ. Show that they’re actively trying to cyberattack people in the area where they are trolling for inventory.”
That word sat in my throat like hot iron.
Inventory.
Marla wasn’t fucking inventory.
I drew in a breath and forced myself to choke down my anger before Brutus spoke up from his dark corner. “Got any idea what they’ve exploited to compromise us like this, Range? How badly are we compromised? Could they have listened to anything we’ve talked about?”
I raked my hand down my face to give myself time to think.
“Off the top of my head? Air-dropping. Bluetooth. Something that was remotely turned on just long enough to load up the email and have it sent. Sending something like that with a video over locked down airwaves would require time to upload the video before it was disseminated. But to answer your other questions, no, not everything would be compromised. And no, they wouldn’t have been able to use our phones like microphones.
Any sort of program like that, even sent over Bluetooth, would have triggered localized erasure parameters that I always load up onto our tech before handing it over. ”
“Is there any way we can backtrack this to them?” Cap asked.
That was the kicker. “If they air-dropped it or Bluetooth’d it to us in any way, it’ll be tricky. It’s like trying to backtrack a spam email blast. It takes time, and usually just takes us to a dump account.”
“A dump account is better than nothing,” Ghost said.
“But,” I said as I placed my hands on my hips, “if they ground wired this to us in any way, we’re talking about a completely different story.”
Brutus piped up. “I thought you said they didn’t do that since none of the desktop computers got anything.”
I shook my head. “Hacking works differently than just setting up a network. You can still ground wire something into someone’s internet source, it just takes longer time and more patience to make sure it’s done properly.
And with how many times we’ve clocked tire tracks all around this place, it just makes me wonder. ”
“Wonder what?” Cap asked.
I shook my head. “I don’t want to say anything that’ll make you guys pop off and go crazy.”
“Just say it,” Cap ordered.
I shrugged and did as he asked. “Again, I’ll have to dig and look into things. But it’s possible to ground wire something like this into someone’s internet by creating a mobile hub.”
“A mobile hub?” Doc asked. “Is that like a doctor’s bag but for techies?”
I chuckled at his metaphor. “Actually, yes, it’s a little bit like that.
It’s a completely mobile internet system, and that kind of system would have the capability of slowly getting through my defenses that I’ve set up around our internet and ground wires.
But again, my systems are robust, and if that’s what they’ve done, then it means they’ve got someone with serious tech skills on their side. ”
“Cap,” Ghost said.
“What’s up?” he asked.
“The law firm has a massive fucking I.T. department.”
That drew silence from all of us before Cap looked over at me.
Cap nodded slowly, and I watched his eyes move around the table the way they always did when he was piecing something together.
"If the law firm has their own I.T. infrastructure, that also means they've got people on the inside that can scrub footage.
" His jaw ticked. "Wreck. That man Amanda saw in the elevator.
The one she described. He ever show up anywhere in what you pulled from their systems? "
Wrecker's face went flat. "Not yet."
"Keep looking," Cap said. "Whoever that is, he's not a lawyer. He's their cleaner."
I just held my hands up a bit. “I’m only talking in theoretics. I won’t know a damn thing until I start digging into all of my protective systems.”
Cap nodded at me. “Then you work on that, and we pivot away from this for now. We’ve got good theories going, now we need facts.”
“Can we talk about this video now?” Doc asked. “Because the woman in that video was pretty beat up, even before she took punches.”
Cap looked over at him. “Got any idea from her wounds how long she’s been captive?”
Doc shrugged. “At least two weeks. She had some faded bruising around her neck that was already turning yellow in the video.”
“Fuck,” I groaned as I slid my hands down my face. “You mean to tell me that woman was captured around the time Marla ran up on us?”
“It could be longer,” Doc offered.
That just made me groan harder.
“How long have Marla and Lizzie known each other?” Cap asked.
“Childhood friends,” I muttered as I slid my hands down my face.
“She’s not being tortured for information, though,” Doc said.
All eyes turned to him before Cap spoke up. “Continue.”
Doc just nodded and stepped to the front a bit.
“In the video, Lizzie didn’t display any of the stereotypical markers of being tortured.
Yes, she had bruises and ligature marks.
Yes, she took some punches. But her fingers and toes were intact.
None were cut off or dislocated. Same with her ears.
With the way she was perched on her knees, she didn’t favor any side, so her ribs are still intact.
As awful as the video was, most of her physical ailments are topical. They’re not holding her for torture.”
“Jesus,” Ghost said, “how many times did you watch that video, Doc?”
The man just shrugged. “You know how I am. Once is enough for me with stuff like this.”
Wrecker piped up. “I’d go so far as to say that they probably weren’t even holding her in the beginning to make an example out of her. She probably snuck her way in somehow and gave away too much information trying to figure out where her friend was.”