3. September 9, 2022 #2
All the faces around the table stared at her in shock.
That name had come up amongst these men before.
Just a few weeks ago, they had battled the lowest edges of that group when one of the Salieri’s soldiers, a mid-level drug dealer named Gendry, stalked and kidnapped TB’s girlfriend, Flame.
Tribe and Mythos rescued both Flame and Medusa, a Mythos member, from captivity.
Unfortunately, it wouldn’t be the last time they heard of the Salieri, whether it was today or months down the line.
Waters fixed their handler with a stern look. “What have you been hiding, Cherry?”
She blew out a breath before answering. “If they intended the bomb for me, the Salieri fit as our bombers,” she said.
“Haskell heading to the table first prompted the man in the brown suit to stand. Had I been first, his companion in the black suit would have gotten up and offered me the seat. They executed it perfectly.”
She swore she felt the vibrations coming off Demon as he went from pissed off to enraged. “Goddammit, Cherry, why do you think the bomb was for you?”
“My real name is Esme Bosworth, the only child of Grayson Bosworth.”
“Shit on a shingle with a side order of fries,” Midas, their computer guru, whispered.
Demon rolled his eyes. “You’ve been hanging out too much with Kubrick and Flame. That was the oddest combination of the two of them swearing/not swearing I’ve ever heard. Why can’t you people curse like normal human beings?”
“You can’t even pronounce ‘fuck’ correctly,” TB argued. “Who are you to talk?”
“I pronounce feck just fine,” Demon grumbled.
“That ‘u’ sounds an awful lot like an ‘e,’ dude,” Nemo, the blond, tattooed, and pierced operator, pointed out .
“Feck you,” Demon said as he threw up his middle finger at his teammate.
“All right, you three, simmer down,” Waters warned.
“Neither one of you speaks right with those goof-ass accents. Now focus your pea brains and get back to what’s important.
” He turned his gaze onto their handler.
With an audible sigh, he ran a hand over his close-cropped, dark-blond hair.
“Now explain, Cherry. Why do you think the bomb was meant for you? And how do the Salieri, whoever the fuck, or feck, they are, fit into all of this?”
“I’ll try to be quick,” Cherry promised.
“My father had many friends in the military, even though he himself had never served. Not for lack of trying. He had a heart murmur that disqualified him from enlisting. But he believed absolutely in the military, even though they couldn’t use him personally, so he turned his skills in manufacturing to support the service branches in another way.
“The story of the day he disappeared is public knowledge, but what the public didn’t know was where I ended up and how I’ve made Tribe my life’s quest. I’ve spent the last twenty years building, financing, and running Tribe from my computer.”
Stunned silence greeted her confession. She pressed on.
“In order to do this right, I knew I had to play the long game. Success depended on relationships being fostered. I knew that would slow things down further—time that my father didn’t have—but what other choice was there?
His survival was already unlikely, so I accepted that if I was too late and he was dead, I would ensure everything was in place to catch and punish those responsible for his disappearance.
“It also required that I remain in the shadows. I knew I didn’t have the skills to do this by myself, so I used my college years to hone my analytical skills.
I learned everything I could about history, culture, finances, politics, and anything else I thought would be useful in running an operation like Tribe.
Combine all of that with my family’s vast wealth, and I could hire people who could.
I purposefully scouted out the best of the best, but there was a hitch.
Those individuals had to be free of family ties.
They had to be people who could walk away from everything because we couldn’t work out in the open.
I started with God and worked my way to recruiting the rest of you. ”
“So we exist because of a personal need for revenge?” TB concluded.
“Justice!” Cherry sniped. She took a calming breath. “My father deserves that.” She looked to TB. “Whatever the reason I created Tribe, you’ve all done a lot of good over these past five years. Good others couldn’t have gotten done.”
“We’ve also done some shady-as-fuck work,” TB reminded her.
She pleaded with TB to understand her choices. “None of it was assisting truly bad people. I ensured nothing like that ever touched any of you.”
Steel, the quiet Latino member of the team, brought the conversation back to the pressing issue. “What’s the connection between today’s bomb threat and the Salieri?”
“Years ago, when my father disappeared, I was going through his things, desperate to find clues about who might have taken him. Buried in his personal cloud were folders and folders of articles relating to Mozart and his fellow composer, Antonio Salieri. Everything from research articles to reviews of many play performances around the theatrical world of Amadeu s by Peter Shaffer. I nearly deleted the files because I couldn’t figure out why my father would have something like that saved in his drive.
He hated classical music, and live theatre was barely one step above it in his estimation. ”
“The articles were breadcrumbs,” Waters deduced.
Cherry nodded. “In truth, I forgot about the files because getting Tribe up and running became my sole focus. When Gendry gave up the name, it triggered my memory of what I’d found, so I started looking closer at those files again.
They were all downloads of genuine articles from a worldwide database, but something about them looked…
wrong. Recently, it hit me why.” She reached for a keyboard under the conference table and pulled up her files from her co mputer, switching the content from Midas’ screen to hers. “What do you see?”
Silence permeated the room.
Midas’ voice broke the silence. “The spacing is all wrong.”
“Very good,” Cherry complimented him. “I figured you would see it right away.”
“Pardon my limited brain power,” TB interrupted, “but what does spacing have to do with it?”
“The margins are off,” Midas explained. “When you download an article off the internet and save it to your drive, it follows the same default protocols to format the file to its new location. Text centers left, right, up, down, and spaces the lines at 1.15 lines.”
Haskell chimed in. “It’s like how I configure my body in a small space, or if someone played the game of Tetris.
The document uses the allotted space as efficiently as possible.
When you copy over text from one source to another, unless you tell it otherwise, the formatting follows along with the text.
Most internet articles use Chicago style formatting—the style journalists use—where the document justifies the text so that the margins are even on both sides and words are flush with both the left and right margins.
In addition, there are rules for when and where a new page can start. ”
Midas picked up the explanation again. “If you look at this document Cherry pulled up, the formatting is uneven. Also, if I were to print this document in its entirety, there would be”—he counted—“one, two, three extra pages at the end of the article that would be blank. In a professional setting, that wouldn’t happen.
That it does here suggests hidden text to me. ”
Cherry nodded. “I finally came around to that as well.” She highlighted the entire article, and within the highlighting in the margins, a shadowy character like a medieval-style “S” inside a diamond appeared at the top left and the bottom right of each new page.
The three blank pages that followed the end of the article showed shadowy writing in an unreadable font that was colored white and microscopic on the page .
“What are we looking at, exactly?” questioned TB.
“The authors, or the publishers more likely, used extremely low tech to hide a private message,” Midas explained. “Microscopic, white-colored font. Unless you knew what to look for, you’d just assume those last pages were extra and probably ignore them.”
TB rose from his seat and walked closer to the screen. “It’s brilliant,” he whispered. “How did no one see this?”
“Sometimes the best hiding place is in plain sight,” Cherry acknowledged.
“Like hiding a specific needle in a stack of other needles. Hang on.” With a few more keystrokes, Cherry placed a second document side by side with the Amadeus article she’d used as the example for the group.
The entire room could now view the new version of the document with the white text changed to blue and enlarged to size twelve font.
Haskell looked at Cherry. “Is this what I think it is?”
“Looks like gibberish,” Demon complained.
“To most people, yes. In reality, it’s Middle English,” Cherry informed him.
“Wow.” Haskell popped out of her chair and joined TB at the screen, her fingers tracing the lettering. “I haven’t seen this since I read The Canterbury Tales .”
“This is… I don’t know what this is,” Waters whispered.
Haskell swore under her breath. “My Middle English is rusty, but it’s good enough to see that this file is an order of purchase.
White women between the ages of sixteen and twenty-five.
Clean bills of health, no underlying conditions, no history of genetic disease markers.
Preferably women with few family ties and few connections to miss them.
” Her eyes were glassy as she turned to look at the others in the room.
“Bloody hell, they wanted three hundred women.”
Cherry nodded. “This is why my father disappeared. He was chasing the Salieri long before Mythos. I bet each of these articles he stored in his cloud is a publicly hidden communication between the Salieri and prospective clients. I’m convinced that they figured out he was closing in on them, or at least closing in more than anyone else had in the past. Now I’ve been poking around in his files again, as well as digging into new areas, and it looks like I inadvertently announced my presence to the Salieri.
” She cringed. “I’ve no one to blame but myself for becoming this easy of a target.
I broke one of our biggest rules by eating at that café every Friday. ”
“Cherry,” Demon groaned.
“I know, I know! No repetitions! Don’t go to the same places; don’t go the same routes. Haskell almost paid the price for my mistake.”
Waters cut off her self-recriminations. “There’s no use worrying about that now. What’s done is done. But Cherry, you understand?—”
“That my father’s most likely dead? Yes.
But I can’t stop looking, Waters. This is an enormous piece of information I never knew I had until Flame.
It’s been years with no leads, and now there are thousands of reviews, articles, and files he downloaded off the internet.
There are even some video files. I don’t know what those are for?—”
“Advertisements,” Midas conjectured. “I bet that’s what they are.
Maybe for the services of the Salieri. Possibly advertisements of specific people they had for sale.
Embedded images likely exist within those video files.
Each one of these files needs to be gone through and translated, reformatted.
Who knows what information is in there?”
Waters stared at the screen. “Something tells me we need this information translated yesterday.”
“I’ll put Nova on it immediately and go over whatever she finds.”
Waters nodded tightly.
Steel walked over to Waters and put his hand on his team leader’s shoulder.
“ Jefe , we’ve just all had a shit ton of information dumped on us and no time to process it.
Maybe we should take a break, then come back together when we’re in a headspace more prone to taking on the more pressing issue at hand. ”
Guilt swamped her as she watched Waters process the information.
“Agreed. I need to… call Kubrick.” At that point, Waters hit the security button on the starfish, putting the room back to its normal pr otocol.
“Reconvene at eighteen hundred. Demon, you’re on protection detail for Cherry.
Nemo, you’re in charge of Haskell. Both of you—do not, under any circumstances, allow these women to leave this building. ”
Waters practically flung himself out of the room, the rest of the team right behind him. When Cherry rose from her chair, a hand gripped her bicep to steer her away from the table and to the elevator. “You and I need to have a conversation,” Demon muttered so that no one else could hear.