Chapter Five
Dakota
Monday
Dakota pushed through the ground-floor door of his office building and back out into the blustery gray day.
A glance skyward told him he could leave his umbrella in the messenger bag, hanging crossbody, but he turned up the collar of his suit and hunched against the wind, his hands shoved into his pants pockets.
It smelled like snow.
Benny was right; if anything was in the cards for a lasting relationship between him and Rose, this ten-minute walk would have been hugely convenient.
He’d let her know at lunch that they needed some quiet time on the phone to talk things through privately.
He wouldn’t bring it up over a public lunch or mid-way through her hectic day.
Rose should finish up with her last patient and take the elevator down to meet him out front in the next few minutes.
She only had half an hour to grab a bite, so they agreed to hit the place they’d gone a time or two, a little deli around the corner on the same block as her medical building.
Since every eating joint was packed this time of day, Dakota had called in an order that morning for the same sandwich combo Rose had last time.
If she wanted that today, that call saved them time.
If she was in the mood for something else, he’d take that order home and eat it for dinner; fewer dishes to wash. Win-win.
The lunchtime rush filled the streets with jostling, impatient cars, riding bumper to bumper. Dakota’s gaze searched through their windshields, taking in all the cameras posted on the front dashboards. Then he turned and scanned the street. How many cameras could he count along this short route?
Dakota had a new concern that had niggled at him since yesterday’s race.
When Iniquus put protocols in place, they were there for good reasons.
That Iniquus had worked out the exact stripe configurations and grease paint colors required to thwart AI recognition meant they’d put resources into a threat.
He had his own criteria for keeping himself safe. He’d used it effectively for over a decade.
Technologies were constantly advancing.
Working in the sphere of counterfeit money, he didn’t need a savvy criminal with the ability to print ungodly amounts of money to pay someone to look up their new contact and find Dakota’s smiling, (probably) mud-covered face and his real name and home address.
Things were changing fast.
Dakota would have to ask Reaper what minimum actions he could take to mess up AI recognition.
On his cell phone, the security on the facial identification seemed to hold.
It didn’t open for Dakota’s cousin, who, according to his grandma, was Dakota’s “spitting image.” It didn’t even recognize Dakota if he contorted his face with laughter or a grimace—the grimace one turned out pretty bad the last time he tried to make an emergency call with a dislocated shoulder.
While Dakota raced under his given name in his triathlon competitions, his face was usually screwed up with exertion or distorted by goggles or sunglasses. Before the hospital charity run, he hadn’t put it together with the danger this posed for him.
Yeah, if Iniquus was taking the precaution of war paint in public, he’d have to up his survival game.
In the field, Dakota worked under pseudonyms. The idea that those aliases could be pulled up on some kind of sheet and the touch of a bad guy’s finger on the enter key: Here is Dakota Ryan Kayne AKA and his list of work names.
Yeah, it wasn’t quite a gun to his head, but it was a pistol wagging in his general direction.
What would cartels do to Dakota if they could figure out his job title?
So far, he hadn’t needed to utilize his SERE—survive, evade, resist, escape—training, and he certainly didn’t want to land in anyone’s cabin far enough away that no one could hear his screams.
Just last week, he and Jasper had been talking about the short-sightedness of Uncle Sam contracting with a privately owned security network to provide a nationwide surveillance system that could track anyone, anywhere in the United States by linking house cams, street cams, toll cams, and phone pings.
Texas police recently tracked a woman seeking a legal abortion in another state using over eighty thousand automated license plate readers as they tracked her state-to-state, even in states where tracking women seeking abortions was illegal.
Interestingly, a young woman disappeared in Texas, and the family filed a missing person’s report. The surveillance systems were not used to find her. They simply asked neighbors to check their doorbell cameras and see if they picked up anything.
Different circumstances, sure, and in that case, the lack of a license plate was probably the missing link.
But that was what Dakota and Jasper debated the other evening: Who decided which cases got the full capacity of the system for good or for bad?
Unfortunately, men in law enforcement had a sky-high rate of domestic abuse.
And there was also a strong brotherhood that closed ranks to protect their own.
Police officers went largely unpoliced.
How easy would it be for powerful people to make a phone call and abuse the system—politicians with an eye to punishing their enemies, the monied wanting to manipulate the market?
The federal law enforcement now had a contract with two private companies that could digitally lasso an area and track anyone’s phone from home to work to the shop to the gym. The surveillance was conducted without even a nod to Fourth Amendment rights and without a warrant.
It was also predictive.
So, if you got on the wrong side of the wrong guy and they had X amount of money to give to the private business, the bad guy could get a literal roadmap to where the subject would be and when.
And that’s why Dakota used a burner that he changed out monthly and slipped his phone in a Faraday bag as often as possible.
It wasn’t paranoia; it was self-preservation.
And Dakota thought the surveillance state in China was bad.
In China, surveillance was state-owned and used by the government.
In the United States, the fact that a private company ran the system meant that data on every citizen could be bought and sold to the highest bidder and fed into algorithms to manipulate and target.
Would the data centers only sell to other Americans or to American companies? Or was this data available on the international market?
Already, data collection had gotten so bad that grocery stores could predict what a given person would be willing to pay for any item and raise the price for that person. Three different people in the same store at the same time could see three different prices on a carton of eggs.
Dakota was pretty sure that didn’t happen with citizens’ data in China.
He wanted to keep himself out of the engines as much as possible, and it was getting harder and harder.
It meant using burner phones for the most part, with only a household and an office number that remained constant.
It was a whole lot of hoop-jumping, baseball-cap-wearing, and mirrored aviator glasses that covered much of his facial bone structure.
His phone rang, “Dakota here. What’s up, Jasper? Miss me already?”
“Yeah, my heart aches,” Jasper deadpanned. “Are you private right now?”
Dakota chuckled. “I was just wondering if I will even be private again. I’m walking to Rose’s work. Why? What have you got?”
“Two things. I might call you in a minute. I was talking to Kumar about Tank to see if he had anything you could use to get him real-world experience. He said there’s a charitable group of first responders coming in from the Colombian landslide.
Since that’s a vector for counterfeit, and since we’ve been seeing an uptick in counterfeit U.S.
dollars in global disaster spots, he’s working on getting search warrants together so he can look at any cash they’ve got on them.
I told Kumar I wanted to come along and loop you in so we can test Tank’s snoot.
He said no problem. We need to wait on the judge’s signature, then it’s a go. ”
“What are you thinking?” Dakota asked.
“We stand to the side as the passengers walk by one at a time. If there are any hits, Kumar takes control of them. Then you and I go down to the luggage. You and Tank sniff the bags as they come off the conveyor. I take control of those that Tank indicates on. The rest head on through customs. We take anyone with a suspicious scent to a little room and do a search. Even if Tank doesn’t get a hit, Kumar’s going to signal to customs that we need to search the group. ”
“When is this?” Dakota asked.
“I need to get more details.”
“I’m game,” Dakota said. “Once we have a plan, I’ll call over to Cerberus to check in. Tank is training today.”
“In the meantime, your target’s in the paper. The Colombian police took him into custody. Well done. I’m sending you the article. Read it, then give me a call.”
Dakota’s text pinged with a link, and Dakota stepped out of the path to lean against a bare-branched tree as he read that the attorney general’s office in Colombia had arrested Carlos Diaz, the leader of a transnational counterfeiting group.
This was the guy Dakota had been after for years, gathering data and evidence, and on that last trip to Colombia, he’d handed it all over to the government, hoping protection schemes wouldn’t make it all disappear.
Since Diaz had been seeding their fake money in Colombia, Ecuador, and the U.S., Dakota had sent the same information to Ecuador as a back stop to the kind of corruption that exists to some degree in governments worldwide.
Dakota wished they could extradite Diaz to the U.S. and try him in American courts, but it was always easiest if the country of origin charged first, and the guy went through their system.