CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Petrov’s men toted in ancient computers one by one. The old CRT monitors were so heavy they required teams to carry them across the vast grounds of the compound.
Corbin rapped the glass screen with a knuckle. “Why were computers so dang big? Is it just empty space in there?”
CJ stood nearby with a clipboard in his hands, marking things off our checklist. “No, most of the space is occupied by the cathode ray tubes that give the monitor its pictures. The tubes produce an electron beam that strikes the surface and makes the image.”
“Beams?” Duane asked.
“Yep, beams,” I answered, sending one away that had been cracked in transit while directing the functional ones to the far wall where we’d installed a countertop running the length of the room for this specific purpose. “Fired from the electron gun after receiving input from the circuit board.”
Duane crossed his arms and smirked at me. “Electron guns, huh? I bet that’s hell on the electric bill.”
CJ shooed Corbin away when the amber-haired man poked another black screen. “Careful. They are delicate.”
“Delicate?” Joe huffed, hefting one up on the table by himself and then using it to prop his elbows on. “I watched Radko and Zakhar drop one down the stairs, and it didn’t bust.”
I inched away from him as he invaded my personal space and glanced at the monitor in question with a resigned sigh. It didn’t appear damaged. “Well, it won’t be long until we can verify if it’s still working or not. Why didn’t they just tell us?”
When I turned, Duane must have made some gesture, because while he stood a hair closer, Joe had backed off to a more than respectable distance.
Joe held his hands up in supplication. “Hey, just because you earned our respect, that doesn’t mean they are thrilled about being at your beck and call, lugging around outdated technology.”
Considering I’d saved Radko from getting his head lobbed off from the forehead up, he should have been a little more tolerant. Although Zakhar’s attitude came with zero surprise. He’d always disliked me. If Vasily was showing more favoritism toward me, that probably knocked me back to square one with the hothead.
Duane propped his hip against the counter. “Yeah, remind us non-technologically inclined lackeys why you needed these.”
“For ALPHA 2.0,” CJ replied, earning a warning glare from his twin when he and Bryce appeared with one of the last computers. “Over there.”
“Don’t boss us, little brother,” Jace grouched, putting it two feet to the left of where CJ had indicated. “That clipboard has gone to your head.”
They grappled around a second, proving that siblings never grew out of their immature habits, before Brock walked in and barked out a quick order that had CJ jolting from the tussle.
“We’re all here now, so enlighten us one more time,” Payton ordered as he entered, followed by the rest of the heavy hitters with a stake in this upcoming battle, including the somewhat unstable Papatonis.
They had naturally angled themselves to leave CJ and me as the focal point, so we shared a look.
“Well, it was your idea to use the old computers, so do you want to take the lead?” I asked.
CJ arched a brow at me. “Actually, my idea was to use an old computer, singular. You were the one—”
“Yeah, but Paride inspired the concept of utilizing multiples when he asked how many computers we needed, so really—”
“For the love of—” Jace cut off with a sigh. “Quit humble bragging about how smart both of you are. We already know that, so can one of you, we don’t care who—just please explain?”
“I care,” Aleks interjected with a scoff. “Callie better to look at than puny twin.”
Since Payton’s vein popped out on his forehead as his face grew puce, I jumped in to explain. “We discovered my sister is the hacker behind the attacks, right? And based on Callum—my dad’s reaction, it’s a safe bet he feels protective of her.”
Aleks pretended to spit on the ground at the mention of my father, and the fierce loyalty thawed some of the freezer burned betrayal lingering from my father’s unprecedented exodus.
“Since he taught me most of what I know, we figured he did the same with her. Now, we assume her ability to track us so quickly, no matter how careful we are, is because she knows the same tips and tricks I do. Assuming that’s the case, CJ and I retrofitted our ALPHA with a program trained to look for and recognize certain pattern types.”
“ALPHA 2.0, if you will,” CJ added, holding up the device that had grown additional longer tentacles throughout our design process.
Duane grinned a crooked smile. “You’re flipping the script on her, stealing her play.”
“Exactly.” I beamed at his understanding. “If she can track us through our habits, it’s because she has those same habits herself.”
Corbin raised his hand as if this was a classroom setting.
“Uh, er, yes, Corbin?” I asked.
“Right, so, if that octopus thingy can track her—and thereby Tarasovich—why’d we have to lug half a ton of obsolete technology in here?”
“They are not obsolete,” CJ defended, as if someone had just insulted a pack of defenseless puppies.
I nudged him with my elbow.
“What? They aren’t.”
“He’s technically right.”
“Not completely,” CJ defended, digging his heels in. “Something obsolete is considered no longer useful. Obviously, that’s not true if we need them.”
“Maybe if you let her finish explaining why they are necessary to your plan, we can be on the same page,” Vasily growled, and CJ’s jaw clicked shut.
I licked my lips, waiting for another interruption. When none came, I continued. “The problem with just using ALPHA is that it’ll give us control, and it’ll allow us to track her, but not before we make our own presence known because we ding on her radar by falling into old typing and coding habits in the heat of the moment.”
“They are called habits for a reason,” CJ added.
“Right, so despite being very careful when we recoded ALPHA, we needed a way to force ourselves to behave.”
“Yeah, and the old programming in these computers will do that,” CJ finished. “Current coding languages hadn’t even been invented when these bad boys hit the market.”
CJ and I shared a smile.
“Okay,” Jace began. “In other words, you’re throwing out our tried-and-true playbook because this opposing team got their hands on a copy. That part makes sense, but did you really need so many?”
We answered in tandem.
“Absolutely.”
“Yes.”
CJ gestured with his hands. “The world’s first computer needed an entire room to compute simple arithmetic, but now we have phones that fit in the palm of our hand and can do so much more.”
“The drawback of going old school is processing power,” I concluded with a shrug. “One of these setups wouldn’t stand a chance at breaking through any firewalls before whatever protocols my sister has in place kick in, but together, we might have a shot.”
Jace snapped his fingers and pointed. “There it is. Now we’re talking. Okay, tech-heads, you’re saying we overwhelm the jumbo weapon with numbers.”
My mouth opened and closed. “Er, yeah. I guess, in the simplest of terms…”
I glanced at CJ, floundering for help.
He spread his hands wide. “There’s a lot Callie has to work out for combining the CPU. We’re not even sure it’s possible, but it’s the best plan we have. It’ll take some time—”
“Ah, and here we arrive at my point of interest,” Papatonis added, inserting himself into the discussion. “Let’s talk timelines. How long will it take to test this hypothesis of yours?”
That was a tough question.
CJ and I broke into our half sentences form of speech that absolutely drove Jace up the wall and irritated the others.
“I’m not sure, what do you…”
CJ shrugged. “The challenge of getting these processors communicating… that alone could take…”
“Yeah, exactly. Not to mention if we need more supply runs for…”
“Right, of course. That has to factor into our estimate, and let’s not forget...”
“Coding,” we agreed in stereo.
I nodded. “We still have to familiarize ourselves with…”
Someone whispered too low for me to discern their words, but Brock shushed them with a warning to let us “do our thing.”
After a beat, CJ began, “So what are you thinking?”
“Two?”
“Maybe. Though a safer bet would be—”
Leo huffed, interrupting CJ’s statement. “Two what? Two or three—to be safe—days?”
I flinched, staring at him with an incredulous look.
“What? What’d I say? Were you talking about weeks?”
“No.” I shook my head. “Months.”
“And I wouldn’t say three,” CJ corrected, crossing his arms. “I was going to say four.”
Leo laughed. “You’re joking, right?” When we kept up our dead serious expressions, his amusement dried up. “What, four months?”
“Minimum.”
“Hi, yeah, I don’t think we have four months,” Joe called from the back while watching something on his phone. He glanced at Vasily. “Boss, check out the latest story on Rossiya 1’s website.”
That was the largest and longest running news network for all of Russia.
Details of Ivanov’s death had dominated the news cycle for several months on that station after the CIA released the information about the operation to the press. There’d been lots of speculation surrounding the anonymous hacker who had turned on the criminal ruler and toppled his regime. My bots had been kept very busy, scanning the comments section for any keywords in response that might spell additional trouble for the guys and me.
To say I was overly familiar with the news station was a gross understatement. I’d been forced to run deep background checks on each of the anchors and stakeholders, scanning for corruption since they’d cast us in such an unflattering light—not that sensationalizing details was uncommon, but I’d done it to be safe.
The room had an overhead projector for narration and presentations, and in no time, we were watching the midday newscast.
A lithe woman with sleek black locks read the news in that bizarre tone that was both friendly yet stern.
“A slew of deaths occurred within the Moscow metropolitan area early this morning, all involving young women between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five. At first, the deaths seemed accidental, but the physical similarities between the young victims has authorities scratching their heads as they scramble to find answers to this bizarre occurrence. More to come later. This has been Katerina Mikhailovna, reporting for—”
Brock quietly interpreted for our team, but the pictures and video clips spoke a thousand words.
When the victims’ photos, smiling and glowing with youth, filled the screen side by side in a grid, my breath caught.
“Shiitake, Callie… they…” Corbin trailed off, his sky-blue eyes lost and forlorn in a way he normally avoided with jokes and laughter. His silence was understandable, as there was no amusement to be derived from the situation.
“They could be her sisters,” Joe said, the first one to state the obvious.
“This is his retaliation for the warehouse,” Payton surmised. “With that many deaths, he could have made a mistake that will lead to his arrest.”
“We don’t have enough time to wait on local crime scene units to determine that, do we?” Papatonis countered.
Vasily broke into a slew of curses and pacing, and he wasn’t the only one either.
Eventually, Vasily stopped and stared me down. “You will not be harmed, lisichka.”
I nodded, my attention still on the heart-wrenching reality of the lives cut short before they began.
“Nine girls,” CJ murmured beside me. “Ten if you count…”
Right, the one we’d been tricked into “saving” at that apartment had looked like me as well.
CJ wrapped his arm around me, pulling me to his side. “It’s okay, Callie.”
His soothing words cut my tears short. Here I was crying, and these women had been unfairly killed because they happened to have brunette hair and petite frames. I had no right to cry.
“No, it’s not,” I croaked, “but we’re going to do something about it.”
“This one’s for them,” CJ stated with a final click. The deaths had hit him hard. He’d tacked a list of the victims’ names up on the wall near his workstation, and I’d caught him staring at it more than once with tears in his eyes. The original count had grown, totaling fifteen now.
“Seven days without sleep, and this is the culmination of our work,” I agreed, glancing down the row of computers already preloaded with the program. All they needed was someone at each one to hit the enter key at the right time to sync the attack.
We were halfway there with our team and a mix of Papatonis’s and Vasily’s men present.
I paused, lowering my voice so no one could overhear. “Are you worried we cut too many corners or didn’t run enough tests?”
CJ glanced pointedly at the list, a silent reminder that we had no choice. Every day, Tarasovich claimed more lives, and neither of us could stomach another tally.
“Places, everyone!” CJ clapped.
“On our mark,” I reminded them. “Remember, it has to be as precise as possible. Whichever devices aren’t timed right will miss the initial wave of our attack. We may still need you as a reserve for counter protection if the hacker catches on, but it’s best to get as many through on the first round to avoid extra hassle.”
“Are you ready?” CJ murmured, kissing my cheek.
“Sure.” My fingers shook as they hovered above the keyboard, and not just from tossing back four rounds of coffee in the past hour alone.
“On the count of five—”
“Why not three?” someone joked.
I glared, upset they failed to comprehend the severe consequences of what was happening. “Because, again, we need our timing down. Hit that enter key right on the beat. Don’t wait for us to say five. If you do, you’ll have missed the launch. Since you haven’t grasped even our most basic instructions, CJ and I felt it was necessary to give you the extra numbers to pick up the tempo. Any other dumb questions, or can we get this show on the road before another dozen girls wearing my face show up horribly mutated in some Russian morgue?”
Someone released a low whistle, but Aleks grinned salaciously at me. He liked it when my attitude came out to play, and apparently, sleep deprivation was an excellent method for coaxing her to the surface.
“Good,” I snapped. “Now, on the count of five. One, two, three, four.” I didn’t say five, so I could hear the clicks ring out.
CJ and I had worked our fingers to the bone night and day, getting a total of twenty-two keyboards operational. Based on the lagging clacks, we’d be lucky if half made it through the syncing process.
“It worked,” CJ murmured. “We have synced fifteen computers.”
“Don’t think you can relax, guys. CJ and I are handling the legwork, but you need to tell us if anything wonky starts happening on your screen.”
CJ and I watched with bated breath as ALPHA 2.0 did its thing, running a counter search, sniffing out any programming based on parameters detailing my hacking habits.
The good news was that my sister’s thoroughness in detailing out any and all of my possible tricks meant that ALPHA didn’t need to search for long before it narrowed in on a single hit, assuaging my worries that we’d pick up numerous results to sift through. We didn’t even need the backup power of the linked computers because we’d already coded ALPHA to uncover the addresses ahead of time, and with only one possibility, we didn’t need to do any digging to narrow down the choices.
Her own meticulousness had proven to be her downfall.
“Is that it?” CJ whispered. “Callie, did it work?”
I grinned, staring at the flashing address on the map. “Oh, it worked.”
A pit of unease writhed through my stomach.
It was always mind games and torment with Tarasovich, and he’d picked the one place in all of Russia where I wouldn’t willingly venture without being dead sure he’d holed up there.