Chapter 27
Chapter 27
T he four of us stood considering the ramifications. I broke the silence. “So if Frank inserted something like this into any one or all of his generals without their knowledge, even though he’s dead, their chips are still signaling their location.”
“And will be for the next decade.”
Camp asked the next obvious question. “But who’s listening?”
“If Frank was the only one who knew, then no one,” Ariel admitted, “but that doesn’t stop them from signaling.” He smiled. “The chip doesn’t know no one is listening.”
I tried to bring the conversation back around to next steps. “Then to track his generals and tear down his playground, we need the encrypted IDs.”
“Known only by dead Frank,” Camp said.
“Correct,” I muttered. “Except that he willingly gave me the GPS coordinates to his data vault. If he knew he was about to die, why give me the keys to his kingdom but deny me these encrypted numbers identifying the very people who make the kingdom possible? There was no love lost between these people and Frank. He held no loyalty to them. At all. They were disposable. Slaves. They performed a service like the people he trafficked. That’s all.” I paused, letting this reality sink in, then turned to Ariel and voiced the question I couldn’t answer. “Why share this with us? Your intelligence is as good as if not better than ours. You don’t need us.”
Ariel nodded. “We think Frank might have given them to you and—”
Camp cut him off. “We don’t know it because we don’t know what to look for.”
Ariel nodded.
I dialed Eddie, put him on speakerphone, and asked Ariel to explain what they wanted and what they wanted access to.
Eddie listened, then considered the ramifications of letting foreign intelligence rummage through the data vault. “Murph, I’m good, but it’s your call.”
I wasn’t too worried about Ariel. He was knocking on the front door. Laying his cards on the table. Or at least some of them. If he wanted to sneak in a back door to the vault, his people could find it. “The more eyes the better. But now we’re splitting our focus. Diverting time and energy away from Ashley’s daughters. And the clock is not working in our favor. Going on four days.”
“Correct,” Ariel admitted. “But it might help you find who took them. Or find the one who paid someone to take them.” A pause. “And if it helps us discover the identities of the seven, or even just one of the seven, what will that do? How many will that free?”
I liked this guy.
Eddie spoke over the speaker. “May I throw you a curve?”
We waited.
“The data we’re looking for doesn’t make sense without knowing the identities of the people carrying the passive chips. Essentially, we’re looking for a spreadsheet of data that is meaningless without that connection. It’s simply transactions. Mostly small dollar amounts. Coffee. Gas. Parking. Lunch. It also contains no account numbers. These are not bank transfers. We’re looking at what happened in the past with little to no connection to the future. It’s simply a record of what happened.”
Ariel nodded. “Correct.”
“So if you were Frank, and you already had your hands full trying to keep valuable data protected, which is what we found in his vault, then why would you bother hiding a spreadsheet of transaction data inside your vault? Why not hide it in plain sight? In fact, it would make much more sense to keep them separate at all costs.”
Camp was nodding now as well.
I wasn’t quite sure where he was going. “So what are you suggesting?”
“When I was a kid, one of my favorite things was to buy cereal with secret decoder rings. Lucky Charms. Frosted Flakes. Cap’n Crunch. Healthy stuff like that. Then I’d spread the secret message out across the kitchen table and ‘decode’ the message. “‘Drink your Ovaltine.’”
I doubted anyone but me got the Christmas Story reference.
Eddie continued, “If we know anything about Frank, he probably kept the identities in his head. He knew the identification numbers by heart. So if he was the only one who knew the decoder ring, why try to keep secret the passive or active transactions? They are meaningless without the data in Frank’s head. If that’s me, I’m going to hide it in a Google spreadsheet with an address known only to me. You might stumble upon it, but if you did, all you’d find are receipts. Nothing of real value.”
“Why would he do that?” I asked.
“Because he could keep it separate from his data, outside his vault, and access it from anywhere. And he wouldn’t have to worry about someone hacking in. It would be ‘hidden’ among a trillion other documents and make sense to no one but him. It’d be like discovering an ancient language with no way to translate. Without something telling you what the symbols mean, it’s just scratches on stone.”
Ariel picked up on the idea. “And if he was worried about it somehow getting corrupted or deleted in some massive Google accident, he could duplicate it with some simple code.”
I nodded again. “Create a redundancy.”
“Yep. Have three to five of the same document floating in the ether.”
Ariel looked at me, nodding. “You have a good team.” He looked at the speaker. “Eddie, if you ever tire of Murph, I’ll hire you. And double whatever he’s paying you.”
Eddie laughed.
Jess had yet to make her presence known, although I knew she’d be sitting there with Eddie and BP. At a break, she said, “So...” She paused for effect. “ If the chips exist, and if Frank bribed the doctors, and if they’ve been inserted into Frank’s generals without their knowledge, and if they are passing within a few feet of a scanner, and if the chips actually do what you say and trigger a passive scan, and if Frank wrote the code to gather that data—then those scans are registered as receipts or transactions, something insignificant to anyone but Frank, and are then gathered automatically and updated every second or so to a spreadsheet housed somewhere in the inter-web.”
Ariel laughed out loud. “Please tell me your name.”
“Jess.”
“I’d like to hire you as well. Are you available?”
Jess’s no-nonsense pragmatism was a real plus to the team. She didn’t beat around many bushes.
Camp continued Eddie’s line of thinking. “So we could be sifting the data vault for something that’s not there when in reality we need to be sifting Google for a single spreadsheet that only makes sense to a dead man.”
I tried to bring us back to square one. To remind us of the main thing. “Frank built an empire on the backs of people who did not want to be controlled, and yet he did it by blackmailing them with evidence of their sins. While Frank was evil, he wasn’t dumb. He knew, sooner or later, they’d tire of the forced servitude and escape the cage. Undetected, passive chips ensured they could not and did not. To Frank, knowing the location of the chip at any moment in time was priceless. And it’s brilliant because it’s only priceless to him. Everything he did hinged on this.” I paused to let the totality sink in. “Knowing Frank, he probably inserted more than one chip.”
Camp paused. “So this spreadsheet... in a sense, we’re not looking for a needle in a haystack, and we’re not looking for a single grain of sand on the beach, or a grain of sand on planet earth. We’re looking for a single grain of sand somewhere in the Milky Way.”
“That pretty much sums it up. But...” When I spoke again, I made sure I had everyone’s attention. “We are still no closer to finding Miriam, Ruth, and Sadie. And right about now, they need us to find them. Not to mention Aaron and Esther.”
Silence weighed heavy across the room.
I turned to Ariel. “This still doesn’t explain why Steve sent me to you when he had just kidnapped the vice president’s daughters.”
Ariel shrugged. “It’s an olive branch. Steve is playing this card because he’s looking at the strong possibility he never walks out of a military prison. Never sees the light of day unobstructed. And...” Ariel paused. “He was once one of the good guys.”
I nodded. “You mean before he shot and killed a dozen men on the vice president’s detail?”
Ariel nodded.
“Steve sold out. He’s lucky to be breathing. He doesn’t have many cards.”
Ariel nodded again and motioned, saying, “Follow me.”