But I’m speculating. Until River wakes, I won’t know all the details of last night. So, I start at the beginning. I spoof Mika’s last known IP address and mask it so it looks like it’s coming from a residential node in Sacramento.
It takes a little longer to get through Mika’s encrypted partitions, but once I’m into his drive, I run my custom parser.
The coffee pot bubbles as it finishes brewing, and I get up to grab a cup. Memories of the day I dropped the cup flood me, but instead of feeling shame and embarrassment, I reassure myself that the terrified and anxious human I was then is now safe. And that I don’t need to carry those emotions with me anymore.
I’m safe because I’m protected. But I’m also safe because I’m seen. I’m safe because I have people who care about me. And I’m safe because that fear of how my evolution might affect the person I love has dissipated.
I’m safe because I trust River to love every version of me.
“Because I’m River’s, and he’s mine,” I say, before wincing at my own words.
Any cheesier and it’d be a song lyric.
I smile regardless as I sit back at my laptop.
All I need is a pattern. A doorway. An email chain. A file folder.
Anything that will tell me more about how Mika and Chase and the cartel are interconnected. I take a large gulp of coffee and get started.
I go through the obvious places. Emails, which reveal that Mika was fastidious with his setup, and anal when it came to emptying his email box every day.
But in the temp directory, timestamped three days before the raid of Mika’s electronics, there are three messages. All from Griseus6.
So, you dropped theCam, huh?
My pulse races, like I’ve chugged too many coffees back-to-back. I recognize the variant of the name. The person who instructed me to hack the cartel in the first place.
No…it can’t be.
Can it?
Griseus6: Use this drop again. It’s secure.
Griseus6: This will be the last time.
Griseus6: Unless you want a life sentence, you will.
The last messages carry an embedded tracking pixel. It’s subtle. The work of someone who knows what they are doing. It takes me a while to crack it, but when I do, the callback log points to an internal subdomain within the FBI.
I stare at the screen, certain I must be misunderstanding what I’m reading.
secure-dchase.fbi-internal.gov
dchase
Dorian Chase.
He’sthe one who asked me to hack the cartel?
My brain misfires as questions flood through it. Why? For what gain? Was I being set up? Was it entrapment? How can I ever get out of it if he knows and has evidence of what I did? What if this is some weird U.S. government strategy to target cartels?
What if?—
“Wren,” I say out loud to stop myself. “You’ve got this.”
It takes about an hour to figure out what I can do. I’m going to have to hack into Dorian Chase’s files, personal and FBI. And I’m going to have to make Mika’s machines do the talking for me.
I can’t send a direct email. First, depending on if Mika is dead or alive, it might be weird receiving an email from a ghost. And that would set any careful Fed on edge.
