Chapter Three
“When I was eight years old, I was invited to participate in a computer coding class provided for free by the charity Communication For All. My father died when I was just a baby and my mother worked really hard just to make ends meet. There were no finances for tutoring or extra lessons. Everyone, including my elementary school teachers, knew I needed to be challenged, but no one knew how to do it. By eight years old I had already figured out more than what most of them had learned in their computer science degrees.”
Bree ran a hand over her eyes, then stared at the laptop screen in front of her on the kitchen table at Tanner’s ranch house.
Gregory Lightfoot, one of the federal prosecuting attorneys for Michael Jeter’s case, had been working with her two or three times a week for the past month on her witness statement for the prosecution.
Gregory was located in Dallas, where the federal trial against Jeter would take place. Eventually Bree would have to go there, but for right now they were working via teleconferencing. Her testimony in Jeter’s trial in a couple months would play an important role. The case against the members of the Organization was very complicated and intertwined.
Bree wanted to help ensure the conviction of Michael Jeter, but this part wasn’t the way she wanted to go about it.
She let out a sigh. “I just don’t understand why I have to go back so far into my personal Bethany Ragan history. Why can’t we just focus on me talking about the crimes I can prove Jeterand the Organization committed, and how I brought them down?”
As far as she was concerned, Bethany had ceased to exist once she’d gotten away from the Organization.
Gregory’s face filled her screen. “Because what they did to you and your mother will be the nail in the coffin. Terrorist activities can sometimes be vague in a jury’s mind. But picturing little eleven-year-old Bethany being tortured in order to get her to cooperate? That’s the sort of thing that will guarantee a conviction.”
“Right.”
But did it matter that she didn’t want to relive that? That there were times when she could still hear her own bones snapping in her dreams? That she could still remember what it was like to hold her mother as she vomited up blood from the beatings the Organization inflicted on her?
“Let’s just focus on Michael Jeter,” Gregory said. “Let’s leave the more painful stuff out for today and focus on when you first met him.”
Gregory didn’t understand. It wasalltied to Jeter. He’d been the face of her nightmares for nearly a dozen years. There was no separating him from the horror of what happened to her, even if most of it hadn’t actually happened by his hand.
She attempted to focus.
“I moved up the ranks at Communication For All pretty quickly. At the time my mother didn’t realize that the free courses were being utilized by the Organization to discover children who had natural hacking abilities. We just thought they were giving kids in poorer neighborhoods a leg up.”
“And when did you meet Michael Jeter?”
“I’d been inside the Organization for over a year before that happened. He didn’t get involved with the classroom programsin any regard except the highest possible levels. He met maybe one child per year.”
“And you were that child?”
Bree nodded, glancing away from the screen. “Yes. I’d aced every class and test they’d given me. I was already living on the Communication For All compound with my mom, and honestly was a little bored.”
She could still almost perfectly remember the day she met Jeter. His office had been on a high floor in a Chicago skyscraper. She and her mother had grinned at each other all the way in the ride up the elevator.
“What happened at that meeting?” Gregory asked, yanking her out of the memory—one of the last clear good ones she had of her mother.
“I was brought into his office. It had unbelievable views from the window, and I wanted to look out them. But Jeter told me I had to do a test first before I could.”
On the other end of the screen, Gregory jotted something down. “And what was the test?”
“To most people it would’ve looked like a computer coding game. That’s how Michael presented it to me.”
Thinking about it all now, with such hindsight, was difficult. If she hadn’t wanted to show off so much, impress the bigwig in the fancy suit with the grandiose office, how much different her life would’ve turned out.
“I almost missed the true test,” she finally murmured. “I was so used to everything coming so easily to me with computers that I almost missed the Trojan horse Jeter had put inside his little game.”
The defect had been placed deep inside the coding, and couldn’t be fixed with a simple rewrite. Almost the entire program had to be refitted, and had to be done quickly and creatively because of the countdown the system was on.
“He was testing to see how I could adapt. He wanted to know what I would do when a system’s walls started closing in around me. If I could think outside the coding box.”
“And how did you do?”
“I passed.” She said it with a shrug like it was no big deal.
