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  “You didn’t tell me they had a fucking truck!” Sarah said, trying to find another gear, but the bruise on her back triggered a spasm of pain with every step forward. The engine roared in unison with the gunfire, and the first tree she passed upon entering the forest received the bulk of the bullets before two more managed to strike the back of her Kevlar. She skidded face first into the dirt and branches, dirtying her face with cuts and soil. With the instincts of an animal being hunted, she wildly pushed herself off the ground, kicking up the soil and sticks behind her as she made her way through the thicket of trees and brush.

  “They’re sending another unit to follow you in,” Johnny said. “Get out of there now, Sarah.”

  Sarah’s muscles whined with infantile distress with every step. Years of training, endurance, building pain tolerance, all of it was in full effect. The heightened sense of awareness that accompanied the adrenaline fuel coursing through her veins was focused to a knifepoint.

  “Air support heading your way. Let’s move, Sarah.”

  The whirl of helicopter blades thumped overhead through the sporadic gunfire behind her. Whatever they thought she’d done, it must have been bad. “Johnny, start running an analytic scan of everything you can about the summit and the information they stored on the servers.”

  “I already told you, it can’t be accessed from an outside network. You have to be there in order to pull any information of—”

  The vibration of a .223 round rippled past her ear, momentarily relieving her of Johnny’s excuses and whatever he was going to say next. “Dammit, Johnny, use your imagination.” Sarah broke through the leaves of a small bush, and she could feel the wind of the choppers overhead. She immediately changed her trajectory from her escape vehicle and started north, toward the mountains and higher ground.

  6

  Books and magazines were tucked neatly away on the shelves that covered the walls of the modest one-bedroom apartment. The only semblance of anarchy was the dismantled computer equipment and tools on the dining room table next to a plate holding the crumbled remnants of a Pop-Tart and a crumpled can of Mountain Dew.

  The same meticulous order defined the bedroom, where Bryce had wrapped himself into a cocoon of sheets, offering only his head as the single appendage protruding from his chrysalis state. He lay on his stomach with the right side of his face pressed up against the bloated pillow. A small dribble of spit rolled down from the corner of his mouth.

  The curtains in the room were drawn, but the sun had risen hours ago and beat its light against the thin fabric, casting the room into a bluish tinge through the filter of the curtains themselves. The alarm clock on the nightstand next to him read 10:00 a.m.

  Bryce ruffled his nose, the poignant stench of body odor and fatigue wafting across his nostrils. The smell was powerful enough to trigger the unconscious physical response but failed to wake him. A nudge into his shoulder triggered a roll to a more comfortable position, away from whatever subconscious pest was ruining his slumber, but still did not wake him.

  However, the cold sensation that pulled him out of this dreamless sleep was powerful enough to break the REM cycle, and he jumped from his protective cloth barrier as bits of water rolled off his face and bangs and onto his shirt and sheets.

  “Morning,” Sarah said.

  Bryce wiped the wet from his eyes and took in Sarah, still dressed in her field gear, her face filthy. Bryce had to rub his eyes to make sure he wasn’t imagining the bullets lodged in her Kevlar.

  “Sarah, wh—how did you—why did you throw water on me?”

  “You wouldn’t wake up.” Sarah walked over to one of the shelves in his room and picked up a model spaceship and twirled it in her grimy hands. “Is this the Enterprise or the Death Star?”

  Bryce jumped out of bed and stomped over in his bare feet, wearing only a faded Rolling Stones T-shirt and a pair of boxers. He snatched the model out of her hands and placed it carefully back on the shelf. “What are you doing here? I thought you were in Germany.”

  “I was,” Sarah answered, walking around, taking in the rest of his room, the posters on the wall, the models, and the tech gadgets that dotted shelves and table tops. She turned around quickly and then pointed at his boxers. “Are those bunnies?”

  Bryce’s face flushed red, and he immediately went to his dresser, where he pulled on a pair of shorts. “What happened on the mission? I thought Johnny was covering for me.”

  “He did.” Sarah pulled a thumb drive from her pocket and extended it to him. “This is the compiled data from a server hack at the G7 summit. Nobody at HQ was able to figure how it happened.”

  Bryce snatched the drive from her hand. “Why couldn’t anyone at HQ find the hack?” With the adrenaline from the splash now receding, his eyes started to feel heavy and weak as he made his way over to his laptop in the living room.

  “It wasn’t a part of a networked server,” Sarah answered.

  The light thumping of Bryce’s feet against the fake hardwood floors ceased. He looked down at the drive in his hands and then spun back to Sarah. “That’s impossible.”

  “Yeah, that’s what everybody at HQ said. I’m hoping you can figure out what happened.”

  “No, Sarah, that is impossible. You can’t do that. No one can do that. It had to have been a manual hack.”

  “I was there, Bryce, and the hack was still happening when I was in the room. No one was there. There wasn’t even a trace of somebody being there.”

  “Maybe they left a tracer somewhere on the server. I wouldn’t doubt that—”

  “Bryce! Nothing was in the room that wasn’t supposed to be there. No one entered that room except me.”

  Bryce looked back down at the drive in his hand and then rushed to his laptop. He inserted the drive, and the laptop booted up. He could smell Sarah looking over his right shoulder, and he put his hand up. “You can take a shower.”

  “No, I’m all right.”

  “It wasn’t a suggestion.”

  The smell disappeared, and the sputter and hum of his water heater turning on signaled that she had found her way to the bathroom. The data from the download uploaded on his screen, and Bryce concentrated on categorizing everything that had been pulled, searching for ghost files and any highly encrypted data, which he began tearing down and manipulating. His hand absentmindedly reached for the Mountain Dew can to his left, which he quickly discarded after discovering that it was empty. Given the amount of encryption and security that surrounded the data pulled from the server, which was a mystery within itself, there wasn’t any doubt that what was on it was very sensitive material.

  The sudden noise of his television startled him, and he turned around to see Sarah with her hair dripping wet, changed back into her field uniform minus the Kevlar, watching TV. “What are you doing?”

  “Seeing if I made the news,” Sarah answered.

  With the number of high-profile leaders at the summit, including the American President, there wouldn’t be a news channel not talking about it, but the fact that the events didn’t even make the news ticker at the bottom of the screen meant one thing: something important had been taken from the summit, and the leaders of the world didn’t want anyone to know about it.

  Bryce returned to the algorithms and encryptions, his sluggish fingers unable to keep pace with his mind, working through the problems, trying to go over them, under them, through them, whatever way he possibly could. It was some of the best security he’d ever seen. Finally, after almost three hours of not blinking, Bryce finally managed to get one piece of data.

  “It’s not much,” Bryce said. “But it’s something.”

  Sarah shot up from the couch, her hair now dry and slightly curled at the ends, contorting to the natural curl of her hair. “C’mon, mamma needs a new pair of shoes.”

  “So, without the slightest idea of how they were able to hack into servers not located on a network, I used a decryption algorithm to break through the initial firewall. F
rom there, what I di—”

  “I’m not getting any younger here, Bryce.”

  “Global Power.”

  Sarah shook her head. “What is that?”

  “I don’t know, but it’s the file that was stolen from the server.”

  “What’s inside the file?”

  “That’s going to take a lot more time and the resources of the satellite at HQ.”

  “I think I know someone that might be able to give us some inside information.”

  Chancellor Andrea Jollenbeck flicked off the light to her bathroom, found her way through the darkness that was her bedroom, and pulled the covers over her as she rested her tired eyes for a few hours of sleep before the sun would rise and she’d begin her day.

  Since the attack at Schloss Elmau, she’d been spending equal energies both keeping the incident contained to those that were involved and finding out the motives behind the attack, both of which had left her exhausted. She could still hear the gunfire ringing in her ears. She could smell the sweat, lead, and blood in the air around her, the bodies lying on the ground, the adrenaline coursing through her veins. Even now she could feel her heart pumping, the hard thump pounding against her chest.

  The tiredness in her body started to wane, and she could feel it replaced with the heightened sense of anxiety and fear. Her body tensed. She curled her fingers as their grip on the blanket grew stronger. Sweat rolled off her body, and the heat from under the covers became too intense. The escalated pulse and the fire growing from within her caused her to fling the covers off and rise from bed, her chest heaving as she struggled to catch her breath. She stumbled to the window and drew back the curtains. She looked up into the night sky, searching the darkness for pieces of light to hold onto, which the cloudless sky generously provided.

  Andrea closed her eyes, attempting to regain the control she’d lost. Her breathing slowed, and her pulse decelerated. She looked at the tight grip her fist had formed over the curtains and slowly released the crumpled bunch of fabric. Her nightgown was damp with sweat, and she walked over to her dresser to change. She pulled a new shirt out, and before she turned around, she felt a firm hand cover her mouth and another disable her arms. The rush of panic that had accompanied her distress from earlier returned.

  “I’m not here to hurt you. I was the one who saved you and your men from getting killed at the summit.”

  The voice was female. Firm, strong, with a tone that suggested the woman holding her was telling the truth. While Andrea was immobilized, there was no knife or gun to her head or body that she could see or feel.

  “I need you to tell me everything you know about the project named Global Power.”

  The skin on her captor’s fingers and palms was rough, calloused. Andrea nodded her head in understanding, and the woman holding her puppeteer-guided her body back to the bed, where she kept her hand over Andrea’s mouth. Once Andrea was sitting on her bed, she recognized the woman’s features before she let go of Andrea’s mouth and backed up to the window behind her, the moonlight casting the already dark shadows along her face in deeper shades of black.

  “Thank you,” Andrea said. “For the summit. I don’t think my men would have been able to get me out if you hadn’t been there. Who are you? CIA? NSA?”

  “I’m the person trying to stop the bad guys from winning.”

  Even with the woman’s voice low, no doubt avoiding the security detail just outside the hallway to her private quarters, there was still the echoing resonance of the same truth as before. A jumbled mixture of emotions ran through Andrea in that moment, admiration, fear and anger all jockeying for the lead position. “And you’re the one who determines who the bad guys are?”

  The woman took a step closer toward Andrea, and despite the fear welling up from the pit of her stomach, she refused to lean back. She wouldn’t be intimidated, not by some assassin playing god. Her captor seemed to respond to the defiance.

  “No. That’s your job.”

  The woman backed off, retreating to the window, where there was nothing more to view than the silhouette of her figure, which accentuated the pistols on her hips. Andrea smiled, almost laughed, but held it back. “The fact that you even know the name of the file is impressive. We had some of the best cryptologists in the world make sure nobody would find out about it until we were ready to unveil it.”

  Andrea attempted to rise from the bed, but the silhouette drew her pistol, leaving nothing but a shadowed outline of a holster on her right side. Andrea leaned back onto the mattress. “I thought you weren’t the bad guy.”

  “I’m not, but that doesn’t mean I want you walking around triggering the silent alarm that’s by your bed stand, or the one by your dresser that you couldn’t reach before.”

  “Well, you’re definitely not FBI.”

  “What makes you say that?”

  “They wouldn’t have been able to figure it out.” Andrea couldn’t tell, but she thought she heard the lightest laugh come from the silhouette. “Global Power was an initiative proposed by my country to decrease the level of energy consumption by means of cutting down on energy waste. The software involved in the development of the program was cutting edge. A team of engineers has been working on this for the past eighteen months, and the summit was meant to be our first test.”

  “How many countries were involved in the decision-making process? Just yours?”

  “No, every member of the G7 was involved.”

  “And each country provided its own engineers?”

  “We used a combination of public- and private-sector individuals and businesses.”

  “The attack in Rome. It involved bringing down the power grid. Did your people check to see if the software was used?”

  “Yes, and they couldn’t find any trace of Global Power used on the Rome power grid. However, we do believe that whoever attacked us at the summit did have something to do with what happened in Rome.”

  The silhouette stepped forward, and for the first time, Andrea got a good look at the woman’s face. Despite the scars and weathered look an individual acquires from many years in the strenuous line of work that accompanied the woman’s skill set, her features were striking. And the hands that had gripped her arm were firm, steady. There didn’t seem to be any part of the woman’s body that didn’t serve its purpose to an efficient maximum.

  “I need the name of every business that was a part of the project.”

  Rick Demps had his feet up on the desk, giving the casual onlooker the impression he was doing nothing more than talking to a golf buddy. But what the onlookers couldn’t hear was the trembling voice issuing from his mouth. “This is very alarming news. You’re positive that someone’s hacked into the servers?”

  “Yes, Mr. Demps. The tracer we put on the server was triggered during the attack on the G7 summit. It’s still unclear whether the thieves will be able to get past the security measures in place, but the fact that they were able to steal the information at all suggests that these people know what they’re doing.”

  Rick took his feet off the desk and leaned forward in his chair, keeping the phone close and his body tucked tight within himself. “We’ll need to draft something immediately. I don’t need the news catching wind of this, do you understand me?”

  “Yes, of course, sir. We’ll be sending something over for your approval within the hour.”

  Rick hung up the phone without another word, his action the exclamation point needed to end the conversation. He picked up his personal mobile and dialed a number. It only rang once before someone answered. “Mr. Secretary, this is Rick Demps. We may have a problem on our hands.”

  7

  The conference room attached to Mack’s office had never had so many people in it before. Almost all the support agents had been pulled off their current assignments to work on this, and the number of field agents in such close proximity to each other was causing the room to overinflate with ego.

  Bryce took the lead in the meeti
ng once Mack had brought everyone up to speed, while Sarah did her best to distract him with faces, a few obscene hand gestures, and inappropriate hand puppeteering. Despite her best effort, she didn’t deter him.

  “As Mack stated, the main connection among all three cases seems to be New Frontier Real Estate. The bank accounts I was able to crack and trace were child’s play compared to the level of security from the data around the G7 hack,” Bryce said. “However, the other support agents and I have been concentrating our efforts on cracking the code, and this is what we’ve been able to come up with so far.” The projection screen flickered to show a very large list of names. “This is the combined list of every person in both the private and public sectors that worked on the Global Power Project. Now, as you know, we believe New Frontier Real Estate is nothing more than a shell company for a much larger organization, and one of the first things we attempted to do was cross-reference any and all of these names against the New Frontier employee database. But there weren’t any matches. However, we did find a trend of six names who owned shares in New Frontier, and it turns out those same six people all worked for the same investment firm by the name of Tuck Investments.”

  “And a roar of shock and awe ripples through the crowd!” Sarah said, throwing her head back and jutting her arms up into the air with the triumph of victory. But the room remained quiet. “Oh, c’mon! Tuck Investments? They make Halliburton look like Aunt May’s groceries.”

  “Sarah’s right,” Bryce said, diverting the attention of the room back to him. “They are a conglomerate with their hands in just about everything.”

  Vince Moores, admittedly the second-best field agent in the room (and only recognized as such because Sarah gave the endorsement, to which Mack responded that it wasn’t her call who was second best and that the stats of missions spoke for themselves), raised his hand, which almost touched the ceiling. She always marveled at how long his limbs were. It was almost as if he was a highly advanced orangutan. The red hair didn’t help his case in the analogy.