Meanwhile
Nigel set up his laptop at the back of the hangar. Far away from the makeshift hospital that Dahlia arranged for Eva. He set up a half dozen VPN connections and was about to bring up his hacking interface when a piercing shrill of a scream echoed through the hangar. The acoustics in the hangar gave the sound an eerie quality that unnerved Nigel. The moans and screams became unbearable. A memory of Jet being taken into a veterinary clinic by a young cyborg entered his mind. He shuddered at the memory.
I can’t work in these conditions.
He removed his headphones and connected his phone. He was about to play the loudest song that he could to drown out the screams when a message appeared—it was from Jet! He played the message. He stopped the video on her face. In one frame, he thought he caught a glimpse into her world of pain. The video was pixelated and garbled, but the sound worked—a little.
She must have a low signal, which explains the video corruption, Nigel thought. Let me see if I can fix the sound. Nigel played the rest of the video, listening intently. About a third of the way through the video Jet was discussing her captors. Although he could not hear clearly, he caught a name fragment. He brought up a scrubber program to clean it up. It took several minutes, but he was able to hear the remainder of the video. Several gaps were present, but he thought he had caught most of it.
Mountains? Where is she, the Catskills? Dahlia knows, but she is keeping that from me.
Nigel brought up a MORP search window, which allowed him to access more information than a normal web browser. He pulled up information on the older couple. They lived in a mountain range way north of Milford. Nigel estimated it was about an eight-hour drive from his current location. His chest ached at the thought of Jet in any more pain. Soon he would be with her. He just had to be patient. He tucked the information in a hidden folder for later use.
“Hold her still,” a man’s voice said.
Eva screamed as the unknown assistant did something to the wound. Nigel buried his anxiety and restless feelings into a virtual box and continued his hacking. He often visualized what the inner workings of his computer might be like inside its silicon circuits. Sometimes he fantasized about controlling virtual worlds with his mind. He reasoned that was why he loved The Colossal Machine so much.
I need to follow the clues that D provided.
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Nigel inserted the flash drive that Dahlia gave him. It still had the sticky residue of drying blood. The drive’s LED gave it an eerie quality as Nigel unlocked its secrets. On the drive was a document encoded with a relatively weak encryption algorithm. Nigel’s computer was more powerful than most, so he could crack the code quickly. A series of twelve seemingly random words appeared when he opened it.
Frog stance tire aviary stare square
Stairs voyage stars pickle bread horizon
This must be a private key to someone’s crypto wallet.
Nigel launched a program called chameleon. It was wallet reconstruction software that supported every known cryptocurrency on the planet.
Moments later, Nigel’s attention was diverted by the familiar chirping sound of the program’s completion. He reviewed the execution time. Thirty-nine seconds wasn’t too bad, he concluded. The identified cryptocurrency wallet was a variant of DigiBit. The spinoff was called DCash, which was known for its privacy and was difficult to track. It only held a few coins, but there were a lot of small transactions. At first glance, Nigel couldn’t figure out why someone would bother to send a series of thirty- or forty-cent transactions. But close examination revealed something else. The sender was encrypting every message that was being sent from the wallet.
Secret messages? Let’s try to decrypt one of them!
Nigel loaded his hacking program and set it up for a brute force password hack. This ensured that he wouldn’t need to guess at the password. But it could take more time than he had.
“I hope you’re not hacking into any airport control systems,” a man’s voice said.
Nigel’s head snapped instinctively in the direction of the voice. A man in an Omnitech Cybernetic Systems jacket stopped to investigate what Nigel was doing. He was so silent that Nigel had not even sensed the man.
“No—wait—who are you?”
The man’s brow furrowed.
“I provide security for the doctor.”
Nigel swallowed, all the moisture of his mouth evaporated.
“Which doctor?”
“Dr. Clemmant. The man operating on your friend.”
Nigel felt a weight life from his shoulders. The sensation wasn’t physical, but the relief was real.
“No, I work for D—I mean Ms. Frost,” Nigel blurted.
The man’s gaze was penetrating and unnerving. He slipped a semitransparent film out of his laptop bag and affixed it to his laptop’s display. If anyone else tried sneaking a peek, a reflective glare would greet them.
Nigel was about to resume his wallet decryption when a pop-up message got his full attention.
How did he?
The message read: I know you hack our funds, Nigel. I’m not the script kiddie that you made me out to be. I should make you pay for the embarrassment you caused. But I’m giving you one chance to redeem yourself. Come to channel 1337 at the tavern of the forgotten gnome in ten minutes. I will not wait for long.
“That message is from Freeman,” Nigel said.
“I didn’t catch that,” the doctor’s bodyguard said.
Nigel checked his private dark web notes. Freeman’s message was cryptic, but he knew what it meant. Freeman was inviting him to a virtual speakeasy on the dark web.
If Freeman is calling me out, then he must be in real trouble. Or the cabal is.