The Excoms by Brett Battles

Author:Brett Battles [Battles, Brett]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: revenge, espionage, suspense, mystery, spy, conspiracy, thriller
Published: 2016-11-15T00:00:00+00:00

ROSARIO HAD EXPECTED Shinji to be another wannabe hacker who could do a few tricks but was otherwise worthless. As a test, she’d tasked him with breaking into the NSA satellite database, figuring it would tie him up for hours. She then set about hacking into it herself.

She was still working on the secondary firewall when Shinji called back and told her he was in. Her response was at first disbelief, and then surprise after he provided her a pathway into the satellite’s data.

Either he’d been lucky or he was better than she was. Considerably.

After she finished talking to Ananke, she initiated a new video chat with Shinji.

“Anything?” she asked.

“I found a clear view of the road about five miles west of the Conifer Lodge. The van never showed up. I even went an hour beyond when I should have seen it. Nothing.”

“Show me the location.”

She heard Shinji clicking a few keys before a map appeared on her screen, with a marker hovering over the spot he’d described.

“You are sure you did not miss the van?” she asked.

“You can look at the data yourself, if you want. But you’re not going to find anything.”

He was probably right, but she didn’t know him well enough to take him at his word. “Send it to me.”

“Oookay.”

She could hear him typing for several seconds. A second after he stopped, a message box appeared on her screen, asking if she wanted to accept a file transfer.

“I converted it to a single movie,” he said. “You can speed it up, slow it down. Whatever you want.”

“Thank you.” She initiated the download, then said, “We have something new to look into.”

“What is it?”

She passed on Ananke’s request. “We’ll take fifteen minutes to find as many of the security cameras as we can. After that, we divide them between us and search footage in a twenty-four-hour window before and after the van left the lodge. If we do not see any motorcycles that fit the description, or we do but they leave the area before the van disappeared, then we do not worry about them.”

“That’s still a lot of footage. I could automate the process. Set one of my computers to check all the cameras.”

“You have an image recognition program that will do this?”

“I do.”

“How fast?”

He paused. “Twenty minutes to get it running, then five minutes per camera processing.”

“Accuracy?”

“About ninety percent.”

That wasn’t perfect, but a ten-percent error rate seemed a fair enough exchange for not wasting time they could spend on something else.

“Let’s do it.”

They found nine cameras in their target area, seven of which stored footage far enough back to be useful. While Shinji dealt with the footage, Rosario reviewed the satellite info he’d sent and confirmed the van had not driven past. She texted this information to Ananke and turned her attention to looking into the backgrounds of the missing kids and their chaperones.

The three rich kids all went to private schools and were stars in one way or another—debate, student government, and track. The

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