Nathaniel’s job was to handle all things cybersecurity for the Dark Citizen Movement from his tiny, dark office, but they still weren’t entirely trusting him at this point. Not that he could complain much. His own soldier Lucky had kept Nathaniel from going right back to an English prison after Jake caught them or being traded to the Americans—or worse—so Nathaniel had had to take whatever gig he could find.
Old contact of an old contact sort of thing. Now he was minioning for a lunatic. Or all of them.
Adding insult to injury, as it were.
The woman across the desk from him had set up the original electronic perimeter around Lord Wraith. And she’d been pretty good at what she did. Not world-class, like Nathaniel liked to think of himself on a good day, but adequate to deal with average governments and keep North Korean, Chinese, and Russian hacking attempts mostly at bay.
It helped that Dark Citizen didn’t need a lot of visibility on the internet. Exactly the opposite, if anything. Twenty-First Century Survivalists, lurking in the shadows as much as humanly possible without needing to expose websites or server back ends to the insanity of all the bored and dangerous script kiddies out there. Grandkids of those weirdos from the 1980s. Or renegade Mormons. You could never be too sure.
Just another kind of cult, but this one might be dangerous enough to actually be a problem.
All his adult life, Nathaniel had been a criminal. Raging against Jake and the gang. Then against the world.
Raging against the machine.
There were, however, lines he did not cross. Ever. Families were off-limits, his and theirs. That included Mrs. Johnson who was Jake’s housekeeper in Seattle, as well as any musical acts she had invited to use the recording studio out back. Whoever they were.
Nathaniel just wanted to get rich. To be generally acknowledged as the mastermind that he was.
Hard to do that if some idiot decided to crash the global economy, end the modern world, and overthrow however many governments were going to go down with it. Might be most of them that mattered, considering how tightly intertwined everything was electronically these days.
That would be bad.
And there wasn’t much he could do about them not trusting him much yet. Lord Wraith, at least, and that man had instructed the woman sitting across from him to be extra watchful over anything he did. That included all his old email accounts and various websites that he owned, however many layers of corporate obfuscation deep Nathaniel was. They were all set to auto-update, so things stayed out as close to the edge of secured as he could keep them. That was just smart, since he could not talk to them right now.
Instead, he studied the woman who was his assistant. Whose job he had largely taken over, causing her to be demoted. If you wanted to look at it that way. She seemed to be handling it well, but he’d also come in and taken a lot of things up an entire level from what she’d managed, and she seemed smart enough to understand that.
Her name was Gothic Chip. Why, Nathaniel had no idea. Nor did he really care, other than to confirm early on that she’d come from Portland, Oregon originally, where steampunk had buried itself so deeply in the fandom’s cultural DNA as to be endemic these days.
Brown. Stood out, when so many of the others wore either all black or some bold, primary color with black highlights. Not her.
GC had no name she’d been willing to share with him. But she only knew him as Moriarty unless she’d been smart enough to run him through a face match algorithm. And she probably was.
They were alone in his office with the door closed, though that was professional, and not personal. The woman was too old for him, being somewhere on the far side of fifty. And not the well-preserved kind that made you stop and ogle as she walked by. No, overweight and stuffed into a too-small corset that should have been retied at some point. Looked painful and she wheezed when the room was perfectly quiet.
Like now.
Brown hair, but that was a cheap home dye job. Pancake makeup too heavy on skin with acne scars. Makeup drawn around the eyes like kohl to make them more elongated and possibly stylish. At least on another woman. Brown eyes. Brown corset. Brown leather shoulder piece with gorget around her neck. Brown cotton skirt over brown leggings. Brown lace-up boots.
It would have helped if everything was either closer in color or more contrasting, but no, everything was just off enough to be wrong.
At least she was smart, if something of an emotional descendant of the Baader–Meinhof Group/Red Army Faction lunatics that had been destructive anarchists in West Germany before Nathaniel’s time. Way before his time.
He didn’t think she’d been one of them. Probably too young, unless she was a niece or groupie who came along after folks had finally started cracking down on that shit.
He suppressed the shiver. Those people had been the wrong kind of criminal. Crazy and destructive for the sake of blowing shit up.
What Lord Wraith seemed to be aspiring to.
He’d been watching the woman. She was watching him. He gave up trying to outstubborn her.
“I need to contact the outside world,” Nathaniel said abruptly. “You heard Lord Wraith talk. I’d like to get to my various brokers and liquidate things quietly into gold or maybe Euros before I’m flat broke.”
“How many brokers do you have?” she asked with a furrowed brow.
Smart, but not worldly. Ivory tower intellectual, though probably still cinder blocks in her case. Lady Nyx at least had brains and a cosmopolitan sophistication. GC was a steampunk goth who knew computers.
“Let’s see,” Nathaniel mused, leaning back and staring at a spot over her shoulder where the paint job had been half-assed at some point. He could see the mustard cream underneath the current gray of the walls. “New York. Hong Kong. Tokyo. Berlin. London. Shanghai. Seattle. And Cleveland.”
“Cleveland?” she asked. “Why the hell Cleveland?”
“Because you asked that question,” he smiled. “Always fly below the radar until they force you up. Safer that way. Lord Wraith and the others keep things quiet. A broker in Cleveland is nobody who folks looking for me would expect because I have absolutely no connections to the city.”
She blinked too many times, like a cow with an especially tasty cud trying to solve trigonometric functions. Which was rude, but she’d done little to convince him to take her seriously on anything but a purely technical level.
GC was a decidedly intelligent woman. Nowhere near sneaky enough to impress him.
“Why so many?” she demanded, finally latching on to the pure incoherence of the concept.
“Most of them aren’t in my birth name,” he replied, holding the sneer inside but just shadowing his tones with it. “Various passports and identities I’ve created or acquired over the years so that I could hide from my enemies.”
“So how will you contact everyone?” Brow still furrowed. Probably the mind behind it, too.
“I have memorized everything I need,” Nathaniel replied, softening his anger at being questioned.
It was all reflexive paranoia on their part, rather than anything he’d done. Lord Wraith would have had someone shoot him in the back of the head if they had any reason at all.
“So what do you need then?” GC asked.
“Considering how delicate things are around here, what I would like is for someone to hit a pawn shop or something around here and pick me up a used laptop that’s been flattened and rebuilt,” Nathaniel replied. “Preferably a basic Windows machine, though I could make do with a Chromebook if I had to. That, or buy it used and then let me flatten it here inside a Faraday cage. Really, what I need is a clean device that exists solely to let me onto the internet anonymously. Then someone can drive me to an internet cafe or coffee shop with an open wi-fi node that I can use. We don’t dare send any sorts of signals out from these machines here in the warehouse, because of the risk that someone might track it back to us. This way, I’ve completely anonymized myself. Best they could do is track me to an IP address, which maybe gets them to a city, but as soon as I’m done, we’ll put the machine in a press and utterly destroy it so that nobody can ever trace it or use it as evidence.”
He didn’t say that it would be Lord Wraith or one of his other minions finding evidence that Nathaniel was betraying them. Again, bullets in his head. Maybe while he slept.
No thank you very much.
“That’s it?” she asked.
From the confusion in her eyes, she was still trying to calculate how he might be betraying them. Not opening their network wasn’t a scenario they had gamed out, obviously. Whatever else they had planned.
But he was the new guy. He understood that trust had to be built over time.
“That’s it,” Nathaniel confirmed. “Talk to Lord Wraith and see if he’ll sign off on it. If so, somebody needs to find me a machine that is raw OS with no current updates. I won’t let it do anything while I’m connected, then we shut it down, bring it home, and burn it. Safest way to talk to the outside world once. Like I said, I’d rather not be broke when all this goes down, so I figure I need to do it sooner rather than later.”
“Oh, you’ve got about five weeks,” she nodded nonchalantly.
Nathaniel had engaged in high-stakes negotiations with some incredibly dangerous men and women in his time. The folks who had a gun on their side of the table and a willingness to shoot you in the face if they thought they needed to.
As a result, he had developed a poker face so smooth that butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth. Right now, he needed it. Nathaniel was pure innocence as her eyes got huge.
Operational Security breach. The kind that might get her killed if he wanted to say something to someone who might take offense that he knew.
Nathaniel played it casual.
“Long as I’ve got a week, it’s good,” he continued, as if she hadn’t said anything meaningful. “Tomorrow is Thursday. If I can send my messages out then, they might be able to start liquidating my various positions Friday, but it’s more likely that they’ll do things in small chunks, so I don’t figure the last set of sell orders will go out until next Wednesday. Won’t finalize until Thursday. A week from today I am hopefully entirely liquid, though if I thought it would matter, I might exercise a massive number of options for the drop. Not going to help if there’s nobody around to close them next year, ya know?”
“Ain’t that the truth,” she agreed.
From the look in her eyes, GC was hoping he hadn’t understood the significance of five weeks.
Now, he just had to find a way to get out of this mess, bring in some help, and maybe save the world.
Shit, he hated that idea. Who the hell would believe a guy like him?
Fortunately, he knew one person who would.