part0049

His fingers punched in the code with focused accuracy. The familiar thunk of the steel bolts preceded the equally familiar whir of the cooling fans.

The positive pressure, created by the hefty air conditioning units sitting behind the townhouse, sent a puff of icy air through the stairwell. It was enough to rustle a lock of fiery red hair across his right eye. He swept it back and pushed his way inside.

After everything that Blake had been through over the past week alone, one would think there would be nothing left in the world that could surprise him. Then, there was the note.

A few minutes earlier, he had returned home with a head full of vivid images. A romanticized version of a life that would begin the moment he crossed the threshold of the Alexandria townhouse. He and Haeli. The way it should have been from the beginning.

But with a simple paragraph, written in Haeli’s own hand, he would again have to come to terms with the disaster he often facetiously referred to as his ‘charmed life.’

Although he had left the piece of lined notebook paper on the kitchen counter, he could still see the words as clearly as if they were hanging by a thread in front of him.

One passage, in particular, pulsed in his mind.

The sentence he should have been fixated on was the one where she explicitly asked him to not try to find her. Or, if not fixated, at least mindful of. But that specific sediment had been deleted from his recollection the moment he had decided to disregard the request.

The thought had occurred to him that there wasn’t actually a thing at all. That the fictitious task had been invented in order to spare his feelings. The truth was, a week ago, Blake wasn’t sure he possessed such a thing as feelings. Not the way he imagined normal people did. But his experience with Christa, Gwyn and Lucy had caused him to reevaluate that notion. Allowing himself to be vulnerable was no easy transition. Still, the result was good even if the timing had turned out to be less than optimal.

Blake circled the perimeter of the subterranean room. He ran his fingers along the racks of processors mounted to the wall. He could feel the heat radiating from behind the blinking red and blue LED indicator lights.

In a way, the state-of-the-art computer equipment seemed a pathetic character. Built to churn complex code-breaking algorithms, the system was not unlike a greyhound being kept in a cupboard. It’s powerful legs atrophying with lack of use.

It had been some time since Blake had utilized the full capability of the system he had so meticulously built— if he had ever used its full capability at all.

Before his dust-up with the Cryptocurrency Evangelist Army, he had spent many hours a day in this room. Locating, exploiting and cataloging vulnerabilities in supposed secure networks. Maintaining classified software that he had built for the Central Intelligence Agency while he was still under their employ. Building software for clients as a freelance developer after retirement. But, since then, he had done little of any of it.

This day would be no different. Except, while he had no intention of using the system to thwart a nefarious foreign government or to infiltrate a global communications network, he would be using it to find something much simpler and far more elusive. The truth.

Blake moved to the center of the room. He lowered himself into the seat of the Herman Miller chair with a sigh and spun himself toward the desk. With the press of a switch, the terminal came to life.

It was deceiving, really. The single station, situated in the center of the room, looked no different than one might find in any office. A few screens, a keyboard, a mouse. But it was merely an interface. An abstraction. Just as the buttons and levers of a fighter jet’s cockpit enabled the pilot to unleash the beast’s fury with the twitch of a muscle, it connected Blake’s fingers to the awesome power of the system.

At first glance, the note seemed a mystery. But, in Blake’s experience, there was no such thing as a mystery. Only an unsolved equation. Haeli had left Blake’s home and his life, that much was a given. But where was she going? Where was her trajectory taking her? If he were going to solve for x , he would first need to define y .

Of the list of traits he would have used to describe himself, the one he most recently embraced was pragmatism. It was a peculiar approach in his circles. Most preferred to skip the shovel and go straight to the dynamite. But, while the dynamite might be effective, it also drew a lot of attention.

Blake withdrew his hands from the keyboard and pulled his phone from his pocket. He tapped the icon for the text messaging app and again on the thread entitled ‘Haeli.’ He brought up the ‘info’ tab. An image of a map flashed on the screen, then faded to gray. ‘Location not found.’

The callous message meant Haeli had either turned her phone off or switched off the ability for Blake to see her location. It also meant he would need to employ less conventional methods after all.

Back on the keyboard, Blake entered the command to list the tools and scripts he had installed. The green text scrolled over a black screen. The command was on the tip of his tongue but, for the sake of time, he welcomed a quick reminder. Three quarters of the way down, he found what he was looking for.

During his time with the Agency, Blake had used this command line interface, or CLI, on a daily basis. With the forced cooperation of all United States based communication providers, federal agencies such as the CIA, NSA, and, to a limited extent, the FBI, were provided access to real-time cell tower data. Blake had built the CLI to simplify the process of downloading and interpreting it.

The CTST tool, short for Cell Tower Signal Triangulation, takes two parameters: The provider and the cellular phone number. The software gathers the raw data from any tower with which the cellular device is communicating and uses it to derive a location. By measuring the time delay between the device and each tower, and the direction from which the signal is originating, or azimuth, the position of the device is triangulated using a basic mathematical formula. While its level of accuracy often fluctuated based on signal strength and other environmental factors, it would be accurate enough for his purposes.

Blake input Haeli’s number. The blinking cursor froze for a moment, then spit out the result. Instead of a set of coordinates, as he had hoped, the software balked.

The phone was off. And, if she was serious about not wanting to be found, she had probably already discarded it in the Potomac. The words she wrote weren’t just idle talk. No, she was taking steps to disappear.

Blake could have easily pulled her data from iCloud and obtained full backups of her device, but it wouldn’t have done any good. She knew enough to turn the phone off before she ever left the house. What he needed was a totally different vector.

There was one other option. A script that Blake had not used since becoming a civilian. But if the previous options had been the shovel and the excavator, he would be reaching for the dynamite.

Although the public was probably not aware that their cellular provider was streaming their usage data to the federal government — unless they made it a habit of reading the thirty-seven pages of fine print— it was legally given and readily available. Its use was so commonplace that it carried little oversight. Access to the Transportation Security Administration database, on the other hand, was highly scrutinized.

Before committing to his new plan of attack, Blake ran a traceroute to be sure the proxies and tunnels were sufficiently obfuscating his Internet Protocol Address. Satisfied, he typed the name of the script and hit enter.

An ‘Authorized Use,’ warning popped onto the screen. Below it, a prompt. He had half-expected the old script to have been obsolete in its method of gaining entry. But, just like that, he was in.

Fingers flying across the keys, Blake entered names and dates of birth for each of the aliases Griff had set up for Haeli when she arrived in Virginia.

As expected, there was nothing.

There it was. As plain as day.

It hit him in the gut. He told himself he understood. That he didn’t blame her. Haeli had left behind everything and everyone she had ever known and traded it for him. It was too much to ask. Too much to expect.

As the pit in his stomach dissolved, it was replaced with a sense of relief. Not because she was gone, but because, for once, he wasn’t an impediment. She knew what she needed and she acted.

With the kind of sincerity one can only have within the confines of their own thoughts, he wished her well. He wished her happiness. Still, he couldn’t help but worry about her safety. She was supposed to be dead. And Blake had no doubt Levi Farr continued to harbor a burning desire to get a second crack at her. By returning to Israel, she was flying dangerously close to the flame.

He reminded himself that she was capable of taking care of herself. More than anyone else that he had ever met. She would make her way. A new life, loosely modeled after the old. A reimagining of an early version of herself, perhaps. It was what he had risked his life to make possible. And, as selfish as it felt, he hoped she remembered it that way.

Such regression wasn’t an option for Blake. There was but one path for him. Forward. He was on the starting blocks, again. Pointed in an arbitrary direction.