“So that’s it?” Trent asked in disbelief. “We’re just going in there on blind luck, hoping you actually have the encryption key and there’s a way to stop this from the console?”
The two men had carefully guided him to the room with the laptops.
“That about sums it up,” she said flatly.
“Fuck,” Trent said.
“Fuck is right,” Cyndi Grayson said uncharacteristically.
They all shared a quick laugh. This was the first time she’d ever cursed, and it underscored the dire situation they were in.
“The entire US economy is riding on one of us having a golden horseshoe up our ass,” she added.
“Well it could be our lucky day, because it sure as hell feels like I’ve had something stuffed inside me,” Turner joked as he sat down tenderly in front of one of the laptops.
He could feel himself fading, but thoughts of his brother and Melody Millar kept him motivated. He needed to pull this off for them.
“Jack, I sent you the image,” Grayson said.
Jack Turner pulled out his device and held it so his nephew could see what they hoped was the encryption key.
Trent Turner moved back and forth through several screens trying to find somewhere that would let him send a command to the bots. After a minute he found what he was looking for and said, “Here goes nothing.”
He typed in the encryption key and pressed Enter.
“Damn, I must have typed it in wrong,” he said.
His vision was getting blurry. He deliberately worked the keyboard and punched in the encryption key again.
“Uncle Jack, do they match up?” he asked.
His uncle went back and forth from the image to the screen. “Yeah, it looks good to me.”
Trent hit Enter again, and a message popped up in Russian.
“Shit. It says we have one more chance. If we don’t get it right, the program will kick us out.” He could feel the stress building as he struggled to punch the code into the keyboard one final time. “Unc, make sure that’s right,” he said. His voice was weaker but still managed to convey the importance.
Jack Turner wiped the sweat from his brow and checked it twice. “Brendan, you have a look too, will ya?” he said, concern evident in his voice.
“Sure thing,” Manion said.
He went over each character one by one and said, “Winner winner,” and he and Trent blurted out, “Chicken dinner,” before Trent pressed the Enter key.
“Fuck!” Trent shoved the laptop and closed his eyes as the medics entered the room.
“No luck?” Grayson asked.
“No, Cyn, we’re screwed,” Jack Turner said.
There was a long moment of silence as the medics worked to cut off Trent Turner’s gear.
“Talk to Hector about the operation in Europe,” Trent told his uncle.
That was the call sign for a contact they had made in Switzerland. He handed Jack Turner his XHD3.
“He’s in my contacts. Hopefully he’s had better luck than us.”
“Okay, we’ve got to move you, buddy,” one of the medics said as he motioned to a stretcher by the door.
Trent could feel his body shutting down. The deflation from failure had sucked away all of his adrenaline. He placed his hands on the desk to help the men lift his weight and listened as they counted to three. They heaved him upright, and he felt his head drop forward before he peeled his eyes open one final time.
“Whoa. Hold on,” he snapped.
“Sorry, pal,” the medic said as he helped him toward the stretcher. “This is going to be painful. There’s nothing we can do about that.”
“No, no. Get me back to that other laptop.”
“Can’t do that, buddy. You’ve lost a lot of blood. We need to get you to the hospital.”
“Take me to that fucking laptop!” he yelled and attempted to break free.
Jack Turner could see the intensity on his nephew’s face and said, “Boys, it’s okay. Take him over there.” He knew Trent wouldn’t bet on his life without a good reason.
“But sir, he might—”
“Do it,” Manion demanded as he helped the men turn Trent around.
They nursed Trent back over to the second laptop, and he started laughing.
“Fuck, he’s delusional,” Manion said. “Sorry about that, fellas.”
Trent kept laughing and said, “Hold on a second.”
The text on the screen was in Russian, so nobody else would understand. It said, “Press Enter to distribute the commands to the botnet; press Escape to cancel.” It took just about everything he had left to reach his hand out and press the Escape key. He struggled to stay conscious and looked over to his uncle and said, “Sometimes it’s better to be lucky than good.”
Jack and Brendan shared a confused look.
Trent struggled to speak again, and instead of using his last moment of consciousness to let them in on what had happened, he said, “Look after Etzy. You’ll need him now that Ryan’s gone.”
His eyes slid shut.
“What the fuck was that about?” Manion asked.
“I have no idea,” Jack said. “No fucking idea.”
“I hope he makes it,” Manion said, shaking his head.
“Me too, Brendan. Me too.”
Chapter 164
The three men sat around the long table and listened intently to the anger seething from the voice coming through the phone’s speaker. President Vincent Cross was growing impatient with the caller. It had been a long weekend for everyone involved, and Addy Simpson had filled him in on the details about Trent Turner’s contact, who went by the name Hector.
Federal Reserve Chairman Bart Stapleton barked into the phone again and said, “Are you incapable of understanding the magnitude of what’s happened here? The entire country is at risk. It’s not about saving my ass.”
Cross blinked slowly as he composed his answer. “Let’s run through this again, Mr. Chairman, just to make sure I’m following you correctly. I seem to recall speaking with you on the phone, asking for your help with an investigation into something I referred to as a matter of national security, did I not?”
They could hear Stapleton take a deep breath before he spoke. “Listen—”
“No, you listen!” the president demanded. “You had your chance to do something about this, and you let politics, personality, ego — whatever the hell it was — burn the olive branch I extended to you. Then for good measure you returned my goodwill with a pointed threat.” He pounded his fist on the table. “Now you’re telling me you want my help? No, wait. You demand my help, and you shouldn’t be held accountable for what’s happened?” He laughed, but it was crystal clear that he wasn’t the least bit amused. “You’re too much,” he said dismissively.
“I’m not resigning my post,” Stapleton spat defiantly.
The president knew more than Stapleton would have liked. The Shop had been listening to the chairman’s conversations all day. The team of analysts had been able to determine that the Russians had hacked into the Federal Reserve’s phone system and redirected calls intended for the individuals who were responsible for approving a series of large wire transfers. From what they could tell, over a period of several months the communists had figured out the central bank’s approval processes. The Russian’s had been able to stand in for Federal Reserve employees with advanced voice-emulation software that leveraged voice samples from previously recorded conversations.
The cherry on top was having a legitimate transfer in the amount of more than seventy billion dollars to Iraq to piggyback the fraudulent transfers onto. It was a failsafe in case a call was made outside their phone system hack. Using the amount of a legitimate transfer for the fraudulent ones was a ruse they hoped would buy them at least a day before the transactions were noticed.