Rogue Faction Part 1 Read online

  Chapter 15

  Memorial Tower

  9:21 am

  It was a relief that the discussion was over. As far as Boone was concerned, he didn’t care who dealt with the tree-hugging little communists down in Florida. And for the life of him, he couldn’t figure out how they’d managed to debate the issue for so long. Worst of all, they were only one third of the way through their agenda.

  Not for the first time this morning, Boone considered himself lucky to work in the field. Even these short interludes, being stuck at the office, were enough to drive him insane. He just wanted to get out of the building before he snapped and shot someone.

  “Alright,” Clayton said, with some satisfaction. “That brings us to the second case. It looks like we’re dealing with industrial espionage on a massive scale. If we take a look at the preliminary evidence—”

  Boone began rubbing his temples. There would be no stopping the headache that was taking root.

  Just kill me now…

  “Ah, actually,” Cyrus interrupted. “It just looks like industrial espionage. Keystone Global went to a lot of trouble to make it look like someone took their intellectual property for a ride, but it’s just a smokescreen.”

  The room dropped into silence for the first time since everyone had taken their seats. All eyes were on Cyrus. The kid was receiving a blank stare from Clayton, a look of complete confusion from Monica, and Luke Reid seemed as if he’d sniffed something foul. To her credit, Charlie Greene remained genuinely interested.

  No one knew what Cyrus was talking about.

  “Do you care to clarify?” the Red Queen asked, finally breaking the silence.

  Boone could see that there was something on Cyrus’s mind. But knowing the kid as he did, it didn’t seem to be the case on the table. He seemed to be in a renewed hurry to get out of there—a sentiment which Boone could wholeheartedly sympathize and agree with.

  Looking at Cyrus more closely, Boone began to reassess that evaluation. The kid had something on his mind. Maybe he wasn’t worried about getting out the door after all.

  What are you up to?

  “Yeah, sorry,” Cyrus said, moving on to explain.

  He stood up and advanced slowly around the room as he spoke. It looked like he was working off some kind of anxious energy. Though he spoke clearly and decisively, Boone could tell that Cyrus’s mind was focused on another matter.

  “While you were going over the last case,” he said to the room as a whole, “I had a chance to read up on this one. We didn’t have access to these files on the flight in, so this was my first opportunity to read the last case cover-to-cover. If you take—”

  “Wait!” Reid interrupted. “Go back a second. Did you just say you read this case, cover to cover?”

  Cyrus nodded.

  “Just now?”

  He nodded again.

  Reid opened his copy of the report and fanned through at least fifty pages of densely typed information. “You couldn’t possibly have read all of this just now.”

  Boone rolled his eyes. He was about to lose it. “Are you kidding me? Are you trying to derail the conversation? At this rate we’ll be here until lunch! What the hell difference does it make if he read it all just now?”

  Slamming the folder shut, Reid glared at Boone. “When I hear bullshit, I call bullshit! That’s the point. There’s no way he read the entire gist while we were sitting here.”

  Boone rubbed his temples again. Reid wasn’t going to let this go. Of course Cyrus had read the file. Boone had watched him read the goddamn file. In fact, he’d watched him read the last two remaining files. But no good would come from bringing that up now.

  “Oh, for the love of God,” Boone finally conceded. He glanced at Cyrus. “What’s the second full sentence on the third page of the report?”

  All eyes turned to Cyrus who just stood at the edge of the table looking uncomfortable. “Are you kidding?” he asked.

  Boone shook his head and said nothing.

  When Cyrus didn’t immediately answer, a wide grin spread across Reid’s face. “See! He can’t answer the question.”

  Clayton chuckled. “You expect him to recall the exact contents of the file from memory? Come on.”

  Cyrus was still standing, having stopped his random pacing of the room. He turned and walked to the bright floor-to-ceiling windows that overlooked an expansive duck pond twelve stories below.

  “Of course he can’t answer that question,” Charlie grinned.

  When all eyes turned to her, she made a point of flipping to the third page of the report before holding it up for the rest of them to see. It was a technical drawing, a blueprint of Keystone Global’s data server vault.

  “There is no second sentence on page three,” she clarified.

  Boone made no effort to hide the smile as it spread across his face. He did, however, contain the chortling laugh he felt welling up from within.

  Looking to Cyrus who still had his back to the group as he stared out the window, Boone decided to let the spectacle play out. “Cyrus, if you please?” he urged.

  He heard Cyrus exhale with some resignation. “If we apply the same criteria to page four of the report, it reads: ‘Keystone Global employs multi-factor authentication in the form of biometric locks as well as ten digit personal identification codes’.”

  Boone watched with amusement as Reid rifled through his folder in search of page four. He nearly burst out laughing, watching Reid’s lips move as he read silently through the page. For their part, the Red Queen and Clayton were also reviewing page four, although they managed to do it without moving their lips.

  Reid looked pissed. He fanned through the stack of paper and selected a page at random. “Who is Keystone’s head of security?” he challenged.

  “Renfield Cabott,” Cyrus answered without missing a beat, his back still to the group.

  Boone burst out laughing. Charlie Greene joined in, though she looked chagrined at having let the boisterous response unexpectedly slip free.

  After an awkward silence, the Red Queen finally cleared her throat. “Fine. Now, if we can dispense with the parlor tricks, perhaps Mister Cooper can finally enlighten us with his analysis of the case?”

  Cyrus spun on a heel and continued his slow circuit of the room. “As I was saying,” he glared at Reid.

  Oh, that won’t earn him any points.

  “There’s a lot of evidence pointing directly at Keystone’s chief competitor, McMullin Shift LLC, as having raided the Keystone server farm and stolen proprietary secrets. When that data was compromised, Keystone lost a major related contract with an undisclosed client. If you look at the value of that contract and consider the technology that Keystone was developing, as well as who their only high value client has been within the last half decade, it becomes clear that the client in question was the Pentagon. In any case, the entire theft was a sham. I’m willing to bet that McMullin Shift never had any interest in Keystone’s intellectual property, let alone made any effort to breach their security.”

  “That’s bullshit guesswork,” Reid mumbled. “You can’t possibly know that based on the report.”

  “It’s all there,” Cyrus promised.

  Clayton looked dubious. “Do you care to explain?”

  Cyrus did. “Among other things, McMullin Shift LLC, specializes in next generation security systems. First of all, they have no product that directly competes with the intellectual property that Keystone is accusing them of stealing. But even more telling is the clumsiness of the intrusion. McMullin literally employs the most brilliant security researchers that money can buy. Yet, according to the report, the exploits used to gain access to the Keystone’s server farm were unsophisticated and guaranteed to leave a trail.”

  All eyes were on Cyrus, but no one seemed to be following his logic.

  “McMullin has the best and the brightest; yet, they used a clumsy and amateurish attack on their competitor that was guaranteed to lead directly back to
their doorstep? That’s absurd. When someone looks close enough, I think they’ll find that Keystone orchestrated the security breach themselves. If we take a closer look at the contract they had with the D.O.D., there will be some kind of stipulation that lets Keystone off the hook if they fall victim to industrial espionage. There will be an emergency provision that guarantees Keystone some kind of payout as a contingency.

  “Keystone suffers a breach, then points the finger at McMullin, and the entire project ends up scrapped.”

  Boone watched as the Red Queen’s eyes narrowed. She was seeing the ultimate destination of Cyrus’s logic. “Why would Keystone subvert their own contract with the government? Certainly any such emergency provision would net them less than the delivery of the final product.”

  Cyrus nodded at her. He stopped his slow circuit of the room and dropped a hand firmly on Luke Reid’s shoulder. “Care to field that one, Luke?” he asked.

  Reid sat stock still, clearly uncomfortable at being called out. The kid had guts, putting Reid on the spot after what he’d just done to him. It was fitting, but it was ballsy.

  “I’m betting,” Cyrus concluded, “that if we look close enough, we’ll find that Keystone couldn’t make good on the contract. They couldn’t make their product work. So they set up this little scam to defraud the government—cheat the D.O.D. out of a sizable chunk of change, figuring they could still capitalize on their failure if they played their cards right.”

  After a few moments of silence, Boone saw the Red Queen smile. She was concurring with Cyrus’s assessment. Devious and clever, the chances were very good that Keystone had orchestrated the entire affair.

  “Let’s put Antzak and his team on it,” the Red Queen said to Clayton. “There’s no sense in putting a field team in place for this. Mister Cooper is very likely correct. We can let the lawyers sort out this mess. We have far bigger fish to fry.”

  Chapter 16

  Memorial Tower

  10:12 am

  Cyrus’s plan to push through the ‘Keystone Caper’ had been bogged down in the group’s slow moving back–and-forth. He knew that if Reid had just kept his mouth shut and not tried to embarrass him, things would’ve progressed more efficiently. And while Cyrus didn’t like others to know about his eidetic memory, at least in this case, it had helped put Reid in his place.

  Still, for the life of him Cyrus couldn’t figure out what he could’ve done to antagonize the man and provoke such persistent aggression. Reid seemed fixated on undermining, or at least embarrassing him at every turn.

  All of this was the least of Cyrus’s concerns when the group finally moved on to the third and final case. It was the case he’d been pushing the group toward with all available energy since the moment he finished reading the file. Despite his best efforts, it had proven a slow and painful process.

  And then, when they finally reached the case, the group opened up into a great discussion. Cyrus was infuriated. They were simply rehashing the information that was contained within the report. Nothing they discussed led to anything new or brought any additional insight.

  While the research Voss was conducting was commendable, the Red Queen believed it was incumbent upon the Coalition to monitor his work and track his progress. Should his technology come to fruition, it would be a substantial benefit to medical science, but it also represented a far-reaching threat to national security. As such, she dictated that his work fell under Coalition purview.

  First and foremost, they needed to understand the current status of Voss’s work.

  And now, after all of the talk and debate, Boone’s solution was to bug Voss’s home and office. Unfortunately, the building where Voss both lived and worked was a literal compound, completely segregated from outside contact. The building sat on its own power grid, and had onsite capabilities to produce its own electricity and fresh water in case of emergency. In addition to this, Voss employed a private security force that patrolled and defended the facility.

  All of which seemed like paranoid overkill, until the history of the Voss family was taken into account. Rutger Voss’s wife, Eleanor, had been killed in a car bombing nearly twenty years prior. At the time of the bombing, Rutger and Eleanor were both employed by Onyx Gander, GmbH—a German-based research and development group with offices all over Europe.

  According to the information provided, authorities had never concluded whether Eleanor or her husband had been the target of the bomb. Since they were both employed by the same firm at the time, and both were high ranking senior staff members, both had access to sensitive and proprietary company information.

  Cyrus was familiar with Onyx Gander. The company didn’t make headlines, but it was well known within intelligence circles. The company dealt with all forms of cutting edge research. They were involved in everything from next generation military systems to the latest in experimental medical research. Given the sort of research Voss was now conducting, it wasn’t any surprise that he’d worked for Onyx Gander earlier in his career.

  After the death of Eleanor, according to the files, Voss had spiraled briefly into a fit of depression. He left his position at Onyx Gander, and little was known of the man for nearly a year until he resurfaced on the Isle of Kapros, off the west coast of Norway.

  From what Cyrus could infer from the data, Voss must’ve made some sort of impression on the small nation’s imperialistic leader, King August Casper Borden, II, because Voss was allowed access to a squat industrial tower located in the heart of the capital city. The short concrete and glass complex had once been home to the French embassy in Kapros, until an unfortunate falling out led to the King expelling the French from the island nation more than a decade earlier.

  Following the death of his wife, Voss left Germany and made the island his permanent residence. He moved his family into the defunct French embassy and quickly remodeled the facility to meet his needs. The building became both his home, and a state-of-the-art research facility. His work at Onyx Gander had made him wealthy and, over time, he parlayed that wealth into an even greater fortune. His work created technology that generated revenue in the form of patents that continued to bolster the balance of his investment portfolio.

  But for all of Voss’s successes, the loss of his wife seemed to have made an indelible impression on the remainder of his life. According to reports, in the last twenty years he rarely left the compound, and he absolutely never left the island. The compound was staffed twenty-four hours a day by a team of highly trained bodyguards, and the number of visitors admitted to the facility was few and far between.

  While the reports stated that it was never clear if Eleanor Voss was the intended target of the bomb that killed her, Rutger Voss seemingly feared for his safety and that of his two daughters, Natasha and Anna. But what the reports didn’t specify one way or the other was if there had ever been any additional threats to the family. It was unclear whether the pervasive level of security surrounding Voss and his family was justified, or simply the work of an overprotective—perhaps, paranoid father.

  Voss’s security-conscious nature seemed contradicted by the fact that one of his daughters was a professional tennis player who competed in tournaments around the world. She was always escorted by a contingent of security personnel, but it seemed odd that Voss would allow her to travel and participate in public tournaments if there was, in fact, a threat to her safety.

  It was a paradox Cyrus would decipher once he gained access to Voss’s compound. Was the man a cautious and protective father, or an irrational and unpredictable man? While Cyrus had personal reasons for suspecting the former, he wouldn’t bet the operation on a hunch. Only time would answer the majority of his questions.

  All of Voss’s security presented a great deal of trouble when it came to keeping close tabs on his progress. Current intelligence indicated that Voss’s early experiments with memory recording had proven promising. Taking the technology to the next stage would involve prolonged neural captures, and a more
advanced method for displaying the captured experiences. So far, all of the information they had was sketchy and vague, but it was enough to convince the Red Queen that the project was worthy of Coalition attention. The group needed to get up-to-date information—ideally, real-time updates—if they were going to keep proper tabs on Voss’s work. The technology he was developing was both groundbreaking and powerful. But until it was complete, it was useless. The Coalition needed to know when the technology was perfected so it could be the first to acquire it.

  But for everything that Cyrus read, there was nothing to indicate Voss had any intentions for his work beyond the obvious medical applications. This was a first in Cyrus’s experience. Every case he’d worked since joining the Coalition had involved some sort of cutting edge technology or weapon that needed to be kept out of the so-called ‘wrong hands’. Voss was the first target of an investigation that appeared to be working toward a legitimate, altruistic goal. As a result, the sort of surveillance and oversight that was being suggested seemed more like an invasion of privacy than anything else.

  “Our biggest problem,” Reid explained, “is that the facility is completely autonomous. It has no hardwired connection to the outside. No phone, no internet—hell, not even power or plumbing! The building was designed to be entirely self-sufficient.”

  “That’s not our biggest problem,” Boone countered. Where Reid’s voice was raised and animated, Boone remained calm and collected.

  “Our biggest problem is this man,” Boone continued. He slid an 8x10 color photo to the center of the wide boardroom table.

  “His name is Ian Dargoslav. He’s retired Spetsnaz: Russian Special Forces. He served with distinction in the military and, upon discharge, started doing freelance security work.”

  Boone paused for effect, or maybe to consider his next words. As he did, he scanned the faces of the room. “This guy’s smart, he’s well trained, and since he’s spending Voss’s money, we know he’s well-funded. We can expect the security inside this building to be top notch. You won’t get anything less from Dargo.”