Page 17

17

SEPTEMBER 9, 2022

Haskell

The room was so silent that Haskell swore she could hear her eyelashes batting.

Cherry explained her reasoning, “The man in the brown suit got up because you were headed to the table first. Had I been first, his companion in the black suit would have gotten up and offered me the seat. It was perfectly executed.”

Demon grabbed her hand. “Goddammit, Cherry, why do you think that bomb was for you?”

She took a deep breath and released it slowly before delivering her own version of a nuclear bomb. “My real name is Esme Bosworth, the only child of Grayson Bosworth.”

“Shit on a shingle with a side order of fries,” Midas whispered.

Demon rolled his eyes. “You’ve been hanging out too much with Kubrick and Flame. That was the oddest combination of the two of them swearing/not swearing I’ve ever heard. Why can’t you people swear like normal human beings?”

“You can’t even pronounce ‘fuck’ correctly,” TB teased him. “Who are you to talk?”

“I pronounce feck just fine,” Demon grumbled.

“That ‘u’ sounds an awful lot like an ‘e,’ dude,” Nemo pointed out.

“Feck you,” Demon said as he threw up his middle finger at his teammate.

“All right, you three, simmer down,” Waters warned. “Neither one of you speaks right with those goof-ass accents. Now focus your pea brains and get back to what’s important.” He turned his gaze onto their handler. “Now explain, Cherry. Why do you think that bomb was meant for you? And how do the Salieri, whoever the fuck, or feck, they are, fit into all of this?”

“I’ll try to be quick,” Cherry promised. “My father had many friends in the military even though he himself had never served. Not for lack of trying. He had a heart murmur that disqualified him from enlisting. But he believed absolutely in the military, even though they couldn’t use him personally, so he turned his skills in business and manufacturing to support the service branches in another way.

“The story of the day he disappeared is public knowledge, but what the public didn’t know was where I ended up and how I’ve made Tribe my life’s quest. I’ve spent the last twenty years building, financing, and running Tribe from my reception desk.

“In order to do this right, I knew I had to be willing to play the long game. Success depended on relationships being fostered. I knew that would slow things down further—time that my father probably didn’t have—but what other choice was there? The odds were already stacked against him being alive, so I accepted that if I was too late… if he wasn’t alive… then I wanted to ensure that everything was in place to catch and punish the men responsible for his disappearance.

“It also required that I remain in the shadows. I knew I didn’t have the skills to do it by myself, so I used my college years to hone my analytical skills. I learned everything I could about history, culture, finances, politics, and anything else I thought would be useful in running an operation like Tribe. Combine all of that with my family’s vast wealth, and I was able to hire people who could. I purposefully scouted out the best of the best, but there was a hitch. Those individuals had to be free of family ties. They had to be people who could walk away from everything because we couldn’t work out in the open. I started with God and worked my way to recruiting the rest of you.”

“So we exist because of a personal need for revenge?” TB concluded.

“Justice!” Cherry sniped. She took a calming breath. “My father deserves that.” She turned her eyes to TB. “Whatever the reason I created Tribe, you’ve all done a lot of good over these past five years. Good others couldn’t have gotten done.”

“We’ve also done some shady-as-fuck work,” TB reminded her.

She pleaded with TB to understand her choices. “None of it was assisting bad people. I ensured that nothing like that ever touched any of you.”

Steel brought the conversation back to the pressing issue. “What’s the connection between today’s bomb threat and the Salieri?”

“Years ago, when my father disappeared, I was going through his things, desperate to find clues as to who might have taken him. Buried in his personal cloud drive were folders and folders of articles relating to Mozart and his fellow composer, Antonio Salieri. Everything from research articles to reviews of numerous play performances around the theatrical world of Amadeus by Peter Shaffer. I nearly deleted the files because I couldn’t figure out why my father would have something like that saved to his drive. He hated classical music, and live theatre was barely one step above it in his estimation.”

“The articles were breadcrumbs,” Waters deduced.

Cherry nodded. “In truth, I forgot about the files because getting Tribe up and running became my sole focus. When Gendry gave up the name, it triggered my memory of what I’d found, so I looked closer at those files again. They were all downloads of real articles from a worldwide database, but something about them looked… wrong. And then it hit me why.” She reached for a keyboard under the conference table and pulled up her files from her computer. “What do you see?”

Silence permeated the room.

Midas’ voice broke the silence. “The spacing is all wrong.”

“Very good,” Cherry complimented them. “I figured you would see it right away.”

“Pardon my limited brain power,” TB interrupted, “but what does spacing have to do with it?”

“The margins are off,” Midas explained. “When you download an article off the internet and save it to your drive, it follows the same default protocols to format the file to its new location. Text centers left, right, up, down, and spaces the lines at 1.15 lines.”

Haskell chimed in, “It’s similar to how I configure my body in a small space or if someone played the game of Tetris. The document is formatted to use the space allotted as efficiently as possible. When you copy over text from one source to another, unless you tell it otherwise, the formatting follows along with the text. Most internet articles are formatted to Chicago style formatting—the style journalists use—where the document justifies the text so that the margins are even on both sides and words are flush with both the left and right margins. In addition, there are rules for when and where a new page can be started.”

Midas picked up the explanation. “If you look at this particular document Cherry pulled up, the formatting is uneven. Also, if I were to print this document in its entirety, there would be”—he counted—“one, two, three extra pages at the end of the article that would be blank. In a professional setting, that wouldn’t happen. The fact that it does here suggests hidden text to me.”

Cherry nodded. “I finally came around to that as well.” She highlighted the entire article, and within the highlighting in the margins, a shadowy character like a medieval-style “S” inside a diamond appeared at the top left and the bottom right of each new page. The three blank pages that followed the end of the article showed shadowy writing in an unreadable font that was colored white and microscopic on the page.

“What are we looking at, exactly?” questioned TB.

“The authors, or the publishers more likely, used extremely low tech to hide a private message,” Midas explained. “Microscopic, white-colored font. Unless you knew what to look for, you’d just assume those last pages were extra and probably ignore them.”

TB rose from his seat and walked closer to the screen. “It’s brilliant,” he whispered. “How did no one see this?”

“Sometimes the best hiding place is in plain sight,” Cherry acknowledged. “Like hiding a specific needle in a stack of other needles. Hang on.” With a few more keystrokes, Cherry placed a second document side by side with the Amadeus article she’d used as the example for the group. The entire room could now view the new version of the document with the white text changed to blue and enlarged to size twelve font .

Haskell turned to Cherry. “Is this what I think it is?”

“Looks like gibberish,” Demon complained.

“To most people, yes. In reality, it’s Middle English,” Cherry informed him.

“Wow.” Haskell popped out of her chair and joined TB at the screen, her fingers tracing the lettering. “I haven’t seen this since I read The Canterbury Tales .”

“This is… I don’t know what this is,” Waters whispered.

Haskell swore under her breath. “My Middle English is rusty, but it’s good enough to see that this particular file is an order of purchase. White women between the ages of sixteen and twenty-five. Clean bills of health, no underlying conditions, no history of genetic disease markers. Preferably women with few family ties and few connections to miss them.” Her eyes were glassy as she turned to look at the others in the room. “Bloody hell, they wanted three hundred women.”

“This is why my father disappeared. He was chasing the Salieri long before Mythos. I’m willing to bet that each one of these articles he stored in his cloud is publicly hidden communications between the Salieri and prospective clients. I’m convinced that they figured out he was closing in on them, or at least closing in more than anyone else had in the past. Now I’ve been poking around in his files again, as well as digging into new areas, and it looks like I inadvertently announced my presence to the Salieri.” She cringed. “I’ve no one to blame but myself for becoming this easy of a target. I broke one of our biggest rules by eating at that café every Friday.”

“Cherry,” Demon groaned.

“I know, I know! No repetitions! Don’t go to the same places; don’t go the same routes. Haskell almost paid the price for my mistake.”

Waters finished the chastising, “There’s no use worrying about that now. What’s done is done. But Cherry, you understand?—”

“That my father’s most likely dead? Yes. But I can’t stop looking, Waters. This is a huge piece of information I never knew I had until Flame. It’s been years without any leads, and now there are thousands of reviews, articles, and all sorts of files he downloaded off the internet. There are even some video files. I don’t know what those are for?—”

“Advertisements,” Midas conjectured. “I bet that’s what they are. Maybe for the services of the Salieri. Possibly advertisements of specific people they had for sale. There are probably embedded images inside those video files.” He looked at Waters with fire in his eyes. “Each one of these files needs to be gone through and translated, reformatted. Who knows what information is in there.”

Waters stared at the screen. “Something tells me we need this information translated yesterday.”

“I’ll put Nova on it immediately and go over whatever she finds.”

Waters nodded tightly.

Steel walked over to Waters and put his hand on his team leader’s shoulder. “ Jefe , we’ve just all had a shit ton of information dumped on us and no time to process it. Maybe we should take a break, then come back together when we’re in a headspace more prone to taking on the more pressing issue at hand.”

Haskell watched Waters grind his teeth, then, after a moment, his eyes closed. “Agreed. I need to… call Kubrick.” She watched him come to a resolution internally as he hit the security button on the starfish, putting the room back to its normal protocol. “Reconvene at eighteen hundred. Demon, you’re on protection detail for Cherry. Nemo, you’re in charge of Haskell. Both of you—do not, under any circumstances, allow these women to leave this building.” He ripped the door op en and slammed it so hard behind him that it didn’t close, just bounced back from the doorframe.

Demon took hold of Cherry’s arm and guided her into the hallway. The rest of the team followed close behind. Haskell felt a tug on her hand and looked up to see Nemo trying to help her up from the chair. “Come on. Let’s get you settled in. You’ve got to be exhausted, but it’s nothing compared to how you’re going to feel in a few hours.”