Yes, my boy, came his mother’s voice again. You have a very bright future ahead of you. Why, together, we could rule all of Rome.
Chapter 42
Sienna
Now
“We’ve got it,” Scott said without preamble, as he poked his head into my office. I sat up in my chair, waiting for him to elaborate, but instead he gestured for me to follow, and I was after him in a hot second.
“Where is it?” I asked as I followed behind him at a jog. He was hustling—human style, not in meta terms. Meta-style hustling would have forced people to dive out the way in fear for their lives.
We were passing cubicles, whipping through the half-occupied bullpen “Gables, Minnesota,” he said. “There’s a resort up there called Terramara. I’ve already had J.J. verify, and it looks like this is usually its off-season, all low occupancy and whatnot. But it’s fully booked for the next few days. Private party.” His eyes gleamed.
“How’d you find it?” I asked as we entered the conference room. Reed was already there, sitting over Rocha’s shoulder as the man worked on a laptop that was hooked to a projector.
“Because I’m extremely good at what I do,” Rocha said simply, and I got the feeling that arrogance ran over him full-force. It gave his voice a quiver of pride.
“We traced cell phone signals in proximity of the jail attack in Arizona,” Scott said with a hint of his own pride. “Managed to trace them back to the source, then Rocha used NSA resources to hack their communication—”
“It wasn’t hacking,” Rocha said with a little irritation.
“Yeah, when you do it, it’s considered government compliance, right?” Reed shot at him. Rocha didn’t even bother to look at my brother.
“Useful,” I said, hoping to end any argument before it started. “What did you find? Text messages?”
“Everything,” Rocha said, a little more muted now. “Once we knew what smartphones your targets had, it wasn’t too difficult to pull the data through our system. We have emails, web histories, calls made, and yes,” he glanced at Scott, “text messages.”
Reed looked at Scott and mouthed, “Text messages,” at him. Scott looked a little flushed for a moment after that. I tried to pretend I didn’t see it.
“It was the emails that gave it all away,” Scott said, his expression returning to normal as he got back on track. “Apparently Claire and the rest of Century have been very, very bad at internet security.”
“Why be so good at kicking our asses and eluding us but fail so hard on something so damned trivial?” I asked.
“You’re not thinking like them,” Zollers said, and I realized he’d snuck into the room behind us. “I told you before, they’re on an offensive footing. In addition, they are the powers of their day. Gods and monsters dating to before recorded history.” His eyes gleamed. “In other words, they’re not exactly tech-savvy. I doubt any of their number have been born in the last century.”
“We’re up against people who don’t realize their emails are being read?” Reed asked, shaking his head in disbelief. “How tuned out do you have to be to not notice basic bits of news like that?”
“The world changed slowly up until recently,” Janus said, entering the conversation from where he’d been standing in the shadows. I hadn’t even noticed him, sitting in a chair next to Kat and Li in the corner. “You could go away for a hundred years, come back and things were more or less the same. Technology such as this has only been around for a flicker of a candle’s flame to our kind. Be amazed that they even know how to use a cellular telephone.”
“Could this be a trap?” I asked.
“Anything could be a trap,” Janus said, a little wary. “But I doubt it.”
“Remember,” Zollers said, “they weren’t expecting your move in Vegas, either. They think they have the initiative, and they’re still moving as though they’re the aggressor and they have nothing to defend against. They’re failing to react to the fact that you have additional resources moving into position. Possibly because they don’t know it, or possibly because they just don’t have the strategic thinking necessary to operate in a world of high-tech warfare.”
“They’re like Khan,” Reed said, “thinking in two dimensions while we hit them from above.”
I pondered that for a moment. “Well,” I said, noticing that it seemed like everyone was waiting for me to finish my thought after I spoke, “we can’t hit them from above,” and I let the smile take over my face, “but we can sure as hell watch them from above …”