“Yes. They’re all green,” she said. “There was no malware.”

David shook his head. “I don’t get it. Why did you have us do that if there’s no malware. You can’t determine who did it.”

“Determining who did it was easy,” Elaine said. “You did it.”

Susan took a long, hard look at David and then tipped the cryptophone in Elaine’s hand down. “His phone turned green like everyone elses?”

“That was a trick to get you all to unlock your phones for me. The encryption method that I used on all of them was so solid that even I couldn’t easily hack them in the time we had in this meeting, so I had you all make them vulnerable for me.” Elaine pointed at the blank screen on the side of the computer lab and the projector hummed to life. A moment later six document images appeared with names beneath each of them—the image from Brad’s smartphone materialized on the screen.

The partially blurred document moved over each of the displayed documents until it came to rest on the one marked with David Dalton’s name and displayed the word “MATCH.”

David swallowed.

“I already had some proof that it was you,” Elaine said. “Because the header section of all these is marked with barely visible digits that told me that the stolen document came from the document that Roger here had shown to you specifically. However, someone else could have taken a picture of your document and delivered it that way. I have just proven this is not the case. Mr. Dalton. You are the spy.”

“I suspect that you’ve been trading the secrets every time you get coffee. In fact, there’s a direct correlation to you joining the rest of the group with a cup of iced coffee and the releases from the spy,” Elaine said. “If someone were to investigate, I think we’ll find your partner, or partners, work at the Starbucks stand on the north side of campus.”

Zane walked slowly from his place with his team until he was facing David. The two men were about the same height, with similar builds, but Zane looked entirely underdressed standing next to David in his lawyer-going-to-court styled business suit. Susan and Russell moved away from the pair as Zane exhaled and shook his head.

“Why?” he asked.

David worked his jaw and rubbed his hands together, his eyes had taken on a slightly wild look as he glanced at the door. He set down his coffee on the table next to him and backed subtly away from Zane’s intense stare.

“They paid me,” David said.

With that admission the rest of the room moved almost like a pack of wolves. Even Brad’s team quit their side of the room to move into a semicircle around Dalton’s trapped and shrinking form. Elaine and Frog did not move—only watched. Zane stopped their advance with a gesture, a single finger in the air.

“Tell me who and how much and you can go. No one will stop you.”

David looked at Susan and Casey—who had managed to flank him. Then directly at Elaine and Frog with a defeated but defiant expression. “Another DarkNet team…they’re team three. They paid me a thousand dollars for the information and I figured that I could sell it to other teams.”

“You tried to sell us out, you bastard,” Susan said, clenching her fist.

“You should go now,” Zane said. “Susan, move aside.”

Without a word, her jaw held tightly shut, Susan slid out of his way and David took no time to walk quickly to the door. The room remained tense and silent until the hiss of the closing mechanism was punctuated with the rattled and click of the door locking itself.

“David?” Russell said. “I would not have guessed. He’s pre-law. You’d think he’d know better.”

“Well at least we got him,” Brad said, clapping Zane on the shoulder.

“Another cheater caught, ey Elaine,” Casey Vargas said. “I think that you’ve probably saved the day a dozen times by now. Too bad we’re about to become opponents again. The last comm instructions are here and I think now that this is over…we should audios.”

“Thanks guys, and thank you Brad,” Zane said, shaking the other student’s hand with gusto. “May the best team win.”

“May we win indeed,” Brad said, tossing the package he had into the air and catching it again.

With a few goodbyes the other team filtered slowly out of the room.

Elaine nodded to herself as Zane’s DarkNet team filed themselves into chairs to wait for the Flashdrive to be inserted.

Impatiently, Frog shouldered Zane out of the way and looked down at her shorter friend. “So…what’s the verdict?”

“We have successfully ended the ‘cheating ring’ that was causing Dean Harwood problems for his department, thwarted a cheating attempt gone awry, and even caught a spy in an alternate-reality game,” Elaine said. “Case closed.”

“Yes!” Frog jumped into the hair, her green hair flailing everywhere as she pumped her fists as if she were holding pom-poms on a football field.

“Good job, sis,” Zane said. “You’ll have to fill me in on everything—”

“Are we going to run the comm?” Russell asked. “I want to beat those bastards.”

“Me too,” Susan said.

Zane shrugged. “Well, you’ll have to fill me in after we trounce Brad’s team in this final contest.” He unwrapped the Flashdrive and put it into the tablet.

“Your mission, should you choose to accept it…”

The post Chapter 29 – Case Closed (Part III) appeared first on Black Hat Magick.

A knock at the door to Elaine’s lab and Frog opened it to admit Russell Murphy and David Dalton. Russell smiled at Frog as he walked past, drawing a pinched look from Ben Osborn—from Brad’s side of the room. David sauntered past with a cub of coffee in his hands marked with the Starbucks logo emblazoned on the side.

“We were delayed because David needed a cappuccino,” Russell explained as he took up a position next to Zane.

“Looks like both gangs are all here,” Zane said.

Frog tapped Elaine on the shoulder and she switched off the data visualization in her goggles. With a practiced motion, she pushed her goggles onto her forehead and replaced her spectacles.

“Brad Wright,” she said. “Please let everyone know why we are here and we’ll get on with this meeting.”

“Sure.” Brad stepped away from his side and into the center of attention. He pulled a smartphone out of his back pocket and pressed a few buttons. “About ten minutes ago, my team received another invitation to pay $100 to some unknown person to receive updates on information about Zane’s team. Same as last time, it was $100 by the end of day or the information would go away.”

Nervous coughs echoed through the room as he turned, looking at each member of his and Zane’s team in turn. In a rare show of sensitivity to the gravity of the situation, Adam Roach extinguished the light on his Bluetooth headset. He frowned back at Zane when his eyes fell on him.

“We’ve known for a while that there’s a spy and that spy is someone in this room. So we came up with a plan to catch him—or her.”

“You didn’t pay them, did you?” Adam Roach said. “That would probably be a losing proposition and play right into their hands. It doesn’t make good business sense. Plus, if you got caught paying them you could get disqualified from the game.”

“No. We did not pay them,” Brad said. “What I did do is contact them again and ask for proof that they had the information we wanted, and I received this.”

He held up his smartphone and passed it by everyone in both teams. On the screen was the topmost part of a document with an ASU letterhead and the rest blurred beyond recognition. As each person looked at it they nodded in recognition: it was one of the documents they had loaded into their phones during the weekend from the operation they’d run together at the Student Administration Building.

Operation Honeypot. Elaine had called it—but the participants in Zane’s team did not know that.

“So they picked up info from the last comm,” Susan Pilgrim said. “And they’re hoping to sell it so that someone else can solve our clue without our help?”

Zane nodded. “The spy has been doing a good job of getting our clues and trying to sell them to the other groups. I’ve reached out to the other groups to make sure they don’t try to buy it either. But I think this proves that the spy is in fact getting real, actionable information.”

“And that spy is in the room with us now,” Susan said. Not a question: a straight blank statement. She looked left and right at the other members of her team.

Russell frowned. “I don’t like where this is going either.”

“Frog,” Elaine said and gestured to her friend. “Please let Roger into the room. I think he’s been waiting in the hall for a little too long at this point.”

Frog trotted to the door and pulled it open. When nobody entered, she poked her head out and waved franticly. After she pulled it further open, Roger’s lanky frame slid through the door and walked into the room. He waved as he walked past as gasps and grunts of recognition echoed from those present.

“The whole affair at the Student Administration Building was a ruse,” Elaine said. “A honeypot operation to catch the spy.”

“Who is it?” Susan said abruptly. “If you know, why the production?”

David Dalton just finished a sip of his coffee. “She’s drawing it out for dramatic effect.”

“I don’t quite know yet,” Elaine said, “but we’re about to find out. Everyone take out your cryptophones and turn them on. The documents loaded into them from the honeypot operation have been tagged with malware which will turn your screen blue if you transferred them off.”

Suddenly every cryptophone in the room had been pulled out and turned on. A few keytaps later and each of Zane’s team were staring at their screens and scratching their heads.

Susan and Russell immediately flipped their phones around to show that the screens remained the standard green hue that the cryptophones always displayed. Benjamin Miller quickly also displayed his phone. Zane, of course, didn’t even look at his phone before displaying it to the room. Adam Roach looked at Susan, Russell, and Ben then displayed his phone with amusement. The only person who didn’t immediately flourish his phone was David Dalton, he glared at the screen for a long moment.

“David?” Frog said and walked over to him. “You’re the only one still not showing your phone.”

“It’s green,” he said suddenly and displayed it along with the others.

The post Chapter 29 – Case Closed (Part II) appeared first on Black Hat Magick.

“Left side contains all of my reports as to the students affected by the activities of the professors listed,” Elaine said. “Including their involvement and the extent that it impacted University resources. I have included carefully delineated citations to evidence as well as dates.” (Leaving out the unlikely-to-be-believed technological effects of the Rössler engine and Moriarti’s involvement, of course.) “Right side contains a series reports that carefully clear you of any involvement, show that every graduate student accepted by your department was accepted according to normal policy. It’s a lot of math and it’ll hold up.”

Elaine thumbed one of the pages on the right side and slid it out slightly.

“I included a letter from those two FBI agents who were here earlier for good measure.”

The dean nodded.

“Finally,” she said, pointing to a small USB Flash drive strapped to the right side of the folder near the spine. “All of these documents are stored here, including a contact database for everyone involved.”

Elaine concluded her presentation by closing the folder and proffering it across the table to the dean. He took it gratefully and placed it in an open drawer—which he promptly slid closed and locked with a jangle of keys.

Frog put a hand on the desk and leaned in slightly. “You have enough information here to clear your name as well as ruin the lives of all of the professors involved,” she said. “What do you intend to do with it?”

The dean took a deep breath and let it out slowly. Instead of answering right away, he pulled up his chair and sank into it. A thoughtful repose passed over his features and he shook his head as if disagreeing with himself. Finally, he steepled his fingers and gave Elaine and Frog a purpose-filled look.

“I have not decided yet, Ms. Kermit,” he said. “It will be good to get out from under the Trustee’s thumb on this matter and you’ve done an excellent job doing that for me. For that, I thank you. As for your payment, it’s very reasonable considering the work you’ve done. I understand you have peculiar instructions for the remittance, Ms. Mercer, and I will pay it as soon as I get home today.”

“Thank you,” Elaine said. “Now that I believe our business is concluded, I have duties elsewhere.”

Frog opened her mouth to say something as Elaine turned on her heel and marched out of the office.

“But…” Frog said, looking between the quickly retreating figure of her friend and the dean behind his desk. “It’s not over until she says it.”

“Says what?” The dean leaned slightly to the side to look down the corridor beyond his office doors.

“The case is still afoot, my dear Frog!” Elaine shouted from the hall. “We have other business to attend before the day is done.”

“I’m sorry, sir, but I should go.” Frog sketched a curtsy and then turned to dash after her friend—her green ponytail fluttered as she raced out of the office.

From the throne of his chair, the dean allowed himself a slight smile. Running in the halls could not be accepted as professional behavior from either of his erstwhile detectives; but they were young and had done him a great service. Castigating either now would be an imposition he need not press—and, he thought to himself as he reached for the phone, he had some politics to attend before Chairwoman Naughton could muster any further forces against him.

Mr. Richard Harwood, Dean of Engineering, would clear his name before she returned to her office the next morning.

* * *

“Another package?” Adam Roach asked.

The box, wrapped in brown paper most likely contained a USB Flashdrive that would hook into the DarkNet tablet—Zane held it in his hands and tapped it against his knuckles, but he had not opened it yet. The reason: Brad Wright and his entire DarkNet team stood across the room in a row, he too held such a package in his hand. Elaine and Frog stood idly next to the blank projection screen waiting.

Russell Murphy and David Dalton from Zane’s team were late to the meeting and Elaine would not start without everyone present. Brad had grudging agreed to wait as well, even though every minute they had the package and weren’t using it would mean other teams would have a little bit of a head start.

“I admit, I’m more worried about your brother getting a head start,” Brad said at the time, “than any of the other teams. We’re both way ahead of everyone else right now.”

Larry shifted nervously on the counter he had situated himself on, trying to move himself into Elaine’s field of view—little did he know that with her goggles down she was deep within some data code structures and oblivious to the world. His sister, Susan, glared at him from across the room and Casey Vargas whispered something to him to get him to stop fidgeting.

The post Chapter 29 – Case Closed (Part I) appeared first on Black Hat Magick.

“Now, to figure out who they intended to send this to,” Elaine said.

She set the Enoch on the table next to the monitor and plugged it into the USB port on the side of the dumb-terminal’s keyboard. Moments later the Enoch had gained root level access to the controller for the supercomputer and opened up a link back to her lab to help parse the logs.

“Why did you stop compiling?” a message appeared in one of the command line terminals.

“Hadaly, trace that message.”

“On it, boss.”

A few seconds passed as Elaine started some forensics of her own into another terminal.

Another message appeared. “A trace! Could that be you, Holmes? You are late.”

Elaine frowned. Could these messages be from the “Professor X” that Whitaker had talked about. Watching the screen she wondered if she should speak to this person. Interrogating them might lead to further closure in the case. Not that she needed it: the case was essentially over. She’d caught the culprits, unveiled the “cheating” ring for Dean Harwood, and now she would secure the evidence.

In whatever way she could.

“It is you, isn’t it. Let me know it’s you. I’ve been following your progress in finding the professors, in unwrapping the project, and that would lead you inexorably to this place. Talk to me,” the screen displayed. “You already have the means, I know you do. You found my listening device, after all.”

“Boss, Frog tells me that the bug in the dean’s office wasn’t put there by Tango,” Hadaly said over the goggles’ earpiece.

“Intriguing,” Elaine said as she fished out the makeup compress with the bug she’d excised from the dean’s office a mere week earlier. She fit her nail beneath the lid of the compact and popped it open.

“Who are you?” she said into the device.

Moments later, a message flashed onto the screen: “Bravo. Congratulations. You are a regular Sherlock Holmes, Elaine Mercer.”

“What should I call you? Professor X?”

“Professor X?” the terminal’s display lit up. “I don’t know if I could bear an X-Men reference. I prefer the classics. How about you call me…Moriarti. Still a professor but not some regrettable idealist.”

Elaine looked to her Enoch and used gestures to ask Hadaly how the trace was proceeding. The reply did not fill her with confidence—Hadaly was quick to explain that Professor X, Moriarti, whomever, had managed to run the messages through several different anonymizing services through a very sophisticated Onion Router (still easily unraveled by an equally clever AI.) The trace would take a little more time.

Elaine pulled a stick of pocky from her vest and chomped on it idly while passively watching the screen. He was good, her adversary.

“Don’t tell me I have you stumped, Holmes,” the terminal flashed.

“I’m going to delete this binary and all the source code,” Elaine said. “I don’t know what you intend to do with it, but you’re not going to get your hands on it.”

“Delete it. The software has served its purpose, I have no need for it,” the terminal responded.

Elaine didn’t hesitate. Her finger okayed the file kill command on the Enoch and the smartphone went about the work of obliterating not only the partially compiled binary produced, but it also chewed through all source code linked to it. Seconds later no trace of the program remained on the local computer and it cycled up again to overwrite those sections of the hard drive with random data; it wouldn’t stop until it had done so over two-thousand times.

“There are copies, of course?” Elaine said into the bugging device.

A momentary pause passed.

“Not if the professors followed my instructions to the letter,” the screen displayed. “If you’ve just done what I suspect you should have done, you have destroyed the resident copy. The only copy of the project in existence.”

“He’s telling the truth, boss,” Hadaly said. “There hasn’t been enough time to compile the source and nothing has been exfiltrated from this machine in…weeks. The professors really did a good job of keeping it secret, this is–was–the only working copy.”

“Why would you let me delete the only copy?”

The screen flashed: “The project doesn’t work. It would compile, link, and run; but that version can only affect the students that my dear professors set it to work with. It functions almost entirely on contagion and will not scale to anything other than tinkering with a particular finite set of students’ grades.”

The terminal paused for a moment then added:

“Quite useless. Actually.”

Elaine sank into the chair—after her use of Acellerando earlier her muscles had begun to complain and through sheer adrenaline she’d remained standing.

Something didn’t seem quite right about Moriarti’s reaction–all this subterfuge, a huge hidden project, lots of money changing hands, the hostage situation… Perhaps Frog would be able to give her better insight into what it all could mean but put together there was no reason for him to be so blithe about the destruction of the final product…

Unless…

“This was just a test,” Elaine said. “You never intended this project to work; you just wanted to prove that you could construct a Rössler engine using conventional computer code.”

“Wrong again.”

Elaine frowned. She tapped away at the Enoch. “Where are you on that trace?”

“Its hiding behind a very complex onion-router,” the AI said. “Quite sophisticated. I’m not sure I can trace this. I’ve been capped out at Princess Elisabeth Research Station…in Antarctica. Somehow I don’t think that’s where Moriarti is.”

“What? No pithy reply, Holmes? Alright, I’ll give you a hint: it’s like Umberto Echo, sometimes the city is its own map.”

“I don’t follow.”

“No. This time you didn’t. The case you were on for Mr. Harwood was only part of the equation and while you have all the pieces to the puzzle you probably won’t understand until a few days from now. Perhaps next time our paths cross. Kwaheri.”

With that the bug sitting in the makeup compact emitted a soft pop, followed by a sizzle, and a small wisp of white smoke issued forth.

“Hadaly!?”

“The connection closed,” she replied. “We’ve lost the trace.”

The post Chapter 28 – My Moriarti to Your Holmes (Part III) appeared first on Black Hat Magick.

It still took a great deal of reprocessing to open the door to the Engineering building (and Elaine still almost tore it from its hinges as the field attempted to adjust around the doorway and knob) without buffering the intersection of slow-and-fast inertias could have caused tremendous damage to her hands. The spellcode instead dumped that into the door causing the frame to creak with distress.

The same thing happened again when she opened the door to the supercomputer room.

Linscott jerked away from his keyboard and monitor as if he’d heard a gunshot.

In some ways he had. The dynamic of Elaine’s passage into the room surrounded by the Acellerando field, opening the door, and cutting it off without allowing it to dissipate fully generated a small sonic boom–with about the same kinetic energy of a whipcrack. Most of the energy of the boom exited through the now-open door, but the rest echoed and reverberated around the restrictive space and close walls.

To Linscott, Elaine’s entrance would be heralded with a peal of thunder.

Paul Linscott looked about as haggard as he sounded on the phone—his greying hair frayed about his skull like a thunderhead that couldn’t decide which direction to flow redoubled the dark patches that surrounded his eyes. He wore a grey suit and pearl white shirt that ill-fit his frame, the red tie loosened but still hanging around his neck flung haphazardly to one side revealing a few buttons undone.

His face froze in a shocked expression, squeezing wrinkles from every surface as he stood—bolt upright—trying to keep the chair he had been sitting in from tipping over (one of the wheels on the base spun with a soft grinding sound.)

Elaine entered the room with purpose, removed the Enoch from its belt holster, and pointed the phone like a weapon at Linscott. He let go of the chair and it rattled back into a stable setting, but he didn’t sit in it. He just stared without comment.

“Step away from the keyboard,” she said to the professor.

“You’re the girl on the phone,” said Linscott. “What do you have to do with all this?”

“The FBI has arrested Whitaker and they’re going to be on their way here shortly,” Elaine said. “You heard it happen on the phone. Unless you want to be in handcuffs next, you should step away from the keyboard and leave.”

Linscott’s jaw worked as he looked at Elaine. His eyes fluttered from the screen–with its dazzling display of configuration and linker messages–and finally relented. He sighed, straightened up, and walked across the room.

Once the professor had vacated the keyboard, Elaine took over. She pressed Control-C and halted the compilation.

“We were so close,” Linscott said.

“Why did you make this?” Elaine asked. The curiosity of the statement came easily to her lips, but the words felt strange in her mouth. It didn’t matter why the professors had done this. It was over. She would end it and very little explanation would be changing that.

The professor stood tall for a moment and adjusted his crumpled sleeves. “Some, like Whitaker, needed the money,” he said slowly, “but I just wanted to know if we could do it. It’s an astonishing piece of technology.” He nodded to himself slowly. “Of course, the money didn’t hurt. I could fund an entire department on what I’m going to make. And, with my friends, some of them actually need the money we’d make from this project. We have an amazing mathematical puzzle, potentially unsovlable, solved here, and a way to get Whitaker out of debt. A nicely wrapped package. ”

“This program you made could be weaponized,” Elaine said. “It plays with probability in ways you couldn’t understand. If you’ve been using it to control graduate students’ selection and grades, didn’t you think it could be used for other purposes?”

“Will that matter now?” His eyes flashed in the dim light as he gestured to the computer. “Once I heard your voice on the phone, I figured it was all over. You can confiscate it…or destroy it.”

“That’s exactly what I intend to do.”

The post Chapter 28 – My Moriarti to Your Holmes (Part II) appeared first on Black Hat Magick.

Frog, however, could only deflect questions back to Elaine—and she was holding a conversation with Hadaly who had been tracing the call.

“The call trace shows that Linscott is in the Engineering building,” Elaine said to Frog. “Narrowing it down now—he might be at one of the supercomputer terminals. We might not have much time to catch up with their Professor X and find out what he’s really up to.”

Frog nodded.

Agent Warren made an exasperated noise. “You had someone tracing the call from the Dean’s Office while you were…doing…whatever you were doing?” he said. He shrugged in his suit jacket as if he had suddenly become uncomfortable in his skin. “Where do you get the resources to do all this?”

The phone on Elaine’s hip flicked on and switched itself to speakerphone “Is that Agent Noobcake? It is! You should play Horde, dude, Alliance sucks.”

Toller laughed so hard she needed to brace herself on the wall; this elicited a glare from Warren.

“How many people do you have on your little team?” he asked. “It’s almost as if I’m dealing with Charlie’s Angels.”

“And I’m Charlie!” Hadaly said.

“I’d better get over there now,” Elaine said, her voice distant and distracted. She gestured idly–her mind and attention lost deep in three different context menus all referencing different pieces of spellcode that worked together to produce the Acellerando effect. The Enoch required time to refill the motion capacitors and it had been mere days since she’d used it last. They’d be stretched thin, but according to several quick calculations using Google Maps and a pathing algorithm across ASU campus showed that she could just barely make it before the reserves ran out.

As the code came together to cut some corners, Elaine thought about how she could shorten the motion she’d need to get from here to there. The idea was simple, every motion–however slight–would bleed from the capacitors. That meant she needed to reduce he the route to avoid people and things that might slow her down.

Then it came to her as the new code finished compiling and the buffer indicated that it was prepared to trigger.

“Could you open the door for me?”

Warren raised his eyebrow as Frog immediately sprang into action and trotted across the room to yank the door open.

“Thanks,” Elaine said.

Warren balked and pursed his lips. “Why would you–”

The relativistic effect of activating the Acellerando spellcode would have caused Elaine to momentarily appear flash-frozen, as if caught in a strobe to everyone standing nearby. The human eye, unable to follow her movement, would register that she just vanished from space; but the brain, unable to accept that as a reality would produce an illusion for most people. Warren and Toller both saw Elaine blur for a moment, as if out of focus. Warren in particular, but for a moment, thought maybe she was winking at him; but it was only a moment later she was gone and the sigh of an uncanny wind replaced her absence.

“–need her to open the door?”

Toller took a step towards where Elaine had stood a moment before; then she paused as if thinking better of the motion and turned towards Frog instead.

“What just happened?”

Frog let go of the door and chuckled. “You just watched Elaine turn a door transparent,” she said. “You think she can’t turn herself invisible?”

“Invisible,” Toller said as if testing the word out in her mouth. “Right, your friend can turn invisible.”

“She’ll have to explain it herself,” Frog said. “Meanwhile, can you two tell me something?”

Warren had been taking a phone call behind the two women, he lowered his cell and said, “What do you want to know?”

“Why did you bug the dean’s office?”

Warren raised an eyebrow again. “We didn’t bug the dean,” he said.

“Really?”

“Really,” Toller said. “We don’t have the proper authorization to bug anyone. It’s bad enough that Ellis here has been spending his time playing video games with your friend there and having the analysts back home follow her through forums… Our boss is going to be on our case about that. We couldn’t get a bug if we wanted it.”

Frog frowned. “But, if you didn’t bug the dean, then who did?”

The post Chapter 28 – My Moriarti to Your Holmes (Part I) appeared first on Black Hat Magick.

“Give him the code,” Whitaker said.

“No.”

The gun switched to Harwood. “If you don’t tell him the code, I will shoot you.”

“Threaten me instead,” Elaine said.

“What?” Both Harwood and Whitaker spoke at the same time and their surprise registered in the same way–they looked at one another as if embarrassed.

Elaine spent a long moment silent as if collecting her thoughts, Harwood and Whitaker remained captured in their collective surprise until she spoke again.

“You’re in this because your wife is sick, Professor Whitaker,” she said abruptly–and just as swiftly the gun was back on her. Harwood felt his muscles tense and he started to move to recapture Whitaker’s attention–but Elaine’s hand shot up in warning and he froze. “You need money, I suspect, to pay for her treatment. Cancer is expensive and I can see how that would lead you down the path to the dark side.”

Whitaker shook visibly as he spoke. “My wife,” he said. “My wife has nothing to do with this. She’s none of your business. Shut your mouth, little girl.”

“Do you want me to shut up? I can convince the dean to you give you the authorization code. Just tell me, what do bitcoins have to do with your software?”

“Huh?” Blinkered and flushed, Whitaker shook his head and pursed his lips at Elaine’s question. “All I have to tell you is why we’re using bitcoins and you’ll convince Richard to give me the authorization code?”

“I don’t think that–” Harwood began, but Elaine fixed him again with a look that took the voice right out of his throat.

“You hired me to discover the root of this cheating ring,” she said. “I’m about to lay it bare, and when I do, all you need to do is tell Whitaker the code and he’ll let us go.”

“I…” Whitaker said. “Sure, I’ll let you go.”

“Bitcoins?” Elaine said.

“Okay. The person we work with–he calls himself Professor X–commissioned the software by paying us in bitcoins. Of course, we all cashed them out as soon as we got them, but as the software developed he’s asked us to trade the coins with him as their value changed and it’s worked to fund the research. The grant money helped too, but Professor X subsidized us hugely using that currency.”

“Are you aware that not only were the students selected by your software fitting for your departments and numerous grants they’ve also been the people sending you those bitcoins? Not only has Professor X been having you design software that manipulates student records and graduate selection, but he closed the loop by making sure it would look as if they were paying you to do so. We’ve been checking those bitcoin transfers and it looks a lot like graduate positions are being bribed out of the department.”

Whitaker frowned and his grip on the gun wavered again. “I hadn’t thought of that.”

“Your Professor X has been playing you this entire time,” Elaine said. “You design the software and you get the heat for the fallout. It’s almost perfect really, a phantom mastermind who will just vanish

“Sir, give him the authorization code,” she said. “I think everyone knows now that when this ends everyone involved will be found out irrespective of if the professor finishes the project or not. You have nothing to fear from the school even if you give him the code.”

“I don’t fully understand,” Harwood said and he took a deep breath while looking at Elaine as if staring at her hard enough might reveal the impetus behind her request. “But I’ll trust you on this, Ms. Mercer.” He leaned forward and raised his voice. “The code is HEXIDECIMAL8990. All caps.”

A long pause followed and the phone crackled to life and a voice cut through the clatter of keystrokes. “The code works. I’ll get the build started,” said Linscott.

Whitaker nodded and a smile hesitated on his lips. His posture relaxed a little, but the gun remained aimed squarely at Elaine. “This will be over soon,” he said. “Just be patient.”

“Will you let us go now?” Dean Harwood asked.

Whitaker shook his head. “I need to keep you both here for a little longer.”

“I’m sorry, but this is where our conversation ends,” Elaine said.

“You’re not going anywhere. You’re staying right here until Linscott says he’s done,” Whitaker said.

In a loud, clarion voice Elaine said, “Clear!”

With that word, the holographic image of Elaine blurred and vanished—the phone emitted a high pitched screech and the speaker threw a spray of radiant sparks—the lights in the room went pop and darkness crashed down—Harwood slumped in his chair with a grunt and Linscott fell to the floor with a surprised cry. The gun jumped out of Linscott’s hand as he toppled and it skidded across the room.

The doors to the office banged open and people rushed in and with them light from the hall spilled into the room.

“Get the gun!” A man dressed in a suit knelt over Whitaker and pulled him onto his side—he found himself unable to resist, or move, his legs felt numb as the handcuffs went on. “Don’t move, you’re under arrest.” A woman in a suit, her own gun drawn, went quickly across the room, retrieved the pistol and went to check on Harwood who moaned behind his desk.

Behind them, backlit by the hallway’s florescent lights Elaine walked into view, her goggles glinted as she stared down at him; right at her shoulder a womanly student with striking green hair grinned at him. Whitaker closed his eyes.

The post Chapter 27 – It’s Time To Tango (Part IV) appeared first on Black Hat Magick.

“Who’s on the phone?” she asked as she rolled to a stop next to the desk.

Whitaker’s surprise came with a shout as he dropped the phone and turned the gun towards her.

“Ms. Mercer!” Harwood shouted. “Get out of here!”

“Stop right there,” Whitaker said. Too late, the gun was already on her.

He could try jumping Whitaker. Someone would get shot, he realized, and it could be anyone in the room. So he restrained his instinct to jump the man–his friend with the gun–and stood as still as he could.

“Both of you, get on the other side of the desk,” Whitaker said. He kept the gun fixed on the student, Mercer, even as she moved around the desk, but she kept a careful distance away from Harwood. “How did you get in here?”

“Bertrand,” Harwood said. “Whatever problem you have… It’s with me. Let her go.”

“But I don’t want to go anywhere,” Elaine said. “Tell me, Whitaker, is that Linscott on the phone?” She reached across the desk and pressed a button on the phone–the SPKR light came on and a buzz emitted, cut only with the scattered gallop of keypresses.

“What are you doing?” asked Harwood.

“Bert?” Linscott’s voice spoke from the speaker on the phone. “What’s going on in there?”

“It is Linscott,” Elaine said. She didn’t smile as she said it, but nodded instead as if glancing at a scoreboard. “I’ve been wondering about why you two are working together. Until I learned that you’ve been conspiring with Professor Shutters.”

“How does she know that?” Linscott buzzed from the phone. “Who is that?”

“I don’t know,” Professor Whitaker said. His gun didn’t waver from Ms. Mercer–which made Harwood feel both relieved and uncomfortable at the same time; the gun may not be aimed at him, but how could he allow a student to remain in danger. “You’re a student at ASU?”

“Yes,” Harwood said. “She’s one of my students, Bertrand. Could you kindly not point the gun at her?”

The gun didn’t budge and Elaine stared directly into it. To test his aim, she moved slightly to one side and back again. Whitaker tracked her well enough and shook his head until she stopped moving. Before going on, she nodded to him as if accepting the status quo.

“Right,” she said. “I did not introduce myself. My name is Elaine Mercer, and I was retained by the dean here to investigate what you folks have been doing to his Science and Engineering graduate program. Do you want to know what I’ve found out?”

“I don’t think that’s necessary,” Harwood said.

“No,” Whitaker said, he looked at Harwood long and hard. “Tell me what you’ve found.”

Now Elaine smiled—she tried to mimic one of the smiles that Frog used when she wanted to convey that she knew something someone else did not. Smug, Elaine designated this particular pattern of facial muscles.

“FIrst, you’ve been using some sort of picking algorithm that is changing how the program selects students for the graduate program,” she said. “You’ve been gaming the system to pull in specific and select students based on how likely they were to increase grants to the program from various federal and state programs. As you did so, I noticed that the budgets for your departments inflated…but the output of your departments did not.. I have no evidence of what happened to those funds, I can simply surmise that with the increase budgets you were able to shuffle them somewhere. With me so far?”

Whitaker’s eyes narrowed and he started to frown.

“Who is this again?” Linscott said over the phone. “She knows a lot more than she should.”

“Elaine Mercer, professor,” she said. “And I am curious about your probability project. It does cover probability, yes? If you’re using the IBIX-7 then it’s probably a quantum-position equation and I suspect it’s written in Capra or LISP so that you can easily cluster it. I suspect this is related to your graduate-student selecting program, but instead of picking graduate students it somehow affects the probability that they’ll be selected.”

‘How do you know this?”

“Sirs,” Elaine said. “It doesn’t matter how I know this, but I submit to you that it’s more important that I know how dangerous what you’re working on is. Certainly you didn’t write this code for experimental purposes, you did it because it would make you money–and I’m not referring to the increased budgets in your respective departments–I’m referring to the potential capability this software has to effect change in more than just student selection. If it can do this to test scores, imagine what it could be used for elsewhere on surveys or research.”

The silence between them filled with a soft sigh from the phone.

“Someone commissioned you to make this software,” Elaine said.

Whitaker mopped his forehead with a hand and looked at the phone as if for support from his peer.

Elaine cocked her head slightly. “How am I doing so far?”

The phone crackled. “You know I didn’t want to be part of this, Bert,” Linscott said. “But it’s too late to get cold feet now, isn’t it? I have the password entered and…all I need now is the authority code and we’re good to go.”

The post Chapter 27 – It’s Time To Tango (Part III) appeared first on Black Hat Magick.

As the image clarified, soon objects in the room came into focus and it was obvious the figure behind the desk was Harwood. The expression on his face looked worried and tired. Upon seeing the man in front of the desk pace once, both Warren and Toller went for their guns.

Even with the sometimes-faded image passed through the door by the surveillance spellcode, the gunmetal glint of the pistol in Whitaker’s hands became obvious.

“You may want to lower your weapons,” Elaine said. “The door is still there and they can’t see us. As you can see… Dean Harwood is being held hostage by Professor Bertrand Whitaker.”

“I should call this in,” Toller said she pulled her cell out of her pocket and flipped it open.

Warren holstered his gun. “You two need to get out of here,” he said. He reached for Frog and Elaine and ushered them behind him. “It’s no longer safe and we can handle this.”

“I think you know that you can’t,” Elaine said. “Otherwise, why did you call us all to the dean’s office tonight?”

“Hostage situations are an FBI matter, miss,” Warren said. “We can’t have civilians in the crossfire–” He crossed slowly to the door and reached up to barely touch the shimmering image. “But perhaps you can explain how this works first. Does the dean know his office door is a TV screen?”

“Er,” Frog said. “That might take a while and…I don’t think the dean has that long by the look of it.”

“He’ll be fine,” Elaine said. “Whitaker is waiting for someone to call him so that the dean can do something. I’ve been watching and listening during our entire conversation. He doesn’t intend to shoot him. The firearm is drama to keep the dean from leaving before he can do what he needs to.”

“Local authorities are tied up with a big car chase, they won’t have people here for another twenty minutes,” Toller said. “We’re on our own if we need to move quickly.”

Professor Whitaker continued to pace and argue with Dean Harwood, although their words were inaudible through the door. His posture looked agitated, stilted as he moved. Every time he paused, he wiped sweat away from his brow and his gaze lingered on the phone.

“What do you intend to do?” Frog said.

“We can do this by the book,” Warren said. “I’ll announce myself and see if we can negotiate Whitaker’s surrender.”

Elaine shook her head.

“Do you know something I don’t?”

“What if I told you, I have a plan,” Elaine said.

* * *

Richard Harwood sat stock still in his chair; he could feel an ache creeping into his shoulders. Professor Whitaker paced once again from one side of the room to the other–Harwood realized his neck had also begun to hurt, from watching the man prowl like a caged tiger. Except it was his friend, Bertrand Whitaker, with the gun who had caged Harwood.

He had attempted to engage his friend a few times, but Bertand wasn’t talking. It was odd… And out of character for the normally talkative professor. He just glared at Harwood every time he spoke after their initial exchange.

The presence of the gun spoke enough volumes needed for both of them.

Every time he paced the room, he glanced at the phone. Harwood hoped it would ring soon–and, almost as an afterthought, that the news would release him from the cage.

“I’ve had about as much of this as I can take,” Harwood said. The ache had stretched from his shoulders down into the small of his back and he had grown sick of his friend, of his friend’s gun, and the entire night. He rose from his chair and grabbed his coat from the back of it.

Whitaker only fixed him with a brief glare and stopped in front of the desk.

“I’m leaving,” Harwood declared. He stood up from his chair, pulled his coat from the back, and started to put it on. In his peripheral vision, he saw Whitaker raise the gun and move toward him, but he ignored it with as much pretended confidence as he could–and he could muster a great deal. He felt angry. Betrayed. And now, he felt fed up.

“Sit back down!” Bertrand Whitaker growled, however the man couldn’t bring himself to aim the pistol again.

Harwood’s second arm slid into his jacket and he pulled it over his shoulders, carefully shrugging it into place. HIs annoyance flooded into his joints and mingled with the ache, giving him a reason to ignore the gun, and the danger. Bertrand had been one of a few other professors who had accosted him earlier in the week because they thought that they could intimidate him into remaining silent about their extracurricular projects.

The dean had been convinced they’d had something to do with the Powers That Be coming after him for the “cheating ring” in his own department. Sending the dragon lady and her entourage into this very office to confront him–and then, as if that wasn’t enough, they drew him into the midst of their cloak-and-dagger conspiracy with mumbled threats of exposing his own backroom dealings.

Enough would have to be enough.

“Or you’ll shoot me, Bertrand?” Harwood said. “It’s late and I want to go home.”

Moved to get between Harwood and the door, the gun still lowered, but now it hovered slightly higher. “I’ll–”

That’s when the phone rang. Harwood started directly into Whitaker’s eyes–carefully avoiding looking at the gun–and did not move a muscle. Mrs. Blake will get it, he thought, absurdly–of course, his receptionist was not in today.

Whitaker withdrew slightly and lifted the phone from the cradle with his free hand.

A tinny voice percolated up the line and Whitaker said, “Hang on, he’s right here,” he said. He held the phone up to Harwood. “Tell him the password for the IBIX-7 cloud supercomputer access.”

“Why?”

“Tell him.”

The gun rattled in one of Whitaker’s hands and the phone became the new weapon–the other man levelled it speaker and receiver directly at Harwood.

“Crystanthamum, all lower case, with two plus-signs at the end,” Harwood said.

Whitaker pulled the phone back to his ear. “Did you get that?”

That’s when Harwood saw Elaine Mercer walk into the room. Except there was no way she could have come into the room: the door was closed, she hadn’t been in the room originally, and the way she walked in it was as if she’d just emerged from the space between the bookshelf and the case that held his awards and trophies.

The post Chapter 27 – It’s Time To Tango (Part II) appeared first on Black Hat Magick.

Warren blinked a few times and rubbed his temple, he looked to Toller as if for help, but she only shrugged.

“Must you hang from the ceiling like that?” he asked, still craning his neck. “Come to think of it, how are you doing that?”

Agent Tango—or Ellis Warren as he introduced himself—did not look like Elaine had expected. He was tall and cabled, with a distinctly Latin features and tanned skin; reminding her more of the hero from a TV spy special than the blundering agent Hadaly had met in World of Warcraft. His suit fit nicely, snug in all the right places; although a little too snug around the shoulders and his sternum where his jacket formed a bulge from his gun-butt and another on the other side obviously for an extra clip of ammunition. She reminded herself that she should look up proper photographs of people once she determined their identities before meeting them in person in the future.

While spending the discussion upside-down might have been acceptable, it wouldn’t do for the next course of action. So she decided to answer his question.

Strands of Elaine’s hair fluttered as she leaned up, toward the ceiling. “Electrostatic attraction,” she said as her fingers flashed at a menu projected in her goggles. “The technology uses Van der Waals forces to keep me affixed to the ceiling as long as the electric potential in the ceiling doesn’t change. That’s also why the lights are off.”

Moments later, she dropped to the floor with the grace of a gymnast–but to the trained eye, it would have seemed more like she fell slower than she should have. At first the acceleration of her fall matched gravity; but the further she fell, the less the attraction of gravity mattered. As she crossed the logarithmic lower bound between ceiling and floor her velocity plateaued, then reduced, and her fall slowed mere inches from the ground. The landing cushioned as landing on a memory foam mattress and not a carpeted concrete floor.

Toller pursed her lips, “Did anyone else…?” She shook her head and glanced at Warren, who returned her previous shrug. She glanced away as if embarrassed.

“You got it to work without the bug!” Frog’s beamed a smile at Elaine.

“Actually, no,” Elaine said. “Manual that time, I don’t trust the Featherfall sensor trip yet.”

“Oh,” Frog said.

Another emotion passed between Warren and Toller, which elicited a smirk from Frog but Elaine static and stoic expression remained unmoved. Her eyes unfocused instead at some point far-far away, tracking a display inside her goggles’ virtual desktop.

Agent Kathy Toller looked almost dwarfish and pale next to Warren’s tall, tanned figure. Her suit was exactly the same as Warren’s almost down to the last detail (except her jacket set one size larger and better hid her sidearm from view.) Perhaps FBI agents all shopped at the same store to get their suits and afforded the same tailor. The only difference that Elaine could make out was that Agent Toller wore a small gold pin on her lapel in the shape of an eagle.

“I’m not going to ask,” Toller said after a drawn out moment. “Why are we still standing in a dark room? I’ll get the light—”

Elaine’s pale hand flashed in the dim light. “Wait,” she said.

Toller paused in midstride. “Fine. Why?”

“Before I tell you,” she pointed at Warren. “Explain to me why you sent me the list of professors that you did?”

Warren flashed a smile for his partner and folded his arms across his chest. “You don’t know already? They’re obviously tied up together in some sort of conspiracy. From what I’ve seen of your investigation–taken from reading your posts on math forums, by the way–it seems to involve cheating.”

“You’ve been investigating these professors?” Frog let her incredulity dissolve into her tone. “And here I thought that all this was about my girl Elaine.”

Warren rubbed the back of his head with his palm and shrugged. “What can I say, our investigation of Ms. Mercer came back to be nothing to write home about and what was going on with the dean turned out to be very curious. Not a few days ago, his friends here practically kidnapped him in front of us. We started looking into it. It led to some interesting places.”

Elaine’s glasses glinted in the dark. “Such as tying together Harwood, Whitaker, Linscott, Morehouse, and Shutters.”

“Apparently you know more names in this conspiracy than I,” Warren said. “I’ve only had the chance to speak with Whitaker’s wife and Professor Shutters… Not together, of course, but…” He smiled broadly and motioned openly. “Could you tell me what bitcoins have to do with cheating?”

Elaine nodded. “Of course.”

“Of course what?”

“That would be exactly what I intend to find out in the next moment, and it’s why I asked that your partner not turn on the light.”

“I don’t understand,” Toller said–who had seemed content to remain quiet up until this point. “What do you mean moment?”

“Stay quiet a moment and you’ll know why,” Elaine said.

“But–” Warren started to say, but Frog shhed at him and pointed at the door to Dean Harwood’s inner office.

Muffled voices emanated into the quiet room. The sound of a hard, hasty voice–shaking with anger and frustration–followed the low but tight words of Harwood’s baritone.

“The dean?” Warren lowered his voice to ask. Elaine moved closer to him and lifted the goggles onto her forehead. “He’s not alone.”

“It’s worse than that,” she said.

“How could that be…worse?” Toller asked.

“Let me show you,” Elaine said.

The post Chapter 27 – It’s Time To Tango (Part I) appeared first on Black Hat Magick.