I kept talking while I helped Rio unpack the computer equipment, and Checker either got over his freakout about Rio or was capable of ignoring everything else when it came to computers—I suspected the latter—because he proved more than equal to multitasking, bossing us around with the authority of someone who knew exactly how he wanted his personal computer cluster to take shape and taking time out from his coding to flash around the cramped rooms and set up the network cables the right way around or slot in the correct hard drives when he deemed we were being too slow or too dull to get it right on his time schedule. He’d brought a huge stack of solid state drives originally pulled from the Hole, along with at least seven laptops—seven I counted, anyway—and in short order, the monitors spread across the table and counters sprang to life to show Checker’s customized operating system.
By the time the sun began baking the little house the next day, Pithica’s revenue sources were unfolding for us layer after layer, banks and locations and names blossoming fast and furious in a text file thanks to my algorithms and Checker’s coding. The skinny hacker also had a frankly surprising level of financial knowledge, which accelerated the process considerably. I could hardly believe how quickly we were aggregating the information.
Of course, nothing was as easy as all that. Rio, who had been moving around the place doing who knew what—probably setting up a Barrett on the roof or something—came back in while we were in the middle of a raging argument.
“I’m telling you, I know how this works! The notification needs to come from the banks, and we’re talking at least fifteen different government agencies in a dozen different countries! I don’t even know half the strings we’d need to pull—”
“So, why can’t you hack them all and find out?”
Checker literally threw up his hands. “I’m not a slot machine! Do you have any idea how secure these systems are? And how much cross-checking happens? I can’t hack human brains!”
“What’s going on?” asked Rio. He reached into one of the stacked crates and tossed a ration bar at me as he spoke.
Right. Food. I tended to forget about that. I tore it open.
“Hey! Not near my machines!” squawked Checker.
I obligingly backed up a few paces. “Checker’s pussying out,” I answered Rio.
“Pussying ou—! First of all, gendered slur, not cool, Cas Russell, and second of all, you’re asking for something patently impossible. Look, tracking’s one thing, but to differentiate ourselves from a thousand different phishing scams you’d need—”
“Explain,” said Rio, leaning up against the doorway and crossing his arms.
Checker swallowed and then answered while shying away from eye contact, concentrating on his monitors instead of on Rio. “Cas’s idea here has two parts to it. Tracking the accounts is turning out to be…well, not easy, but doable. Cas’s math on that is pretty spectacular, and the uniqueness of format in the account information, even though we only have numbers and amounts, is—”
Rio cleared his throat and Checker stopped like an animal in headlights, mouth working. The room wasn’t large enough and was too full of equipment for him to shrink away from Rio effectively, but he certainly looked like he wanted to try.
I took pity on him. “We’ll be able to get a pretty complete account list,” I explained. “It’s a staggering amount of data—we’re tracking the money through layers and layers of banks and front businesses—but by the end of today, we’ll have a huge list of the exact paths of all Pithica’s revenue streams. We’re talking thousands of sources here.”
“But?” said Rio.
I huffed out a frustrated breath. “My thought had been to send massive tip-offs,” I said. “Warn people they’re being stolen from, or that their money isn’t going where they think it is, the idea being that Pithica can’t have more than a couple key people converted to the cause. And we can actually do that, but Checker pointed out—”
“We won’t be taken seriously,” finished Checker. “It’s not a matter of running a scam on a single bank and convincing it we’re sending legit warnings. Our account list—their network comes from all over the world.”
“And the revenue sources are diverse,” I said. “All different banks, all different businesses and organizations. We could send a mass communication, but it would be dismissed in less than zero time. It probably wouldn’t even get past most people’s spam filters.”
“We lack legitimacy,” said Checker. “What about this? What if I sent some sort of Trojan that…I dunno, does something to all of these accounts, so when they’re checked on people see something happening—”
“But if you’re right, nobody will check, even if we tell them to. Not for a while, anyway, and not all at once. We need everyone to jump in fright and move their money simultaneously—if the transition’s slow enough, Pithica will be able to deal with it, get out in front of it—”
Checker’s frustrated words overlapped with mine. “It’s verifying the message, not delivering it. Without some virtual psychic paper that grants us authority—”
“Wait,” I said.
“What is it?”
I could feel a smile starting. “We happen to know a shadowy multinational organization who can pull every string in the book.”
“Wha—bad idea!” Checker cried.
“Do you have a better one? We don’t have time to sit on this. Pithica knows we’re out here, they know we have this information—it’s only a matter of time before they either track us down or change their revenue structure enough to make it not matter.”
“Those guys already said they’d kill you!” Checker sputtered.
“Then they can’t do much worse, can they?” I said.
Checker pressed a hand against his forehead in apparent pain. “Why do I have the feeling you’re going to get your own way on this? No matter how much I object to it?”
“Because I am.” I turned to Rio. “Have a spare cell I can burn?”
He stepped past me into the narrow kitchen, opened a drawer to reveal a jumble of disposable cell phones still in their packaging, and pulled one out.
“Come on! You can’t possibly think this is a good idea!” Checker called from over by his computers.
Rio ignored him. “You think this is a viable plan?” he asked, handing me the phone.
“It’s what we’ve got,” I said.
“These are dangerous people.”
“And since when do you care about that?”
He raised his eyebrows. “I attach somewhat greater value to your well-being than to my own.”
Right. He attached more value to pretty much anyone else’s well-being than he did to his own. We were all works of God, I thought. I wondered if he viewed us like a security guard with no appreciation for art might view the paintings in a museum he’d been charged with safeguarding—bits of paper and wood and canvas mushed together with some oily and plasticky stuff that someone else told him were worth protecting at any cost.
“Are you going to try to stop me, then?”
“No. You are quite capable of looking after yourself.”
I blinked. He did still trust my skills, then—at least against anyone who wasn’t Pithica. The sense of disgruntlement I hadn’t even realized I’d been feeling against Rio faded somewhat.
“At least wait until we’ve finished our end of it,” begged Checker. “Come on, this isn’t the movies; we can’t just hit ‘send all.’ Who knows what other difficulties we might run into.”