Authority, page 24
part #2 of The Tracker Sequence Series
“There’s more coming.” I pointed at the screen.
Peyton’s glistening eyes looked up at the screen, silently pleading for some answers.
I hoped this wasn’t some awful trick. But despite the chaos churning inside me, I knew in my core J.W. had the answers we’d been looking for.
J.W.: He’s my boss.
“Boss? That doesn’t make any sense. Jake didn’t have any employees, did he?” The uncertainty inside me swirled a little faster.
Everyone shook their heads but Lydia. “What if he means creator, instead of boss?” she asked.
“Lydia, you’re a genius!” If I hadn’t been tied to the chair with the wires attached to me, I’d have leapt from it and tackle-hugged her. I didn’t need to ask. That was the answer; it was the only thing that made sense. Whatever this was, Jake had created it. It explained why it sounded so much like him. The program must have inherited his sense of humor as it grew and developed. But it didn’t explain why it existed. “Ask what it was made for.”
Bailen didn’t wait for confirmation from the room. He typed in the question.
The three dots were brief this time before the reply appeared.
J.W.: The loophole.
That seemed simple and obvious, but I knew there was more to it than that. But J.W. must have read my thoughts because another response came just as fast.
J.W.: to track progress
J.W.: to remember
J.W.: to share data
J.W.: to destroy
J.W.: eventually
“That’s a whole lot of purpose but not a lot of clarity,” Ava said. She watched, perplexed, as Peyton stood, moved closer to the screen, and stared at it without a word, as if the phrases on the screen somehow helped her get closer to Jake.
“This is what he was doing. All those lines of code he wouldn’t tell me about.” The words were spilling out of Peyton faster and faster, the dots all connecting simultaneously. “He kept telling me he was working a special assignment for a future upgrade. It didn’t make sense because I didn’t know of any future upgrades. He brushed me off and said it was a secret. I believed him, didn’t push it. But seeing this, it all makes sense now. He was trying to piece together his fragmented memories of what had happened to use against Scurry and stop the loophole. That drive, this program, he was trying to tell us what was happening because we weren’t listening to him. He was trying to fight a war with a one-person army. All this was his backup plan if he failed.” Peyton let out a long wail. “I wish I had heard him then. Maybe I could have helped him.”
Ava opened her arms, and Peyton collapsed into them and sobbed. “But you hear him now. It’s not in vain.”
My mouth dropped open in surprise. A fresh wound ripped open inside me. We’d failed him. I’d failed him. I should have known this wasn’t all just about me. I should have seen he was struggling. I didn’t know how I’d missed it.
But I always knew Jake was not one to let things go. Despite everything he’d been going through, he managed to be there for me and everyone he cared about. From beyond the grave, he still got us the information we needed to piece this mess together. He’d given us J.W. and the USB drive.
“Okay, new plan…” Bailen’s voice trailed off as a new message box popped up on the screen, this time from Jeremy.
J.J.: Harlow, Mr. Overland, and Mr. Weiss are on the move. All headed in different directions.
I closed my eyes and let the darkness envelop me. It was starting.
Twenty-Nine
If I wasn’t already sitting down, I might have collapsed. My breathing grew ragged. “Get me out of this chair.” I pulled at the leads on my temples but didn’t have the strength to yank them off. “We need to follow them. See what he’s up to.” And I needed to let Mom know what was going on, and check on Emily. There was so much to do. My mind raced a thousand miles an hour.
When I opened my eyes again, Bailen was beside me, unhooking the leads. “Take a deep breath.”
I did.
“And another.”
I didn’t fight him on it.
“Better?”
I nodded. “A little. But—”
“We’ll figure this out. I think the best plan is splitting up, though, to cover as much ground as possible.”
I nodded, though I also sensed he was pulling me from the fight again.
“Find out who Jeremy is following,” I said, secretly hoping it was my dad. We may not have figured everything out yet, but I couldn’t lose him too. Not like this.
Lydia typed in the message and Jeremy’s reply came quickly.
J.J.: Mr. Weiss.
I let out a long sigh of relief, but noticed Bailen’s shoulders tighten. I squeezed his arm. The tension didn’t ease. While I cared about Harlow and Mr. Overland too, my gut told me they were just pawns to Scurry. This was personal. He had a connection to Dad. “What about Harlow and your dad? Do we just let them go off on their own?”
“We’ll follow them.” Ava indicated herself and Peyton.
“I’ll meet Jeremy. He might need help.” Lydia was already packing some supplies in her backpack.
“Perfect. I’ll stay here with Kaya and work on this data. I still need to look at Scurry’s box and those files you downloaded.”
I nodded, afraid my words would betray my disappointment. He was right. We were drowning in data that had the potential to bring all the pieces of the picture together.
The room was a flurry of activity and then, just as quickly, it went silent. Only Bailen and I remained. Bailen grabbed the box and started unfastening the casing. I peered inside as he lifted the cover. I didn’t recognize most of what I was looking at, but I knew enough to realize it was badly damaged.
“What a mess,” I mumbled.
“You did this?” he asked with a mixture of pain and admiration in his voice.
“Yeah, it was J.W.’s suggestion. I knew if Scurry wanted the box, I couldn’t give it to him in working condition, regardless of what he might do to me as punishment.” I gave an apologetic shrug, knowing it was the right move, but that damaging the box might now make Bailen’s job examining it more difficult.
A smile erupted on his face. “Atta girl.” He high fived me, then leaned over and kissed me, a quick peck but full of so much meaning and thanks. “That is one clever AI.” He shook his head. “Maybe next time don’t be so… thorough. This might take a while to pick through all the components.”
My cheeks pinked a bit. “What can I do to help?” I felt a little less guilty about the damage to the box but became painfully aware I wouldn’t be much help deciphering what was inside it.
“Want to help with those files?” He pointed to the corner of the room where several large rolls of paper sat.
I grinned. He wanted me to draw the mysterious files on my tracker, just like I had with the two-hundred and twenty schematic files Dad had hidden on my tracker. I rounded to my desk and opened the center drawer where I kept all my drawing supplies. Grabbing the box of pencils, I looked for a good-sized spool of paper. I unrolled it on the floor beneath the large screens still displaying Jeremy’s and J.W.’s messages.
I accessed the first file, not sure what to expect. It wasn’t a schematic; it looked like a map. I closed it and opened the next file, another map. I opened the third and found the same. Were these all maps? I skipped to the final file, expecting a map, but instead found the schematics I was looking for. After a quick search of the hundred or so files, I saw the majority were plans for various pieces of technology. The rest were maps. I scanned the files, searching for something familiar until I found what I was looking for.
“Bailen, I think there’s a schematic for that box. Want to download that file?” It would be faster than me drawing the whole thing out.
His face lit up, but there was worry behind his eyes. “I think those files better stay on your tracker just in case there’s something nasty hiding in them.”
I nodded. “Drawing it is.” I smiled, secretly excited to not only draw but also to have found my purpose in all this again.
As I examined the image, searching for where to start my drawing, I grabbed a couple of pencils, finding a tip that wasn’t too sharp or dull. My hand floated over the page. The pencil scratched across the paper in a familiar rhythm as muscle memory took over.
Before I knew it, I had a complete drawing in front of me.
“Want to take a look?” I noticed for the first time all the components Bailen had removed from the box scattered across the table. There were so many. I wondered if he’d left anything in it.
“Yeah, I’m hoping it will shed some light on what I’m looking at.” He rounded the table and knelt on the floor next to me. His gaze moved across the page like he was solving a complicated math problem in his head.
After a long silence, he pointed to an area toward the top of the schematic. “Is there any more detail about this component?” He pulled a particularly mangled piece of equipment from his pocket. “I think that’s this part, but it’s too badly damaged to tell exactly what it is.”
“I’m not sure. There’s lots more schematics in this data.” I closed my eyes and opened another file, inspecting it closely. Then I opened my eyes and looked at my drawing. As I scanned the page, I found a component in the bottom right corner that matched the dimensions.
I opened a second file to test my theory and quickly located the matching component on my drawing. “These other files are the schematics for the individual components. Let me see if I can find that one and draw it next.”
“Sounds like a plan. I’ll keep working on the box while this program continues to run analysis on the other data we downloaded from your tracker. Let me know when you get this one drawn out.”
“You got it.” I grabbed a new pencil and unrolled more paper, then set to work opening files until I found the schematic for the component in question.
Partway through, I noticed a tracker message from J.W.
J.W.: Anything I can help with?
K.W.: Not unless you can move this data onto Bailen’s computer without compromising our network.
J.W.: No.
I sighed, knowing the request was too good to be true. Then the three dots appeared again.
J.W.: But I can tell you about the box and the different components inside.
K.W.: What about this one?
I shared an image of the component in our chat.
J.W.: It’s a sequencer.
K.W.: What’s that?
J.W.: It allows for one person to process a lot of data quickly.
“Bailen!”
“What?” When he looked up from the box, his expression changed to concern.
“You were right to focus on that component. I think it’s the key to everything Scurry was trying to do. Or at least that’s what J.W. is telling me.”
He glanced at the big screen, but it hadn’t changed from the prior messages. He looked back at me. I nodded once, confirming his suspicions. “It’s like you two have a secret bond or something.”
My cheeks grew warm, but not out of guilt. More because of the unspoken bond I felt with this computer program or whatever it was. It may not be Jake, but there was definitely an unexplainable connection there. “Something like that. Maybe he’s looking out for me.” The minute the words came out, I knew it had more than one meaning. It was like Jake was watching over me from beyond.
“That’s one strange guardian angel. But I’m glad you have extra protection. I don’t know what I’d do if I lost you.” Bailen smiled, but it wasn’t full-on. He understood the pain Peyton had been through, but also knew how lucky he was not to have experienced it to the same level. “Tell me more about this component.”
“J.W. told me it’s a sequencer.”
“That explains a lot.”
“You know what that is?” Of course he did. The guy had devoted his life to tech, especially the obsolete kind.
He nodded as if it was a simple piece of code he’d committed to memory. “This is the reason why Scurry can control more than one person at once. I don’t know how I didn’t think of this before.” He stared off into a void, looking for answers. “If this one is damaged, that means he has at least one more. I don’t know the exact computing power of this box, but the more of these he has, the more people he can control at once.”
“If we find the others, we cut Scurry off at the knees?”
“Yep. But we also need to figure out how he’s running this backup network. The only question is, where is he hiding all this?”
I shrugged. But despite the mystery, it all made a bit more sense now. Then an idea struck me.
“We have a lot of location data on Scurry. Maybe we start there.” I looked up at the screen with all the chat conversations and data from my tracker.
“Process of elimination. I like it.” Bailen pulled a chair up to his terminal. The large screens went blank, and then the chat logs appeared on them. “Let’s setup a timeline.”
I closed my eyes and retraced the last few days of events. “The most recent conversation is from the current facility we put him in after capture. Prior to that, he was in the run-down SuperMax. Did he ever leave?”
“I’ll bring up the spreadsheet Lydia created. She was cross-referencing location data.” Bailen leaned closer to his screen and used the scroll wheel on the mouse to read through the data. “Looks like he left the prison twice and went to the same coordinates.” Bailen grew silent. The quiet clicking of the keyboard filled the void. “Why go back to prison if he could leave?”
I revisited the in-person conversation I’d had with Scurry. “He said staying in SuperMax was the perfect cover. No one would suspect him if he stayed. But he left twice, which means wherever he went and whatever he had to do there was important enough to risk blowing his cover.”
“I’m trying to pull up the coordinates from the IP address on the map.” When Bailen stopped typing, a giant map appeared on the overhead screens. A red circle indicated the spot. As he zoomed in on the area, I looked at the few surrounding roads and cities, but it didn’t look familiar.
“Can you switch it to satellite mode?” I asked, hoping the sight of trees and buildings might help spur my memory.
The image morphed into a wooded area with a large clearing and a barn next to a farmhouse. A second smaller house sat off in the distance.
“You’ve got to me kidding me.” My body filled with rage. Scurry had run me around secret passageways at that stupid farmhouse and threatened me. The whole time, he was hiding more secrets there, barely outside my grasp.
“What?” Bailen asked, but when he met my gaze, his expression softened. “You know this place?”
“You should, too. It was part of Scurry’s demented scavenger hunt. He ran me through secret passageways and locked rooms before confronting me via video feed.” I cursed under my breath. I knew he’d been toying with me this whole time, but I shouldn’t have been surprised that the layers to his misdirection knew no bounds.
“We went there but never found any passageways. Think you can draw me a map of them?” A glint of excitement lit up within Bailen’s eyes.
“Maybe, but I’m not sure it would do much good. It was all underground and had revolving rooms. I doubt any of it would make sense, but I’m happy to share what I remember.”
As soon as I finished talking, a notification from J.W. appeared in the corner of my vision. I blinked and opened it.
J.W.: You don’t need to remember.
K.W.: What do you mean?
J.W.: You have everything you need already.
I had everything I needed? I wasn’t sure what that meant.
J.W.: I’ll show you.
A dozen files from Scurry’s data opened in my field of vision. The images rotated and rearranged themselves like J.W. was putting a puzzle together before my eyes. When he finished, there was a gigantic map with multiple levels, floor plans for the three buildings on the property as well as numerous secret passageways that ran underground. It was a maze of tunnels. The few I’d traversed were a small fraction of what this map showed.
“Bailen, you’re not going to believe this. Those files I got from Scurry are not only schematics but also maps to the farmhouse and all its underground passageways. J.W. put them together for me. We have a comprehensive map of the entire property.”
I paused. It all seemed too easy. We finally had an advantage. But every time I thought we had one, it crumbled before me. I thought back to when we’d fought Scurry, how I’d brute forced his tracker and the connection to everyone in the room. I had overloaded his tracker the same way I had my own tracker and the network in the past. Similar to when I’d unlocked the files hidden on my tracker from Dad, I accessed files from my connection to Scurry. There didn’t appear to be any trap to spring, just large amounts of data Scurry never imagined I’d gain access to. Maybe we actually had some fortune on our side this time.
“Finally, a breakthrough.” Bailen gave me an inquisitive look.
“I’m on it. We can send copies to the others.” I paused, the convenience of the situation still eating away at me.
Bailen closed the gap between us and pulled me into a tight hug. “What is it?”
“Doesn’t this all feel just a little too easy? I know we’re due some good luck, but something doesn’t feel right about this.”
“I think awareness is the first step. As long as we know it’s too good to be true, we can keep an eye out for surprises.”
“I think it’s more than surprises. He wants us to find him. I’m not sure why, though.”
Bailen leaned in and kissed me long and slow enough to drive the worry out of my mind for a small fraction of time. “Regardless of what he’s up to, we’ll do this together.”
