The Siren's Code

A break through at last

Jay had been up for a while when Bear came down and made a fresh pot of coffee, standing in the open plan kitchen waiting for it to brew the curve of the french windows visible through the sitting room he looked out into the thick jungle, the valley not even visible through the low cloaking cloud as if their hilltop was floating, like them, in limbo.

He looked round at his brother in the dining room, another makeshift comms room, phads, projection screens, old school maps and mugs covering the large mahogany table.

"More coffee?"

"Yeah thanks bro," Jay rubbed his face holding out a dirty mug to his brother. They'd had a few setbacks and he wasn't as far along as he would like to be.

The gang had travelled further north than they had expected docking along the coast of Honduras around four pm on new years day, they must have had substantial spare battery packs on the boat, as even with the Solar boost EV engine of the Hacker-Craft Margo and Yossi couldn't stay the duration stopping on the island of Utila to recharge and most likely get some rest. Jay had registered Remi's surprise at this, it had set them back considerably as without the intel from the Hacker-Craft Bear and Jay were on the wrong side of the border, picking their way across mountainous old smuggling routes with the help of Bear's drone but it didn't make for a speedy crossing.

On top of that Cassie's tracker had been intermittent, a GPS pet tracker was no match for the dense mountain jungle that is Belize. There should have been sporadic signals as the vehicle Cassie was transferred into passed through clearings, but to make matters worse he had been locked out of his pet tracker account, the company citing malicious activity, so even intermittent signals were useless as he couldn't access them.

Seven's team were awaiting orders in Prince Barracks just north of their current location, but that communication was intermittent as well as their secure channels seemed to be jammed, and they knew local networks would be being monitored. His suspicions were aroused but he'd just needed to work with what he had and that was Carlos.

Señor Martinez had been true to his word, he slept on the Surefly, freshened up when they arrived at Sahara's finca and then started to talk. Remi coaxing a stream of information out of him. Gabby meanwhile had logged back into her UNAM account, deflected a million messages and notifications and set up a new project in her paralegal app FastCase. She added each name as Pa mentioned them, confirming mugshots from the system's auto-suggest, connecting people and detail from what they knew, to create a mind map. Then setting the AI to do its work, scraping the universe to bring in any data out there – from socials, payments, CCTV, IOT, biometrics – you can't even start a car or enter a house these days without letting it know who you are. There is nowhere to hide from an AI that knows where to look, connecting dots and recognising patterns. By the time Bear and Jay turned up she had quite the projection set up on the end wall. Enough to impress Bear, Jay noticed, even through the weight of severe tiredness – they hit the sack and started again early the next morning.

With Bear's help there was now a location map added to the mix and a colourful data visualisation mapping a network of dense areas of activity highlighting residences, meeting rooms, possible labs, storage depots, smaller gang headquarters and illegal tech hubs. Clearly documenting their movements in real time overlaid on the past week, months and year. Burner phones may be being used for their dirty work but everyday life is too interconnected not to be captured across the wall lighting up the cartel and related gang operations like a Christmas tree. Its branches stretching out towards the Belize jungle that Jay was now looking at, but again the thick canopy acted as a faraday cage.

Non of it possible without Carlo's knowledge as previously they had not had enough names for the algorithms to crunch. By the time the CIA came to take them into witness protection Carlos had given them a lot more than they would have had with all these blackout anomalies, and this map was quite literally the DEA's idea of cartel gold, but Bear and Gabby had spent extra time before the CIA swooped in to collect them to remove schools and family related data from the evidence gathering.