Devious Origins

CHAPTER 29

I arrived at the factory around 11 AM the next day, wishing it could have been sooner. My morning classes had to compete with contemplation of criminal conspiracies. I was physically in attendance, but my thoughts were elsewhere. Walking up to the lair, I could feel my body and mind finally synchronize.

Homeless Joe's truck was parked back in its usual spot, and Joe was sitting on the tailgate reading a newspaper. He waved, and I waved back. I approached the main door, finding it locked again. I used the keys Dee had recently given me to let myself in. The team was again arranged around the makeshift coffee tables, printouts and computer tablets covering the surfaces.

"I see Joe is back," I commented as I approached.

"Yeah, I told him it might not be safe here," Dee replied, "but that just made him more determined to stay."

"More determined?"

"He says he's standing guard. I asked him to come inside, but he still has a thing about buildings."

Dee really seems to inspire loyalty in people. "You really think its not safe here?" I asked.

"Well we did just kick the hornet's nest in a big way. No telling how they might respond. That's why we're keeping the doors locked, and I've asked Ruth to keep the kids away."

"Maybe we should have had this meeting at the Intergalactic," I mused. "It's a public setting, and they might not even know we go there."

"I'm not letting them chase me out my lair just yet. We've a few more days before they can evict us."

I dropped onto one of the sofas and gazed at the materials scattered across the coffee tables. "Any luck with the data mining?"

"Some," Liz answered. "No smoking guns yet, but we're definitely getting a sense of the scale of things."

"It's quite the tangled web," Brian continued. "We couldn't find a lot of specifics. We've mostly mapped out the dimensions by following the trail of deletions. The Freedom Birthright Foundation gets most of its funding through donations, and some of those are public, but most are not. We couldn't get direct access to any of the financial data; it was all behind a firewall on a completely different network. We did manage to trace a lot of those deleted emails back to their sources. We mostly couldn't reproduce the messages themselves, but we at least managed to put probable names to the IP addresses."

Liz handed me a printout. "It's like a who's who of the rich and powerful. We've only dug into a few so far, but that includes a couple of multi-millionaires, a well known news anchor, and a federal appellate judge. The surprising thing is how their politics don't always line up with those of the Foundation. In fact, we're having a hard time finding much of a pattern at all. I've added additional external data sources into our analysis. Social media, public court records, credit reports... Cerebro will ping us if it finds something."

"Cerebro?" I had to know what that was.

"It's our compute cluster," Brian explained, "I wanted to call it Colossus, but she wouldn't go for it."

"I never liked that movie," Liz responded. "It's depressing."

"It's prophetic," Brian insisted. "Personally, I welcome our eventual cybernetic overlords. I think the computers will do a much better job of running things."

Liz just rolled her eyes. "Anyway, like I was saying, we're running more analysis and hoping to dig out some patterns."

I flipped through the list of names Liz had handed me. A few seemed familiar, but I couldn't place where I knew them. Rich and powerful. Undoubtedly some of these people were in the news on occasion. "We can see the pieces and where they sit on the board, but we still don't know what their game is." I handed the list to Dee.

"They play it well, that's for sure." Dee flipped through the list. No great revelations appeared to her either. "It's frustrating as all hell, actually. We know they're corrupt from the bottoms of their feet to their hundred dollar haircuts, but we can't pin anything on them. They've been careful."

"We'll figure it out," Liz declared confidently. "Brian will babysit Cerebro tonight, and I'll pitch in again tomorrow."

Brian leaned over and loudly whispered, "She's got a hot date tonight."

"Shut up, you." Liz drove an elbow into her brother's side.

"Ow! It's not like it's a secret. The two of you have been flirting with each other on social media for weeks now."

"That's not flirting, it's socializing. You should try it some day."

"Hey, I socialize," Brian insisted.

"Playing Counterstrike with your on-line pals does not count as socializing. You need to have real conversations."

"I want to hear more about this hot date," Dee interjected.

"It's not a date really," Liz replied. "Well, I don't think so. She's just a friend really. I'll tell you tomorrow if it was a date."

Dee smiled. "I'm just happy to know you get away from the screen sometimes. It's important to have some balance in your life."

"And when was the last time you did something purely social?" I asked.

"Superheroism requires sacrifice," Dee insisted. "I'll party after we take the villain down."

I was about to ask how that qualified as a balanced approach but was interrupted by a bell like tone from one of the tablets.

"Cerebro has something for us," Brian explained as he scooped up the device. He spent a few seconds tapping at the screen. "It's a first pass at profiles to go with our list of names." He handed the tablet to Dee, and she began scrolling through the files. Liz brought open a copy on her tablet as well. I watched over her shoulder as she browsed the data.

Something caught my eye. "Wait a second... go back one screen."

Liz scrolled backwards, then handed me the tablet. "This mean something to you?"

"I'm not sure. Maybe. This guy looks familiar, but I can't place why." I read through the profile. CEO of a pharmaceutical company. Married with four children. Graduated from... Penbrooke College, Louisiana. That had to be more than a coincidence. I scrolled to another profile. This one graduated from a west coast school. No connection there. The next one was from Harvard. I scrolled on, glancing at their pictures and details of their lives. Schools, careers, hometowns. I didn't know what I was looking for. It seemed unlikely I would find a pattern that Cerebro had missed, but I kept looking. Then I came to another profile picture that looked familiar.

"Oh my god." I exclaimed as I jumped up.

"What?" They all asked the question nearly simultaneously.

I held up my hand, quieting them as I read the details of the profile, then began pacing around the sofas as I tried to get my head around the ramifications of what I had discovered.

"What is it?" Dee asked again.

I didn't answer, but instead headed for the door. The rest of the team followed. I flung the door open and headed straight for Homeless Joe's truck. He seemed a bit wary as I approached, so I slowed my pace and tried to be unimposing as I showed him the tablet and spoke.

"Joe, I think it's time you told us about the demons."