The Emperor's Revenge

NINETEEN

By the time the coast guard arrived at Vlorë Castle, Erion Kula and his family were aboard the Oregon, the RHIB was stowed, and the ship had hightailed it out of the area. After making sure Kula’s children and aunt were given fresh clothes and a hot meal, Juan went down to the infirmary to check on Gretchen’s injury.

Julia Huxley, the ship’s Navy-trained chief medical officer, was applying a dressing to Gretchen’s thigh when he arrived in the sick bay. Despite having just attended to Gretchen’s bloody leg, Julia’s customary white lab coat remained spotless as it draped over her voluptuous curves. Her ponytail bobbed as she finished taping the gauze.

“How are you?” Juan asked Gretchen.

“Annoyed with myself. Ten years in the service and I never got shot.”

“Could have been worse. Has she been a good patient?” Juan asked Julia.

Julia smiled. “Could have been worse. She’s a tough one. Refused morphine, so I stuck her with a local anesthetic. The bullet hit the quadriceps, a lateral through and through. Luckily, the round didn’t tumble, so there was no serious damage, although it’s going to hurt like a mother when the anesthetic wears off.”

“Can she walk?”

“I wouldn’t recommend running any marathons for a few weeks, but she should be hobbling around just fine in a day or so.”

“A day or so?” Gretchen said. “I’m not waiting here that long. We have to interrogate Whyvern.” When she sat up, the cut-open flap of her pant leg flopped to the side. She looked down at her exposed leg and said, “Maybe I should get changed first.”

“Already took care of it,” Juan said, handing her a clean change of clothes and shoes that he had fetched from her cabin. She took them and ducked behind the curtain.

“How did the kids look to you?” Juan asked Julia as he waited. She had checked them over before tending to Gretchen’s wound.

“Malnourished and scared, but they shouldn’t have any lasting physical effects. The aunt looks pretty haggard and bruised, but she refused an examination. I’d like to string up whoever did this to them.”

“Don’t worry. Their captors got the worst of it. They won’t be bothering anyone again.”

Julia glanced at the curtain and lowered her voice. “So this is the missus, huh?”

“Fake missus. I had a real missus at the time we were partnered up.”

“Oh” was all Julia said, though her raised eyebrow invited more info that Juan wasn’t about to share.

“I’m ready,” Gretchen said as she pulled back the curtain. Her leg gave way suddenly, and Juan rushed over to keep her from toppling onto the floor. He put his arm around her waist while she leaned a hand on his shoulder.

“Thanks for the patch job, Doc,” Gretchen said.

Julia stuck a bottle of pills in her hand. “Take one of these if the pain gets too bad.”

As they exited, Juan caught Julia giving him a knowing smile.

By the time they reached the wardroom where Murph and MacD were watching over Kula, Gretchen needed to steady herself with her hand lightly on Juan’s arm. She eased into a chair opposite Kula, while Juan remained standing.

“I want to thank you again for saving my children and aunt,” Kula said. “But I must ask what you are going to do with us now.”

“Your family is being well taken care of,” Juan said. “After you tell us what we want to know, we’ll let you all go. If, that is, we’re convinced you aren’t ShadowFoe. Do you have other family back in Albania?”

“No. But I have cousins who immigrated to Greece, on the island of Corfu. We would be safe there.”

Knowing that Max was listening to the conversation and would already be changing course for Corfu, Juan said, “Now, you said you know how we can find this hacker?”

Kula shifted uncomfortably in his chair. “What I said was that I’d help you find her. The problem is that I don’t actually know who she is.”

“What makes you think ShadowFoe is a woman?” Gretchen asked. “Have you seen her?”

“Well, no. I don’t know what she looks like. I only know her through our online communications.”

“Then ShadowFoe could be a sixty-year-old man, for all you know,” Murph said. “Or a teenager emailing you from his parents’ basement.”

“That is true,” Kula said. “I don’t know for sure. But the way she words things in her emails is more like the women I work with than the men. I can’t put my finger on it better than that. But I do know that she is the best coder I’ve ever worked with.”

“So you did work with her,” Juan said.

“For five years. We started by trading viruses and Trojan horses that we’d written. Then we moved up to ransomware.”

When Juan glanced at Murph for an explanation, he said, “It’s malware that’s installed when a user clicks on an infected link or opens an app from a spam email. The installed app then locks up your computer, and the only way to get it unlocked is to pay the creator a ransom to receive the password. If you don’t pay, your PC becomes a brick. Bye-bye, data.”

Kula shrugged, seemingly both proud of his ability and embarrassed by his deeds. “It was good money. If people weren’t so gullible, we wouldn’t make anything. Their idea of computer security is a joke.”

“I’m sure you taught them a valuable lesson,” Juan said sarcastically. “Why were you in an Albanian mobster’s castle?”

“I got… uh… too curious, let’s say, about a new project ShadowFoe wanted me to work on. She found out and didn’t like it. Really didn’t like it, as a matter of fact. So she told Simaku that I was stealing from him and sent him false evidence of the theft. I’m sure she hoped he would have me killed. Instead, he took my children and forced me to work for him. When she found out I was still alive, she must have pinned the Credit Condamine attack on me.”

“The project you got curious about was the bank heist?”

Kula shook his head. “That was just the first part of the full operation. The endgame is much bigger than a simple bank theft.”

MacD chafed at that. “Simple? She and the people she’s working with wiped out half the Monaco Grand Prix to cover their tracks.”

“And do you think they would have gone to all that trouble for the money in a single bank? Believe me, there are less risky ways to break into computers and steal.”

Juan took a seat on the table. “What are they planning?”

“I don’t know.”

“You know something or ShadowFoe wouldn’t have gone after you.”

“I’m sure she thought I discovered more than I did. All I got were bits and pieces, really.”

“You just couldn’t help yourself,” Murph said with a knowing shake of his head. “You broke into her computer system, didn’t you?”

Kula nodded. “The things she was asking me for were so bizarre that I wanted to find out more. I had no idea she was so ruthless or I never would have looked.”

“What did you find?” Juan asked. “What was she asking you for?”

“She wanted me to write a program for her that would let her change the settings on industrial protective relays. They’re the microprocessors that control circuit breakers. When a protective relay detects an overload condition, it trips the breakers to prevent damage to an electrical circuit.”

“Why would she want that?”

“That was exactly my question. We’re not talking about the kind of breaker that would keep a shorted hair dryer from causing your lights to pop out. She was aiming at huge power station breakers that could take out a city grid. I gave her some info about the breaker control software, but I didn’t end up writing the code. My ethics may be questionable, but even I know taking out a power system of that size gets whole countries after you.”

“And asking her what she was doing wasn’t an option,” Gretchen said.

“Of course not. So I backtracked her IP address. It was spoofed very well, but I had discovered some of her favorite methods when I was working with her in the past. But when I found her computer and hacked in, she had only a few files on it that weren’t encrypted. Most of them were irrelevant, but I found an obscure folder buried down deep. It was marked Dynamo Op Res.”

“Op Res could mean ‘operation research,’” Murph said. “Was Dynamo the code word they were using for the operation?”

Kula shrugged. “She never told me they had a name for it.”

“What was in the files?” Juan asked.

“It was bizarre. There were notes about Napoleon’s invasion of Russia in 1812 and a subsequent search for his treasure.”

“What treasure?” Gretchen asked.

“According to the files I found, Napoleon attacked Russia in the summer of 1812 with one of the biggest armies ever assembled until that point, over six hundred and fifty thousand men.”

Juan nodded. “Yes, and it ended up being one of the greatest military disasters in history. Russia pioneered the scorched-earth tactic, leaving nothing for Napoleon’s army to forage. He retreated from Moscow in December, during a particularly brutal winter, and crossed back over the Russian border with fewer than thirty thousand soldiers.”

“But what most people don’t realize,” Kula continued, “was that Napoleon looted everything he could along the way. The Russians weren’t able to take all their valuables with them when they fled in front of Napoleon’s army, and the fires were concentrated on the food stores and lodging. When Le Général reached Moscow, much of it was still intact, including the Kremlin. It is thought that the French acquired two hundred wagonloads of gold, gems, antique weapons, and other valuables.”

“What happened to it?” Murph asked.

“No one knows. When Napoleon began the retreat, he took the treasure with him, but they were losing horses at a staggering rate due to the cold and hunger. Two hundred thousand horses are estimated to have died. Many of the soldiers ate them or cut them open and crawled into their bellies for warmth. Because of the shortage of horses, Napoleon had to abandon the treasure along the way. The amount of gold alone could be worth hundreds of millions of dollars. Some think he sunk the entire treasure in a lake, but no one’s been able to find it in two hundred years.”

Gretchen shook her head in disbelief. “What does this have to do with a bank heist and shutting down electrical systems?”

“Most of the files in the folder were unreadable, but I found mentions of banking system encryption algorithms and utility maps of Europe. There’s definitely some kind of connection. I also found the PDF of a letter from a French naval lieutenant named Pierre Delacroix. It was secretly sent to a French businessman after Napoleon supposedly died.”

Juan narrowed his eyes at Kula. “What do you mean ‘supposedly’?”

“I don’t speak French, so my online translation may have been spotty. But it seems that the businessman hired Delacroix to abduct Napoleon from St. Helena in order to help him find the treasure. According to Delacroix, the abduction was a success.”

“Wait a minute,” MacD interjected. “Ah’ve been to Les Invalides in Paris. That’s where Napoleon is buried. He died on St. Helena, in 1821.”

“That’s the year the letter is dated,” Kula said. “They supposedly carried him away on a submarine called the Stingray.”

MacD laughed. “Oh, come on! A submarine? Mah kid could come up with a better story than that.”

“I thought the same thing. But Smithsonian magazine had an article about real plans for such a rescue by some of his most fanatical followers. Now it looks like someone actually went through with it.”

Murph, who was tapping on his tablet, said, “He’s right. I just found the article. The sub was based on one designed by Robert Fulton, the same guy who invented the steamboat. He demonstrated it for Napoleon’s navy, but they thought it wasn’t practical even though the test was a success. Fulton’s sub was called the Nautilus.”

“Did this Delacroix find the treasure?” Juan asked Kula.

“The letter didn’t say. The reason Delacroix wrote it was because Napoleon had some demands before he would lead them to the treasure. The emperor also implied that he left behind clues to its whereabouts on St. Helena to suggest that someone else might find it first. He had been planning to smuggle the information off the island so that the treasure could be found by his loyalists and fund his triumphant rescue.”

“What were the clues?”

“He wouldn’t reveal them, but Delacroix suspected that they may have been in a book he left behind. Napoleon ripped some pages from it before they escaped, but the information on those pages seemed to be incomplete.”

“What book?”

“Homer’s Odyssey. It’s also called Napoleon’s Diary. ShadowFoe was intent on getting it in the hope that it would lead them to the treasure.”

“And she might,” Murph said, looking at his tablet. “It’s being auctioned off in Malta in two days.”

Gretchen put up her hands. “Just stop. Let me get this straight. ShadowFoe and her cronies broke into Credit Condamine and threatened to take down the banking system, while at the same time asking you for help in causing some kind of electrical outage. And all of that is related in some unknown way to finding Napoleon’s lost Russian treasure using a diary the emperor left behind after he was supposedly kidnapped from exile without anyone realizing it?”

Kula gave her a halfhearted grin. “I did mention it was bizarre.”

Gretchen pounded a fist on the table and pointed a finger at Kula. “I think you’re making all of this up to get out of being put in prison for helping them plan the bank heist.”

“I swear it’s the truth! I can prove it!”

“How?”

“I couldn’t copy the files, but I took screenshots and uploaded them to a private file-sharing site.” He rattled off the URL and password to Murph, who put the information into his tablet.

“Got it,” he said. “The files are all here. I see the letter, but I don’t read French.”

Gretchen reached for the tablet, and Murph handed it over. She took a few minutes to read it and looked up with an astonished expression when she was finished. “If this document is authentic, Kula is telling the truth.”

Juan shared her surprise, but he also felt the same confusion about the links between such strange events. “It still doesn’t explain how everything fits together. We need to track down ShadowFoe. Can you do it?”

“You know everything I do now,” Kula said. “They want Napoleon’s Diary badly. I think that’s your best chance of finding her.”

Juan shook his head. “The auction is still two days away. I don’t want to wait. You said you traced her computer. Where was it?”

“At sea.”

“ShadowFoe was on a ship?”

Kula nodded. “Somewhere in the Mediterranean. I don’t know what type or the name of it. But I did find a coded reference to a refitting the ship had undergone recently that leads me to think she may be Russian, possibly in the military.”

“Why?”

“Because it was done at the Primorskiy Kray Naval Base near Vladivostok.”

Juan felt a chill in his stomach. He slowly stood up and turned to MacD. “You and Murph take Kula to his kids. I don’t think this guy is ShadowFoe. We’ll drop him off in Corfu as promised.” He turned back to Kula. “We’ll inform Interpol to meet you there.”

Kula protested, “But I’ve helped you—”

“And we appreciate it. If what you’ve told us proves useful, we’ll recommend that you be shown leniency.”

“Who knows?” Gretchen said. “If you play your cards right, Interpol might even offer you a job. It’s better to recruit hackers than fight them.”

That seemed to mollify Kula. MacD blindfolded him for the walk through the secret parts of the ship and left with Murph.

Gretchen frowned at Juan. “What’s the matter? You look like you’ve just seen a zombie.”

“More like a clone. ShadowFoe must have some powerful allies.”

“What are you talking about?”

Juan took a seat opposite her. “The Primorskiy Kray Naval Base is known for outfitting ships with the latest weapons technology. Nationality isn’t a barrier. They sell to the highest bidders.”

“How do you know that?”

“Because that’s where we refitted the Oregon.”