The Kraken Project

47

William Echevarria worked late, as he often did, glad of the peace and quiet after the rest of the staff had gone home. He was still a little shaken up by the strange visit he had had that morning. The more he thought about it, the less worried he was about that N-400 false statement. That had been twelve years ago. He was a successful entrepreneur, a wealthy man, and he had powerful friends over in the valley. It was unthinkable that they would try to take away his citizenship. Sure, the FCC might make him jump through a few hoops, but he ran a tight ship and had been in strict compliance from the beginning.

After those two men had left, Echevarria had checked up on them. They were indeed who they’d said they were. The young one with the long hair, Moro, had an old criminal record for computer hacking. The WASP dude, Lansing, seemed clean. Echevarria decided to dismiss the odd incident as a clash of cultures, the thuggish New York stock trading culture meeting the sophisticated and educated Silicon Valley dot-com culture. Maybe that was the way certain elements did business in New York. Echevarria was glad he lived in a civilized place where that sort of behavior was frowned upon.

He rose and went to the kitchenette adjacent to his office, filled a kettle with water, and turned it on to boil. He took out the Japanese iron teapot, rinsed out the old leaves, and tossed in some jasmine pearls flowering tea. He hummed as he waited for the kettle to boil. When it began to whistle, he took it off the heat and stuck in a thermometer: 210. He waited, humming, until the temperature had dropped to 204 degrees, and then poured it in the teapot. The flowery scent of jasmine rose in curls of steam.

It all exploded into stars. A moment later he found himself on the floor, his head clearing, with a nasty buzz in his ears and a wrenching headache. Two ugly men in tracksuits stood over him, one with his sneaker planted on his chest and gripping a wrecking bar, the other aiming a pistol with a fat silencer at his head. The men had black hair, acne-pitted faces, and looked foreign. Echevarria felt wetness creeping down his scalp — he was bleeding. He had been hit on the back of the head. He felt slow, stupid, confused. As he tried to move, he realized his hands and feet were zip-tied.

The one with the foot on his chest leaned down and spoke into his face. “You a marathon runner?”

Echevarria stared back. What was he talking about?

The man took the crowbar and lightly began tapping Echevarria’s knee with it. “You look fit. You a marathon runner?”

Echevarria’s head was starting to clear. He saw, standing in the background, the figure of that fellow who’d come this morning — Moro.

The man leaned closer. “Hello? Anybody home? You gonna answer my question?”

“Um, I once ran a marathon.” What was this all about? It seemed like some sort of dream or nightmare. God, he must be concussed. He just couldn’t seem to think straight.

The wrecking bar moved from his head to his knee again. The man raised it, rapped it hard, painfully, on his kneecap.

“What the hell? What are you doing?”

Another painful crack, even harder. “You waking up?”

“I’m awake. What do you want?”

Moro came into his field of view. He looked nervous, pale, sweaty, his long hair limp. He was scared. “I want the root password to your system.”

“What for?”

Another hard rap on his kneecap. “Listen to the man.”

“Ow! Jesus, you’re going to hurt me. Who are you?”

The two men looked at each other. “The password?”

“No way. Never.”

The man with the gun removed a roll of duct tape and tore off a piece, and with a quick motion plastered it over Echevarria’s mouth. He struggled, trying to get it off, work it loose with his tongue.

The man with the wrecking bar raised it over his head and swung it down on Echevarria’s knee with massive force. Too late, he tried to pivot away. There was a loud thwacking sound, like the breaking of clay, and Echevarria jerked his head back and screamed, only it came out muffled. The pain was so incredible it was impossible to believe it could exist.

The two men stood back and waited while Echevarria thrashed about, sucking air in and out of his nose, making horrible strangled sounds.

The man with the bar knelt down. “Get yourself under control. We’re going to ask you the question again. Calm down. Focus.”

The pain was astronomical, but the mental anguish was worse. His knee was never going to be the same again, he knew that; maybe no more surfing ever.

The man began tapping lightly on his other kneecap.

Mmmmmm, mmmm. He tried to speak, shaking his head back and forth.

“Take off the tape.”

Wrecking Bar ripped the tape off his mouth. He gasped, sputtered, drew in air. There was the face of Moro again, looking down at him. “For God’s sakes, just tell us the password.” His face was white as a sheet, and the sweat was pouring down.

Echevarria told him the password.

“Wait while I check it out.” He went over the subnet, began typing on the main terminal. “It’s good.” He did some more work, copied the customer data onto a flash drive. “Okay, done.”

Now the man with the gun raised it. The other man pressed down on him with his foot.

“No,” said Echevarria. “No, please. I told you the password.”

The shot sounded more like a popgun. Eric Moro jerked his head away, but not before seeing an eruption of red and gray spurt out of the man’s head. They’d said they weren’t going to kill him. They’d said they weren’t going to kill him.

“Come on,” said one of the Kyrgyz brothers, taking his arm roughly, “before the blood gets on your shoes.”

Moro turned, the nausea rising in him. They went out the back door, the way they had come in, into a dark rear parking lot. The security cameras were still dangling from their broken mounts, dripping in the rain, disabled. They got into the car and drove slowly away, this way and that way, while Moro tried to control his rising gorge.

“Hey, man, stop hyperventilating,” one of the Kyrgyz brothers said. “You’re gonna make yourself sick.”

They dropped him off at the inn. He found Lansing having a drink in the lounge, where a wine tasting was going on, with a lot of yuppies in pressed khakis and black mock turtlenecks swirling and tasting. He felt a surge of resentment that Lansing had stayed back.

Lansing motioned him toward a couple of overstuffed chairs in a secluded corner of the room.

“How did it go?” he asked.

Moro was still feeling sick. He swallowed. “You said they weren’t going to kill him.”

“Eric? This is a big-boy’s game now.”

Silence.

“If you’re not in, that’s going to be a major problem, because you’re already an accessory to two murders. You’re way past the point of no return.”

“I’m in.”

“Good. Now, did you get the address?”

Moro told him the address.

“Excellent.” Lansing looked at his watch, murmuring, “We’re going in tonight.”

“I’m sitting this one out.”

A fatherly hand placed itself on Moro’s shoulder. “This is a tough business, I know. I don’t like it, either. But we’re too far in to turn around, and the reward will be extraordinary. You can’t sit it out. Your expertise tonight will be absolutely crucial.”

Moro realized the truth of this.

“Everything’s going to be all right. Have a glass of wine.”

“Aren’t you going in, too?”

Lansing looked at him, laid a reassuring hand on his shoulder. And gave him a little shake. “Of course. We’re partners, aren’t we?”

Moro nodded.

“I want you to focus on how we’re going to do this. We’re going to have to cut power and phone to the house ahead of time. We have a lot of planning to do.”

“Without power,” said Moro, “I’m going to need a portable power source so I can check the router logs.”

“Excellent. This is the kind of planning we need to do. I can see we have a lot of work ahead of us.”

“Another thing: I’m not going to have anything to do with those Kyrgyz guys. I don’t like them. That’s your deal.”

“I’ll handle them. Just follow my orders and all will be well.”

Moro was feeling better. All he had to do was follow orders. Lansing would do the rest.

“You gave me the address. Did you look into the location of the house and the background of the family, like I asked?”

Moro nodded. “The account’s in the name of Daniel F. Gould, 3324 Frenchmans Creek Road. I looked at the place on Google Earth. It’s in the hills behind the town. Isolated. Nearest house a quarter mile away. Gould’s some kind of inventor, owns a company called Charlie’s Robots, Inc. Married with a kid.”

“Robots? Now, that’s interesting,” said Lansing.

“Please tell me you aren’t going to kill them.” Moro felt his voice shaking anew at the thought.

“That’s up to you.”

“What do you mean?”

“It depends on how quickly you can identify the device. And how quickly they cooperate. If all goes well, nobody will get hurt. We get the device and get out. Twenty minutes or less.”

Lansing looked so normal, so calm, talking about this. Maybe he was a true psychopath. Moro almost hoped that was the case — psychopaths were effective. He was frightened of someone getting killed, but he was even more frightened of being caught.

“We’ll go in at midnight,” said Lansing. “Let’s get to work and set up this operation.”