The Prisoner's Gold

1

Hector Garcia couldn’t have cared less about the view.

He was there to hack.

Garcia was oblivious to the panoramic landscape of the Rocky Mountains outside the windows of the suite he had leased on the upper floor of the CenturyLink Tower. He hadn’t rented the office for the scenery but for its proximity to the roof of the second tallest building in Denver — and its array of antennas, satellite dishes, and telecommunications equipment. As it was, he had covered most of the windows with thick tinting to reduce the glare on his monitors and to regulate the temperature inside the suite.

The room was kept at a perfect sixty degrees from the industrial-strength air conditioning unit that constantly battled the heat output of the room’s vast collection of computing hardware. Three racks of enterprise-grade servers and switches from Juniper Networks, Cisco, and half a dozen other vendors filled one wall of the room. An adjacent office held the rest of his system in row after row of next-generation devices that resembled stacks in a public library.

The wood floor of the main room was littered with overlapping power cords and network cables, and Garcia lived in the middle like a spider in its web. A collection of tables was configured in a circle, with a small gap to access his comfortable office chair in the center. A total of twenty-four screens — two rings of twelve monitors — encircled the single seat like the walls of a fortress.

In front of the monitors was an assortment of wireless keyboards, mice, track pads, web cameras, and other peripherals, plus an unopened package of Twinkies. Garcia would save the snack cakes for later. He never ate or drank at the desk, preferring to eat in the kitchen down the hall or on the mattress he had thrown in the corner. He’d seen too many people ruin a good system with a spilled can of Mountain Dew. The Twinkies were only there to remind him to get up once in a while to eat.

In his early years as a hacker, Garcia often went to bed hungry because he had spent all of his money on computer equipment instead of food, but money was no longer a problem since he had been hired by an enigmatic Frenchman named Jean-Marc Papineau to assist a team of specialists in finding the world’s most famous treasures.

The first mission had taken the team to the Carpathian Mountains in search of a missing Romanian train. Then they were asked to find the tomb of Alexander the Great in the vast Egyptian desert. After a devastating tragedy on the mission, Papineau had reluctantly paid the surviving team members a portion (twenty percent) of their agreed-upon fee (five million dollars each) while placing the rest of their money in separate trust funds that they couldn’t touch as long as they continued to work on his team. They still hadn’t received payment for their second mission, but Garcia wasn’t the least bit concerned about the money.

In a matter of seconds, he would be forty million dollars richer.

As his eyes skimmed financial transactions on twelve of the monitors, he watched as funds simply disappeared from the accounts of several would-be dictators in Africa, a Ukrainian mobster, and a few corrupt politicians in America before reappearing in an offshore account of his own. To Garcia, it was blood money that none of them deserved, and he was one of the few people in the world who could do anything about it. He would keep two of the forty million as working capital and anonymously donate the rest to charities. The only thing money got him personally was the promise of more computing power, but as long as he maintained his association with Papineau and his team, that would never be a problem.

Five of his monitors were hooked into a quantum computer manufactured by Payne Industries and maintained by Papineau in the team’s headquarters in Florida. Each of the five connections had been established through a back door that Garcia had installed into the quantum. Papineau was aware of and occasionally tracked one of these connections, but the other four would remain undetected as long as Garcia had access to a keyboard.

Once the money had been moved, Garcia shifted his focus to the monitors that he used to keep tabs on his team. They had been on vacation since the last mission had ended in November, but he kept track of their whereabouts through a combination of facial recognition software, Papineau’s super-computer, and ubiquitous camera feeds. Garcia could pull footage from a variety of sources from cell phones to security systems. This gave him almost constant supervision of his targets, as long as they didn’t stray too far into the wilderness.

And for those times there were NSA satellites.

He knew Jack Cobb, the team’s leader, had entered the United Kingdom at London’s Heathrow airport, but once he had left the terminal, he had slipped off Garcia’s grid. Cobb wasn’t aware that Garcia was spying on him, but he was quite familiar with facial recognition software and was cagey about cameras all the time.

Papineau was also good at avoiding cameras, but in the Frenchman’s case he knew he was being followed — not only by Garcia but by his employer as well.

The other team members, Sarah Ellis and Josh McNutt, were far easier to catch on screen. Sarah had spent some of her money decorating a small apartment in San Francisco. And one in Dallas. And another one in Toronto. Garcia wasn’t sure why she had so many places, but he assumed it had something to do with her career as a world-class thief.

Or rather, a world-class ‘acquisitions specialist’.

Sarah hated when people called her a thief.

Meanwhile, McNutt had surprised everyone with his recent purchase. The former Marine sniper had spent half of his funds on a beachside bar in Key West, Florida. He lived on the second floor and mostly kept to himself, unless his biker buddies stopped by. Garcia had expected wild orgies with hookers and drugs and more hookers, but McNutt was laying low as Cobb had recommended. Today he was snoozing in a hammock near the shore.

A transaction on one of his monitors completed with a soft ping, and Garcia swiveled his chair around to see the money that he had looted from the son of the former Nigerian president, who had swindled billions from his government’s coffers. The former leader had died in office, but his son was living a cushy life in the south of France. Every month, Garcia lightened his fortune by a few million. No one in his family had yet to even notice.

A second ping confirmed the stolen funds had been sent to fifteen NGOs in Nigeria. Garcia smiled at the transactions, just as his cell phone started to ring. He glanced at the screen and saw it was Papineau calling. He leaned forward in his chair, muted the master volume on his system, and answered the phone.

‘Good afternoon, Jean-Marc. What can I do for you today?’

‘I have another job for the team. Can you please call them in for me?’

‘Right now?’

‘Yes, Hector, right now. It’s time to get back to work.’

‘Yes, sir. But just so you know, Sarah isn’t going to be happy.’

‘Why not?’

Garcia glanced at one of his monitors and grimaced. ‘Right now, she’s kind of busy.’