Puzzle by Nora Phoenix
16
Seth yawned, stretching his arms above his head. “God, I slept like the dead.”
Coulson smiled at him as he finished the Windsor knot in his tie. “I’m glad to hear that, baby.”
Seth’s stomach went soft at the tender look in his man’s eyes. “Thank you for taking care of me.”
Coulson had taken him apart the night before, fucking him relentlessly until Seth had been a whimpering, boneless mass, too exhausted and spent to even lift a finger.
“Always.”
Seth finished filling the two travel mugs with coffee, then turned off the coffee maker and emptied it. “We’re good to go.”
“You have my peanut butter and banana sandwiches?”
Seth quirked an eyebrow. “Would I ever forgot those, boo?”
“Good point. Let’s get out of here, then.”
Usually, they were out the door much earlier, but for once, they had slept a little later, both needing to fuel up on sleep—and sex—if they wanted to continue the grueling hours they were putting in. Coulson had informed his boss the night before, and even Sheehan had told him to come in as late as he wished, proof that he knew how hard they were working.
As soon as Seth drove off, Coulson’s phone rang, and after a quick look at the screen, Coulson picked up, connecting it to the car’s speaker. “Special Agent Padman.”
“Hey, Coulson, Iris here. I have a call you should take.”
Iris was one of the newer agents on Coulson’s team. A former lawyer, she was methodical in her approach, building cases no one could argue with.
“Who is it?”
“His name is Warren Stack, and he says he’s received an email that was intended for someone else… Coulson, I think it was supposed to be sent to Donnie Smith.”
Donnie Smith? The security guard from the Baltimore Convention Center had been dead for almost ten months now. Why the hell would someone still email him?
“Patch him through,” Coulson said. “Good morning, this is Special Agent Padman,” he said as soon as a click indicated she’d connected the call.
“Good morning, agent Padman. My name is Warren Stack. I contacted the FBI because I received a rather disturbing email. Actually, the email was sent to my son, Damon, and the content itself wasn’t concerning, but the website it linked to was.”
Seth smiled. The man was clearly trying to be accurate, but the slight tremor in his voice betrayed his nerves.
“What kind of email was it?” Coulson asked, his tone warm and calming.
“You know those emails you get when you forgot your password for a website and they send you a link to reset it? My thirteen-year-old son is, quite frankly, not always the smartest when it comes to internet safety, so I monitor his email. He received one of those reset password messages, except I didn’t recognize the website, so I figured Damon must’ve gotten into something he shouldn’t have. I clicked the link, and that’s where it got weird.”
“Where did the link lead to?”
“At first, it showed a normal website for a store or maybe a service called DITS, Durrick IT Services.”
Seth’s heart skipped a beat. Durrick? Naomi Beckingham’s current boyfriend was Ralph Durrick. Not common enough of a last name for this to be a coincidence.
“But then it automatically logged me in, and I ended up on some kind of backend of the website, like a second site hidden behind the first one, only this one was called Proud Patriotic Nationalists. It had some information, but it mostly was a forum where people were exchanging messages with each other as well as private messages.”
“What kind of messages?” Coulson sat ramrod straight now, at full attention.
“Agent Padman, I think they're about the assassination of President Markinson. There’s talk of money, details about the Baltimore Convention Center and the guards’ schedule, and of what this person whose account I got into had to do.”
Oh my god. What the hell had happened here? “Mr. Stack, this is Special Agent Seth Rodecker with the Secret Service, listening in on this call. Could you tell me what email address this reset password email was sent to?”
“Yes. My son has a special account he only uses for his online games and things. It’s [email protected]”
Holy crap. Someone had tried to get into Donnie Smith’s account and had mistyped his email address by one letter: it had a z at the end of boyz rather than an s.
“Mr. Stack, do you know how to make screenshots?” Coulson asked, urgency coloring his voice. “And if you don’t, do you have a cell phone you can use to take pictures?”
“I can do screenshots. What do you want me to screenshot?”
“Everything. Once they discover someone else has gained entry, they’ll shut this site down, so we need everything you can get. Please start doing this right now.”
“On it.”
Coulson blew out a slow breath. “Okay, while you do that, I’m going to connect you with one of our IT specialists who will ask for remote access to take over your computer so they can see what you see. If we’re fast enough, they may be able to download the entire website. Please do not log out of that site.”
In the background, Seth could hear the faint clicks of an app for screenshots.
“Got it. I’m already screen shooting. Want me to do the private messages to whoever they were intended for too?”
“Yes, please. Thank you so much, Mr. Stack.”
Coulson pointed at Seth’s phone, and Seth nodded he could use it. In the office, placing someone on a brief hold was easy, but on their cell phones, it could get tricky, and it was all too easy to accidentally end the call.
“I’m going to make a brief call, Mr. Stack. I’ll mute myself, so you won’t be able to hear me, but we can still hear you. If anything happens, just let us know.”
“Okay. I’ve got ten screenshots already.”
Thank fuck they’d gotten lucky with someone who was savvy enough to follow directions. Seth knew plenty of people who wouldn’t have known how to take a screenshot on a desktop computer if their life depended on it.
Coulson got through to someone from IT and gave quick instructions for her to call Mr. Stack in a minute. “Mr. Stack? Special Agent Amy Niles will call you as soon as we hang up. If for some reason, you don’t get her call, please call the FBI again and ask for me by name.”
“Okay, will do.”
“And, Mr. Stack? Thank you. In time, I’ll be able to tell you how crucially important this information is you’ve given us, but thank you.”
“My pleasure, Agent Padman. Just doing my patriotic duty as an American citizen.”
Within twenty seconds after ending the call, Coulson received a text message. “Connected with Mr. Stack,” he read out loud. “That’s from Amy. She’s on the phone with him.”
“Holy shit,” Seth said, his head still reeling. “If that website is what I think it is, we just hit the jackpot.”
“Proud Patriotic Nationalists?” Coulson said. “They might as well have called themselves the KKK. Sure as fuck sounds the same to me.”
“Do you think Naomi’s boyfriend runs that?”
“Wouldn’t surprise me. With her support, most likely, considering her history of being a right-wing extremist.”
“He’s an IT specialist,” Seth said. “He’d have the skills to build something like this.”
They were all but sure it had been Naomi’s boyfriend who had hacked into the Secret Service’s server, using the entrance Christopher Hales had unwittingly provided by clicking on the link Naomi had sent him to her ”résumé.” According to what they’d discovered about him, he had experience with hacking, having been warned by the FBI back when he’d still been in high school for illegal online activities. If he were behind this, he’d upped his game.
When they arrived in the office, Amy had already uploaded the first screenshots into their system, and Seth pulled them up. His heart caught in his throat as he went through them, Coulson sitting next to him and reading along with him.
“Twenty thousand dollars,” Seth whispered. “That’s what they paid Donnie Smith to let the bomber and the bomb in. For twenty thousand dollars, he had the president killed.”
“It’s so little.” Coulson put his hand on Seth’s lower back in silent support. “You can’t even buy a new car for that. I know it shouldn’t make a difference, but the fact that they bought him for so cheap is… It somehow makes it worse. If they’d paid him millions, at least I could’ve understood what he got out of it. But twenty thousand dollars? That’s nothing. Peanuts.”
“I doubt Hamza Bashir was a similar bargain, but we’ll find out.”
Amy called twenty minutes later. “The site kicked me out, and it’s shut down now, but I was able to download a lot. I have all private messages to Donnie Smith and some from the forum. I wasn’t able to get any other private messages, since they were behind another firewall that I couldn’t get through that fast. But I’ve already sent a request to Legal to contact their web host and prevent them from deleting their backup. Hopefully, that will get us the rest.”
“That’s amazing work, Amy. Thanks for jumping on this.”
“We got lucky with Mr. Stack. He wasn’t merely cooperative, but he knew enough about computers to quickly give me access so I could take over his computer within two minutes.”
Together, they poured over the screenshots. Mr. Stack had been right. The private messages had been about the assassination, and they contained all the details Donnie had provided. He’d given them the guards’ schedule, a detailed map from the convention center with cameras and security elements marked, all the information he’d picked up about the Secret Service protection, and more. And he’d received instructions on what time to be at the back door to let Ghulat Babur in, including a line that whoever would be escorting him would be dressed like a cop.
It was all there, the whole plan, all the details. The proverbial smoking gun in all its glory. They’d figured most of it out, but to see it all spelled out was still shocking. Donnie had had second thoughts at some point, but whoever had sent him these messages had reaffirmed his decision to be a true patriot, to liberate his country from the socialist, left-wing rule of a corrupt president, to bring honor back to the White House, and more similar statements that made Seth’s stomach turn sour.
Everyone on the forum—and they were still figuring out how many people were members or at least had access—used nicknames. Donnie Smith’s nickname had been Benjamin Tallmadge, after the man who had organized the famous Culper Ring, a network of spies during the Revolutionary War that had helped George Washington obtain critical knowledge about the British. Seth doubted Donnie Smith had picked that name himself, since from all the info they’d found out about him, he didn’t strike him as a history buff. Maybe he’d been given that nickname in another effort to butter him up, make him feel important.
Then the information Amy had downloaded came in, and with every word Seth read, his anger grew. “They boasted after the Pride Bombing about using Muslims to divert the attention so they could strike again,” he said bitterly to Coulson.
”They” being Kingmakers, they determined from reading through everything. Even though Ralph Durrick owned and administrated the site, he didn’t seem to be the one in charge. Whether it was Basil King himself or one of his men, they hadn’t figured out yet, but someone from Kingmakers ran the show…calling himself George Washington. Subtle, they were not.
Ralph Durrick had labeled himself Paul Revere, and they suspected that Virginia Hall was the nickname for Naomi Beckingham, since it was the only female name they’d found so far. A quick Google search had shown that Virginia Hall had been a famous American spy in the Second World War.
“Yeah,” Coulson said with a sigh. “Proud Patriotic Nationalists, but by all means, let’s use a group that represents everything we stand for and let them take the fall. How do these people live with themselves?”
“What’s this?” Seth pointed at an exchange on the forum. It was dated only weeks before.“Who the hell is this Eisenhower?”
Paul Revere: Sissy has no idea of Eisenhower’s plans. He’s so stupid.
Virginia Hall: @GeorgeWashington When will Eisenhower make his move?
George Washington: We gotta lie low for a while. Too much heat from the feds. But fear not, he’ll step up when the time is right, and he’ll be the man we need.
“No clue,”Coulson said.
Seth studied the snippet again. “Sissy… That could refer to President Shafer. It’s still a derogatory term for any cis man not considered masculine enough. Him being bisexual would qualify.”
“Hmm, could very well be. But how does Eisenhower fit in? So far, we’ve had a theme of spies and revolutionaries. He doesn’t fit. He was a…”
They looked at each other.
“…a general who became president,” Seth finished his sentence.
Holy shit. General John Doty, former Secretary of Defense. Could it be?
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