Lost (5 page)

I
tapped the edge of my tablet. "Sure, but the mere fact that the
lamias have managed to stay a secret over here for tens of thousands
of years proves that Strakes was right about there being
preternatural species here that were unknown to our people.

"We
spent all of that time fighting the jaguars and never realized that
there were other threats out there, never even considered that there
were other continents out there. Even worse, we never even considered
that the humans might someday become so numerous that we'd be forced
into hiding to avoid being hunted to extinction."

"You
think that we should have fought back, that the packs should have
rallied together to push the Europeans back into the ocean?"

"I
don't think it was even possible. The packs were all still at each
other's throats. It hadn't been all that long, relatively speaking,
at that point since the monarchy had been overthrown. If the Coun'hij
had tried to put together the kind of massive army that fighting the
colonists would have required, they would have lost control. Whoever
was put in charge would have almost certainly used the army to
establish themselves as the new king."

We
drove in silence for a couple of minutes before Ash finally
responded. "I think you're probably right. The jaguars in South
and Central America tried to fight back. They worked as individuals rather
than a unified force, but they had some resounding successes against
the second wave of colonists. Despite that, they never really got
their heads around the fact that it didn't matter how many people
they slaughtered. With the promise of so much gold over here, there
was no way they were going to stem the tide of
conquistadores
."

"Yeah,
and once the native humans down there realized that the Spanish were
generally the less corrupt option, the humans turned on our cousins
with a speed that shocked everyone."

I
thought maybe Ash was done talking history with me. We drove for five
more minutes before he sighed and slouched down in his seat. "The
jaguars have never forgotten that betrayal. The ones who were alive
when it happened are all long dead, but hatred for humans is endemic
down there. All of the corruption in that area can be traced back to
the jaguars. If they'd worked together they probably could have won,
but they don't see it that way. That's a weakness we all seem to
have. Wolves, jaguars, vampires, werewolves, we're all terrible at
cooperating with our own kind. If even one of the preternatural races
could bring itself to work together like a human nation, we'd be
unstoppable."

"Is
that why you're so determined to back Alec's play?"

"There
isn't a simple answer to that question, but yeah, that's part of it.
I made a promise to him that I'd join your pack in return for his
help saving us from Anton, but if that was all that was going on I
wouldn't have taken some of the risks that I've taken trying to
support him.

"The
truth is that my ancestors were probably the reason that the monarchy
fell. They were so concerned with trying to protect their power base
that they let the Coun'hij take over everything. It was the worst
decision they could have made. Alec's ancestors weren't perfect—if
they had been they wouldn't have lost control in the first place—but
they're good, fair leaders. It's like it's in their DNA."

"Alec
has made his fair share of mistakes."

"I
can't argue with you there, Isaac, but when he does something wrong
it is because he's made a mistake rather than because he's some kind
of despot who views the rest of us as disposable pieces that exist
solely to serve him."

That
hit a little too close to home. Once upon a time I'd backed Alec as
far or farther than anything Ash had done so far. I'd done it for
different reasons, but I'd done it anyway. I'd backed him against
James—kept him in power inside of our pack dozens of times
after he'd pushed too hard and left himself exposed—and I'd
done it with a pretty minimal amount of complaining.

The
problem was that I'd done it at least partly because it had been the
easiest way to keep my life from taking a turn for the worst.

"I'd
like to believe that, but I'm not sure I can give Alec quite that
much of the benefit of the doubt. Not after he let Agony's group do
what they did to us. Even declaring war on the Coun'hij was suspect.
He should have waited, gathered support and then moved against them
later when it wasn't as much of a risk."

"It's
easy to second-guess the person in the big chair when you're not the
one who has to deal with the ultimate consequences of the hard
decisions, Isaac. That's something I didn't realize until after I
left home. I gave my sister a lot of grief over her policies, and I
always felt justified in doing so until I was on my own. That changed
my perspective."

"Maybe
you're right, but it's going to take more than just a pep talk to
convince me to get religion again where Alec is concerned."

"Fair
enough. You wanted to know why we're headed south and I only
partially answered your question. The lamias…know things.
Their queen is supposed to be able to see into the future. It's not
as clear as what Kristin gets from her dreams, but they get a much
broader picture than she does."

"That
doesn't make me feel any calmer where these snake people are
concerned, Ash. No wonder nobody knows about them—if the queens
know everything that is going to happen in advance then it's a wonder
that they haven't taken over the world already. All of the Aztec
sacrifices aside, they don't happen to be a bunch of tiny scaly
pacifists do they?"

"No,
not according to my family's records at least. They're six and a half
feet tall and incredibly violent. There's a reason that there aren't
many werewolves in Louisiana. The lamias hunt them down—not in
packs, singly—because the queen's consorts like the challenge
of killing werewolves in single combat."

"You're
going to give me a whole new set of nightmares."

"Yeah,
that's not the worst part though. One of my ancestors was convinced
that the only reason that the lamias hadn't tried to take over the
world was that their queen had decided that it wasn't time yet."

"And
you're going to just stroll up to the queen and ask her if she can
tell us where Dream Stealer is hiding?"

"Something
like that. It will have to be Kristin who asks though. Under the
right circumstances they'll treat visiting females as honorary
queens. You and I just have to convince them that she deserves a
hearing. By defeating one of the consorts."

Isaac Nazir
I-55
Western Tennessee

Our
conversation lapsed into silence and we drove for hours in our own
little worlds, Ash focused on the road and me continuing to make
notes on my tablet. It felt more than a little pointless to continue
planning the largest single hacking operation in history now that I
knew it probably wasn't going to happen, but I kept grinding away at
it regardless.

There
was always the possibility that we'd survive combat with something
that was capable of bringing down a werewolf by itself. It wasn't a
very good possibility, but it might happen, and if it did then we'd
need a backup plan in case the lamias didn't know how to find Dream
Stealer. Besides, the problem of simultaneously launching attacks on
so many different places had captured my imagination.

As
I continued working I realized that cracking all of those government
and corporate databases was only part of the problem. Given enough
time and effort, just about any system could be hacked, but you
couldn't guarantee access for any extended period of time.

The
real question was what to do with the access once we had it. We
needed to conduct the world's biggest data-mining operation, which
meant that we needed a data repository where we could store
everything we stole.

That
was easy enough, but if we just sent the data there then the Feds
would be able to track the electronic trail from their systems to the
warehouse. We needed a physical cutout, a spot in the process where
the data could be copied onto some kind of transportable medium and
then physically moved to a new location, preferably a location that
didn't have any kind of connectivity to the rest of the world.

The
last thing we needed to worry about was some kind of Trojan horse
leading the authorities to us the first time that we copied the data
over. We needed processing power and we needed a massive storage
array, something that could handle petabytes of data and still
resolve data requests quickly enough to keep the rest of our
infrastructure busy.

That
wasn't a trivial task, but now that I'd identified the problem I'd
just use more of Ash's money to solve it. The one thing that couldn't
be outsourced was figuring out our approach to analyzing the data
once we had it.

Banking
data could be picked through looking for large cash withdrawals, but
I knew that wasn't likely to reveal anything, not with the level of
scrutiny that kind of information was already under by the IRS. It
took me a while, but as we crossed over the Louisiana border I
started to hit on some approaches that might succeed.

Rare
art sales might get me something—members of the Coun'hij had
been known to occasionally liquidate art that nobody had even known
existed—but my money was on gas station data. Coun'hij
enforcers tended to travel to and from operations in big SUVs so as
to avoid the paper trail that flying unavoidably left behind.

It
went without saying that they were using either cash or anonymous
prepaid credit cards to buy fuel for those cars, but that was
probably something I could still work with.

"Hey,
Ash, how long do you think it would take to put together a
comprehensive list of times and places that the Coun'hij or their
people have made an appearance in the last fifteen years?"

"Normally
I'd say we could have something pretty solid in just a day or two.
I'm pretty sure that the Chicago pack has been religiously taking
notes on that very thing since even before Ulrich came into power."

I
sighed. "Alec said that Shawn and Ulrich have gone off of the
grid. For all we know there isn't a Chicago pack anymore."

"No
way. They might have been forced to scatter, but Ulrich is way too
cagey not to have seen that coming. He'll have had contingency plans
in place. Even under a worst-case scenario he'll manage to get a good
chunk of his people out."

"Maybe,
maybe not. Even if he gets out, there's no guarantee that his records
will make it out too. Most of the old guard is overly attached to
paper records."

"I
guess we'll just have to wait and see what he's got access to when he
or Shawn resurface. What do you have in mind?"

"I
want to track them back using point-of-sale data from the gas
stations. If we figure out the range of a typical SUV and then look
at all the fuel purchases in that radius around each appearance, one
of those purchases will be the guys we want to track."

"They'll
be using something untraceable."

"Yeah,
I'm actually counting on it. I'll ditch all of the transactions made
by regular credit cards, which will get my data set down to something
more manageable, and then I'll start massaging the data. If you've
got a large enough data sample then you can find all kinds of
patterns in there. If we can get a pretty comprehensive list of
visitations by guys like Agony and the rest, the data we're looking
for will eventually pop up; it will just be a matter of wading
through the false positives."

"There's
going to be a lot of false positives in that much data, Isaac."

"Yeah,
you're right there. I can do a lot to fine-tune the
pattern-recognition algorithm, but the real key is going to be
getting our hands on the data showing buy times and locations for
prepaid credit cards. I'm betting that something will pop up there."

"That
just might work. Whoever is bankrolling the Coun'hij's operation
isn't going to be buying those things one or two at a time. They'll
be picking up dozens of them at once."

"Yep,
and they probably won't just stick a hundred bucks on them either,
which means that they'll get used to refuel the vehicles more than
once before they are depleted and thrown away. By cross-referencing
the point-of-sale data and the instances of multiple cards being
purchased, we're bound to be able to track them back. Even if they
are smart enough to issue each enforcer multiple cards and tell the
line grunts to rotate them I'd still bet that some of them get sloppy
about that kind of thing and there will still be a pattern there for
us to find."

"Sure,
that works if they are using prepaid cards, but it doesn't do
anything for you if they are using cash."

"Except
that if they are using cash then it will still tend to create a
pattern. That would mean that I could disregard every electronic
payment and just focus on cash transactions above, say, fifty bucks.
With search parameters that narrow I just may be able to track them
all the way back to their home base despite cash being the perfect
anonymous payment method."

Ash
looked doubtful. "I know trying to track the Coun'hij down by
running a team of hackers was my idea, but if it's really that easy
then why hasn't someone already done it?"

"It's
not easy. You're going to have to hire a ton of really top-level
talent to get the data we need, and that isn't going to come cheap.
Credit card companies spend billions every year to make their systems
as close to impregnable as possible. At the end of the day we may
have to hire someone to physically break into some of these
facilities—actually, it wouldn't surprise me if we had to send
a team of shape shifters in, normal humans would have an easier time
breaking into Fort Knox. Whoever tries to go in there is going to
need a serious edge."