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The Raven folded his arms and leaned forward. “Crimson Hammer kidnapped David, and you’ve got fewer than twenty-four hours to hand over Firefly and Rapadon before they kill him. Let’s not waste time.”
Taken off guard by the Raven’s omniscience, Tess faltered. “Correct. And Kyle’s car accident—”
“No, not an accident. Murder. Goddamn senseless loss for the Druid to die at thirty-six.” The Raven bit his lip, and his chin wavered. “The answers are on the USB drive. May we begin there, so I can ascertain who and what we’re dealing with?”
“I see you’re well-briefed.” An indignant sound escaped Tess’s throat. Incensed this stranger uncovered these details and had even pinpointed her hotel room number in London, she grew wary. As she considered what other personal information he might possess, she tightened her body from head to toe. Without another word, she reached into her bag and handed the Raven the USB drive.
“Thank you. Can you please verify no one has touched or altered this drive or put it in any computer?”
“The package was locked inside an airtight bank safe deposit box for the last year. Kyle’s mother, Molly MacTavish, sent it to me in Seattle via international post, and I’ve carried it with me since. Never opened the case.”
“Let’s see.” He strode over to the bank of computers and looked up. “I apologize. I work alone and don't have guest chairs.”
With Mark by her side, Tess scanned the Raven’s patchwork of monitor screens with no idea what to expect.
First, the Raven ran several diagnostic checks and virus scans on the USB drive before searching all the directories for specific file extensions. “Huh.” He paused to type short notes in a separate window on one of his monitors. While several directories loaded, he opened one group of files. “Kyle left a lot of source code on this disk, which I expected. I need the gestalt of what’s on the drive to judge where to dig deeper. I’ve found Firefly v1.0, but not Rapadon, the other code Crimson Hammer wants.”
“Rapadon doesn’t exist. David and Declan spent days searching for it, but Kyle never mentioned it to me.” Tess polished off a couple of biscuits.
“You’re right. Rapadon isn’t a password, either.” The Raven tapped his fingertips on the desk.
Gears shifted in Tess’s mind, and she visualized the letters rearranging. She grabbed a blank sheet of paper and a pen from the desk. With growing eagerness, she scanned the screen and scribbled several words in different sequences until one combination clicked. Beaming, she tapped the paper. “I understand Kyle’s message. Rapadon isn’t a code or a project. It’s a strategy, in the form of an anagram: Pandora.”
“I don’t follow. How does it relate to this code?” The Raven raised his head and squinted at the monitor.
“Think of mythology. Pandora’s Box, when opened, unleashes all sorts of evil but leaves one thing in the box—hope.” Studying the Raven’s screen, she continued. “Kyle’s clue is that the hackers demanded the anagram of Pandora, not Pandora itself. The code sends a silent signal, so when the Firefly code executes, it sends Rapadon, flagging the user as unauthorized. To deflect the attempted breach, the code must unleash destructive actions to punish the intruder.”
The Raven leaned back in his chair and scanned several open screens on his monitor, murmuring to himself until he burst out laughing. “Tess, you’re brilliant.”
“What is it?” Mark held a teacup close to his chest.
Chuckling, the Raven slapped his knee and grinned. He beckoned them to come closer with a forefinger and pointed to one screen. “Pandora’s box is classic Druid. Glad you solved the riddle, Tess. Kyle tricked the terrorists and sent an instruction to me in puzzle form. Like you said, the metaphorical box, when opened, unleashes the motherload of all computer viruses. He’s asking me to create a virus to defeat the hackers. He’d have done it himself but ran out of time.”
“Sure. But stealing the source code won’t help the terrorists hack the banks. They need the encryption root key for any specific institution to unlock Firefly.” Tess pushed a curl behind her ear.
“Right, the secret key to the kingdom, which is tricky to get. They need specific bank names to identify it.” Processing screens of code from Kyle’s disk in rapid succession, he highlighted several lines with a cursor. “Weird. The chumps asked for the wrong thing. Code, not key.”
Mark reached out and pointed at the text the Raven had selected. “Code and key have similar meanings, and they might have lost the nuance when translating Russian to English. Code is kod, a similar word, but key is klyuch. The terrorists heard a familiar word and demanded code.”
“Astute observation, Mark. You know Russian?” The Raven arched his eyebrows.
“I worked as a surgeon in Crimea, and many patients spoke Russian and Ukrainian.”
“Plenty of unrest there. Damn shame what happened in Crimea.” The Raven turned back to his monitors.
Tess concentrated on the various puzzle pieces and imagined them reassembling and clicking into the proper place. “They dealt us a red herring. Crimson Hammer hunted Kyle because they believed Rapadon was the encryption key. They can’t break into the banks without it, so they wanted to kidnap David to get it.”
“Let’s search the code and figure out what they’d see.” The Raven pored through several code-filled screens. “I found it here. This tiny subroutine reads like an innocuous performance improvement, but the algorithm triggers the Rapadon message if someone unauthorized tries to access it. Then, it requires the Rapadon code to continue. Our hackers are stuck, and Kyle tricked them.”
“But how does it help us save David? If Crimson Hammer can’t steal money from the banks, they’ll kill David and come after Tess and Declan. How do we stop the cycle?” Mark rubbed his chin while peering at the monitor.
“With my help, which is why Kyle requested you contact me. Crimson Hammer is Belarusian, but dark web chatter suggests they’re tight with Russia.” The Raven scanned his multiple screens, frowning. “I’ll investigate Kyle’s other files.”
As they worked to unpeel layer after layer of the puzzle, she felt her head tingling and plopped on the leather couch next to Mark. “No shortage of conspiracies in Russia, of course, but their end game could be anything.”
The Raven typed at warp speed, and his computer screens updated. He stopped, paused at one straightforward text file, and flipped back and forth between two similar files. “Oh no.” He groaned and spun his chair around to face them. With his piercing eyes wide open, he shook his head and contorted his face. “I’m sorry, but you guys are in serious deep shit.”
Chapter Seventeen
