Page 90 of No Questions Asked

“Ti amo, Slash.” She pressed a soft kiss against his mouth and disappeared into the women’s barracks.

Instead of heading for the men’s quarters, he walked to an area behind the building that was relatively private and pulled out the satellite phone. He punched in a number and waited until someone picked up.

“Alo.”

“Vicente? It’s Slash.”

There was a pause, as if the man was moving somewhere he couldn’t be overheard. “Are you back at the camp?”

“I am. Martim Alves isn’t here. He’s still in Coari at a hotel.”

“How do you know that?” He could hear the surprise in Vicente’s voice.

“Money talks. Can you put a tail on him? He’s deeply connected to what is going on here at the camp and what just happened at the compound. No time to explain how I know. You’re going to have to trust me on that.”

There was silence as if Vicente wanted more details, but didn’t want to discuss on an unsecure phone either.

“I do trust you,” he finally said. “Give me the details on Alves’s location and I’ll see what I can arrange.”

Slash gave him the name of the hotel. “I’ve got some threads of my own to pull. We’ll talk soon.”

Vicente paused. “Just for your operational awareness, Gabriel knows what is going on and is in the loop in regards to the operation, so you can trust him if you need anything. I’m in Manaus now with the prisoners, but I’ll keep close to the phone. I intend to be back in Coari soon, and hopefully I’ll have some news for you then.”

“Looking forward to it.”

Slash hung up the phone and headed to his bunk for some much needed sleep.

Chapter Fifty-Three

Lexi

I felt good when I awoke—my head was clear, my body rested. I attributed it to sleeping in a real bed with a mattress, sheets and a pillow. Holy cow, I would never, ever,ever, take a bed for granted again.

After visiting the bathroom and brushing my teeth, I swung by the dining area for breakfast and coffee. There was no one in the dining area except for a couple of security guards, so I scarfed down some food, took my medicine with an excellent glass of guava juice and took my beloved coffee to the lab with me.

Natelli and Lilith were deep in conversation when I arrived, and Melinda, Gwen and Sara were checking samples under a microscope. No sign of Slash.

“Good morning, Lexi,” Lilith said, waving me over. “How’d you sleep?”

“Like the dead,” I said. “A real bed felt wonderful, but I’m ready to get started this morning.”

“I’m happy to hear that. I have a call with Hayden in about thirty minutes, so I’m anxious to hear what you find out from your team. I updated him briefly yesterday on your and Slash’s desire to continue with the project, so based on that, we’ll decide how to proceed. The Brazilian government has assured us they will increase their presence and patrols in our area, and Gabriel has already hired more guards for us. We aren’t going to do this unless we do it right. Every person on this team will have a personal bodyguard. And I intend to go out in the field, as well.”

I looked at her with new appreciation. A CEO who was willing to get her hands dirty was someone I could learn to like. “Sounds like a good plan to me.”

After she left, I quickly checked my emails, getting caught up with what had happened in my absence. It took me several long explanations to all of my team members and an extra-long email to Finn, but finally everyone was convinced I was fine, unharmed and ready to continue the vaccine project. Thankfully, Finn had not contacted my parents about my kidnapping, so they were none the wiser. I had thirteen wedding-related emails from Mom, which I delegated to a later viewing.

I wanted to know what had happened on the cyber front while I’d been at the village. Thankfully, my team and Tim had done an excellent job of noting every penetration attempt and their countermeasures to stop it. I began carefully reviewing the activity logs of all the attempts to crack into the internal firewall at Vaccitex. The attempts had become bolder and more inventive, but I wasn’t worried. When I was in New York the first time around, I’d moved all the critical files to an even more deeply buried and masked part of Vaccitex’s system, leaving little behind the firewall. After strengthening the firewall a little to make it look like we were making counter-defensive movements, I embedded a code that allowed me to better track their hacking activities. I could see that while they were routinely harvesting internal Vaccitex emails, most of their efforts were targeted at breaking through the firewall and trying to cover their tracks. It didn’t take long for me to see a pattern emerge. Within the past few days while Vaccitex’s operation had been shut down, their level of attacks and sophistication had increased significantly. Their attempts were setting off internal alarms on a daily basis, but I’d rerouted those alarms to a hidden folder so the hackers would think they remained undetected.

The more I studied their behavior, the more I thought the level of activity was unbelievably reckless. Did they really think they were remaining undetected? Something here smacked of desperation...or maybe something else. I couldn’t believe any decent hacker—and the hacking I’d seen was fairly sophisticated—would behave in this manner, which led to me believe the hackers weren’t calling the shots. A good hacker would always prioritize stealth over speed, because once they were detected, the opportunity was gone. That was good news for me because that lack of caution would play right into my hands.

It was time to turn the tables from defense to offense.

I located the honeypot folders, a bunch of fake documents filled with harmless information that had been created for me. My team, in coordination with some of Vaccitex’s scientists, had carefully doctored the real and sensitive vaccine files so the information in them was seemingly real, but actually fake. I also discreetly added a few tools of my own that would implant themselves into the hacker’s system once they were downloaded and opened. The files would create a backdoor, notify me of how to break in and then erase all signs of their presence. My exploits, once downloaded and launched, would give me significant access to their network.

I made sure that the file names containing my exploit codes would be impossible to resist for someone desperate to get their hands on Vaccitex’s technology, processes and recipe. If my opponent was careful, he’d be checking for such a common maneuver. But I was counting on the fact that my opponent was under a lot of pressure to produce the information, and would likely open them or be ordered to open them.

Now was the time to lure the hackers to the honeypot in a way that wouldn’t make them suspicious. I created a fake email exchange between Tim and a researcher at the company who’d supposedly just returned from vacation. The researcher couldn’t access the project data and was asking for the latest firewall password. The IT admin’s response included a password reference that indicated the new one was a derivation of a previous password that I knew the attackers had already compromised. Once I’d completed my trap, I created a few alerts to notify me when the hackers had broken in and were downloading the data.

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