Loyalty Game
Her cell beeped insistently; she kept ending the call. She wasn’t in the mood to take any call from Roy. The FBI agent probably needed her to be on another task. This wasn’t the time for a task. Her twenty-two-year-old son, actually nephew whom she had legally adopted, was reported to have been involved in a bank fraud. She didn’t understand why Colin would want to be involved in any sort of fraud. She wondered if it had something to do with drugs. She provided him with everything, and he hadn’t been a greedy child. He could have simply called her if he needed money. She had a tidy sum saved up from her years as a successful attorney.
The police and the dean of undergraduate in his college had called to inform her. He was on the run, six days now and nobody had found him. His apartment had been checked, and it was almost cleaned out and neatly arranged. He had definitely planned to leave. She had flown to Boston already and was not able to help with the search, so, she was back home, waiting for a call from him.
A new caller ID popped up on her screen; an unknown number. She wondered if it was Roy again. But she wasn’t going to risk it. It could be Colin. She still didn’t believe that her dear boy was involved in a crime. There was some mix up. There had to be. He had been home for the weekend three months before and hadn’t looked the least bit out of normal; she hadn’t even seen any signs of drug use.
Doris answered her call. “It’s Roy. Before you hang up, I know about your son, and I have someone who can find him, I just need you to perform a very urgent task.”
Doris sighed. If he could find her son, then she would take any task. “What do you want me to do?
“Break into the National Intelligence Agency network?” He said, his voice had gone low like he didn’t want someone beside him to hear.
“What? Are you crazy? That’s probably the most secure network in the world;” even as she said that, she knew she could do it. She had found weaknesses there once, and if they hadn’t been patched, she could definitely break in.
“If anyone can do it outside the FBI, it’s you Doris. I’ll pass you on the man who will find your son.”
“What do you-” She was saying when a new voice came on the phone.
“We’re driving to your house now.” A new voice said on the phone, it was deep and a bit too confident.
“What the heck? Roy knows my house is off limits. I’ll meet you at the Red Park.”
And she ended the call. She didn’t bring her spy business to the house. She had tried hard to separate Doris the hacker, and Doris, the former lawyer who loved to bake, and consult for Information Technology organizations.
Tony Knight had been straightforward. He already had leads and was sure he could find Colin within forty-eight hours; in return she’d give her best towards breaking into the National Intelligence Agency network and retrieve files on “Operation Black Tent.” Tony had instructions to sabotage the operation, and they needed to do it with very few people within the FBI knowing.
Doris asked what Knight knew about her son’s whereabouts. “He’s mostly innocent. It’s not that atypical of a story, started gambling. Rang up some debts and got involved with bad company while trying to pay them off. The bad guys used his bank account to transfer stolen funds. He’s on the run because he thinks he is guilty and the real criminals helped him disappear.”
“And you can find him?” She asked, looking pointedly at Knight.
“Yes, I will. I can even help clear up his involvement in the fraud.”
That was all Doris needed to hear. She set up a station that very night in her study. It had been a difficult job. She had had to monitor the network for three days straight waiting for the right moment. When she first broke in, her access didn’t have enough authority to retrieve the files she needed. So she had had to install vector in the system that did the job.
She had broken her home rule and allowed Knight come to her house. He was shocked when he saw that she worked basically from the internet on her laptop. “You sure this is the best way to break into the Farm?”
Doris was peeved at him but she wanted her son back, and she had more confidence in him than he had in her. He took more than forty-eight hours, but he brought Colin home on the third day as promised and hours before she finally retrieved the files Knight needed.
Knight was a man of his word and cleared Colin from all criminal charges at the same time helping the Feds break a crime ring. The guys who had used her son’s bank account were caught and handed over to the authorities. It was something they had done several times before; they looked for desperate young people and used them to move around illegal funds while setting the young people up to take the fall.
Colin had gone into bad gambling habits, some sort of sports betting and had fallen deep into debts barely two months into the habit. He had known how easily Doris would have discovered and been cross with him, so he had tried to source quick cash.
That was what cemented the relationship between Knight and Doris. Whenever Knight called, she answered.
“You’re a good man,” she said to Knight when she met him at the park that day to hand over the USB containing the files she had retrieved. Knight had just kept mute. That was his way, a man of few words.
Now that Knight called for another mission, something he called ‘Operation Sea on Fire’ and hinted that it was quite big, she hadn’t been able to resist the temptation. Roy had moved to New Jersey and gotten married, so she was bored. Working for Knight had always been a worthy distraction and usually fun.
She called for her dog and prepared to meet him.
“Walkies.”
