03/12/2023
chapter I.
That day was truly very grey, leaden clouds driven by a strong wind brought humidity that seeped into the marrow of the bones. Rebecca turned up the heat and dived herself even deeper into her article. In reality, she was just staring at the letters and trying to understand: what this article really wanted to convey?
Particular facts fit together like Lego blocks. She pieced together a too-obvious picture of the corruption of the minister who oversees our country's finances. She had long thought whether it is worth letting herself be brushed off one beautiful day, but over and over again, she convinced herself that when it came to murdering investigative journalists, our politicians were still small fish in a small pond.
Her thoughts were interrupted by a memory of last year's vacation in Thailand. She and Dark had a great time back then. In winter, it was a welcome boost, there was plenty of sunshine on Ko Phan-Ban, maybe even too much, and the scuba diving course they paid for was absolutely amazing. She learned to dive to 50 meters with scuba gear, into the world of marine crustaceans and colorful fish darting among corals and marine flora; that completely enchanted her at the time. She had to go back there again and again, spent so much money on dives that she almost didn't have any left for Christmas gifts.
Because of her underwater "affair," she even bought a special camera and tried to capture the life thriving beneath the surface during each dive. She couldn't break free from it. It was all new and unimaginable, diverse and fantastical. Underwater, she really felt like she was in a dream. The marine world was shrouded in a gentle haze, dimmed, and only the cone of her spotlight, attached to the camera, illuminated the strip of the underwater, that mysterious, new, unexplored corner of the world...
Her contemplation of last year's vacation was abruptly interrupted by the ringing phone; the reception indicator lit up on the display. "Hello?" she picked up the receiver. "Good day, Rebeka, it's the reception," the receptionist began in her usual drawn-out manner. "Magdi?" Reb replied. "... there's a courier with a package for you. Should I send him up?" came from the other end. "No, that's fine, I'll come down to the reception. I've been sitting here long enough; might as well stretch my legs," she hung up and get up from her chair.
As she stepped into the hallway, suddenly Peter emerged from around the corner, a colleague who had evidently been pursuing her for the past six months despite her clear rejections. "Hi, Reb," he blurted out as soon as he saw her. "I'm just running after you," he smiled as if to suggest he had something important to discuss. "I don't have time. What do you need?" she snapped and turned towards the elevator doors. "I'm going about the scandal with the deputy of the social care secretariat in Prague 10," he began, as if it were something crucial. "That's old news; look, I really don't have time. Take care!" she dismissed him and continued toward the elevator. She waved in front of the intercom, and the doors slowly began to open. "Thank goodness the elevator is here," she thought to herself.
Behind her, Peter playfully remarked, "...and when will you join me for that drink?" She entered the elevator, turned to him, raised one eyebrow, as only she could do, and sarcastically said, "never..." She pressed the ground floor button, and the doors started to close. Peter wasted no time and, sensing an opportunity, which he never let slip with any attractive lady, rushed into the elevator, pushed his hand in front of the intercom, the doors immediately stopped closing and swung aside. He entered and blatantly pressed the door close button.
The doors closed, the elevator started moving, and an awkward moment of silence has emerged. „There's Verdi's La Traviata, at the National Opera, today" he continued, knowing that Reb had a weakness for opera, and Dark rarely takes her to one. She remained silent and tried to look elsewhere. The elevator faintly chimed with the ground floor on the display, and the doors opened.
She walked out and headed to the reception desk towards Magda, where a courier, suited in a classic yellow jersey, was already waiting for her. He dressed the helmet and bikers cloths, that so obvious, he has arrived on a bike.
"To ride a bike in this weather, hats off to you. Good day," she smiled at him and playfully tossed her long fringe, angled sharply toward her right ear. She did it intentionally to annoy Peter, who, of course, also disembarked and pretended to examine the bulletin board in the entrance hall, full of posters and various announcements, whether from the management or invitations from individual publishing house editorial teams.
Peter noticed Rebecca's flirting, and offended, walked away muttering to himself, "Idiot..." she thought to herself and gratefully smiled at the courier. The poor guy blushed, not understanding why he deserved such a smile from such a beautiful girl. "It's my job," he replied, lowering his eyes. However, he immediately raised them again and pulled out a package the size of a CD from his backpack.
"You'll probably need to sign something, right?" she asked him. "No, that's okay; the sender is unknown, and we don't even know where we should send the delivery notice," he shyly smiled. She carefully examined the envelope; in the upper left corner was an address printed from a computer: Netherlands Onderzoek Instituut, De Boelelaan 1105 1081 HV Amsterdam, Netherlands. "But the address is right here," Rebeka marveled and shook her head. "Yes, this morning, when it arrived at the central office, a delivery notice was set in the system, but when I was on my way here, the dispatcher called me, saying there was a cancellation on the delivery notice, some computer error apparently, that address simply doesn't exist. She said she double-checked it twice," he shrugged and turned toward his bike, waiting for him across the street in a rack.
Rebeka shrugged as well and mumbled half to herself, "Well, thank you, goodbye." "Goodbye," he called out to her as he left the building. She didn't even hear him; she turned towards the elevator, waved to Magda behind the counter, and a myriad of questions raced through her mind. She knew that address very well; it was a research institute where experiments beyond believability took place. They had recently contacted her about research that aimed to prove the existence of the soul. They chose her because, as they said, they had been following her work and liked that she pretended nothing, don't manipulate facts, and wrote truly about what was the subject of investigation.
They claimed to have read several of her articles discussing scientific discoveries and theories and noticed that she could... Her thoughts were interrupted by the elevator. She stood in front of it and stared intently at the control panel. Shooked her head to snap out of it and stepped inside.
…
Dark sat in front of his three monitors, intensely typing commands into the terminal. "Just need to bypass this firewall, and I'll be in," he muttered to himself. The room was lit only by a small desk lamp and the glow of the displays—just enough for him to see the keyboard and the ashtray where a lit joint smoldered. He stretched his arms, leaned back in his chair, took a deep drag, and observed his worm sending a data stream from the intercepted port to the terminal. Finally, after two hours of intense probing, he found the right service tunnel to access the database. The worm tirelessly sucked the data stream passing through the firewall, and Dark took pleasure in watching it.
In these moments, he felt like a king. He redirected the data flow to his cluster, where, with the help of a part of the encryption key he exchanged at the hacking bazaar in Shanghai with some lunatic from Taiwan for the keys to the Czech national bank, he decrypted it and tried to find access codes to break the protection of the database, which he had been trying to infiltrate for a week.
Next to him, on his laptop, a video call blinked. He picked it up, and there was Blanička, straight to the point:
Blanička: "Hi, want to hear something funny?"
Dark raised an eyebrow and replied, "Hey hehe, what?"
Blanička: "I think I fell in love last week. For the first time in my life, with someone I slept with—awesome."
Dark: "Wow, that's great, isn't it? More than funny."
Blanička: "60 percent unpleasant, 30 funny, 10 pleasant."
Dark: "You'll reconsider depending on how it turns out, unusual, huh?"
Blanička: "It will end that I'll get over it in a week. How could it turn out? It's unusual and unpleasant; hormonal fluctuations are making me feel terrible. Besides, it's sympathy-driven infatuation, so..."
Dark: "The ways of the Lord are inscrutable. Infatuation out of sympathy? That's a bomb; you'll have to tell me about it sometime."
Blanička: "Not all, if they are the ways of nature, are predictable. You don't know infatuation out of sympathy? It's a problem for a huge percentage of women, probably."
Dark: "Yeah, this perspective intrigues me too. Let's talk about it in about 3 weeks."
Blanička: "OK."
Dark: "I'll invite you somewhere for a beer, and you can tell me everything."
Blanička: "OK - so remember the topics."
Dark: "That's unforgettable, and if we don't know, we'll check the chat history."
Blanička: "Today I'm going to Brno, and that guy is there too, and I can't stand being in the office for another two hours."
Dark: "Try some procrastination."
Blanička: "No, work at least somewhat distracts my thoughts. I really hate this—what's worse is that people tell me that nobody likes it well—that's, in my opinion, nonsense, otherwise, people wouldn't keep falling in love. I want it to be over now."
Dark: "Just enjoy it thoroughly; you never know when it will come in handy."
Blanička: "I've experienced it like 4 times already—that should be enough. But OK, he's really cute.“
The main display flickered, and the terminal reported 'Key found.' "Hey, I'll call you, I need to finish something here," Dark ends the call. "Fantastic, we're in!" he cheered, took a long drag, disposed of the joint in the ashtray, and placed both hands on the keyboard. "Now, let's get into this nicely," he said towards his computer and started typing a series of commands for his worm. He had groomed this pet for such cases, suspecting that the type of firewall being used was by the American secret services, but it didn't bother him. He was confident it had robust cover. The worm, hidden on Amazon servers, connected to the entire network of access nodes throughout the dark-net. He was one hundred percent convinced that no one was tracing him.
He began sifting through the data the worm sent to his cluster, and his well-trained demons obediently organized them into the structure of the breached server's database. He couldn't believe his eyes. Everywhere were encrypted data, so meticulously encrypted that even the insertion date and record identifier were ciphered.
After a while, the first decrypted records dropped from the cluster. To his surprise, he realized that although the guys put effort into encrypting the IDs, the access key allowed relatively straightforward decoding, merely with "10,000 combinations." He estimated that within an hour, he would have all the data cracked.
He looked at the first batch of data and couldn't help but marvel. The amount of data in the rows exceeded his expectations; there were stacks of documents, orders, reports, and final analyses of various actions by CIA teams directly in Europe.
In the first row, he stumbled upon a record of the liquidation operation of some Dutch laboratory by a special team in Europe. Their task was to erase its existence not only physically but also informatively. The record contained information about all logistics and the conduct of the liquidation operation, including deleted online records from international ISBN magazines.
