Chapter 30.1

Conducting the search from devices owned by other people was only the beginning.

August recopied the data to ten more email addresses, then to a flash drive which she continuously mailed to a PO box so that it was always in transit. Every time she left home, she stopped somewhere unmonitored to apply her blonde wig, blue contacts and heavy eyeshadow. Every time she examined her data she did it from a different location.

Her precautions were extreme considering that she was only exploring correlations claimed by Stephen Cruze, none of which could directly implicate anyone in anything. She was doing it more to get into the habit. Depending on what James came back with, the investigation could quickly veer into the red zone.

Five days of sorting data and August still wasn't done, though she was getting better at skimming and homing in on keywords. One more day ought to do it. There was only one problem.

It was Christmas and all the stupid libraries were closed.

For August, Christmas was a motivator to get buried under a mountain of work. Inactivity produced thoughts of putting up a tree, decorating, buying presents—thoughts quickly squashed like unwelcome roaches. The extent of her holiday was to send a text message of Merry Christmas to the contacts on her Australian phone list: John Ward, her foster parents, a favorite former professor, and two school friends with whom she had not quite fallen out of touch. By next Christmas, there might be no need to send any messages at all.

Therefore, work. With no library anonymity, however, figuring out what she could safely do was hair-pulling aggravation.

August decided not to wait. In addition to her usual security measures, she connected to the net through five extra proxies. If anyone ran a trace, they would have to backtrack through all those dead ends. It almost certainly wasn't beyond the capability of the NSA to find her, but she doubted they would try just for the data she currently had her hands on.

The extra precautions took two hours; combing the rest of the data took eight. When she finished, three hours remained until Christmas would have thankfully come and gone for another year.

August stared at her phone until 9:30, arguing with herself over all the reasons it was stupid to call. She finally growled in disgust and hit the button to dial.

It rang so many times that she was ready to hang up when the call finally connected. A voice said something like hello, though it was hard to tell over the raucous background noise: a hellish din of pounding music, multiple televisions, at least half a dozen conversations, and over it all a few people belting Auld Lang Syne off-key, at the top of their lungs and a week too early.

"H-hello?" August said.

"—lo?" said a voice. "Hello?" Clearer now, because he was shouting, but still crushed beneath overwhelming ambient noise.

"Can you hear me?" August yelled, wincing as the sound echoed wildly through the emptiness of her apartment.

Blessed silence descended. "Alright, sorry," James said. "Had to step outside."

"What the devil is going on?"

"A party at Donald's house."

"A ... party?"

"Yeah. I'm doing it tonight. This zoo is my cover, and as you heard, it's more effective than I ever imagined."

"The flash drive, you mean? Tonight?"

"Unless there's a reason I shouldn't."

"Um, no. No, tonight is fine. Brilliant."

"Good." There was a short silence. "So, what's up?"

"Oh, nothing really, just, well, thought I'd let you know I finished my research into the book. Fact-checking."

"How'd it go?"

"Good, uh, quite good," August said. "I've written up everything in a report and I'll pass it along by hand so it won't go through the internet. Whenever it's convenient."

"Alright. I'll give you a call tomorrow after I get home."

"After you ... you're staying? There?"

"Donald always lets everyone stay," James said. "Place is the size of Buckingham, bedrooms out the wazoo. That will give me all night in case I can't do it during the party."

"You've really thought this through."

"No half-measures."

"Righto ... well, good thinking..."

"I'll talk to you tomorrow. I need to get back."

"Sure, okay."

"Night," James said.

"Um..."

"What is it? Something else?"

"No, I just..."

August briefly covered the phone so he wouldn't hear her sigh. What was she trying to say? Surely not something as stupid as why didn't you invite me? She had spent her day researching, had accomplished a lot, and she was fine with that.

She was fine with that, damn it.

"Merry Christmas," she finished, lamely. Knowing full well that James, at his best friend's house to hack the computer system like a twenty-first century Benedict Arnold, would not want to hear wishes for a happy holiday from the person who had put him there.

But James said, "Merry Christmas, August," and it was the first time she could remember him saying her name.

***

August hardly slept.

What if James got caught?

Imagined scenarios ran the gamut from Donald laughing it off, to Donald calling the police, to Donald calling the NSA on some Batphone private line. If UCC really was in league with the alphabets and James was caught in a treasonous act against the country's national security interests, August didn't want to imagine the consequences.

Maybe James didn't even realize what he had gotten into. He was just a normal person. This had to feel like something out of a bad spy movie to him.

...No. James was a normal person, but he wasn't just anything. He was intelligent, perceptive and analytical. He must know how difficult it would be to prove a negative. They could search until the end of time and find nothing, but all that would "prove" was that they hadn't found anything. He'd had every opportunity to exit the whole mess. He obviously had reasons not to.

You idiot, August wanted to tell him. Why didn't you get out when you had the chance?

At some point, she dropped into fitful sleep. When she opened her eyes, light was filtering through the blinds and her limbs and neck were tighter than ever.

With the turmoil of late, even her best relaxation techniques were useless. All she could do was run until she was too tired to worry.

August did a ten block square around her apartment for ninety minutes, sucking in freezing air and exhaling streams of white, avoiding patches of black ice more by instinct than thought. Slick with sweat and completely drained, she finally felt more clearheaded.

She showered, ate, and sat on the bed to watch television, wanting any possible distraction. The news was the same old garbage: political tensions abroad, dissatisfaction with economic policies at home, natural disaster here, financial crash there, somebody on the lam from the law. Might as well record one session and just re-watch it every six months.

Only one item was of interest: an investigation into the financial state of the People's Liberation Army of China. The exposé claimed that although PLA commercial interests were spun off into private corporations in the late 1990s, the top brass maintained strong connections with the "retired" military officers who took control of those corporations. The Chinese government had only recently become aware of the depth of those connections and was investigating the implications.

Finally, mainstream recognition of what August had known all along. Investigating PLA holdings was one of the projects she had been assigned to before her move to New York. The PLA was still the world's largest holder of commercial enterprise. It was impossible to get an accurate estimate due to the labyrinthine layers of holding companies, governing boards and handshake deals, but the values were certainly in the trillions.

When Australia's catastrophic financial crisis struck in early 2018, the International Monetary Fund came through with a bailout. But speculation within the intelligence community was that Chinese interests may have influenced the crisis, and that all the money flowing into Australia outside of the IMF injection was of Chinese origin—more specifically, PLA origin. That implied, to some, that the PLA was the cause of the problem while presenting itself as the solution, intentionally precipitating the opportunity to buy up Australian holdings at their lowest ebb in value.

That view was impossible to reconcile with the view that UCC was involved in the collapse. People took sides. The call for investigation into the PLA won out, and UCC was relegated to distant back burners. When August's job offer from UCC came up, John Ward leapt at the opportunity to prove that his UCC theory was correct, and that the naysayers fingering Chinese involvement were wrong.

August turned the television off and leaned back into her pillows, hair still in a towel, searching the stucco for soothing patterns.

She had never come right out and asked John why he believed so strongly. She had read his report, of course. Nothing in it constituted proof. UCC was a prime target of speculation because it was doing things that nobody thought should be possible, but it was an enormous leap from being an industry leader and cutting-edge innovator to being a force of instability in the world market and a shadowy agent of political change. What did John Ward know that no one else did? And if the answer was nothing ... what did that say about him?

With the evidence now in hand, August was starting to feel that there was something here after all. Even if UCC wasn't behind the things John Ward had originally believed, it was worthy of investigation. But stumbling on to that had been pure luck.

She had been looking for a needle in a haystack all these years, and from the beginning nobody had been able to clearly show that there was a needle, or even a bloody haystack. Why had she never seen that? Why had she taken on such a ludicrous task?

The answer was obvious, though August hated to admit it.

They met at university: August a fresh-faced first year, John a grad student in political science and already interning with the ASIS. She had been enthralled by his big ideas and eagerness to create change. He treated her as a sounding board, valuable second opinion and indispensable partner, telling her things that by rights he should have told no one, making her feel important. Different. Special.

Between yesterday's idealistic goal of changing the world and today's rut-stuck reality, the only thing that had definitively changed was their selves. August wasn't that bright-eyed girl valuing ideas over truth, and John wasn't that incisive man confident in steering the world where he wanted it to go. John still had ambition, but only for climbing astride his chosen profession; August still had tenacity to see a project through, but only out of stubbornness.

August's unshakable and unjustified faith in a man who was just a man had brought her to this. Ironic, given that she relied on her ability to read people in all of her separate occupations. The lesson: however clearly you could see the truth and faults in a stranger, you could never see them in yourself or the ones closest to you.

The ripples and dots and whorls in the stucco over her bed became ships and dragons and planets and men. August watched them in their unceasing struggle; even though it was always the same, it was never the same.

There had to be a lesson in that, as well. Her life was the same, but the way she looked at it had changed. Maybe that would be enough to find a different ending.