The Agnus Dei Gambit

They were even less amused when they discovered that our digital forensics "expert" was the hottest teenage girl that their corroded old souls had ever laid eyes on. The guy with the food stains on his tie said, "Who's the chickee-poo Wakender?"

That pissed off my wife. She said with menace in her voice, "She's a Certified Digital Forensic Examiner unlike you Maloney, who never finished high school."

Brooke was bent over the wreck hooking her gear to the OBD Port. Her perfect round buns were highlighted in the Dupont Tychem 2000 protective coveralls that she was wearing to ensure against cross contamination.

She didn't need to wear a suit because the evidence was all digital. But Miss Brooklyn did everything by the book. That was why she was so hellishly effective.

Maloney did an appreciative gander at Brooke's apple shaped butt and whistled.

Kelley muttered under her breath, "Pig!!"

Maloney said angrily, "What did you just say??!!"

Kelley gave him a sweet smile and said, "I was just remarking how 'BIG' Brooke's gotten." Then she added sweetly, " I hope you didn't think I was calling you a PIG, Maloney?" He got a bewildered look.

It just took a minute to download the event data from the ECUs. Then Brooke stood up and handed a thumb drive to the evidence tech and took one for herself.

She said, "I'll do the analysis and then I will tell you what I did. You need to duplicate my findings on your sample using the same method. We both agree that the data is pure and untampered with at this point -- correct?"

The thirty-year-old evidence tech, who seemed mesmerized by Brooke's beautiful face, just gulped and nodded. Brooke said, "I will get with you when I have a complete report ready and walk you through the analysis so that you can attest beyond a shadow of a doubt that the findings in my report are correct. That should just take a couple of days."

Now, all three of the cops were looking at Brooke like she had just arrived from another planet. They were not used to nubile teenage beauties who talked to them like the high dollar consultants that the police department brought in for technical issues. But of course, Brooke was a lot smarter and more capable than any consultant.

Brooke and Kelley ran the analysis that day. I was sitting in the sun on our penthouse deck, drinking an Old-Style and listening to the reassuring sounds of the gritty City that I'd grown up in.

The two of them came out and sat beside me. Kelley did the talking. She said, "The good news is that it was murder, not suicide." I perked up my ears. That was interesting.

I said, "You mean it wasn't a malfunction in the car's brakes, or whatever?"

Kelley said grimly, "No, Atkinson was definitely killed by his own car." I was dumbfounded.

I said, "How in the f... I mean... world could his car kill him."

Brooke said eagerly, "Look here at this packet trace." I looked at her sternly and said, "Really??!!"

Kelley interrupted. She said kindly, "Uncle Joey is still living in the Twentieth Century my dear. So, you have to be gentle." Then she turned to me. The loving smile took the sting out of it.

Kelley said, "His vehicle's electronic control system was hijacked by a rogue signal that captured his cell phone, which was linked to the vehicle's hands-free system at the time."

Brooke took out a graph, laid it on the table and said, "You can see here where the normal -80 decibel milliwatts signal was overpowered by something local. It looks like about -50 dBm. They must have used a handheld. directional antenna to defeat the cell tower."

Brooke might as well have just said that in Mandarin. I said, "So where's the murder come in."

Kelley gave me a fond smile, turned to Brooke and said, "You see dear. You just have to love him."

Miss Smarty Pants said, "The cell phone feature is enabled by the car's OBD-II port, which in turn is hooked to its controller-area-network bus. We call it a CAN bus. The CAN regulates all the electronic control features, we call them ECUs, those are the actual things that drive the car."

She paused and added direly, "Once the intruder had access to the ECUs, he could make the car do anything he wanted it to do. In this case kill the occupant."

I said "WOW," but I was actually thinking, "I AM a dinosaur. Maybe I should buy that '57 Chevy that I've had my eye on. At least it isn't a hypothetical instrument of my demise."

Kelley and Brooke were looking at me like they could see the wheels turning in my head. I said, "So, if it isn't suicide then that's good news for Atkinson's wife and kids. But the police are going to hate it. How in the world can they investigate a murder if it was done by remote control? They won't touch it."

Kelley said forcefully, "That's something that you and I are going to have to do my love."

*****

We were helped along in that regard by the University of Chicago. Isobel called Kelly bright and early the next morning. All I heard on my end was the usual, "Uh-huhs" then Kelly said, "We'll be there," and hung up.

She turned to me with Irish humor dancing at the back of her gorgeous emerald eyes, and said, "We have a lunch date. So, put on your only tie because it's formal."

The Quadrangle Club was like my worst nightmare. It was old world academia with the carved wood paneling, the stone fireplace, and the lofty ceilings. I fit in there like a rhino at a garden party. My chief concern was the size of the table and the spindly legs on the chairs. With people like me, accidents have been known to happen.

The other two occupants of the table were looking at us expectantly. One of them was Isobel. The other was an older, very distinguished looking chap. Kelly muttered under her breath, "Oh crap!! It's the Chancellor."

Awkward would be an understatement as we got settled in our chairs. The whole room was staring at us, Kelly because you don't see women as spectacular as her in a faculty club, and me because they probably thought I was there to rob the place.

Kelly was in a very professional and demure black dress. But you couldn't hide what was underneath under a full burka. Moi? I was squeezed into my only sport coat and Oxford button down shirt, with a ratty knit tie knotted around my 22-inch neck.

I gingerly tested the chair before I put my full weight on it. Isobel was looking at me with horror. She realized why I was doing it and didn't want to be embarrassed if it collapsed. After all, her boss the Chancellor was sitting across from me.

The legs quivered and held and. Both Kelley and Isobel breathed a silent sigh of relief. Isobel turned to the Chancellor and said, "These are the two I was telling you about. They are the ones who proved Dr. Atkinson's death was murder. Kelley is also a colleague and a PhD graduate of the University. Her husband has a long history in law enforcement. They are the ones who can get the sample back for us."

I gave the Chancellor my best forthright military cop look and said, "Joey Wakender at your service sir. What can we do for you?"

The Chancellor looked like the folks in central casting had sent the very model of a modern academic leader, patrician face, white hair, penetrating blue eyes, and all.

The gist of the matter was that the University was both out of pocket for the cost and humiliated at losing the sample. So, they wanted it back at all costs. The Chancellor said, "That sample is priceless if it is authentic. Hence, it isn't a simple matter of getting our research program back on track. We owe it to posterity."

I asked the obvious question, "Why don't you just turn this over to law enforcement."

He gave me a "Seriously!!??" look and said, "Just who do you suggest we hand it to? The Chicago Police? They seem to care less, and they have no jurisdiction if the sample has been taken to Italy. Interpol is not going to bother with something that hasn't been vetted for authenticity, even if they could mount a concerted effort, which they can't."

I said, "A project like this will cost a lot of money. So, it isn't something we can undertake lightly. "

The Chancellor got the look that all good academic leaders get when they are talking about their favorite topic and said, "That's what they make donors for, Joey."

*****

Thus, we were committed to deliver one blood sample of potential historic significance back to its original owners. If somebody's ass got kicked in the performance of that contract -- well, that would just be a bonus.

There were clear religious overtones and God knows how many other possible complications. Not the least of which was the fact that the murderer was back at the "Citadel," which was in some Alpine shithole called Melago.

There wasn't any sane justification for us spending money and time to chase a creepy religious nut through the Italian Alps. But of course, there was this subliminal sense of unfinished business that neither of us have ever been capable of ignoring.

Settling up the account with the creepy guy became my obsession the minute he had laid Kelley out. She had a score to settle with him too. It's an Irish thing. Brooke was just overjoyed at the idea of real adventure. As illogical as it may seem, living a privileged life in paradise gets pretty wearing on an eighteen-year-old's sensibilities.

Finally, my ever-practical wife said it out loud, " Things have been normal around here for far too long. Now we have a chance for some action." Then she added more meaningfully, "And I can get something back from the guy who knocked me out." That's my girl!!

Kelley's a soul mate. I understand that term is absolutely the sappiest cliché in the entire romantic toolbox. But really, some guys are lucky enough to find a woman who is their exact peer and finding Kelley was perhaps the greatest blessing I've ever had.

I might look like a silver-back gorilla and Kelley is a stunning example of all-American beauty. But we're the same person underneath, smart, tough, cynical, and afraid of nothing. Plus, both of us need to have action, or we get antsy. So, there was no way we were going to pass up the chance to go creep hunting in the Italian Tyrol.

It didn't take a genius to connect the dots. Obviously, the creepy guy did it. Atkinson's death could have just been simple payback for undertaking the project in the first place. But more likely it was a head-fake, designed to gain access to the blood sample from the shroud.

The Chicago police had moved the determination on Atkinson's death from "suicide" to "murder by persons unknown" and then promptly filed it as cold. That was understandable. Being an old Army cop, I was aware of the fact that there were more people in greater Chicago dying from conventional gunshots and stabbings. Murder by wireless hijacking was a bit out of the average cop's area of expertise.

The good news was that the company settled Atkinson's insurance claim. So, his family got paid and Brooke's presence was no longer required. But Brooke had gotten a glimpse of what life was like in the real world and she wanted to see more of it.

Her mother didn't mind. Chelsea had lived in the wild for a long time before she met her man. So, we now had a teenage genius as a partner in crime.

Kelly told me that Brooke was an anomaly. Kelley said that at age eighteen the only thing she could think about was her peer group, dancing, and sex, not necessarily in that order. But Brooke had been caught up in her mother's black arts very early in life and she viewed the world in an oddly uninvolved way.

I hesitate to use the word loner. It was more like Brooke operated on another plane of existence. One that none of her peers shared. I suppose that was partly a consequence of being educated by private tutors on a lush, tropical island. But more relevantly, Brooke was a prisoner of her own exceptional intelligence. Dealing with her was like talking to somebody who was born at age forty.

Things that interested children never caught Brooke's fancy and her mother had carried her into the realm of the Red Dragon at an age where her daughter probably never remembered a time when she wasn't the princess of cyberspace.

You can judge the Hughes-Meissner's parenting style as you like. But the upshot was that Brooklyn was much more aware of the threats and the opportunities in the virtual environment than most adults.

So, we held a council of war. The first highly reasonable question was, how do we approach something like this? Did we seriously think we are going to knock on the door of a remote mountain citadel and politely ask the creepy guy to give us back our blood sample?

Obviously, the answer to that was, " NOT!!" So, the next question was how should we approach it?

That took a bit of consideration on our part.

The first question was, where and what is this Citadel place? Brooklyn, who had been watching our interchange said, "That's easy." Well -- it would be easy if you were an eighteen-year-old genius with access to the planet's second largest botnet.

Brooke's laptop ran an anonymizing proxy. That was a good thing, because we didn't want the residents of 42 Shchepkina Street to trace back to Chicago and the phantom who had danced around their firewalls and laughed at their encryption. That ghost was one very smart eighteen-year-old and it goes to show how the era of the dinosaurs has come to an end thanks to cyberspace.

So, while Brooke, Kelley and I were sitting at the bistro table on the roof of our Chicago penthouse, our young genius was virtually in Moscow accessing the 8193 MHz band that is used to maintain the Electro-L N5 imaging satellite, floating 22,000 miles above earth.

The first inkling that the folks at the Russian Federal Space Agency, had that their satellite had been hijacked was when it moved off station to a position over the border between Austria and Italy. It orbited geostationary for an hour, while all hell broke loose among the Roscosmos controllers. Then it fired its thrusters and headed blithely off toward the Asteroid belt.

We reviewed the high-res graphic images that the satellite had sent us. I was thinking to myself we could have probably gotten the same information via the internet. But it would have been nowhere near as much fun.

Brooke had walked the radius in from ten miles to five miles and then to the GPS coordinates that were given for Melago, South Tyrol. The resolution was so precise that you could tell the time of day from the shadows cast by the rocks, and even the hair color of the individuals in the parking lot below. You don't get THAT on Google Maps.

The thing that wasn't on any commercial map program was the prominent structure located about a quarter of a mile northeast of a group of hotels identified by the coordinates as Melago. The building was shoved back into a narrow, high sided canyon in a mountain called "Nockspitze" and it had all the earmarks of a "citadel." THAT had to be the place.

The structure had the appearance of an early Romanesque fortress, high stone slabbed walls and narrow windows. It was roughly the size and shape of the White Tower, which is the big central keep that sticks up from the Tower of London complex. But unlike the White Tower, it clearly had Dark Ages overtones, with rows of slit-like windows.

All-in-all it was a forbidding place, even in high summer. I was curious. So, I called up Google Maps and there was no sign of a building there. I said to Brooke, "You're sure you the satellite picture is accurate? There's nothing on any of the commercial sites."

Both Brooke and Kelly laughed. Kelley said, "Take a look at Area 51." I did and there was just a huge hole in the middle of the desert, like a giant amoeba was eating something down there.

I said puzzled, "There's nothing in the picture."

Brooke said, "That's because it's been redacted. Do you think that the military and any other interested party wants the details of its secret sites on social media? It's why I used the satellite." I asked myself how many eighteen-year-old girls would be that worldly wise -- or cynical?

I looked at the images. There was a long forbidding mountain valley leading east, away from the Lago di Resia, or Reschensee as the Swiss call it. That lake is the main terrain feature in the Otzal Alps. The valley was like a natural passageway through the mountains. It ended abruptly at Melago, in what amounted to a box-canyon.

There was no going past that point unless you were a mountain goat. I could see why the mysterious Apostles had chosen it to hole up. The location would limit the number of tourists to just those people interested in stark mountain landscapes, or avalanches.

The nearest large airport on that side of the Alps was two-hundred miles away in Bologna, which was the closest city with a reasonable flight-time. You could drive to Melago from that city in about four hours on the Autostrada west and then the A-22 north.

It was still anybody's guess as to what we were going to do when we got there. Our original idea was to find the creepy guy, beat him to a pulp and take the blood sample back to Chicago. That would be doable in theory if he weren't living in an actual fortress. Since he was -- we needed to rethink.

I said to Brooke, "This little gambit is going to be a lot harder than I thought. Do you want to opt-out now?"

Brooke snickered and Kelley gave me a look like I'd lost my mind. She said, "What's the matter old man. Losing your sense of adventure?" Kelley is eleven years younger than I am and she likes to kid me about the difference. But the love in her voice was unmistakable.

I said smiling, "I'm as up for it as I ever was, even if I have to use my walker to get there. But this is going to be dangerous work. I just wanted to make sure Brooke was still on board before I went off to play Don Quixote."

Kelley's smile is like the sun rising over the hills of Connemara. It's a burst of light on one of the loveliest vistas on earth - her beautiful face. She purred, "It's always been you and me Babe. Where you go, I go. Now we have one additional smart person to come with us."

Anybody who doesn't understand why that simple declaration was touching doesn't have a soul.

*****

The Delta flight from Chicago, by way of Amsterdam, touched down in Bologna just after seven PM on a beautiful northern Italian day. We were all suffering from the jetlag caused by leaving Chicago at noon and arriving in Bologna thirteen hours later at sunset of the following day.

Since a mysterious "donor" was paying for it, I'd booked us into the Grand Hotel Majestic gia' Baglioni, just to get our feet under us. The Baglioni is actually in an old Renaissance palace. Needless to say, it was luxurious. I try to take advantage of spending somebody else's dime whenever I can.

I'd also rented a Mercedes G-Class from the airport Sixt. I wanted to hire a vehicle with Kelley's sophisticated elegance and my muscle because I knew we were headed for the ass-end of nowhere. Okay, it cost an arm and a leg, but I repeat - donors...

Our suite was a two-bedroom layout with a common area in the middle. Brooke was on one side of the suite and we were on the other. Without getting into too many details, Kelley had told me that although Brooke was a genius, she was totally inexperienced when it came to sex. So, we needed to be careful if we planned to make up for any of the time we would be missing once we got to Melago.

Brooke was in her bedroom across the common area playing games on the internet, or maybe bringing some predatory corporation to its knees. It was frightening to think about what our precocious little friend might be up to.

Kelley was wearing her usual traveling gear, a light cashmere blend turtleneck over a skintight pair of designer jeans. She looked delectable and I was hungry. The moment she closed the door to our bedroom I grabbed her by the arm and walked her over to the luxurious king bed.