Abandoned Treasure

Council Chief Enforcer Mark Trestman’s POV

Council Headquarters, Private Quarters

Sunday, February 10th, 2008

Nothing was making sense.

I set the folders on my desk and stood, stretching my sore back out. I’d been sitting here for two hours after dinner with no progress. Vic’s questions about targeting the Sampson family in North Dakota ate at me.

I was no closer to finding the reason for their destruction than a month ago.

The Council records revealed little. The family had lived quietly and peacefully for generations in sparsely populated North and South Dakota areas. With no Packs within three hundred miles, there were few opportunities for adverse interactions with our wolves. Searching the human systems was just as much of a dead end. They didn’t have as much as a ticket, and their towing company had a good reputation in the area. Carol was the first in the family to attend college, although I couldn’t find educational records on her parents or brother.

That wasn’t surprising. Wolves age far slower than humans after reaching maturity. A hundred-year-old wolf would have the same appearance as a human in their thirties, thus the need to move and change identities. Our Enforcers had tracked them from their last identities shortly after Carol was born.

The towing company provided a good income for them as Carol graduated from public schools before going to North Dakota State. They didn’t socialize much with their neighbors, but they had friends. The murders and Carol’s disappearance remained active cases with local law enforcement. Last week, one of our wolves who worked as a Drug Enforcement Agency agent contacted the Lead Detective on the case. He said he was looking for evidence of Cartel expansion into the Midwest, and the Sampson case came up in a search due to the killing of the entire family. The Detective confirmed no evidence of the drug trade, much less other criminal activity. They had no motives or suspects.

The initial report to the Council came in as an anonymous tip; multiple rogues scented at North Dakota State University. Reports of rogue activity were routine until they included one or more aggravating factors, such as criminal activity or mental problems. A gathering of rogues was a red flag for us; a large enough group, with a strong enough wolf in charge, could challenge and overcome a Council Pack.

The prevailing theory was that a rogue band took down the Arrowhead Pack in Minnesota. They burned it to the ground with no survivors.

We couldn’t be too careful.

The report was forwarded to Packs in the area to check out. Bitterroot wasn’t the closest Pack, but they had people traveling home. Alpha Blackstone volunteered his men, and the rest was history. The Alpha’s report to the Council said the family started shooting as the Beta approached, and they had to defend themselves. One of their men didn’t make it, and they burned the place to hide the evidence.

Alpha Todd didn’t bother to inform the Council they’d taken Carol prisoner. We didn’t learn of her until she escaped with her mate, Nathan Storm. The Chairman hadn’t been happy with him, but what could he do? Rogue justice was in the hands of the entity that captured them, and Bitterroot convicted her for killing one of their own. Todd’s explanation for not killing her was that she was the mate of a Pack Wolf who refused to reject her, and prison was better than risking him going rogue after her death. When pressed, he pulled the “It’s Pack business” card. The Chairman and the other Alphas backed off like they usually did.

I cracked a beer and took a sip, looking out the window at the pine trees covered in snow. Record searches and investigative reports were a dead end. To get answers, I’d have to take a more active role, interviewing witnesses and Pack members.

I could predict how the conversation would go if I asked the Chairman for permission to open an investigation into Carol Sampson. “Why? She’s dead, Mark. She killed a Pack wolf, I signed the warrant, and you carried it out. What probable cause do you have to question Alpha Blackstone’s actions? You aren’t getting fuzzy about things like Knightly, are you?”

Yeah, opening an official investigation wouldn’t help. I could ask questions informally, but the first Bitterroot person I talk to? He’ll call his Alpha and report what I was asking about. Ten minutes after that? I’d be on the receiving end of a proper ass-chewing in the Chairman’s office. Alphas don’t like it when their actions come into question.

Since I couldn’t find anything on Carol, I’d have to look into Bitterroot records and search for patterns. I set the beer next to my laptop, logged into the local network, and started digging. Thirty minutes later, my computer stopped working.

I tried a few things before shutting it down. When it restarted, it wouldn’t connect. I closed it down, figuring Luna wanted me to get some sleep, so I headed for the shower.

The Chairman’s summons stopped me short. “All Enforcers report to the office immediately,” he ordered.

Fuck. I grabbed my jacket, slid my feet into my boots, and headed out the door. The four men and two women under my command soon joined me in my conference room. “Anyone know what is going on?”

The Chairman’s secretary sent us to meet him in the computer lab conference room. I could sense the panic as I walked into the server room; despite the air conditioning, every one of our techs was red-faced and sweating. I walked into the meeting room and sat across from the Chairman and his senior leaders, my people standing along the wall. “What is going on, sir?”

“We’ve been fucking hacked,” the Chairman replied.

I nodded. “That’s why the network went down?”

Jen Izawa, our Information Technology Beta, answered for him. “We did an emergency shutdown to stop the data transfer. We’re running isolated now until we can find and close the system breach.”

Shit. “How bad is it?”

“We’re still evaluating, but we know they downloaded all the Enforcer files and Council communications with Pack Alphas. There may be more.”

By the Goddess, this was bad. Our files contained all the intelligence we had on rogues and other threats, plus all the actions and plans we had to deal with them. “Do we know who did it?”

“No, but that’s why you are here. All other priorities take a backseat to this,” Chairman Gruber replied. “I want these fuckers dead, and I want our secrets to stay that way. Got it?”

“Yes, sir,” I replied.

“Get to work. I have to make a bunch of phone calls because I can’t do my fucking videoconferences on a system I can’t trust.” He stormed out of the office, leaving me with my team and the computer geeks.

It took less than an hour for the team to discover how the hacker got through our firewalls. They’d logged in using Alpha Blackstone’s user ID and password, but the IP address wasn’t the one for Bitterroot Pack. Once inside, the hacker had bypassed every protection for the secure sub-net holding the Enforcer files. Alarms started going off on the servers minutes after those files were compromised, allowing the team to disconnect from the Internet. The Pack rosters and a complete listing of Pack-related companies went out, along with a partial list of Pack properties.

By three in the morning, we’d done all we could. The breach began in Bitterroot territory, so I went there with two Enforcers the following afternoon.

They weren’t happy to see us, nor were they cooperative. They’d been breached a month earlier and hadn’t reported it. The Pack had suffered six-digit losses in Pack accounts, plus other losses the Alpha refused to talk about.My computer people confirmed the hacker’s “fingerprints” were similar, though the Council hack was far more sophisticated. Bitterroot’s defenses were older and far less effective than the Council firewall. Using the Alpha’s login bypassed much of that added protection.

They wouldn’t be getting in again, I was assured a month later. Of course, we had no idea who had accessed our system. We knew the hack originated from Palo Alto, but you couldn’t swing a dead cat without hitting a hacker in Silicon Valley.

It was also Sons of Tezcatlipoca territory, so Enforcers weren’t welcome. I wouldn’t have put it past the Sons to be behind the breach! Arguing against that was there had been no ransom notices, no ransomware left behind, and no further data breaches. The Sons would have used the information for either profit or leverage already.

I was out of leads, and the Chairman was out of patience.

He made a difficult choice, passing along what we knew to the Sons with a reward offer. They’d get half a million if they found the hacker and another half a million for recovering the stolen data.

Now we had to wait.