Gold: Chapter 4
Simone Wrenne perched at her desk like a canary in a cage. She had received a call that morning from the First National Bank of Dallas, stating that some old millionaire’s computer system had been hacked in the SWIFT network. It had all the markings of “The Count.” It was a stupid nickname that circulated through the office. The Count of Monte Cristo, someone who stole a treasure and was filthy rich. That’s what this guy—whoever he was—did. He targeted millionaires and billionaires across the globe. Wormed his way into their bank accounts and drained them. Left behind taunting messages, usually in the form of literary quotes embedded in the code. Sometimes he worked as a lone actor, sometimes with associates. Simone had to give it to him—or her, whoever they were. They were good. They covered their tracks. Everyone wanted to catch this guy.
But he had been dormant for a few months. Hadn’t heard a peep from him.
Simone had worked tirelessly for years, making it through the FBI academy, gritting her teeth and shutting up. She was one of the few Black people who worked for the FBI. Only 5% worked for the Bureau. It made family reunions or holidays rather tense, with her family asking why she wanted to work in law enforcement.
Of course, it didn’t help that the people she was trying to protect, the public, the citizens of the country, didn’t show her due respect either. Once when she was executing a search warrant as the team leader, she entered the suspect’s house, where she lived with her 80-year-old grandmother, who immediately screeched, “You can’t be an FBI agent! You’re Black!”
Simone had turned to her and said, “Ma’am, I am in charge of executing this search safely and properly. I need you to sit down and be quiet.”
“Get out! Get out of this house!” She shook her cane at Simone. Another string of insults followed.
Simone turned to the daughter. “Your mother can either sit quietly, or I can put her on the ground, hog tie her, and hold her at gunpoint.”
“Mother? Shut the fuck up.”
For the first year out of the academy, Simone was assigned to the drug squad, even though she had no experience or background with narcotics. But she didn’t complain; she did what the Bureau wanted.
Sometimes, she still got the blood boiling comment from one of the good ol’ boys that women couldn’t understand computer code as well as men (“They’re just more logical.”) She refused to think of the other shit she’d heard when it was only 5am. It didn’t matter that she’d graduated from Cal Tech suma cum laude or that she worked the cybersecurity division of Microsoft for years. Sometimes, it wasn’t even stupid comments that made her question whether or not people were subconsciously racist. She had three years in the Bureau—green as Spring grass—and Monday morning she kept hearing about some cookout that a colleague had over the weekend that everyone else seemed to have been invited to—except her. For one brief moment, she asked herself, “Is it because I’m Black? New? Just some random asshole?” But she couldn’t waste time wondering about how people saw her.
What they usually saw was a tiny, 5’4” rail-thin Black woman. She glanced up at the signed photo she had of Nichelle Nichols in her Star Trek uniform. Simone had idolized Nichols in high school, watching reruns of The Original Series and The Next Generation. Uhura could have run the Enterprise way better than Kirk. Kirk was always getting them into trouble. And no one ever said stupid things to her like, “You’re so quiet,” (for a Black woman) or “you’re so articulate.” No. Uhura was cool, calm, and in control.
She didn’t have time to waste thinking about how her identity was perceived. Back in the 90s, there had been a big push toward affirmative action hiring, which she felt ambivalent toward. On the one hand, the Bureau needed to be more cognizant of who they hired and why; on the other, no one wanted to be the “token Black person.” No one, least of all Simone, wanted the question, “Am I here because I’m good enough, or am I here because of a quota?” rattling around in her head, living rent-free. No one wanted to be the person the Bureau had lowered their standards for. She already questioned whether she belonged at the Bureau plenty, but it didn’t have anything to do with being Black. To work at the Bureau, she had to be perfect. She was part of a historical, elite team that valued, above all, the safety of the American people. The Bureau didn’t give a shit about who you were before the Bureau or where you would go after. The Bureau didn’t care what Simone thought, felt, or needed. It was like an emotionally stunted, borderline narcissistic boyfriend in that regard. It cared about results. Simone felt the constant barbells of expectation and responsibility. To work at the FBI meant learning to live with the agonizing siren always screaming in her mind, “Not good enough.” But everyone in the Bureau had that siren.
Her current workload consisted of taking complaint calls for the cybercrime division. Because she was relatively green, she assisted the main agent talking to the good citizens of the United States. On days like today, she kept that belief at the forefront of her mind as well as DEB—Don’t Embarrass the Bureau. She couldn’t let one whiff of unprofessionalism enter her tone.
“There are lasers being operated in space that can look into people’s computers and steal their bank account information?” she repeated verbatim from the man on the other line. “And that’s being operated out of…Antarctica?” She doodled on a pad. “Well. It has been noted for our records.” Not “We’ll look into it,” because of course, she wouldn’t.
The next call wasn’t much better.
“My boyfriend, or should I say EX-BOYFRIEND, needs to be investigated by y’all,” said a woman who sounded in her forties. She inhaled on a cigarette. “I don’t know where he keeps the money, but he probably owes back taxes. TONS. OF THEM. Cuz he sure ain’t been paying his half of my motherfuckin’ rent!”
That one did hold a glimmer of potential, not paying taxes, but more likely than not the…gentleman in question was probably just broke. Or spending it on another woman.
“Thank you for the tip.” Simone set down the phone and glanced at the image of Wonder Woman as her cellphone screensaver. Give me strength.
97% of her calls were like that, but those other 3% sometimes had good information that the Bureau acted on.
Greg Henshaw, her supervisor, came around to her cubicle. “How’s that New York case coming?”
Shit.
The New York field office had sent a disk to look through since they were overloaded, and Dallas could handle the workload. Simone wasn’t technically a case agent on it, but since she was the newest agent, she had been assigned to work on it, to turn a lead around in 60 days.
She was on Day 40.
“Great. Nearly done,” she replied.
Henshaw turned and walked away.
She needed a break from taking calls anyway. It wasn’t grunt work per se; she would never call it that, but her non-FBI friends would. She had to pick up the leftovers from New York, but if she wanted to bitch, then she should get the hell out of the FBI. Still, she needed a case of her own. She didn’t need the recognition of doing a good job; she needed the satisfaction of doing what no one else could, of being the 1% among the 1%.
She pulled out the disk. The New York cyber division was investigating a group highly skilled in manipulating bank transactions that used the SWIFT network, a fintech/telecom company. Simone needed to comb through the disk and look for IP addresses tied to known bad actors using EnCase, the should-be-put-out-to-pasture software that the Bureau used to crunch forensic data. Not the most updated, but the trusty dusty did its job.
While running the searches, Simone noticed weird HTML tags in free space. Free space was where every single bit of information on a computer went after it was “deleted,” but still recoverable, like some digital bardo state.
It might have been her fourth cup of coffee, but Simone wanted to know what the HTML would look like reconstructed. Of course, since EnCase was outdated, she copied the fragments into Notepad, saved as an .html file, then reopened in a browser.
The files were corrupted but not beyond salvaging. The pages had tables with numbers, account IDs, and in some cases names. Something about the html fragments stood out to her, something she could not yet identify, but it was right there, staring at her.
Simone ran the accounts against the New York case file.
Voila—they were some of the same laundered account shells from the SWIFT hack.
She read through the code. A grin slowly spread across her face.
Hadn’t heard a peep from the Count.
Until now.