Thin Lines (The Child Thief #3)(52)

“Or they’re using other people to do their dirty work,” Kory said suddenly, bringing his finger down on the first OH+ note. The one from that first meeting in the warehouse. Then he lifted his eyes up to meet mine. “Maybe it’s not that they’re getting better at hiding. Maybe they’re just using people and techniques the government won’t recognize as theirs.”

I pulled back, my mind racing.

Well, that was a thought. It matched almost exactly with my earlier thoughts, from when we’d first found out that Little John had rescued us, and that they’d known who we were, and how the mission would have gone, but hadn’t known what we were going to see inside the prison. I’d sensed at the time that we’d been used and that it had been some sort of research mission. Except that we’d never had a chance to report back to Little John about what we’d found. We hadn’t even known that we were supposed to report back—heck, Zion and Alexy were probably supposed to be the “reporters.” We also hadn’t known what they’d been looking for, if there had been a specific target.

Instead, they’d dropped us in a meadow and left us there, to escape the Authority on our own. And our contacts who had known about Little John—Alexy and Zion, and perhaps Allerra—had disappeared without a word.

“Well, a couple things that we do know,” Nelson said. “Little John has been around for twenty years, according to this timeline. That’s a lot older than Operation Hood. So there seems to be a very good chance that Operation Hood was an offshoot of Little John. A younger sibling? Something to maybe take the heat off the main office, so to speak? There are also notes here about raids on Little John offices, or what the government thought were Little John offices. None of them successful.”

She pointed to three different dates on the line, and I leaned over to see that she was correct. At some point, the government had thought they knew enough about Little John to raid a specific location. But each raid was marked with one word: Failure. They might have thought they’d known where to find Little John, but they’d been unsuccessful. Either they’d had the wrong spot, or all the members of Little John had gotten out of there before the Authority showed up.

“But how much of a failure?” I wondered aloud. “Does that mean they didn’t find anything? Or just that they didn’t find the leader?”

“And then the final operation,” Ant noted, putting his finger on the last date of the timeline. The raid on the warehouse, which was marked as our doing. “The warehouse raid. But…” He leaned closer, squinting at the timeline, and then sat up again. “This is labeled as a reverse hack. What does that mean? Isn’t that…” He looked up at Nelson, seeking confirmation for whatever he was thinking, and she nodded.

“It means they followed a line to that warehouse. Someone in that warehouse had… hacked them,” she said slowly.

I shook my head. “But that warehouse was holding the server for that mail order and auction site. And we know that site belongs to the Ministry. Or at least, we think we know…”

I stopped talking, wondering whether we’d gotten it all wrong. But surely we hadn’t. That place had been chock full of things that were Ministry-level documents. The files on all those kids. The applications for adoption. The physical folders with all that information. It was all specific to the CRAS. Who else would have had any of that but the Ministry?

“No,” I said firmly. “That had to be a Ministry site and a Ministry building. There was way too much Ministry stuff in there for anyone else to own it. So why would they label it a reverse hack? That isn’t what they did to you, is it?”

Nelson shook her head. “No. What they did was set a trap for me. That didn’t have anything to do with hacking. They set a trap, and once I tripped it, it told them where I was. A reverse hack can only mean one thing,” she said. “It means someone hacked into them, and then they reverse hacked the hacker, and then followed the trail. They weren’t… prepared for the hackings, so they didn’t have time or warning enough to set a snare protocol. They probably did that later. The first time, they must have figured out they’d been hacked, and then done whatever they could to trace it back to where it came from. The warehouse, though…” She shook her head. “It doesn’t make any sense. That warehouse showed as the location that housed the IP that ran the site, so the warehouse must belong to the Ministry. Why would they be watching a warehouse that was theirs, just on the off chance that someone broke in?”

My mind raced through the implications, and then came to a screeching halt.

“What if the warehouse itself was a trap?” I whispered, understanding dawning suddenly. “Little John is clearly a major thorn in the government’s side. Hell, they’ve been trying to get rid of them for twenty years! What if the warehouse was a trap they’d set up for Little John… and we walked right into it? It would make sense. The Ministry set it up, knowing that Little John would bite, and then had the Authority standing by, ready to make arrests. Then we happen across this site, and we find where we think it’s housed, and…”

“And we walk right into the trap,” Kory finished for me. “Oh my God.”

“But that doesn’t make sense either,” Jackie said, crossing her arms. “It doesn’t explain the reverse hack. If that warehouse belonged to the Ministry—or the government, at least, because who knows if it’s actually the Ministry or some other secret department we don’t know about yet—why would there be a reverse hack associated with it? And secondly, if it was something Little John already knew about, why would Zion and Alexy have gone along without saying anything to us about it?”