Folie II

Folie 2 Part 35

Kyle woke up in the late afternoon; the following day. He had gone to sleep at dawn, having done an all-nighter; scrapping the internet for any mentions of One Eyed Grace. It was all in vain, whoever she was, she seemed to be just as mysterious and elusive as Kobachi and the Blood Cartel.

After ordering a pizza, he did detailed background checks on all the other Graces who worked for the FBI. None seemed to match the profile of an enemy of the cartel. He had hoped that one of them might be working undercover, secretly searching for the cartel, but the information that he had gone over was inconclusive.

The two that were deceased, however, did make him wonder ... One of these Graces had worked with the DEA, in New Mexico, before her untimely death. Her case files mentioned that she had been pursuing a drug lord who also dealt in human trafficking in the 90s ... but Kyle could not connect him to the cartel or the Frozen Beauty Killer.

The other Grace had died in the 70s ... her case files did not say how she had passed away ... only that she had been working with the IRS and investigating several politicians who may have received untaxed bribes from anonymous parties to cover up some homicide cases in West Virginia ... The victims were all males between 20 and 35 ... but their killers had all been caught ... and their motives were all unrelated. The information on the identities of the politicians ... the parties who had bribed them ... and the killers ... had all been redacted. Strangely, however, even though the statute of limitations had passed ... the case was still open. There were no details on who was handling the case now ...

Just as Kyle was about to log off his backdoor terminal to the FBI agent database, he suddenly received an alert. One of the other Graces who had been working in the field with the Chicago police ... had just been shot and killed. She had been in pursuit of a pimp connected to a kidnapping case ...

'Hmm ...' Kyle wondered to himself, 'could I be onto something synchronistic ... or am I just putting meaning where there isn't any?'

Before Kyle could open her case file to read the full details of her death ... he got another alert ... quickly followed by another ... two more Graces had died ...

'Yo ... what the hell is going on now?' he muttered as a chill ran down his spine.

The alerts kept coming ... now there was an ongoing data breach at one of the servers at Quantico ... It was stopped and access to the server was blocked within the same minute that he was reading the report. Then, there was another much larger cyber-attack; a dedicated denial of service ... Basically, someone – or a group of them – was trying hack all the other FBI servers across the country containing case files on the Frozen Beauty Killer with brute force ...

Just as Kyle was opening the command line of his terminal to trace the hack – he too was hit – with a rootkit virus that broke through his firewalls and bricked his MacBook before he could counter the attack.

'Oh-Oh ... something wicked this way comes,' he sighed darkly as he stared at his blank screen.

His phone started ringing. He picked it up and glanced at the caller ID ... it was anonymous. He hesitated before answering ... but his curiosity got the better of him ...

'Hello ... this is Kyle' he spoke.

'This is Grace Sullivan ... I'm calling from Quantico with a warning from the oldest of us,' a disgruntled young woman said breathlessly. 'We followed your breadcrumbs ... but they weren't clues to our success so much as our demise ... It was all a trap and our network has been compromised ... They're going to kill all the other Graces if they can, just to make a point ... Rest assured that they won't – but because of our deadly conflict, we won't be able to reach you in time ... We won't be able to protect you. You need to run ... get out of California anyway you can ... We'll try and make contact again once we put out the fires. Good luck, Renji and thank you for fighting alongside us –'