The Betrayal of Ka (The Transprophetics: Book One)

36. Revelations of Truth

Sirens blared as the Mexican police cars arrived at the park. Joanna and Tim were there within a few minutes too. Everything was a blur to Dylan. Why had he let his little brother wander off? Why in the hell had those men grabbed Bjorn and shoved him into that van?

Dylan sat down on the park bench between his mom and Adelita. Joanna was in a state of shock, but still trying to comfort her older son. As the last police officer walked away from Tim, Dylan watched, as Tim took out his smartphone and started walking towards the public restrooms.

"I gotta go to the bathroom," Dylan explained, as he got up and followed Tim, hoping not to be noticed. Rather than going into the restroom, Tim went behind the building. Dylan stopped before he came around the building. He quickly poked his head around the corner and saw that Tim was right there, holding his phone up, obviously on a video call.

"Mr. Parnell, how's your vacation going?" asked a young woman on the other end of the call.

"Terrible, Kaylee. I need your help."

"Okay, what can I do?"

"Kaylee, please don't hang up," Tim asserted into the phone. "My girlfriend's son has just been kidnapped. I know that you're connected to GAPN. I need to talk to Sebastian, please."

"Mr. Parnell, I don't know what you're talking about. I'm sorry, but I don't understand."

Tim, releasing a deep breath, continued, "Kaylee, a few weeks ago, I came up behind you while you were working late. I saw what you were doing. I could have fired you on the spot, but I didn't. It wasn't all that long ago that I was a kid too. And I was a hacker too. I was one of the original members of the Legion of Doom. I was known as Rudianos."

He paused for a breath, and Kaylee tentatively inquired, "Okay, what does this have to do with me?"

"I need you to connect me with Sebastian, as quickly as possible. I think he can help," said Tim.

"Okay, Tim, hang on."

Tim sat down on a small retaining wall behind the bathroom, letting out another deep sigh. "Dylan, come on around here."

Dylan tensed up. He thought he had been quite stealthy, but Tim obviously knew he was there.

"What's this all about?" Dylan asked Tim.

"Do you know what my company does?" Tim asked him.

Dylan looked at Tim, realizing that he didn't have a clue about what the guy really did. "Not really."

"It's really fairly simple," Tim explained. "We take direct data feeds from over two hundred and eighty-two social media-enabled companies around the world. Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Flickr, and hundreds more. Many of these feeds are from private social networks, corporate networks, government networks, you name it. We've worked a deal to get the data, protect privacy, and extract the intelligence that our clients need. We aggregate the feeds, slice it, dice it, and analyze it a thousand different ways."

"That's pretty cool," Dylan remarked.

"Kaylee is a system administrator that we hired about a year ago. I caught her trying to hack into the systems that aggregate the feeds. I could have fired her, but that would have been a little hypocritical on my part, as you already heard. I was a hacker in my younger days. More importantly, I saw some value in watching her. If she could hack in, we were vulnerable. I had her checked out by a friend of a friend who happens to be FBI. She's got connections to a group called GAPN."

"What's GAPN?" asked Dylan.

"Global Anonymous Pirate Network. It's a loosely affiliated group of hackers, anarchists, conspiracy theorists, and the like. They made big news recently by releasing a trove of secret government documents from the United Kingdom, France, Germany, and the Netherlands."