The drive back was heartbreaking for me. The twins would cry, and when they finally stopped crying Olivia would start up. The three of them stayed in the backseat, the young ones in their new booster seats I bought back at Walmart, and Olivia in the middle.
Mark and I were exhausted, but we couldn't afford the risk of stopping so we pushed onward. We finally got home, and were greeted by a very worried Pack. Olivia took the kids with Mark back to his parent's house, since they had bonded during the drive. I took a quick shower, then went downstairs to talk to my Pack and eat some dinner before bed.
"It's bad out there," I said, "and it's getting worse." I talked them through how we entered the Pack house and killed the Alphas, then everything that happened with the police and military attack on their house and the loss of all but the twins. "I just don't understand it, why would they attack his house and kill him like that? He was going to hand the rest of us over on a silver platter!"
Jacob leaned forward, Melanie pressed into his side. "When they do this, it means they don't need to make the deal. Either they already have the information, are confident they can still get the information after the attack, or they don't trust him to do his part. My money would be that they figure they can still find the information they need without him."
"How?" Craig looked at me, then at him. "Olivia told her brother to destroy his computer, his office. The whole place burned to the ground, we saw it on the news."
It was Josh's turn to cut in. "Nothing is truly destroyed in the age of the Internet."
I looked at him. "What do you mean?"
"They follow the trails. We talked about Echelon earlier. The National Security Agency has all the electronic communications, phone calls, and email traffic going back YEARS stored in a data center in Utah. They know who Alpha Johnson was an Alpha, as was Principal Johnson and Michael Anderson. You go out from there to family and known acquaintances. By using facebook, phone records, emails and financial transactions, you can build a list of probable werewolves. You track those people down, then go to their friends, and so on, and so on..."
I sat back and closed my eyes, my head hurt. "So if they don't know who I am yet, they will soon."
He nodded. "Unless my buddies can do something about it."
Everyone, including his parents, looked at him. "What are you talking about?"
"I'm part of a, well, community of hackers. Some of us are werewolves, some are just anti-capitalist or concerned with government intrusion into our private lives. Anyway, when this whole thing started, we had some discussions on the Dark Web and reached a general agreement. This is the opportunity to wreak havoc on the financial system, the government and powerful corporations, and blame it all on werewolves."
I smiled at him. "You're a fucking genius, Josh." He smiled. "So what have you done?"
"Well, we all agreed to set up our hacks to hit at midnight tonight. The idea is that the cyberattacks are so numerous and widespread that they can't respond to them all at once. Power grids, banking systems, government databases, it's all on the table. We've spread around some really nasty viruses that haven't been seen yet; they worm their way into a system and cause the files to repeatedly overwrite the data." He smiled as he thought about it. "They won't know what hit them."
"But what about the data centers? Surely, they have backup drives, tapes, remote data centers. Two is one and one is none, as the Rangers say." Jacob was sitting back, mulling it over.
"True... except we know where the major ones are we need to take out. The werewolves among us have divided up the targets, and the local Packs will be attacking them tonight. All four Utah packs are working together to go after the NSA supercomputers and data farm."
My jaw was almost to the table, a whole war was being planned and my fifteen year old rent-a-hacker was up to his neck in it. "Why wasn't I informed?"
"Need to know only. No data centers in this hick town." I chuckled, he was right. There were no high-value targets around for us. "I have to get back, I'm doing some things in the FBI databases right now." He got up and left for his house, and we all looked at him with a 'what the hell just happened' look.
My phone dinged, it was a text from an unknown number. The message was short:
"Acuvue Oasys with Hydraclear Plus -BK"
I closed the message program and opened my web surfer. Entering the text, I pulled up a website. I wasn't sure what it meant until I read the product description. "99.4% UVA and UVB protection." Could it be? If it filtered the light... I copied and forwarded the text to Marge with a note to order as many as she could get without arousing suspicion.
It must work, I thought, it was Black Ker approved. Cat eyes glow even worse than wolf ones, and she had been hiding her true nature for a long time. I went upstairs, taking my boys with me, and after feeding them I fell into a deep sleep until the next morning.
When I turned on the news while feeding the boys, it had gone nuts. The stories were one after another.
Multiple banks had been hacked, raising fears that they wouldn't be able to open after the Labor Day holiday.
Multiple blackouts had occurred as hackers sabotaged the electric grid, plunging several big cities into darkness.
An attack on the Utah data center storing the NSA archive looked like it was successful, even though the agency refused to comment on the damage. News footage showed the huge facility in flames as men and werewolves ran around and set more explosives.
At the NSA headquarters and multiple agencies in Washington, DC, all hell had broken loose just after I went to bed. When word got around that the Government was using ultraviolet light to identify werewolves, the wolves didn't wait for the checks to come. Some shifted and attacked their coworkers, using the chaos that resulted to escape.
Others did what they could to protect their species; equipment was damaged, case files destroyed, computers destroyed, and leaders assassinated. At NSA headquarters, two werewolves in the computer room killed the other techs after locking down the entrances and disabling the overrides. As police and agents frantically tried to break in the impenetrable doors, they calmly destroyed every single tape, hard drive and electronic storage device before setting the whole place on fire.
Eighteen refineries across the country had shutdowns from what was later determined to be physical or computer sabotage. Most would take weeks to restart, leading some pundits to predict gas prices would double and we would see lines at the pump for the first time since the 70's.
In police departments and military units across the country, werewolves were causing havoc. They attacked their former coworkers, interfered with ongoing operations and warned Packs of upcoming attacks.
