Save Her

Drayden - Chapter 6-2

I think again about Mother telling us we weren’t full brothers, and then her telling us that my father was good at math and Reginald’s was good at science. Could those manipulative lies have directed our lives so dramatically and magnificently to drive us apart as brothers? If Mother’s motives had not been so selfish and if she had not said such a thing, would Reginald’s and my path be different today? I think so, and I hate her for it. After that comment, my brother seemed to focus his efforts on what mother had implied he would be best at: science. My mind wandered to mathematical theory and algorithms. I fell in love with computers and their amazing possibilities while Reginald had always remained more grounded on the wonders of the human body and the future medicinal possibilities and cures that should and could be discovered. Ever since mother told us we were half-brothers, I cared less about his ambitions and interests. Despite my love for him, I pulled away. I shared less. I didn’t bother him. I spent a lot more time alone. My lack of attention towards him naturally pushed him away, and I now hate myself for it. I fell for Mother’s lies so completely. Whatever her motives, it didn’t matter. I was the one who had decided to trim Reginald from my life. I thought he was half a brother, so he deserved half as much of my time. Because of that decision, I lost out on knowing him.

My brother had a full-time job. Not only that, he was making a lot of money while apparently going to school at the same time. I close the file, open the internet browser, and search for ‘Rine International,’ a company I had never heard of before. Fifteen thousand results populated in a fraction of a second. At the top of the list are headlines about Rine International accepting the European Union’s request to help financially strapped Italy. The story is twenty-two minutes old, and the relevance of that with what I learned at the bank causes me to click open the story. It says that Pieter Rine, the founder of Rine International, had agreed to incorporate their software into Italy’s financial sector to help stabilize the finances within that country, and to help stabilize the entire European financial crisis. The Italian finance minister also agreed to the collaboration temporarily until the country’s debt could be: “Resolved in a manner beneficial to the citizens of Italy.” There’s a picture of Pieter Rine shaking hands with the President of the United States, and then there’s a short and unsatisfactory summary about Rine International in the article: “Rine International, headquartered in Pittsburgh, PA, is a financial services company with a specialization in cloud and virtualization services.”

I sit back to process the article. Rine International is here in Pittsburgh. It’s a financial services company, so then why did my brother work there? Reginald was into the biological uses of nanotechnology. There’s too much coincidence with the timing of my brother’s death, the market-shocking news of Italy’s economic crash, and my brother working at Rine International.

I scroll quickly down the rest of the news stories. The first fifteen are about Rine International and Italy. I click on every story and speed-read similar information that was in the first. There’s nothing new until I open the seventh story that jolts me back in my chair. It shows a picture of Pieter Rine sitting directly next to Radu Dmitriu! They’re seated at a semi-circular table in front of Latin American leaders representing Chile, Argentina, and Venezuela. The caption identifies Professor Dmitriu as the COO of Rine International and Pieter Rine as its owner and CEO. I read on. The article is about Rine International’s growing presence in financially troubled areas. There’s no further mention of Radu Dmitriu anywhere on the page.

Another article mentions Rine International’s stock price quadrupling in two years. I click on a financial page and see that the fervor to own a part of this company is unmatched. The financial gurus all seemed to believe in the company and in Mr. Rine’s ability to move it forward despite the heavy competition from such cloud-computing mainstays as IBM, Google, Microsoft, and sss.

I scan the pages at a breakneck speed, moving as quickly as the wireless connection will allow, trying to find something that can help me to better understand anything. I see another article mentioning Radu Dmitriu. He had apparently created financial software that was purchased by Rine International because of its high-security protocols and algorithms that was designed to take human error out of a country’s reaction to positive or negative financial swings. Rine International used the software and defined its core business as smaller financially strapped countries. They started with Latvia and Ukraine and quickly proved to the big banks and creditors of the world that their proprietary software was effective at speeding up financial gains while slowing down financial decisions during economic contractions. All data was pushed to the security of Rine’s cloud-based system, where it was also backed up for record management and safe-keeping. Rine International’s next customers were Venezuela, Argentina, followed by the big get, Mexico City, soon after. I learn that their integrated system stores information from the institutions and governments and ties directly into the public and government banking sectors. Any institution that desires to transact business with these countries has to download an aspect of Rine’s International’s software to be integrated. Because of that software implementation in those few governments, Rine International had quickly become tied-in throughout the world. The next countries to sign up were Pakistan, Vietnam, Kazakhstan, Belarus, and the state of Mexico. Implementing Rine International’s software gave an added respect and stability to countries with weakened financial positions and allowed all nations to deal seamlessly across the economic spectrum.

I limit my search to ‘images.’ Finding pictures of Mr. Rine is a piece of cake, as he had been in the spotlight at numerous awards banquets, and had posed with multiple heads of state at various functions. Finding pictures of Dmitriu is more challenging. Apparently, Mr. Rine had been the public figure, and Dmitriu had been behind the scenes, but on the twelfth page of my image search, I come across a crowded picture of a charity function that shows Radu Dmitriu next to Italy’s Finance Minister. There’s no date on the picture. I increase the size of the picture on a sign that names the charity and the benefit to abolish world hunger. I do another search and find that the function happened ten months ago. I sit back in my chair and think about the significance and the timing of Dmitriu speaking with Italy’s finance person that long ago, and the coincidental timing of today’s news of Italy bailing on its debt responsibilities. Something is nagging at me, but I can’t place it yet.

I stoop back over the computer and search for ‘Tengen’ and get over six million hits. I add ‘Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania’ to the search and get over two-hundred and fifty thousand. I scan the first few pages but find nothing about the man who had pummeled my head into a pulp. It’s a random and half-assed attempt, and one that yields nothing, so I move on.

I had exhausted the internet for information, so I go back to the computer’s hard drive and re-focus on the long list of files. There are so many with code as the filename, and they’re all zipped, and they all look like they’re as random as every other file, so I start with the one at the top: ‘1clnmrrrhyprrfrctry’. I double-click it and wait nearly twenty seconds for it to open completely. A hundred pages of code appear containing commands on matching and mirroring colors. It’s some of the most complicated and thorough programming I’ve ever seen in my life. I immediately notice areas that can be tightened, but I'm still thoroughly impressed. It's detailed and complex. It's logical and complete. The end coding leads to the ‘external’ interface, which still makes little sense and I try not to get hung up on that, but what the hell is ‘external’? I’ve never used that phrasing or direction before in any of my work. I need to find out what ‘external’ leads to, but force myself to move on so I don’t get distracted down a rabbit’s hole of curiosity.

He had compressed nearly all the files. Opening them at this point is pointless, because as quick as my brain was and as quickly as I can read and type, opening file after file would accomplish nothing unless I can figure out why they exist. I force myself to move on. There are a lot of mysteries still to figure out. Harping on code, no matter how beautifully written, would only slow my progress to finding my brother’s killer.

I feel a surge of impatience and frustration at my wasting of time. I need direction and focus and realize I’m going about this the wrong way. It’s the little brown book I need to concentrate on. Get that figured out and out of the way first and then move on from there. I need to check projects off and move forward instead of trying to cover everything and getting nowhere. I use my memory and open the book in my head. The pages of passwords from the book enter as pictures in my brain as if I had opened a computer file in my head. Access to my thoughts and memories has a different meaning now. I had always had an above-average memory, but now it’s superior. I have total confidence that I forget nothing, but not only that, I’m accessing everything quickly. Each password has a space for itself in my brain, separated like a mixed jigsaw puzzle, but also complete like a small picture amongst the picture of the entire page. I can isolate it or group it just as easily, focus in or widen out, depending on my needs. The first page of the little brown book is titled ‘Computer’ and has exactly twenty-six passwords written on two columns. The first column fills all sixteen lines; the second column has only ten passwords completed. I see it all without the need to take the little brown book out of my jacket pocket and briefly think it’s okay to destroy the book at my first opportunity because it’s fully memorized. The passwords are random and strange and are unlike any passwords I’ve ever used. No two are the same, and all would have been difficult — if not downright impossible — to crack without access to the book. The next page in the little brown book is blank, and I can only guess it’s because my brother expected to need it for more computer passwords. The following pages have more of the same. Pages three and four are passwords for the bank or, it seems, multiple banks. I’d have to figure that out later as well. Money was the least of my concerns. Pages four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, and ten are listed as passwords for ‘external sync.’ External combined with sync makes sense, but I don’t know what it means regarding my brother’s code and do not understand how to start the process. Also, where am I supposed to enter the latest password that's crossed out: 23kk59ERW809?

The page titled ‘external sync’ is the key. Reginald had changed this password more than any other. I search in the computer for a combination of ‘external’ and ‘sync’ but nothing pulls up. Then I separate the words and find ‘sync’ in twelve-thousand five-hundred and seventy-seven files. It finds ‘external’ in over fourteen-thousand files. I start at the top of the search file list and work my way down. Each is written in the same code as the files I had just looked through. As I scan, I noticed a single line of code repeating at different points throughout the pages, which tells me the files overlap. The codes that had been linking to ‘external’ are embedded into the files with ‘sync.’ ‘External’ equaled ‘sync.’ But what was ‘external sync’? I do a Google search but find nothing but gibberish sites. Sync is obvious enough. Sync means he had been linking and sharing. The cord with the prongs that fit into my arm connected directly into the port of the computer. That could be the ‘external’ part, right? So then how had he synced himself to the computer without the files written to direct there? Where were these files brought together if not on this computer?