Last fall…she remembered being hired by a guy named Stahlman to check out the defunct Modern Motherhood Clinics and—coincidentally—the foundation behind them. She’d discovered that the foundation was a shell and the woman who had fronted the clinics was a bogus identity with a skillfully constructed legend. Hari would have dug deeper had Stahlman requested it, but apparently that had proved enough for him.

“How would they have stopped me?”

“The dark web is a gathering place for hackers like me, but also less savory types—like pedophiles and bomb makers and, well, hitmen.” Donny held up a hand. “I know you’re going to try to laugh it off, but there are more button men out there on the dark web than you want to believe. It’s perfect for them. They don’t know who hires them, the contractors don’t know who they hire, the hitters have no connection to the victim, and they’re paid with bitcoins or some other cryptocurrency.”

They were talking about making a move against you…

A chill rippled along Hari’s back. At least she was long past that investigation, but still…she’d had no idea…

“Sorry you had to hear that,” he added, “but you insisted.”

“I did, didn’t I.” She shook it off. “Whatever. Let’s get back to these emails.”

“Right. For two months now these Septimus Foundation folks have been obsessing about ‘signals’ and ‘frequencies’ and ‘wavelengths’ and stuff like that.”

Hari swirled her cooling coffee and watched the screen. Emails flashed by too fast to read.

“Slow down.”

“Most of these are complete bores but they’re available if you want to go back later. I rewound to the first of the year and started from there. Nobody mentions signals or frequencies until February—right after the Internet crash. That’s when you start seeing mentions like these.”

The stream stopped on an email with a yellow-highlighted excerpt.

“The signal frequencies are changing again!”

Followed by another.

“Synchronization is coming!”

and

“Soon-soon-soon!”

“Look at all those exclamation points,” Hari said. “They sound excited. Could ‘synchronization’ and ‘frequencies’ be code words?”

Donny shook his head. “I’m not getting that feeling. But whatever they’re talking about, it petered out a week later when the Internet started coming back to life.”

“I thought you said they were obsessed.”

“Stay with me here. The mentions come back in a rush at the end of March. All of a sudden that’s all they’re talking about. And they keep on talking about it. It seems they were getting some sort of report on the signal frequencies every month, but then last month it switched to weekly, and just last week it went daily, and that made them totally giddy.”

“The high frequencies are slowing more and more!”

“Is it wrong to say they’re slowing faster? ;-)”

“Not too long before they synchronize with the Prime Frequency!”

“I almost wish they’d take more time! We’re behind schedule!”

“We’ll be ready when synchronization comes, don’t you worry!”

“What signals?” Hari said.

Donny shrugged. “Beats the hell out of me. All I can figure is their weekly reports on some kind of mysterious signals say they’re changing their frequencies, getting closer and closer to matching their wavelengths to some ‘prime frequency.’ And when they synchronize—bam!—it happens.”