Read Origin - Season One for Free Online

Bill, both Bill and Amanda were saying goodbye to the small town they had grown up in. Bill was going to State College in Lyndonville and Amanda had been accepted into Penn State. Jesse had the grades, but hadn’t applied to anywhere, a fact that had the faculty, his parents, and his two best friends wondering out loud if he was all there. What none of them understood, and what he was loath to admit even to himself, was that he was afraid if they both left Morisson, he would never see her again.
    “You’re a fucking idiot,” Bill had said. “After all this time, you break this to me now ?”
    By then Jesse had been on the verge of tears. Bill had put an arm around him and squeezed. “All right, it’s okay. I get it, man. It would have fucked everything up.”
    “It’s not just that.”
    But Bill, who had a knack for simplifying the complicated, had hit the nail squarely on the head. It would have fucked everything up. And whichever way it went, their friendship would have been over.
    “Do you want me to talk to her?” Bill had asked.
    “No. She would hate me. It would ruin things for her.”
    “I doubt she’d hate you, man. But you’re right, it would be awkward the way things are now.”
    That had been the entirety of their conversation on the matter. Jesse had driven Amanda to the airport and said goodbye. She had cried and he had told her it would be cool. They’d get together whenever she came home. It would be just like old times.
    Jesse had saved his own tears for the parking lot.
    That had been almost two years ago. But sitting behind the wheel of his mother’s Volvo and looking out at the tractors in the yard at Farmland, it might as well have been yesterday.
    But Amanda had her own troubles. He’d known that from the moment he picked up the phone. She wasn’t coming home, she was running home. The thought both worried and angered him. Someone had hurt her. If she had made friends out there, they obviously didn’t amount to much in a crisis. Jesse tried to focus on that, and it went a long way towards steadying his nerves. He would be the friend she needed, not another problem.
    Feeling a little better, he shifted the car into drive and pulled back onto the road.

Chapter 10
    FBI Field Office New York, New York Monday 17 July 2006
    1200 EDT
    Mike left his office to get himself a cup of coffee in the staff canteen. Someone had left a copy of the Times on the table and he scanned the headlines as he sipped.
    So far the blackout seemed to be working. After taking Mitch to the airport, he’d spent the rest of the morning tracking down names on the list they had gotten from Allied Bishop, the company that ran the Fed’s security system. Then he had spent another hour dissecting the company’s merger history. The idea was to put together a list of everyone who had worked on the security system both when it was written and during any subsequent modifications. The people who made the calls in Washington had thought this a good precautionary measure. Mike wasn’t so sure.
    Nova, the original security system, hadn’t been designed by Allied Bishop, but by a German company called GSL Systems, which had been contracted to create it by a consortium of German banks in 1998. Allied Bishop had acquired GSL in 2001 and then licensed another company, a British firm called Titan, to use the Nova platform as the basis for an updated version. Only by the time it was completed, Allied Bishop had also acquired Titan and renamed the project, rather unimaginatively, Nova 2. In 2003, Allied Bishop won a contract to install the new system in six of the banks in Manhattan, including the Fed.
    Unraveling the puzzle of people who had been involved with Nova and its successor since 1998 had proved more complicated than Mike had anticipated. Allied Bishop had bought up no fewer than eight smaller firms in that time, and the migration of personnel that had occurred as a result was enough to give anyone a headache.
    His