In the Heat of the Light

by Stephen Kearse

Sol jerked right, then reversed onto Kenilworth Drive, aligning the car with the gated entrance, one hundred yards away. She examined the intersection multiple times, her neck oscillating up and down the quiet street. Campbellton was clear. Venetian was clear. Sol turned off the music then revved the engine.

  Sol leaned over the armrest, inches from Apollo’s face. “There’s not like a barrier on the other side of this gate, right? I read that bases in Iraq sometimes have trick entrances and shit like that. I’m blaming you if this goes wrong,” she warned.

  Apollo nodded. “Tyler Perry’s studio has been using this entrance to shuttle in producers and actors who don’t want to be associated with Tyler Perry before signing a contract. Just yesterday, Aaron McGruder was here. I have satellite images to confirm it.” Satisfied, Sol evacuated his personal space then abruptly accelerated, thrusting them forward across Campbellton and into the gate.

  Metal met metal, producing a booming clang. But the car kept going. Sol was booking it, immediately executing her improvised plan. She felt calm as she saw everyone else assume their roles: Kai pulled up a map on her phone, barking out terse directions; Apollo frantically keyed away on the encrypted laptop, summoning images of schematics and documents with maddeningly long lines of code; Zed stretched her legs across the armrest, tightening her shoelaces. Only Theo was idle. Sol wasn’t surprised. They were doing this all for him, but he really wasn’t necessary.

  The battered Civic swerved into the parking lot of a tired two-story brick building. Sol stopped, keeping the car running. She looked away as Zed leaned forward and kissed Apollo’s neck then opened the car and sprinted toward the building. “She’s got twenty minutes,” Theo declared. “Let’s make it count.” Sol winced at Theo in the rearview mirror then drove the car back to the main road, making a left. He thought he was in charge again. Nah.

  More weary brick buildings greeted them as they drove toward the Comm Center, the Army’s former satellite communications hub. Sol peered out the window excitedly. She had never been on a military base before. She marveled at how vulnerable it looked. She’d expected turrets and glass shards and land mines, but this place looked like a college campus.

  “Left,” Kai quickly said.

  “This fucking server better be here, Apollo,” Sol growled as they approached the Comm Center.

  ° ° °

  Apollo paid Sol no mind. In five minutes, he’d successfully jammed the base’s ragtag video surveillance network, but he wanted to keep an eye on traffic. He knew that even if they weren’t caught in the act, which was actually starting to seem possible, they also didn’t need to be caught after the act. A cramped MINI Cooper wasn’t exactly an ideal getaway car.

  Sol stopped the car in front of a sleek modern building. The engine grumbled off. Apollo hopped out, his open laptop swinging unsteadily in his hands as he raced toward the entrance. Even though he knew he’d be able to hack the satellite as planned, he had to hack it while it was passing over Austell, Georgia, giving him a twenty-minute window. The problem was that he had no idea where the control server for the satellite was located within the building. WikiLeaks was always very forthcoming when it came to secret government programs and secret roads and secret plots, but secret building interiors were still beyond its means. Apollo exhaled heavily as he approached the door, passing a flagpole. The run had been farther than he thought. He wasn’t sure if it was defensive design or the military just being extra. He decided to look it up later.

  The door was unlocked. Apollo stepped into a bare lobby, furnished with a plain marble desk, folded plastic chairs, and a portrait of former president Barack Obama. “Damn, this place is old,” Apollo muttered. The only indicator that this building had previously been occupied by the military was its presence on the base. It easily could have been a generic office building. Apollo feared the worst. The military had cleaned this place out, he knew it. He anxiously ran toward the elevators, pressing the call button and searching for a directory. He sweated profusely; the AC was very off. The building had ten floors, but the directory was blank, erased. Lone letters lingered like unfinished alphabet soup, but they were too scattered to be decoded. Apollo mashed the call button.

  The elevator arrived, and he stepped in, eyeing the access panel then checking the time. He had fifteen minutes to find the server, hijack the satellite, and tag Six Flags as planned. It wasn’t enough. He stopped to focus. Webpages, codes, and images of Zed flashed in his head. His heart was beating so fast he could feel his pulse in his right eye. After three silent minutes, he pressed the button for the second floor, reasoning that the floor with the servers would be excessively air-conditioned. The second-floor doors opened. Apollo felt no change in temperature, so he pressed the button for the third floor. Again, no change. He had seven floors and twelve minutes left. He began to feel his pulse in both eyes.

  The eighth floor greeted him with a blast of chilled air. He ran into a dimly lit hallway, his worn gray Vans skidding as he abruptly halted in front of the only door in sight. Apollo sighed as the ice-cold doorknob obligingly turned. He’d found it.

  Tall black servers lined the room like library bookshelves, haughtily stretching toward the ceiling. After plugging in his laptop, Apollo quickly leaped over the firewall, connecting to the local network and accessing the satellite. He had nine minutes. His fingers pecked at the keyboard, summoning the satellite’s celestial eye. Faint lights and dark green shapes scurried across his retina as he initiated the satellite’s onboard laser. Apollo stopped to take it all in.

  How could Atlanta be so large, yet so small in his mind? Activating the laser, he gasped, shocked that it was real, quickly laughing at the absurdity of his surprise. The government had an actual weaponized laser in space, and he was not only controlling it, he was about to do graffiti with it. Even after all this planning and research, it was still jarring.

  The burner rang, directing Apollo’s attention to the time. “Fuck!” he screamed, ignoring the call. He’d blown it. The satellite was now too far east to accurately hit their chosen target; the margin of error was too high outside of the measured time window. He’d triple-checked. He violently kicked one of the servers, then stared at the phone, an ancient Nokia with a sickly green glow that dully radiated from its plain screen. The missed call was from Andromeda, the phone that had been assigned to Zed. He couldn’t call her back. Tasked with manually shutting down the satellite’s remote access panel and then running two and a half miles to the Comm Center, she had been the most at risk. She could have taken a fist or a Taser or a golf cart or a bullet. Apollo would not let her down. Pocketing his phone, he sat down, his eyes lingering on the satellite’s continuing images of Atlanta.

  Running trails and camping grounds trickled into his view. He knew this place. It was Stone Mountain Park, the site of his first mosquito bite and premier destination for the occasional white power rally.

  He acted quickly, directing the satellite’s eye to the park’s main attraction: the mountain. Entering the coordinates, he activated the laser, impatiently waiting for it to finalize. Scripts scurried across his screen like excited ants then abruptly stopped, replaced by a static blackness. Apollo gawked at the screen, disappointed. There hadn’t even been an Are you sure you want to do this? message. The government continued to disappoint him.

  A magnificent orange pillar suddenly erupted into view, ripping through the firmament and descending onto the park with unnatural fury, plowing into the mountain. Even from his proxy celestial perch, Apollo could feel the destruction being wrought, the stone and sediment becoming mobile after millennia of stasis. An entire ecosystem of birds seemed to retreat into the sky, fleeing the devastation. Apollo watched in awe as the air along the beam’s path quivered, it too touched by the beam’s furious omnipotence. He swore to never again shake an aerosol can. He had felt subversive before, but this was power. He was no longer marking territory; he was seizing it from the eart
h, altering it in his image.

  Apollo was entranced by the laser’s raw power. Time unwound as he watched the geyser of light glide across the earth, his screen shaking as the beam pulverized the mountain and its surroundings. The feed lacked audio, but that put Apollo at ease; the drone bombings he’d seen were also soundless. After three sublime minutes, the pillar of light dissolved to black, and a smile crawled from Apollo’s eyes to his lips as he saw a distinct shape take form.

  ° ° °

  “He fucked up. Let’s leave him,” Sol suggested.

  “Fuck you,” Zed huffed, her utter seriousness obvious despite her heaving breaths. Theo squeezed Kai’s hand. Everything was going downhill. Sol was acting crazy, Zed said the remote access panel had been removed, and Apollo wasn’t answering his phone. He felt trapped. They had to get off this base before it got worse.

  Kai spoke up, her voice confident. “Apollo’s fine. Traffic looks normal around Six Flags, but Stone Mountain is looking wild. I think Apollo might have upgraded their weird laser show.” She passed her phone to Sol, who stared blankly at the sea of red dots forming around the mountain’s winding roads.

  “Not bad,” Sol admitted. “Let’s just hope he was smart enough to leave Z, E, and D out of his tag.” They laughed.

  Tension returned as they heard the frantic thump of shoes hitting concrete. Apollo was sprinting toward the car at top speed, spittle leaking from his mouth alongside garbled words. “Drive!” he demanded when he reached the vehicle, slamming his hand on the car’s roof and jumping into the passenger’s seat. Sol reacted quickly, starting the car and veering out of the parking lot in one cool motion.

  “What happened?” Theo asked.

  “Tyler Perry bought the rights to The Boondocks.”

  Zed swung at the back of Apollo’s neck with an open palm, the smack resonating with the dull sound of flesh hitting flesh. Apollo didn’t say anything, but Theo swore he could still hear echoes from the slap.

  Sol smashed the throttle as they headed back toward their entrance, then slowed to a crawl as they neared the gate. The gate was still mangled, but Campbellton was clear. There were neither cops in the bushes nor concerned citizens on the sidewalk. As expected, this part of the city didn’t produce patriots. Theo wasn’t surprised; it didn’t even produce rappers.

  To Theo, their arrival at Zed’s car seemed instantaneous. He asked Sol to allow him one final ride. She agreed, leaving the keys in the ignition and stepping out to join Zed and Apollo, who were walking toward Zed’s car. Kai remained in the back seat.

  Theo got out the car and stretched. A slight breeze grazed his face, momentarily cooling the hot night. It wasn’t enough. A thin layer of sweat insisted on forming. He sighed. The entire ordeal had taken a little over a half hour, but Theo felt like he had aged a year. He leaned on the roof of the car, taking it all in. Both his graduation money and now his car were gone. Maybe even his life, if this night had any more surprises. This wasn’t even remotely how his summer before college was supposed to go. At least he had those three C-notes?

  Kai tapped on the back window, gesturing for him to get back into the car. They needed to leave. Theo slid into the driver’s seat, flustered. Did they really have to destroy the car? A nigga in a busted Civic was as natural as algae in a creek. What wasn’t natural was going to the police station to report a fake crime on the same night you committed a real crime. Wasn’t there a Biggie song about that? And Apollo had disabled the base’s surveillance, hadn’t he? They had gotten away with it, definitely. Probably. If they hadn’t, that laser would have already gotten them, probably before they even got off the base. Excessive precaution could be just as dangerous as naivete. Theo made up his mind. No need to get all surgical with it, throwing body parts to unfed pigs. The night was a success. Theo cranked the engine and pulled out slowly.

  “Where are we going?” Kai asked. Theo stared straight ahead. For once, he knew where he was headed.

  The wrecked van was just as they’d left it, implanted in the trunk of a tree at the bottom of the hill on Central Villa. Theo slowed and parked on the side of the road. Kai removed her flaming red wig and shook out her curls. They exited the car, reaching the trunk in two exhausting steps. Goddamn, it was hot.

  Gasoline containers in tow, they quickly emptied them on the wreckage as Zed, Apollo, and Sol watched from inside the MINI. Theo watched Kai place her gas container on the ground then walk over to Zed’s car, sticking out her hand. The driver’s window slid down and her hand was quickly filled with two phones and a laptop. “That’s not all the gas, right?” Theo heard Sol ask. Kai ignored her and sprinted to the van, emptying her hands. The electronics hit the ground with a dull, unsatisfying thud. She gave her burner, the only one that was a smartphone, a particularly strong toss. It had come preloaded with MapQuest; it deserved the worst. Theo smiled when the screen shattered on impact.

  Retrieving her gas container, Kai used the last few drops to douse the wig. Brandishing her lighter, she lit it then tossed it into the wreckage.

  She and Theo swiftly filed back into his car. Following Kai’s directions, he pulled out quickly and headed toward Cascade Road. Theo hoped for an explosion, but he had watched enough Mythbusters to know better. Instead, he listened as Kai watched videos of their laser tag on Twitter. He couldn’t wait to see what the tag said in the morning, and he couldn’t wait to see Sol’s response to the change of the change of plans. He hated when she stepped up to solve his problems.

  I-285 appeared quickly, and the seven miles home seemed to appear even quicker, but even as the night glided by, Theo remained in that harrowing half hour. When his head finally hit his pillow after dropping off Kai and driving to Marietta, he didn’t feel relaxed. He felt poised, ready to take on whatever else the summer dared to offer and determined not to fuck it up.

  The headache was instantaneous. She had no voicemails, but Tilly Erickson knew that nineteen missed calls from Rick at 1 a.m. couldn’t be anything other than trouble. Scrabbling through her nightstand, she found some loose pills and tossed them back, hoping they were Advils and not the leftover ibuprofens from her root canal. She didn’t check.

  Her temple continued to thump as she made her way downstairs, heading to her work desk. She had left DC so she could avoid nights like this, but Atlanta was rarely the dream destination people wanted it to be, even for FBI agents.

  Easing into her office chair, she turned on her computer and logged into the FBI remote server, opening other tabs to catch up on news while she waited for access to her inbox. Three-step authentication was great for security, but awful for end users.

  “Atlanta is nothing but traffic and fraud, my ass,” she muttered aloud, shutting her laptop. She didn’t even need to log in to the server. The news had told her enough. Leaving her phone on her desk, she headed back to bed. This might be her last opportunity for sleep.

  By 6 a.m., the missed call count had expanded to twenty-four. Tilly moved quickly, darting between the bedroom and the bathroom, gathering clothes and cosmetics.

  At 6:22 a.m., she was in her car, a Cadillac STS, racing toward the office. Buford Highway was chillingly empty. For four miles, Tilly didn’t see a single car in the parking lots of its endless shopping plazas. And the only vehicles on the road itself were MARTA buses, which seemed to rejoice in the ambient desertion, zooming past vacant bus stops at breakneck speeds. The number of cars slightly increased as she turned onto Clairmont Road, but Tilly still felt unsettled. She’d always wished for a better commute, but this was damn near teleportation.

  Century Parkway appeared quickly. Tilly parked and entered her office building, laughing at herself for wearing heels on a day when there was no one present to impress or command.

  Rick was sitting in her office, in the sole guest chair, wearing running shorts, a polo, and worn sneakers, along with a shoulder holster. Tilly went to her desk without greeting him. />
  “Why does your voicemail say ‘Call me back!’ if you know you’re not going to answer?”

  “Because I don’t believe coworkers should text.”

  Rick sucked his teeth. “You’re a real piece of work, Erickson. I guess I’ll fax you the status report then. Since you only read emails from your phone, I might instigate an ethical crisis if I email it to you. Technically, sending government emails to your phone isn’t allowed since our emails are government property, but hackers get to do what they want, right?”

  Tilly didn’t respond. She’d never arrived at the office this early. Her ritual of applying her makeup using her unlit monitor didn’t quite work without a surfeit of morning light. It was only 6:43 a.m. Her eyebrows would have to wait at least another hour. Ready to tolerate Rick, she turned to face him, his eyes already on her.

  “What do we know?” she asked him.

  As usual, his answer was long.

  “Not much. A weaponized government satellite was hacked from Fort McPherson and used to make some sort of giant J on Stone Mountain. The Confederate memorial on the mountain was damaged in the process. Even the horses got scorched. There’s a torched van in South Atlanta near the fort. Real South Atlanta, near East Point, not fucking Henry County, by the way. Some phones and a laptop were found, but they won’t be telling us much, if you know what I mean. They were toasty! There’s no footage of the culprits. McPherson’s whole cybersecurity network was pretty much defanged because of the movie studio work being done there, so it was easily jammed. Apparently, no one learned anything from the Sony hack. There are some car parts near where the culprits broke the fort’s barricade for their entrance, but there’s more cars in this city than people, so that’s probably a dead end. Local cell towers don’t paint much of a picture either. When cell towers started going up around there, the military had them equipped with scrambling devices so no communications could be intercepted. So that’s basically the best place in the city to commit a crime. Other than like, I don’t know, Old National? I’ll check the stats later. I’d personally argue that Buckhead is the best place. It has the city’s highest concentration of single white women. No one believes me because I’m a black man and, clearly, I have a personal interest in passing the torch, but I swear on my life that single white women are this country’s next criminal class. Their crimes may look personal and passionate on Lifetime, but out here in the real world, white girls be scheming. You saw Spring Breakers, right? I didn’t, but I think I know what it was about, you know? I heard Gucci did well…”