The Breaker

by Nick Petrie

  He shrunk back, but he didn’t turn away. “I want to go with you.”

  “Do you not remember the man with the axe? He’s still out there somewhere, and he’s just one player. Maybe not the most dangerous one. So you’re staying here.”

  “You made me an offer back there,” he said. “I keep quiet about the Samaritans in exchange for the story. I accept. So I’m going with you. Unless you plan to shoot me, too.”

  Lowering the pistol, she pulled the slide to chamber a round, then flipped off the safety. “Dean, I’m really not the one you should be worried about.”

  He reached inside his cashmere sport coat for his notebook. “Who was that you were talking to?”

  She shook her head. “Oh, he’s gonna fucking love you.”

  * * *

  —

  The stairwell was a rectangle of poured concrete, with an open center and steel pipe railings and dim utility lights in wire cages. She’d explored the Journal Sentinel building as soon as she’d gotten her key card, not because she expected a moment like this, but because she was curious. She knew the place was a maze with many exits, and Mr. Cheerful was probably too busy trying to survive to try to find her again.

  Regardless, she crept down the stairs as quietly as she could, pistol at the ready, hating every scrape of Dean’s hard-soled Italian shoes behind her. At the bottom, she found two heavy fire doors, one to the old loading area and the other leading directly to the rear parking lot.

  She pushed outside, trying to look in every direction at once. With Zedler too close at her heels, she jogged halfway down the narrow alley and waited in the deep shadow behind a dumpster, shivering in the cold. Ahead of her, a pair of tall iron gates, locked with a rusty chain, blocked access to the street. She realized she was squeezing the pistol grip too hard and relaxed her hand.

  The flickering thought returned and came into focus. About the Virginia family that had been butchered with a meat cleaver. And her certainty that Mr. Cheerful had done it.

  June thought of the two men killed with a machete outside the machine shop on Hampton Avenue, on the same day as the market shooting. They were a lot like the Virginia murders. The same gleeful brutality. The severed limbs.

  With sudden and crystal clarity, she knew. Mr. Cheerful had done the machete killings, too.

  The black Yukon rolled up to the curb like a cruising shark. She saw Peter in the open passenger window. Still holding the .22, she climbed the gates one-handed and ran across the sidewalk to the car. Behind her, she heard Dean’s half-strangled voice. “June.”

  She turned and saw him still inside the gates with his hands raised, eyes like saucers. Peter leaned out his window with a gun in his fist. Lewis stood in the street with a very large pistol held down along his leg.

  “Jesus, don’t shoot him,” she said. “Dean, if you’re coming, move your ass.”

  He didn’t answer. He looked small there at the shadowed mouth of the alley, his clothes like any other clothes, his face like any other face.

  “Dean,” she said. “Last chance. Over the gates.”

  He didn’t move. June saw herself the way Dean must have at that moment, a woman quick on her feet and calm under threat and more than comfortable with these two dangerous men who had come in the night to take her where she needed to go. More comfortable with them than she was with him.

  She smiled. The air was cool and she felt strong and sure. She still held the chrome .22 in her hand.

  She raised her voice again. “Your choice, Dean. But we made a deal, remember? You better fucking believe I’m going to hold you to it.”

  Then she opened the door and climbed inside. “Okay, let’s go.”

  Lewis hit the gas and the acceleration pushed her deep into the black leather. Peter put his hand across the seatback. She grabbed it and pulled herself against the force of the engine to wrap her arms around him.

  He smelled like a bohemian party, spilled wine and pot smoke and something chemical she couldn’t identify. He said, “I’ve got you, I’ve got you, I’ve got you.”

  When she could speak, she said, “That was Dean Zedler.”

  Peter nodded. “What deal do you have with him?”

  “He got your pictures from private security cameras across the street from the market. Good ones, and I’m in them, too. I told him that he gets the story if he keeps us out of it.”

  Lewis said, “Is that a good idea?”

  “If you’ve got a better one, I’m all ears. But we don’t have a plan B. We have to buy time to solve this problem, to get Oliver to clear the slate. Otherwise we’re fucked. All of us.”

  Suddenly Peter looked very tired. “Do you trust Dean?”

  “I’ve known him a long time,” she said. “He’s got the leverage, but I think he’ll play fair. He’s also very good at his job. It’s better to have him with us than against us.”

  Peter nodded. “Oliver isn’t going to like another reporter in the mix.”

  “I’ll deal with Oliver.” She sat forward, perched between the front seats. She put her arms around their necks and pulled them close. “Jesus, I’m starving. Who wants barbecue? What time does Speed Queen close?”

  Lewis began to laugh.

  38

  SPARK

  By the time Spark’s electric skateboard got her to Kiko’s place in Tippecanoe, it was after midnight. His two-bedroom cottage was no bigger than her apartment, but it had a four-car garage in the back. A classic south side bachelor pad.

  Spark didn’t walk up the long wheelchair ramp to the house. She hadn’t talked to Kiko in a couple of years, and she didn’t want to hear his lectures. She also didn’t want to put him at more risk than she had already, just by coming here. But the truth was that she had nowhere else to go, at least not yet.

  At the far end of the garage, she punched a four-digit number into the keypad screwed to the siding, and felt a wave of relief when the door rolled up on its track. She’d been afraid that Kiko had changed the code. He’d been really upset.

  She’d met Vincent Holloway via email when she was seventeen, after he’d sold his company and was back at Caltech doing research. She was just a teenager with an idea for a battery, and he’d coauthored a paper about carbon-ion electrical storage. Once he’d learned that she wasn’t a university research fellow or a corporate vice president, he hadn’t been interested in a conversation.

  So it came as a surprise when he emailed her again out of the blue three years ago. She was still living in her parents’ basement, and her idea had turned into a prototype. She hadn’t published in any of the journals, but apparently he’d had a professional connection to one of her mentors who’d mentioned her project in passing.

  Holloway was going to be in Chicago for a conference. He’d become a tech investor, looking for the next big thing. Did she want to meet for coffee?

  Of course it was flattering. Of course she’d said yes.

  If she’d been worried about anything, it was that he was going to try to get her back to his hotel room. But he never touched her. It wasn’t that kind of rape.

  Instead, he’d taken her ideas.

  After an hour’s conversation at Coffee Lab in Evanston, he’d offered her a hundred thousand dollars for a look at her lab notes and an independent assessment of her battery prototype. After that, if the technology proved out as promised, he’d provide funding to spin up a real lab and hire some PhDs to help her develop a commercial model. She’d have a salary of two hundred thousand dollars a year to start, with more to come. She could pay off her parents’ house.

  Before all of that, though, he wanted her to sign a sixty-page contract, along with a nondisclosure agreement. To protect them both, he’d said. Spark could read a mass spectrometer result, but this contract was utterly incomprehensible. His name wasn’t even on it. It was a totally different company.

&nb
sp; Her professor friends said she really needed to understand what she was signing. She talked to a dozen different lawyers, hoping to get an English translation of the contract, but either they begged off as too busy or they wanted a retainer of ten thousand dollars to get started, money Spark definitely did not have. She was twenty-two years old. Her parents were a firefighter and a house cleaner.

  When she explained the problem to Holloway, he gave her the name of a Chicago attorney who would do the work pro bono.

  On his firm’s website, the attorney wore suspenders and a grandfatherly smile. She’d emailed him the contract and he’d called her the next afternoon. He walked her through the entire document, page by page, explaining everything in great detail. Details of the lab they would build for her, her ownership stake in the company, a company car, everything except the clause that they somehow inserted later. After her signature, and her initials on each page.

  The clause that said the company could, at its sole discretion, exercise an option to buy her technology outright. For an additional two hundred thousand dollars.

  Of course, when Holloway saw her lab notes and her current prototype, he exercised the option immediately. She got a second check and a notification that she should cease all work in this line of research as any intellectual property was now proprietary.

  She should have read the contract more carefully, Holloway told her. His attorneys would bleed her dry, he said. Then he stopped answering her calls.

  She was young and naïve.

  She was royally screwed.

  And totally pissed off.

  She also now had three hundred thousand dollars, so she hired her own damn attorney, a guy with an orange bow tie who told her she had a good case for fraud. A jury would love her story. He wouldn’t get paid unless she won, but then he’d get paid a lot. Which was fine with her.

  The moment she hired him was the high point.

  Holloway’s company sued her back immediately. Breach of contract, making fraudulent claims, violating the NDA, and everything else they could think of. They requested damages in the millions.

  After that came the online attacks.

  Spark had accounts on a few social media platforms, mostly because it was the easiest way to contact people whose work she was interested in. She knew she was in trouble the morning she discovered more than a thousand notifications on every account.

  People she’d never met accused her of doing all kinds of horrible things. There were links to dozens of fake articles on dozens of fringe websites. Some accused her of selling classified technology to the Chinese. Others said she ran a lesbian child sex slavery ring out of her basement.

  Several of those stories gave out her home address, her email and phone number.

  Spark still lived with her parents.

  She called her attorney. These aren’t real people, he told her. It’s just a troll farm. A bot network of fake accounts, hired to come after you. And now we know this is hardball.

  The accusations—China, lesbians, sex slavery—were perfectly tuned to a certain kind of conspiracy-minded Internet idiot. Within hours, actual humans began to repost the articles, calling her all kinds of names. When new websites took up the clickbait cause, things got worse. Someone sent her an anonymous email that described, in graphic detail, the best punishment for her crimes. Someone else suggested several brutal ways she might kill herself. Social media filled up with deep-fake videos of her face on a porn star’s body.

  Then she got her first death threat.

  The trickle of hate turned into a flood.

  The police took notes and started a file but otherwise did nothing, because there was nothing they could do. The technology made it too easy for the jerks to hide their identities.

  Spark couldn’t sleep. Her parents couldn’t sleep. Their phones rang at all hours. The attorney told her to hang tough, the lawsuit would probably take a while. The trolls had started going after him, too.

  His investigator found Spark’s address and social security number posted on a particularly nasty message board with a history of encouraging violence and hate crimes. She called one of the credit bureaus and discovered sixty new credit card applications under her name.

  When her friends in the science community started sending her angry emails, she learned that her email account had been hacked. Pretending to be her, the hacker sent an ugly rant to everyone on her contact list, along with an attachment infected with an ugly computer virus. Overnight, her professional reputation was ruined, and her support group shrank down to her parents, Kiko Tomczak, and her almost-boyfriend, a bicycle fanatic who’d helped her source parts for the rocket bike. The almost-boyfriend tried to step up, but she couldn’t take the pity in his eyes, so she ghosted him.

  Then things got worse.

  She was cooking at home with her mom when the Milwaukee Police threw tear gas canisters through the windows, broke down their door, and invaded the house with automatic weapons. Spark and her parents spent twenty minutes facedown on the floor in handcuffs before they learned that someone had called 911, using software to show her parents’ home phone number on caller ID, and pretended to be a victim of child sexual abuse.

  It was called “swatting,” she learned later. A prank. The police didn’t pay to fix anything, although they did apologize repeatedly.

  Through it all, her parents were great. Her dad told her he was pretty sure there was no such thing as a lesbian child sex ring. Her mom said, “We’ll get through this, honey. How about a margarita?”

  Then came their anniversary. Spark had made them reservations at Odd Duck in Bay View. She learned later that her mom’s Facebook account had been hacked, and her photo of their dinner ended up on her feed, the phone’s GPS providing the location of the restaurant. Eyewitnesses later reported a big red pickup roaring up and bumping their car from behind. Her mom made a wrong turn on Greenfield Avenue and drove down the dead-end street and off the four-foot embankment and into the Milwaukee River.

  It was January and well below freezing.

  The car broke through the ice.

  Her parents died in the water.

  The next day, her lawyer was accused of legal malpractice. He told her it was a lie, part of their attack on Spark, but said that he could no longer represent her. He had to devote all his time to defending himself.

  No other lawyer would take her case. She was unstable and unreliable, a lesbian child slaver and technology thief. Any Internet search proved it.

  From signing Holloway’s contract to her lawyer’s resignation, the whole thing took nineteen days.

  39

  Years before their last argument, Kiko had loaned Spark one bay of his four-car garage, which she used mostly to store salvaged parts and unfinished projects. She had hung a silver tarp as a makeshift wall to separate her space from Kiko’s two trucks. Standing there now, she looked at the carpet scraps on the floor and the cast-off couch in the corner and realized it was just like her parents’ basement. She felt overwhelmed with memories.

  After they died, she’d closed her bank account and found a new apartment and stopped using her real name. With the lawsuit dropped, the botnet focused on its next target, and the trolls slowly began to lose interest. Eventually, they forgot about her.

  But Spark didn’t forget.

  She turned her pain and anger into an icy sphere. She made a plan and worked toward its success every day.

  She became a member of the South Side MakerSpace and learned how to build an automatic rifle that couldn’t be traced.

  She found a local gun range where they would let her practice with the rifle, and a tactical school in Tennessee where she learned to keep her cool and advance on her target. The gun became a talisman, her protection against the ugliness and threats that still came to her old email address.

  She went back to the dojo where she’d learne
d judo as a teenager and worked to improve herself at the art of using her opponent’s size and strength against him.

  Everyone she met told her she was a natural.

  She taught herself to write intrusion software that would harvest the complete contents of a phone. She built another program to assess that content, determine which apps led to bank or investment accounts, insert the saved usernames and passwords, and transfer funds into an anonymous account. She made a third tool that would move the money from that anonymous account to another, then another, and many others after that. And still another piece of code that would use the phone to tunnel into every computer in his network and give her complete access. She would own him.

  Then she would take him apart.

  She changed apartments four times in two years. She was friendly, but made no friends. She pitched in at the MakerSpace because she needed the resources for her work, and because she didn’t want the other members to be suspicious. She invented a fake boyfriend to keep guys from asking her out, and also because she knew she’d be automatically less interesting if she were part of a couple. The guilt stabbed deep every time she felt pleasure, or relaxation, or any sense of belonging.

  She made herself ready.

  In that time, she only allowed herself to be close to Kiko, who had seen her fury from the beginning. He was no stranger to pain and loss. He’d pushed his life from bad to worse, but he’d also clawed his way back from the brink. She admired him. She’d designed and built the hydraulics for his wheelchair. With her parents gone, he was the only remaining soul who knew her well.

  Finally, he’d sat her down. “Chispa, please talk to me,” he said. “I’m worried about you.” Using her dad’s old pet name was a dirty trick, but it worked.

  She told him her whole plan.

  His eyes went wide. “No, Spark, no,” he said. “This is going to eat you up. Take it from me, okay?” After breaking his back in that fire, Kiko had gotten hooked on painkillers, ended up dealing pills to pay for his habit, then ended up in prison for five years, where he’d finally gotten into a recovery program. “Please don’t make the same mistake.”