CyberSpace: A CyberStorm Novel (Cyber Series Book 1)

by Matthew Mather

  Why did they keep speaking English to each other?

  “What do you want?” Agent Coleman growled. “You’re not getting away with this. You’re not getting any of those prisoners you asked for. You think our government negotiates with terrorists? You think we’re bad? Wait till the Russians catch up to you, then you’ll be—”

  Billy jabbed him in the kidney with the butt of his rifle. “Millions of you pigs will die, then,” he said, as if reciting lines from a bad movie.

  He took Agent Coleman’s wallet from his jacket pocket. “This is the one that is Secret Service. We don’t need to tie him. Shoot him now.”

  Agent Coleman cringed, but said, “Screw you.”

  I held my hands up. “Seriously, no, no, what do you want?”

  My phone pinged again in my pocket. I almost wanted to yell, not now, Damon.

  “We only need you and you.” Billy pointed his rifle at Lauren, then me. “Maybe her”—he pointed at Irena—“and the other one. Bring her in.”

  The other one?

  The two men behind Chuck and Agent Coleman moved them toward a wall. Chuck looked like he was ready to jump on them, hell be damned. I shook my head, saying, no, don’t do it. He shrugged: What the heck else should we do?

  Why didn’t they seem surprised we had a Secret Service agent with us?

  “There are more of him coming,” I said, pointing at Agent Coleman. “They know everything about this. We were coming to try and stop any bloodshed.”

  Billy laughed. “So we’re surrounded? That’s what you’re saying? You think this is a movie?”

  “My uncle is a United States Senator on the Armed Services Committee. He knows where we came. I guarantee we got a couple of Ospreys headed this way.”

  “We know all about your senator. The ‘president pro tem’ of the Senate, yes? A very important man. I believe he is your wife’s uncle?” Billy laughed. “And yes, that college kid who found our location? He is very smart and good, no? Very clever, I agree.”

  The way he said it made my heart sink.

  His accent had changed from something American to something else. A painful hole tore right through me as I realized that it had been way too easy to find Lauren. Terek’s sleuthing had seemed brilliant at the time, but he was obviously with them, somehow, for some reason. I glanced at his sister, bloodied and bruised.

  This had been a trap from start to finish. But why? Why us?

  The big man who had gone downstairs, the one urging Billy to hurry up, reappeared from the basement. “It took them longer to get here than we planned. We need to hurry. Get ahead of the storm if we’re going to get out of here.”

  It took us longer than they thought? So they’d been waiting for us. And the other thing he’d said—ahead of the storm?

  I glanced out the window at a palm tree bending sideways. This wasn’t as bad as it would get?

  Through the kitchen patio doors, the only glass I could see through at this level, a gray wave slid by and water seeped through the bottom of the closed door. We were one floor up. The waves were already breaching the seawalls.

  The big man picked up the last crate. “The truck is leaving now. The water is already three feet in the street. The Humvees need to go as well.” Outside, I heard the revving of the semi-truck’s engine over the battering wind.

  My phone pinged again and again and again.

  “Get off me!” A woman shrieked and struggled as two men forced her down the stairs from one of the offices.

  “Katerina?” Irena said immediately. “Is that you?”

  “Irena,” the woman said. “Oh my God. Why?”

  “Did they hurt you?”

  Katerina answered, “I’m fine. Is Terek here? What is happening?”

  I stood, openmouthed for a second. “That’s Terek’s wife?”

  “The four of them, downstairs.” Billy pointed at me, Lauren, Irena, and then Katerina. “We head into Washington”—he looked at me— “and we use your senator’s special documents to get through checkpoints. Yes? You have them?”

  “I don’t know where I—”

  “But you do know where your children are, correct?”

  A gut-sinking realization drained the blood from my limbs.

  Lauren said, “Mike, where are the kids?”

  Terek. At the senator’s house. How many other people did they have? There was security there, the Secret Service. Wasn’t much comfort. These guys seemed to know everything.

  “You will be as creative as you need to be,” Billy said. “But you will get us to Senator Seymour’s residence, and through all the security checks, with that pass you have.”

  “And you expect to waltz into a high-security compound?” I asked.

  “You let me worry about that.” Billy pointed at Chuck and Agent Coleman. “Those two, shoot them. We don’t have room or time.”

  They shoved Chuck and Agent Coleman away from us, toward the front wall. Chuck’s face twisted in something between fear and rage. My phone pinged again and again.

  Billy picked it from the pocket of my jeans, checked it, then held it up to me. “What does ‘getet ega wegay’ mean?”

  I stared at my cell phone’s screen. Gibberish filled one text message after another. Gibberish. My old brain struggled to remember the new trick.

  The whole message read, “Geget ega wegy fregom wegall.”

  Egglish.

  Remove “eg” from the first syllables of each word, or before vowels of words that started with them.

  Geget—Get.

  Ega wegay—Away.

  Fregom—From.

  Wegall—Wall.

  Billy had never used pig latin in English as a child, apparently. Then again, Billy never spoke English as a kid in Chechnya, I would have wagered.

  “I have no idea,” I replied. “It’s nonsense.”

  Geget ega wegy fregom wegall. Geget ega wegy fregom wegall. The gibberish-encoded text messages scrolled down my phone’s screen.

  Which wall? Get away from which wall? There were four of them around us. Was a SWAT team about to come swinging in through the skylights?

  Billy crouched. Realized I’d lied. His eyes followed mine.

  From the corner of my eye, I saw a flash of light. I held my hand in front of Lauren.

  CHAPTER 41

  DAMON STUCK HIS wireless earbuds in, whistled a Green Day tune, and tried to act like nothing was happening. His heart pounded in his ears. From the corner of his eye, he watched Terek munch on a banana muffin and take another gulp of his coffee.

  Staying out of sight of the house Mike had been taken into, Damon navigated the BullyBoy up an embankment three houses down onto a sandy outcropping being pounded by swells coming in from the roaring Atlantic. The seven-thousand-pound truck almost lifted into the air as it went sideways to the gale. He drove it through bumps and dips in the dunes of seagrass already foaming with water.

  He focused most of his attention on three other screens. He had activated the cameras in Mike, Chuck, and Irena’s phones through the meshnet connected to the Wi-Fi he found. The images coming in from the three cameras were dark. All still in pockets, but nobody had smashed them yet.

  He patched the microphones through to his earbuds.

  A lot of noise, but he clearly heard Mike say, “…are more of them coming.”

  Another voice, unfamiliar, said, “…other two, shoot them…”

  If these attackers wanted to kill all of them, they would have done it. Which meant they wanted some of them—Mike? Lauren?—for something. This gave Damon a small window.

  He needed to get an idea of who was where. He had already pulled an old map app image of the area from the web and isolated the house. He found the vacation rental page for it and scanned the interior pictures. A main room, about forty by forty, with a mezzanine. A stairwell down to the garage by the kitchen patio door.

  The patio door looked like the best point of entry. The sandy embankment led straight into it.

 
Someone, please, pick up your damn phone. Even if only to throw it on the ground.

  He pushed send on the message to Mike. Then sent it again. And again. He heard the pinging noise through the microphones. That must be getting someone’s attention.

  Mike’s camera image came to life.

  A face. A man with a tattoo on his neck. The image swept in a circle and faced Mike, whose lips began moving, mouthing the letters of the message.

  Damon paused the image recording, checked that Terek was still busy on his laptop, and then expanded the picture until it filled the screen. He scrolled back in slow motion.

  Three men by the wall with guns. That was Irena in front of them, her hands up. Two more men behind the tattoo guy. Lauren was behind and to the side of Mike. Chuck and the secret service guy behind them. Two more men in the middle of the room with guns.

  He closed his eyes.

  Time slowed down.

  He visualized the room in three dimensions. The future. He just needed to control a small part of this future.

  The easiest path forward was straight through the middle. That would hit the two men in the middle of the room and put a barricade between his friends and the other men with guns.

  His fingers were already sweeping across his touchpad, controlling the truck. He opened his eyes, managed a last fix on the light coming through the patio door, and accelerated the truck at a forty-degree angle to the wall. As soon as it hit, he slammed on the brakes and set the right-side door to open.

  The truck was a beast.

  Even at four tons, the thing could go zero to sixty in four seconds.

  The truck crashed through the wall. In his earphones, he heard muted pops and cracks, which he initially mistook for interference, until he understood it was gunfire.

  They were firing at the truck, right?

  The attackers didn’t know there wasn’t anyone inside—or anyone else coming from outside, for that matter. That should give his friends a few seconds edge.

  His heart came up into his throat.

  He caught a glimpse of Mike, and then the screen went blank.

  Terek was up and out of his seat. His face blank, eyes wide. As if he was terrified. His mouth opened and closed, but Damon couldn’t hear him.

  He took out his noise-canceling earbuds.

  “What’s wrong?” Damon asked.

  Had Terek just witnessed the same thing he had, but from a different camera? Were they fighting on opposite sides of the skirmish? Was that why he was up out of his chair? Damon looked for a knife, a gun. He crouched and got ready to spring.

  “My wife, Katerina,” Terek said.

  “Your wife?”

  Damon hadn’t forgotten about her, but part of him suspected that Katerina was a fictional construct, something Terek had made up to get them to come to Washington. To justify what he was doing.

  The look on his face was abject terror, though.

  “She’s been taken. My friends in Georgetown say they went out on the street to get into a food line, now they heard about the hurricane, the city is going even more crazy…”

  His voice trailed off.

  Damon looked back at his screen. The image from the dash cam was blank. Nothing from any of the phones. Everything blank. Had Terek cut off the video feed? Had he seen what Damon had been doing? More likely, Damon had smashed through and destroyed whatever network hardware had been supplying the data link.

  “I need to go,” Terek said.

  “You want to leave?”

  “I don’t want to. I need to.”

  Should Damon let him leave?

  If he didn’t, he’d have to stop him. Then what? Tie him up? He’d need to incapacitate him first. Damon wasn’t much of a fighter, and he wondered if Terek was. If this guy was a trained assassin, or something. He checked out Terek’s lanky frame. This guy wasn’t a cage fighter.

  But stopping him wasn’t a good idea.

  Because it might reveal Damon’s new gambit. This game needed some sleight of hand.

  “Why don’t you take one of the senator’s cars?” Damon pointed at the rack of keys over the dishwasher. “He said we could take a vehicle if we needed it. Take the Jeep, that’s a solid car.”

  Getting him out of here would reduce Damon’s stress as well. He needed to think. Try and find ways to help his friends, if he could.

  Terek said, “Can you come with me?”

  Damon still had his earbuds in his hands.

  He put them down.

  That look on Terek’s face—either the kid was going to win an Oscar or his heart had been ripped out. A second ago Damon was sure Terek was about to stab him, but now the kid needed his help. That old feeling of him being Damon’s little brother seeped in.

  When Damon discovered Terek had hacked his meshnet, his thought was that he might have been coerced. Or that it might have something to do with his wife. It seemed like a lot of wives were suddenly going missing.

  Maybe Damon should go with him?

  “I can’t,” Damon finally replied. “There might be millions of people counting on us.”

  “Please.”

  “You go. I’ll be here. Call me if you need help.”

  Terek hesitated a beat, but then said, “I’ll be back in an hour or two.”

  He grabbed the keys to the Jeep, ran two steps, but then returned to his laptop. He was about to unplug the cord connecting his to Damon’s when he said, “Can you give me that space surveillance file? Give it to me raw? I swear I won’t show it to anyone.”

  “Your wife is gone and you want space surveillance data?”

  “You said it yourself. Millions of people. I might have time.”

  “I need to deconstruct the file,” Damon said. “Take out the classified stuff.”

  Terek paused, mumbled something, grabbed his computer and bag, and disappeared around the corner. Damon waited until he heard the Jeep’s engine fire up. He watched it drive through the gates and down the street before he sat back down at his computer.

  He had at least an hour, maybe two. Damon better make this good.

  First things first.

  He tried to log back into the Wi-Fi router he had accessed to run the BullyBoy, but it didn’t respond. He did a search for any meshnet node along the Virginia coast, but it came up blank. Not a single person in the meshnet. Not a webcam working anywhere.

  A voice from the next room. “Hurricane Dolly is the first category five to make a direct hit on the Virginia coast. Experts are predicting tens of billions in damages, and hundreds or perhaps thousands of lives lost—”

  No wonder he wasn’t getting any network connections out there. There might not even be any houses left standing on that shoreline. He said a little prayer. He desperately hoped his friends were okay, but it was out of his hands.

  Terek’s little act had fooled him for a while, right up until he’d asked for the space surveillance data before he left.

  Damon cracked his knuckles over his keyboard and brought up the space surveillance data he had retrieved that morning. It was real enough, except it didn’t include any military satellite data.

  That part had been a lie.

  If you want to go fishing, his Grandma Babet would always tell him, you needed something that the fish wanted to eat. Not what you might think they want, but something they’re in the mood for, given the time and day.

  And it had to look real.

  That was the most important thing. Fish were much smarter than we gave them credit for, especially the ones that were hunters themselves. Trout, marlin, barracuda, these were all fearsome predators, and predators knew a lot about hunting. When you were hunting a predator, you needed the prey to look perfect.

  It had to look alive, it had to move the right way. Damon’s fingers flittered over the keys.

  He looked up a list of military satellites and began creating bogus orbital tables. There were hundreds. This was going to take a lot of time, something he didn’t have much of.

 
; One last thing. He opened the protocol files from the SatCom satellites. He needed something simple. Something foolproof.

  He scrolled through the list.

  And there it was.

  CHAPTER 42

  IN A SPLINTERING explosion of wood and steel and glass, the BullyBoy burst through the wall of the house and crashed sideways through the metal staircase leading to the mezzanine. A man on the stairs sailed into the air, along with the crate he carried, which flew open and scattered papers. The man thudded face-first into the steel roof of the truck.

  I flung my arms around Lauren, shielded her with my body. Pulled her to the floor. My momentum carried us backward into Billy’s feet. He tripped and danced but maintained his footing.

  I scrambled forward as we hit the deck. Terrified the truck was going to drive straight through the house, right over us, and out the other side.

  But its knobby black tires locked.

  It squealed to a stop on the pinewood floor, splinters and aluminum siding and the wreckage of half the wall dragged along with it.

  The truck sideswiped Irena and Katerina and flung them into a mess of chairs and boxes to my left. Drove straight into the two men guarding Chuck and Agent Coleman, right over one of them, ricocheted the other like a beaten piñata into the front wall.

  In the fraction of a second before the truck hit the wall, as its LED headlamps sliced through the rain outside, I realized what was happening. Damon was in control of the truck and was about to use it as a battering ram.

  The first thought that surfaced as I clutched at Lauren was: It’s bulletproof. Then: We need to get inside the damn thing.

  The Chechens didn’t have the same insight.

  They had to be wondering if attackers were coming in behind this tank thing. Would it explode? Would someone jump out of it? I’d told them the cavalry was coming. That the Secret Service had them surrounded.

  Billy backed toward the front wall and swung his assault rifle around.

  I was up on one knee.

  A metallic taste in my mouth. I’d hit the floor with my mouth but had hardly noticed. My face numb. An assault rifle skittered across the floor to my feet.