by Brandt Legg
“Who killed him?” Wen asked slowly.
“The ones planning the attack. Hayward found out. He was working with DARPA. It was code-word classified, and somewhere in there he found out about Blackout. Then they found out he found out.”
“Who?”
“Then they just . . . he’s dead . . . they ambushed him. I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know.”
“Wait, slow down. What is the attack? What is Blackout?”
“Blackout is the plan . . . the attack . . . It’s big. They’re going to kill a million people.”
“What?” Chase asked. “Who’s going to kill a million? Where? When? What are we—”
Wen squeezed Chase’s arm and signaled with her hands for him to shut up, knowing how fragile The Astronaut was when he became agitated. “Where are you?” Wen asked. “Let us come.”
“Not safe.”
“Why? Are the same people after you?”
“Yes. Hayward sent me a message. The encryption should hold, but I don’t know what the status of his phone is. Or his watch. I made him that watch. If they have that watch, it can link with the phone, and they can find me. They’ll kill me, too.”
“No one is going to kill you. People have tried to get you before. You’re always running, just like us. You’re the best one at hiding and—”
“Hayward was good at hiding, Hayward was better at running than me, and now he’s dead. They killed him, they killed him.”
“Listen,” Wen began, calming her voice with each syllable. “I will not let anything happen to you. Chase and I will protect you.”
“I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know.”
Chase reached over and muted the phone for a second. “You have to find out where Hayward was killed. Who did it. And what’s this Blackout attack on a million people?”
“I know. But I can’t let him just shut down.” She unmuted the phone. “Are you safe right now?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know,” he repeated.
“Nash, you have to breathe. You have to know that the more upset you are, the harder it is for your mind to work . . . your beautiful mind. Your mind can do anything. We’re going to find who did this, and we will make them pay. But I need your mind to be working.”
“Mind . . . Hayward’s mind got him killed.”
“That’s not going to happen here. Not to you.”
“Hayward sent me a message. They know.”
“Can you send the message you got from Hayward to me?”
“Yes. He sent it after . . . The message just came, but they killed him yesterday.”
“Can you do it right now?” Wen asked, not sure how a dead man could send a message, but she’d worry about that later.
“Yes. I can send it now.”
“Good. We’ll come get you.”
“No. Once you get the message, they will want to kill you, too. Everyone is going to die.”
Twenty-Eight
Washington, DC – April 3rd – 5:23 am
Chase couldn’t digest the message and safely drive at the same time. The million people dead, the talk of an advanced weapons program, DARPA—
“This is crazy!” Wen said to Chase. “Find a place to pull over.”
Chase pulled into a loading zone.
“Look,” she said, pointing to the message.
As Chase scanned it, adrenaline started to flow. “Is this for real?” he asked The Astronaut.
“Yes.”
“But what city? How come he didn’t tell us the city?”
“He may not know, or maybe the full message didn’t get out, or maybe it’s more than one . . . I don’t know.”
“Nash, we need to see Skyenor at DARPA right away,” Wen said gently. “Can you help us get a message to him? Maybe hack into something and find out where he lives?” She looked at her watch, wondering if he’d still be home.
“I think I can.”
“I know you can do it. Get us a meeting as quickly as possible.”
“Okay.”
“Tell me, where was Hayward staying?”
He gave them the address.
“We’re going there now. I need you to focus on getting us into Skyenor.”
“I will.”
“And Nash, where did it happen?”
“What?”
“Hayward,” Wen clarified. “Where did they get him?”
“They killed him at the Lincoln Memorial. It was bad.” He stopped talking for several seconds. “But I traced the origins of the message . . . I’ve been working the traffic cams and other security cameras. I saw . . . I saw the shadows after him.”
Wen thought of the shadow people, the ones that almost killed them in the Caymans and again this morning. However, she knew these weren’t the same shadows he was talking about. “Okay, we’ll go there, too.”
“I looked at the crime photos. He didn’t have his watch on. You have to find his watch.”
“We’ll look for it.”
“They killed him. Hayward is dead. Dead.”
“I know, I’m so sorry . . . ”
“Find the watch. Find watch.”
“We will. Where are you?”
“I don’t want to say.”
“Are you safe?” she asked.
“No one is safe.”
“Don’t move. You stay where you are. After we see Skyenor—”
“I have to set up a meeting.”
“Yes, then after we see him, we’ll come get you. You be ready. Tell us where you are.”
“Okay, maybe. They’re looking for me, too.”
“But we’re looking for them now.”
“Okay. Find watch.”
“I love you.”
She heard him sigh, maybe crying. “Find watch.”
He ended the call.
“Unbelievable,” Chase said. “If this is true, we’ve got less than twenty-four hours to prevent the single worst terrorist attack ever. A million people exterminated in an instant.”
“I don’t know how they could do this without nuclear weapons.”
“That’s where Skyenor comes in.”
Wen nodded. “Right.”
“But why don’t we just call Tess and have her set up the meeting?”
“Two reasons,” Wen replied. “First, I want to keep Nash busy. And second, I don’t want Tess pushing us out until we know what’s going on.”
Chase looked at the message from Hayward, an Astronaut he had never met, and shuddered. “What city?” he asked Wen again. “How are we going to stop this if we don’t even know where it’s happening?”
“Nash will figure it out.”
He scoffed. “Maybe not this time. Even if he pulls himself together, he’s also a target.”
“Then Skyenor at DARPA will know. He was working with Hayward. He’ll have to know.”
“I missed what Hayward and Nash were last working on together.”
“Some sort of deep fake detector for the NSA with some other algorithm to make it more complex.” Wen frowned. “Do you think there could be some connection to this?”
“Depends on if DARPA was involved with that project as well.”
“Wouldn’t Nash have mentioned that?”
“If he knew, and if he was thinking straight.”
“Then again, Skyenor will know.”
Chase sighed. “Let’s hope Nash gets that meeting.”
“Your big question though, ‘what’s the target?’ is only a third of our problem,” Wen said. “Who is behind it, and how are they doing it? We have less than twenty-four hours to answer those questions and figure out a way to stop it.”
Chase stared at her, fear in his eyes. “How can we stop it when we know nothing?”
Twenty-Nine
Washington DC – April 3rd – 6:02 am
Popov studied the screen in front of her, checking the details, thinking again that Blackout was the most impressive plan she’d ever seen. “Blackout is going to destroy America,” sh
e said to her comrade.
“If it works.”
“Do not doubt it,” she said. “Can’t you already feel it in the air?”
He wasn’t sure what she meant. While Popov lived and breathed espionage, political intrigue, conspiracies, attacks, and counterattacks, he was just doing his job. “I don’t understand why we haven’t evacuated all our people from the embassy.”
“We’ve done as much as we can without raising suspicion,” she said, thinking that she didn’t particularly care for anyone in the embassy.
“They should not have to die.”
“Soldiers die in war.”
“They are not soldiers.”
She glared at him. “We are at war. Everyone is a soldier.”
He nodded, knowing that too much protest could cost him his life.
Popov, unconvinced of his agreement, continued, “Imagine when Blackout is complete . . . the massive death . . . unimaginable destruction. Even before they begin to pick up the pieces, the Americans will be looking for revenge.”
“So?”
“We don’t want anything that could remotely point them back to us.”
The man’s skeptical expression made it clear he still did not agree, but he’d already lost this battle with Popov. “Once the weapon is publicly known, the entire world order will shift.”
She smiled. “Yes.”
“A new phase in the arms race,” the man said.
“It has already begun.” Popov had been working on a report that would help protect against any Russian city from suffering the same consequences.
“Vilification,” the man said. “Do we really want to live in a world where four or five countries have the ability to destroy entire cities in an instant?”
“I think for a long time it will be held by just three countries with that ability. Even that will depend on how quickly the United States recovers. I believe the Americans will be a distant third position—powerful, yet perhaps no longer a super power. We shall see. However, once the element of surprise is removed, this kind of attack will be much more difficult. Remember, with lasers, it all gets down to the power source.”
He nodded. The man didn’t know too much about lasers, and only understood the broad complexities of Blackout, but it definitely made him nervous. “The world’s moving very fast,” he said, revealing a cloaked admission of his anxiety. “Just when we figure out how to maneuver and advance our country’s objectives, to protect ourselves, suddenly it’s a whole new technology. Blackout will be the power move today. Next it could be sonic weapons or some kind of AI takeover. It’s always something new to learn. This is a young man’s game.”
“Man?” she echoed. “You mean a young person’s game.”
“Maybe.”
“Yes. It’s another change you speak of. Yet another one you are apparently behind on. It is women running things now.”
“Wasn’t that supposed to make things better?”
“Oh, we’re not done yet. We’ve got thousands of years of men’s mistakes to fix. That’ll take us at least a few more years.”
He looked at the clock. “We’re going to be in a different place in twenty-two hours and thirty-seven minutes.”
“Yes, tomorrow will be much more than different. But first, today. And that will be quite eventful, especially in Washington.”
“I would think they want to keep things quiet today.”
“We don’t always get what we want, do we?”
Jie Shi waited. The updates were resetting. They had been constant during the past two days.
“They know about you,” a man wearing thick glasses said.
“That is unfortunate,” she replied. “What agency?”
“CIA.”
“This is not new.”
“It isn’t about your efforts to gain approval for the telecom mergers,” the man who, in his fifties, was almost twenty years her senior.
“And this from the Department of Justice?”
“There will be six indictments unsealed tomorrow.”
“The congressman, or me?”
“It appears you are safe for now, but when the DOJ squeezes those six, it is likely they will, as the Americans like to say, roll over and give you up.”
“So the technology transfers?”
The man smiled, always amused at the official term the Chinese government used for intellectual property theft. “They have begun to unravel. After the indictments, they will have a complete understanding of the damage.”
She nodded, lost in thought for a moment. “But they will not discover the spyware installed in all the devices.”
He shook his head. “How could they?”
“Then they will never catch me.”
Thirty
Washington DC – April 3rd – 6:10 am
Wen easily picked the lock of Hayward’s apartment. With their guns ready, she slowly pushed the door open. As soon as she and Chase got inside and saw the place in shambles, they knew it was too late.
Wen pointed for Chase to take the kitchen while she moved to the back of the one bedroom flat. Two minutes later, they decided it was clear.
“They may have been here last night,” Wen said.
“Or right after they killed him.”
“Probably at the same time,” Wen said. “They were looking for something, and I don’t think they found it.” Her eyes flashed all over the disheveled flat.
“How do you get that?” Chase asked, unsure what method she’d used determine that the killers had left empty-handed when they had no idea what it was they were trying to find.
“The place is too ravaged. They killed him because he knew something they didn’t want anyone else to know, and they were here for something very specific.” She picked up a couch cushion. One of its sides had been slashed open, foam and synthetic materials strewn around the room. “If they had found it, they would have stopped.” She pointed to the contents of the freezer and refrigerator, thawing on the kitchen floor. “Just look at this place. They didn’t stop, they gave up.”
“So it may still be here?”
“Or it never was. Maybe he hid it somewhere else.”
“Where he works?”
“Maybe,” Wen said, feeling around the underside of the kitchen counter.
Chase checked behind the wall-mounted flatscreen television. It extended out on a swinging arm bracket. “Nothing.”
“Bathrooms are a favorite hiding spot,” Wen said, entering the surprisingly large room.
“It would help if we knew what we were looking for.”
Using his multi-tool, Chase took apart the two ceiling light fixtures the earlier team had missed, but found nothing. Finally, after ten minutes without anything interesting turning up, he decided to check the news for mentions of Hayward, their morning hotel encounter, even the Cayman massacre.
Earlier, Chase had seen the television remote control in a scattered pile of books, pictures, and hundreds of colored pens. He retrieved it, but it didn’t work. Knowing you could roll or rotate the batteries and get another few hours of service from a remote, he opened the battery compartment.
“We-en,” he sang. “I think I found something.”
She came from the bedroom, a framed photo in her hand. “What?”
Chase held up the remote. “No batteries. Instead, our Astronaut friend kept a flash drive in the battery compartment.”
She smiled. “Nice work.”
“See? I may not have been trained for search and surveillance by a top intelligence agency, but . . . ”
“Can’t wait to find out what’s on it.”
“We’ll take it to Nash right after we meet with Skyenor.”
Chase took one last look around the room and felt a wave of sadness for what had happened to this Astronaut. His brutal death, ripping apart his home . . . He imagined how easily it could have happened to Nash, or one of them. He thought of his own father’s tragic murder. “There are always bad guys,” he said quietly t
o himself.
Wen heard him, and knew where his thoughts were. “That’s why we do what we do,” she said, taking his hand and leading him toward the door. “We’re the good guys.”
Thirty-One
Washington, DC – April 3rd – 6:14 am
DARPA Director Skyenor knew it was going to be another long day, and this new, unwelcome wrinkle was surely going to make things worse. He called the one person that might be able to explain it, or at least make it go away.
Already at the office, Tess answered her private cell phone. Crisis and turmoil never sleep . . .
“Chase Malone wants to meet with me,” Skyenor said, sounding agitated.
“Do you know what this is about?” Tess asked, pulling up a screen with the latest details of Chase and Wen’s exploits. It was almost unnecessary, as she had most of the information memorized. More than her “pet project”, as Linda sometimes called Chase, he was often the difference between success and failure. As much as he stymied her, she had come to rely on him more than she liked.
“If I knew what he wanted, I wouldn’t be calling you for advice.”
“How did he reach you?”
“He texted me. I don’t know where he got my secure DARPA line, but he got it.”
“When does he want to meet?”
“Right now.”
“He’s in Washington?” Tess asked, frustrated that she’d lost his trail again, but she was getting closer after the reports of an American man and an Asian woman killing more than a dozen mercenaries in the Caymans.
“Apparently.”
“Did he say anything to peak your interest?”
“It was a text, but he said he needed to tell me something, and wanted some information about Hayward Hughes.”
“The Astronaut?” Tess asked rhetorically. “He’s dead.”
“Dead?”
“I just got the report. Murder on the mall.”
“My God . . . He was . . . He’s dead? Wow . . . Hayward was working for me.”
“Maybe that’s why they want to meet you.”
“They?”
“Chase and Wen.”
“Right, how could I forget.” Chase and Wen had been involved in an international plot to use weather controlling technology in which Skyenor and DARPA, along with Tess and CISS, played key roles. “Okay, I’ll squeeze them in.” He flashed on his incredibly tight schedule. The only possible opportunity without canceling something else was to see them at 7 am, when he was getting his morning coffee. He quickly replied to the text while still talking to Tess. “What do we know about Hayward’s death?”
