His Name Was Zach (Book 2): Her Name Was Abby

by Martuneac, Peter

  That was when Derrick received his summons to appear before the president. He sighed, and ambled his way down the street, up to the White House, to confront his dad. He knew what was coming, but he didn’t know how he was going to handle his father. The scowl he bore on his face when he left Abby in that alleyway kept its residence, and any passerby steered well clear of the wrathful young man as he marched up the driveway and pushed open the doors of the capitol building. He didn’t wait for an escort as he sometimes did to humor the guards posted there, and went straight into the Oval Office.

  Cyrus was talking on a cell phone, pacing in front of his desk when Derrick walked in and closed the door. His father motioned for him to come sit on one of the couches while he wrapped up his phone call.

  “I don’t care,” he said into his phone. “They’re soldiers, they obey orders. You go back there and tell them that I have an open door policy, and any one of them is welcome to come here and say what’s on their mind to my face. Yeah, I didn’t think so.”

  Cyrus closed the old flip-phone with a snap just as Derrick was easing into a couch, and with a rapidity that belied his old age he heaved the small black phone at Derrick. It shattered as it struck his head.

  “What the fuck is wrong with you, boy?!” Cyrus roared as Derrick staggered to his feet, rubbing his head where the phone had hit him. Cyrus struck him across the face with the back of his hand, sending his son back down onto the couch.

  “Am I correct in understanding that you knew twenty-four hours ago that a certain DAS agent was a fucking mole, yet you did not see fit to report this until just today?”

  Derrick said nothing, pursing his lips and glaring up at his dad, so Cyrus continued.

  “You were always a stupid little shit, spent more time chasing tail than you did at your studies. But the one thing I never took you for was a goddamned traitor.”

  “I’m not a fucking traitor!”

  “Oh, bullshit! You aided and abetted a fucking terrorist! I don’t give a hoot in hell how good of a fuck she was, you should have –”

  Derrick jumping from the couch and seized Cyrus by the lapels, shoving him backwards into his desk. “That’s enough!” Derrick yelled.

  At first, Derrick could almost detect a hint of fear in the old man’s eyes as he nearly fell on top of the desk, but in a second that fear was consumed by a twisted mask of rage.

  “Why you,” Cyrus growled, his voice low and dangerous, “you ungrateful piece of shit. Think you’re man enough now to take down your father, huh? Well come on, then. Put ‘em up!”

  “Oh shut the fuck up,” said Derrick. He released his father and stepped back from him.

  “You did this on purpose. You wanted to give her a head start because of your precious little feelings for her.”

  “I’ll kill her myself if we find her,” Derrick insisted, but Cyrus laughed.

  “Bullshit,” he said as he stood up and straightened his jacket. “You don’t have the balls to do that. As for finding her, we already did, and she’s been executed. At least, that’s what the news is saying.”

  Cyrus scooped a remote control off of his desk and pointed it at a TV on the far wall, turning it on. The government news station was playing, and they were running a report on a mole in the DAS.

  “As reported earlier, we obtained this exclusive photograph of the terrorist, who was killed after a brief manhunt this morning,” the news anchor on the TV said. They showed then an image of Abby sprawled on the ground, half her face and one grey eye covered by her hazelnut hair while blood seeped from multiple gunshot wounds to her chest.

  The woman on the TV continued. “The young woman was a confirmed member of the terrorist group known as the ReFounding Fathers who was working undercover to plant bombs throughout District 1. We do not know at this time how far along her plan was nor if any bombs were planted. As a precaution, all government buildings are being swept by Explosive Ordnance Disposal teams, and citizens are urged to keep an eye out for anything suspicious.”

  Cyrus muted the TV and tossed the remote to the couch, stretching his hands out to his sides as if his son should be impressed.

  “You faked her death?” Derrick asked.

  “That’s right, now I’m controlling the narrative,” Cyrus replied. “In war, you always act first, make the enemy react to you. That’s how you win.”

  Cyrus walked around his desk and sat down in the chair. He opened a bottom drawer and pulled out a bottle of whiskey and a short glass. “Now that I’ve calmed down a bit,” he said as he poured himself a glass of the amber liquid, “it’s actually quite funny. I mean, you were literally sleeping with the enemy! My son, the patriotic super-soldier brought an enemy agent into my house, right into the fucking White House!”

  “I’m out,” Derrick said, rising from the couch. He’d had enough of his dad’s taunting, and that wasn’t helping his fragile emotional state, so he headed for the door.

  “Did you know I even found her here in my office during the banquet last week?” Cyrus said as he took a swig of whiskey, preparing a parting shot of humiliation for his son. “I mean, who knows what she could have found if I hadn’t –“

  Cyrus’ voice trailed off, leaving that last sentence hanging. Derrick halted in his tracks and turned around, wondering why his father had not completed his train of thought.

  “Well?” he said, shrugging his shoulders.

  Cyrus was sitting perfectly still, staring at the laptop on his desk, his whiskey glass frozen halfway up from the desk to his mouth. He had checked, didn’t he? There had been no recent log-in attempts that night after he shooed her out of the office. There’s no way she could have…

  “Sit back down,” Cyrus said. He snatched up the handset of his desk phone and pushed the button for one of his secretaries. “Send our best computer programmer to my office right fucking now.”

  He slammed the handset back in place and looked up at his son, glaring. “I thought I told you to sit the fuck back down,” he said, and Derrick did so. Rebellious though he was, he knew there was a certain line not to cross with his father. “And you better pray your girlfriend didn’t fuck with this computer.”

  ***

  Cyrus leaned against one of the bookshelves in his office, rapping his fingers against the wood in a nervous rhythm as the computer programmer he requested sat at his desk. Her long, dark fingers moved across the keyboard of the laptop with the alacrity of a skilled pianist, the staccato click-clacking of keys her concerto notes. Derrick sat on the couch, watching her absent-mindedly. He could see the laptop screen reflected in her large, green-framed glasses, and it looked like she was working in several different programs all at once.

  “Oh mon Dieu!” the woman exclaimed quietly, the French of her homeland of Senegal slipping out.

  Cyrus heard it and snapped his attention to the woman. “What?” he asked, his tone demanding.

  “Oh, I am sorry, sir,” she said. “I am poking around your security system just now, and it is incredible! This is something I would have loved to try to crack when I first studied programming.”

  “Oh. Well, carry on,” Cyrus said, forcing an agonized smile to his face.

  The woman, Camille, continued on her virtual dissection of the president’s laptop, peering into every byte and datum. Finally, after what felt like hours to the other two occupants, Camille looked up and said, “I can’t find any trace of a hacker here.”

  “You’re certain?” Cyrus asked, stepping over to the desk.

  “Oui, monsieur,” replied Camille. “I will just close everything out, and I can be on my way.”

  “Thank you, Camille,” said Cyrus. He blew out a long, steady breath of relief and ran a hand through his hair, shooting a stern look at Derrick.

  “Uh, pardon,” Camille said as she raised one hand, wearing a perplexed look. “Is this computer new?”

  “No, it isn’t,” Cyrus answered slowly. “Why?”

  “It’s just that… so bizarre…. I ju
st noticed now that every single file on your computer has the same creation date and time, like everything was uploaded and installed all at once.”

  Cyrus turned around and gripped the edge of his desk. His hands trembled as he tried to control his roiling temper. Leaning in towards Camille, he asked, “And exactly what date and time is that?”

  “It looks like… last Saturday night, at 7:13pm,” Camille replied.

  Cyrus nodded his head, his teeth grinding together. He turned to face Derrick and said, “The bitch did something.”

  Chapter Forty

  “Is something the matter, sir?” Camille asked.

  “Alright, Camille,” Cyrus said, turning around to face her, “I need your help. Earlier you said you would love to crack the defenses on this computer, right? I need you to think, then. How would you access the files on this computer without tripping any alarms? Could you do it?”

  “Oh, that would be very difficult,” Camille responded, and she sat silent for a few moments as she tried to gather her thoughts, but Cyrus was not a patient man.

  “What about downloading the files right from the computer?” he interrupted. “Would you be able to do something like that right here and now?”

  “Maybe,” Camille admitted. “But your security system should trigger an alarm if there was an unauthorized access or an attempt to download these specific files here.”

  Camille paused again, then said, “Now, and this is purely theoretical, but I suppose if I were to try to do that, I would try to write some kind of program that could be uploaded manually, like on a thumb drive, that would copy and replace the data as it’s being downloaded. This could trick your security system, in theory, and it would explain the matching creation date for all these files.”

  “Could it be done even without turning the computer on?” Cyrus asked.

  Camille shrugged and said, “Perhaps. The data is there in the hard drive whether the computer is running or not. But that would require one hell of a hacker writing one hell of a virus and taking one hell of a risk to upload it into your computer personally. Like I said, this is all theoretical, but, um, but…“

  Her voice trailed off as she glanced at the TV on the wall. Cyrus and Derrick, who had become engrossed with Camille’s train of thought, followed her gaze and saw the TV turn to fuzz. Then the TV signal returned, and an older man was standing in front of a camera with a younger man. Cyrus snatched up the TV remote and raised the volume.

  “…Heammawihio, descendant of the Cheyenne peoples, leader of the ReFounding Fathers. The time has come to finally show my face, and to incite a rebellion.”

  Cyrus stepped closer to the TV, his face a mask of rage as he listened.

  “Our time is short, but I must pay tribute first to the freedom fighter who got us the information you’ve been hearing and seeing recently,” Heammawihio said, and he turned to the young man next to him, who appeared to be fighting with every ounce of strength to keep from bursting into tears.

  “Our worst f-fears,” he stammered, but he regained his composure a little to continue, “were confirmed earlier. The young woman you saw on the news was indeed a spy working for us. But she was not planting bombs, she was gathering the information that might finally free us, protecting us while within the belly of the beast. And apparently… it cost her her life. Her name was Abby.”

  “Find them,” muttered Cyrus.

  “Sir?” Camille asked.

  Cyrus whipped around to face Camille and shouted, “FIND THEM! Those terrorists have hijacked a government TV signal! Find them, tell me where they are, and get me back control of the signal!”

  ***

  “But I’m not dead,” Abby thought as she watched Hiamovi hurry off the screen. But then it clicked. That must be why some of those people had been giving her funny looks earlier. The government must have ran a doctored photo of her to make it look like they’d killed her after discovering that she was a spy. Her train of thought was broken as Heammawihio began to speak again.

  “We began spreading this information over the weekend. You have heard that The Crisis was manufactured by the government, and that then-Vice President Arthur was the mastermind behind this insidious plot to seize control. Some of you may have even seen the proof in the documents we shared in secret. Tonight, I am going to tell you all what our dear Abby found on the computer of none other than President Cyrus Arthur himself.”

  ***

  The clicking of keys stopped. Cyrus turned around to Camille and caught her staring up at him, a hint of fear in her dark eyes. “Is there a problem, Camille?” he asked.

  “Sir,” she began, her voice trembling, “I lost my sister to the disease. Was that your doing?”

  “I don’t pay you to ask questions like that,” Cyrus responded.

  “If you don’t tell me, I will not get your TV signal back,” Camille insisted, placing her hands in her lap and looking up defiantly.

  Cyrus sauntered over to his desk and placed his palms flat on the hard wood, getting down to eye level with Camille and wearing a smile that was bereft of happiness. “If you don’t get back on those goddamn keys right fucking now,” he whispered, “I will shoot you in your head right here, and I’ll personally murder what’s left of your fucking family.”

  He opened his suit jacket to reveal a handgun holstered under his arm. Camille looked back into Cyrus’ eyes, saw the cruel truth in them, and immediately resumed typing.

  “That’s a good girl,” Cyrus said, standing back up. He removed his jacket entirely and tossed it on the couch next to Derrick, who was glaring at his father again.

  “The fuck you looking at, boy?” he growled. Derrick shook his head and stood up, retreating to the far corner of the room and stayed there, arms folded across his chest, turning his attention back to the TV. Cyrus, meanwhile, grabbed the handset from his desk phone and punched in some numbers.

  “General?” he said a moment later. “Mobilize every DAS agent. Send as many as you can spare into District 2 to keep the peace. Arm a Reaper drone, get it in the air and be ready to strike as soon as I get you some coordinates. Oh, and get every soldier on the wall, on patrol, whatever. Just keep them away from any TV.”

  ***

  Far from the capitol building, Hiamovi, Hector, and Jay were hiding inside an old, empty house, the same house where Jay hid what he called his computer lab. It was here where they set up a camera, prepared a script and a video clip, and where Jay hijacked the local TV signal. Jay assured them he could hold off any attempts to wrench the signal back for a good ten minutes, plenty of time to deliver their message.

  But shortly before their planned attack, they switched on the TV just in time to see that image of Abby, shot multiple times in the chest. In stunned silence they sat, debating within themselves if it was a real photo or not. It looked just like Abby, the girl even had the same tattoo on her arm. And she’d been alone. Yes, it probably was her, which meant she was dead.

  Hiamovi had a near complete breakdown, and if it wasn’t for the gravity of their plans for that day, he may have ran off and hid himself away. Somehow, he found the courage to keep his composure enough to stay with Hector and Jay. He even insisted on appearing next to Hector at the beginning of the signal intrusion, to pay respect to Abby himself. Now that he’d done that, he hurried over to a window, retrieved the old SKS rifle that he’d left there earlier, and stood watch.

  Jay’s role in all this, besides hijacking the TV signal, was to keep the government from taking it back until they were done, and also to keep them from tracing his IP address. Hector was especially worried about being found and killed, but Jay didn’t seem bothered at all. He’d fended off potential hackers before; he was the best in the business. As Hector launched into the meat of his speech, Jay chomped on an apple and monitored his computer screens. Already an attempt was made to trace his IP address, but he digitally swatted it away.

  “President Arthur is a liar, and a murderer,” Hector said as soon as Hiamov
i left his side. “As you have seen in the distributed documents, he hired a team of scientists to engineer for him a virus. It was intended to slow down the firings in a person’s brain, to make them less capable thinkers, to care less about important things. But it went wrong. The virus seized control of the host’s brain, and turned it feral. It made people care less, alright. Now the infected cared only about feeding.”

  “Damn, maybe I’m infected,” Jay chuckled to himself as he took another bite of his apple, munching and turning the apple chunk to mush. This mush he then spat out onto the ground as he glanced back at his computer screen.

  A hacker was breaking in.

  “How the –“ he muttered as he jumped on his keys. How the hell had that happened so fast? His fingers fluttered from key to key as his virtual army sallied forth to stop the attack. Moments later, the intruder was sent packing, but before Jay could blink the hacker was back. He deflected this one as well, but the attack redoubled a moment later.

  “Jay, everything alright?” Hiamovi whispered.

  “Ju-SHU- SH SHHH!” Jay replied, without looking up.

  Hector caught this exchange, but continued reciting his script. He had never seen Jay look so nervous in front of a computer screen, and he worried they might not have all the time he had promised them.

  ***

  “Now the infected care only about feeding,” said Hector.

  Every eye in the bar was glued to the TV, and even Abby, who knew the gist of what Hector was going to reveal, found herself enchanted by the power of Hector’s oration.

  He paused for a moment, his eyes flitting off to the side, but continued straightaway. “Arthur knew the side effects of the virus, but he launched it anyway. He spread it strategically, in places that would cause maximum panic without spiraling out of control. He infected the then-President on live TV, to sow even more fear and to seize power. His plan worked too well, in fact, and the pandemic Arthur launched in San Diego, which was no longer necessary given the chaos in Chicago, had to be crushed with bombs and rockets. Hundreds of thousands of people, killed in minutes.”