by Theo Cage
“That’s what happens sometimes on a blind date. Remember, I didn’t pick you.”
The old man rearranged his bony hands on his lap. “In the time we have left together, maybe I can help you to understand my mission better. Here’s the big question. Who's protecting us?"
"Us?" I asked. He was right. That was a big question. He could be talking about huge corporations, governments, secret societies, the ultra freaking rich. A rogue’s gallery of special assholes.
"The engine,” he answered. “Who guards the machinery that turns everything over? Produces the food? Runs the factories? Feeds the people? Keeps everything moving?"
"I don’t think you have anything to worry about there. Your wealthy friends look pretty healthy to me."
"Appearances are deceiving – because something is very wrong with the world. It's not just this climate change nuisance. Or the fact we are running out of oil. Or the seas are dying. Hell, antibiotics don't even work anymore. I could prick my finger on this fraternity pin and be dead of sepsis in three days, and there is nothing any hospital or doctor in the world could do about it. At any price tag. Billions wouldn't buy me an extra day. Billions would get me nothing. What is the point then?"
"You'd have a handsome casket. Probably the best. You'd be the envy of all of the other billionaires in attendance. Or maybe these guys don’t attend funerals. I’m not up on the rich and powerful."
"You are hilarious, Detective.”
“Thanks. Humor helps to get me through difficult times. Like right now. Maybe you should try it." I felt the limo slowing down, and I could see lights reflecting off the water. I recognized the area. The locals called it Muddy Gut. A favorite place to dump bodies.
"Why did you take it upon yourself to interfere in Gideon Lean's plans?" the old man asked.
"I'm a cop. Did you forget it’s my job? If you’re worried about the planet being out of kilter right now – just try removing police from the equation and see what happens? There are some excellent examples on YouTube."
"You really think removing one cop from the system will have that significant an impact? That's quite a self-centered view."
"I wasn't talking about me. I meant peace officers in general. We serve a purpose."
"You ruined a plan that took years to construct and engineer."
"Why would you support a psychotic monster only interested in murder, rape, extortion and blackmail? I'm not sure I like you people."
"Greater good, Mr. Hyde." When he said that, I decided right there that no matter what happened tonight, he was going to pay for what he did to Jann. No matter what.
"So having Gideon mount an armed attack with fifty suicide bombers gets you ahead somehow? How am I supposed to understand that?"
"We need to wake people up sometimes. Complacency only goes so far. We could have channeled a lot of fear and hatred to real purpose."
I’d heard all of this before. Prosperity and peace are all well and good, but a substantial dose of terrorism frightens people to the point where they gladly give up their freedoms.
"As a police officer you should know more than most that people need to be managed. Leave them to their own devices, and they burn their neighborhood to the ground pretty consistently. Remember the L.A. riots?"
"I'm a bit worried about why you are telling me all this,” I said.
"It's good to vent. Releases the stress."
"You've picked a rather old fashioned way of dispatching me, didn't you? A car bomb or a poisoned apple would have been more creative." We were now parked right by an old unlit dock, the Muddy Gut reflecting a partial moon.
"Yes. You are right. But I was curious about you. You seem well known. This is a bit like meeting a celebrity. Despite being an enormous annoyance, no one can seem to get rid of you."
"I'd be happy to give you an autograph."
"If I need a keepsake, I'm sure there will be lots of options later. I will have my pick."
"I'm not going to beg or anything,” I said. “Despite all of your clumsy foreshadowing. I’ve had a great life. No thanks to the meddling of you and your handlers."
"You truly are an interesting specimen, Mr. Hyde." And when he said that, I saw for the first time a hint of uncertainty in his eyes. He could see something far away in the distance that the goons and I couldn’t yet. And not something metaphorical – flashing lights. A lot of them off in the distance. At least six black and whites were turning off the main road and heading our way.
The old man seemed to deflate; his mouth set hard. Then I could see the reflection of the red and blue lights in his glasses and hear the sirens grow louder.
This was all Finn’s doing.
Cops, as I’ve said many times, are superstitious creatures. Finn ringed his bar with security cameras right from day one. Oddly, most of them were hidden – to encourage, if you believe it, criminal activity he could actually watch and record. Once a cop, always a cop.
Finn knew I was waiting for a cab outside his bar, so he was keeping an eye on me. He counted the beers I drank and apparently it was quite a bit more than the four I had estimated. He just wanted to make sure I got home safely.
When I got into the limo, Finn could clearly see the goon with the gun and called his cop buddies just coming off the midnight shift change. Finn followed me in his pickup truck and kept back until he saw the limo turn toward the waterfront. Then he called in the troops.
The old man looked at me and nodded – then the goons lowered the guns they had been poking me in the ribs with all during our Muddy Gut adventure. They were getting ready to pile out of the limo, which was now surrounded by a dozen policemen, guns drawn.
The old man gave me one last look. “This is merely an inconvenience,” he said. That one comment changed everything for me.
I grabbed the wrist of the goon on my right and twisted. He grunted and lost his grip on the gun handle, then I leveraged my weight against him. A guy with that much mass can’t help but follow the second law of thermodynamics – something about an object in motion wants to stay in motion. He smashed his fleshy face into the door frame so hard the limo shook. Just as that happened, I pulled the trigger on the gun, covering my finger with the sleeve from my jacket, the barrel aimed at the old man’s knees. Then I pushed the gun onto the floor.
The bullet shattered the old man’s left kneecap and then bounced, we learned later, off one very modern titanium hip joint and spun viscously into his groin. He screamed like a wild cat.
I tackled the security goon on the gravel beside the car and loudly accused him of dropping his weapon, which had evidently misfired. He was hauled off by several police officers.
Someone eventually called an ambulance.
Unfortunately, the old man bled out before help arrived. Much more than an inconvenience for him, as it turned out.
What would Jann think of my actions? I don’t think she would have been proud of me. No surprise there. She liked to do things by the book. But I couldn’t wait for that. It was far more important to me that the books were balanced.
After giving a statement to the attending officers, I pulled my collar up and got into Finn’s truck. Finn looked relieved – you could tell he was happy he had saved one of his best customers from a watery grave. After all, he said to me on the drive home, he needed everyone he could get.
ONE YEAR LATER
Soo-jin sat at a park bench in the square outside her dorm at Gwangju Polytechnic College. She was attending a state-provided Technology course, which would next year earn her a degree in Computer Science. After graduating, she dreamed of emigrating from South Korea to Canada, and a computer degree would help make that happen.
What she was working on, her laptop on her knee, was not an official school project. She belonged to a small group of hackers who met weekly and traded secrets and information. They offered a year-end prize, a pair of Nike running shoes donated by relatives living in California. But the prize wasn’t the point. The title itself was. Hacker
of the Year.
Soo-jin felt the fine black hairs tingle at the base of her neck. She had broken into the First Chinese Bank’s main server last night. Base security at the bank was only so-so. But the real prize today was the accounting payments system, which she was toying with now. She had written a very compact piece of code that searched text that often contained passwords. The program then repeatedly challenged the sign-in routine using those words.
She watched the letters blur on the tiny screen with a combination of anticipation and dread.
After a few minutes, her laptop played a few notes of one of her favorite songs by a local pop group called S.H.E. Soo-jin smiled. She was in.
She looked for the main program that the bank used to manage how interest payments were made to account holders. She had no criminal intent. She only needed to grab a few lines of code that would prove she had got in, so she could secure the prize.
Suddenly Soo-jin saw something that caught her eye. She was lucky to find it, buried in millions of lines of code. But it wasn’t the code itself that caused her to stop scanning. It was really the shape and feel of the sub-routine. When you’ve been programming computers from the age of four, like she had, you developed an intuitive feel for programming code that just felt right or wrong. This code just didn’t fit.
She looked at it closely, then became concerned. She thought for a moment that someone had beaten her to the prize. And this code was quite malicious. Upon being triggered, it would re-write all of the customer records randomly, mixing up tens of thousands of bank accounts and records. A hopeless mess would ensue. The solution would be to go back and use a secure backup made the day or week before. That’s why organizations backed up customer data every day.
Soo-jin frowned. What this program also did was scramble the backups as well. This could cause billions of dollars in damage to the bank that could never be recovered. She was impressed. And the hacker who did it had embedded their name in the code. Abaddon. An odd name she thought, unfamiliar with the English colloquialisms.
The slight hacker hesitated for a second, her fingers floating above the keyboard of her Mac Air. She felt both afraid and yet incredibly charged with power, a rare feeling for her. She thought of her father who had lost his business recently to an unfeeling bank, something he had sweated over his whole life. Her mother had cried for days. She felt the muscles in her jaw tighten. Then she carefully typed in one word. She changed the dormant code to active. It would launch in twenty-four hours. She looked away fro m the screen for a moment, feeling shame, then signed out, her copy of the Abaddon snippet of code safely saved in encrypted form on her laptop.
Soo-jin usually couldn’t wait for the next hackers meeting to talk about her latest adventures. This time though, she would remain silent.
This was her secret now. And the power the code gave her.
THE END
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
AN EXERPT FROM THE THRILLER
BERZERKER BY THEO CAGE
AT SOME POINT, Kaarle stopped worrying about everything.
His grades were the furthest things from his thoughts right now, his girlfriend – slash –fiancée only a gauzy memory.
That other life – the one that had led him around by the nose like some third-world beast of burden – all that crap about his career, his first glossy credit card, the new Jeep his dad bought him as a grad gift – all felt as distant to him now as some unmapped crater on the moon.
All that mattered was the buzzing in his ears, the icy wind on his flanks, and the way his bare feet burned when they pounded down on the packed ice of the road.
It was the twitching hour. That’s what the Doctor called it. Two in the morning – the time they always sent one of them out to do their chores.
And what chores they were.
You just ran. Faster than you ever raced in your life. Like you were jet-fueled.
You tore down the old road to the town you grew up in, a country lane the Doc and his crew cleared every day in the winter like the launch pad for a Saturn rocket. Only you didn’t fly up – you exploded horizontally towards the town center, across cornfields buried in snow. Like a human cruise missile.
That’s where the targets were. Sometimes a decoy, but other times trembling and alive, fear pouring off them like hot candle wax. A neighborhood dog or cat. And sometimes the neighbor himself. Someone who hadn’t followed the rules. Someone who might give up their secrets.
Those were the best. The ones you could sink your teeth into and shake until their necks snapped.
That was all that mattered now to Kaarle.
The twitch.
The twitch was everything.
JUST AFTER EIGHT in the evening, about thirty miles south of Grand Forks, the wind started to pick up and push ghostly fingers of snow across the highway. Not long after, Sean Chiller switched over to four-wheel-drive on his Explorer, as the frost crawled up the windows with the dropping temperature. Visibility turned poor. He felt like he was driving through cream of wheat.
His wife, Tracy, true to form, had her iPhone on her knee, checking the weather.
“It's going to minus fifteen tonight.”
“Do you want to turn around?”
Tracy looked back over her shoulder. Her daughter was sleeping in the back, her car seat crowded with her favorite stuffed monkey, a miniature plastic guitar, and a soggy, half eaten biscuit.
“How much longer to Fargo?” Tracy asked, considering his question.
“Normally an hour or so, but at this rate we won't get there until ten or later. If we turn around, I'm betting during this time of year, there won't be a room left at the Inn.” It happened just like that a few years ago. Same season.
Tomorrow was Black Friday, the biggest shopping day of the year. They could end up like homeless people in the middle of a blizzard. Sean imagined them sleeping in the car.
“I haven't seen one other vehicle on the road,” said Tracy.
“Would you go out in this kind of weather if you didn't have to?”
Sean's daughter had a rare genetic disease, a variation of Cystic Fibrosis, or CF. Daily injections were required to keep her alive. They had an appointment with a specialist at the Genesis Transfer Clinic in Fargo and a ray of hope for a partial cure based on genetic therapy. It was a long shot, but they had no other options.
Sean was a Corporal with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police in Winnipeg, where they lived about four hours north of Fargo. They were taking an extended holiday to meet with a specialist, and if they were lucky, get in some Christmas shopping.
Also, to escape all the drama going on back home for a few days. Sean was involved in a dispute with fellow officers. He needed a break.
Their GPS offered a suggestion. “Stay on highway twenty-one for another seven miles.”
Sean craned his neck, the blowing snow making the shoulders of the road indistinct and uncertain.
Turning east into Minnesota after leaving the Forks had been Tracy’s idea, not his. He would have preferred to stay on the Interstate. She’d wanted to pay a quick visit to an uncle who lived in a care home in Crookston. He wasn’t doing well, and she’d figured she wouldn’t get another chance.
They headed south from Crookston on seventy-five, then turned west back to North Dakota. Because Sean was horrible with directions, he’d handed his family’s fate over to a computer chip, hoping it knew something he didn’t.
“Well, the GPS thinks we should keep going. She says another few miles.”
Tracy gave him that look he was used to. This time it likely meant ‘Your jokes would be funnier if I didn't think we were going to freeze to death in the middle of nowhere.’
The road ahead had narrowed into a tunnel of icy pavement and howling wind. In some spots, the road was covered over by so much snow the location of the centerline became a complete mystery. Shallow depressions on each side of the highway, indicating ditches quickly filling with snow, were the only landmarks Sea
n could use to stay on the road.
He dropped his speed to thirty.
Then, out of the blurry swirl of snow and ice pellets ahead of them, he saw a bright flash of movement rise up from the roadbed as some whirling shape caught the light from his headlights.
Sean jumped. It was like seeing a ghost heave up out of the pavement. Then they both heard a crunching sound emanating from the front of the SUV.
They had struck something solid. A spooky, rhythmic beating sound followed.
Thump, thump, thump.
Sean slowed to a stop, squinting out into the night. The collision had sent a shock through him. He could feel the hairs on his neck and arms standing up. Something had jumped up from the road’s surface and struck their front end, but Sean could only make out a blurry shape moving just out of their sight below the hood. He looked over at Tracy, hunched over in her seat.
“Did you see that?” he asked.
“It scared the crap out of me,” she said.
“What do you think it is?”
Tracy just shook her head. “You're going to have to look, Sean. I hope it wasn't somebody who was lying on the road.”
Sean jerked his head back around. “Why would you say that?”
“It sounded pretty big.” They both saw the flash of white again, like a ghostly hand waving at them and then disappearing below the headlights. Sean felt another chill.
He looked back at his daughter. She was still sleeping soundly, thank God.
He turned to Tracy, then dropped the gear shift into reverse. He backed up slowly, the snow like cornstarch crunching under the radials. Whatever had disturbed the drift in front of the Explorer was now blown smooth by the wind.
There was nothing to be seen. And no tracks leading away.
Thump, Thump.
Tracy jumped and swore. “What the hell? Where is it? Under the car?” She twisted around and checked the door locks to make sure they were engaged. She peered into the side mirror, the window so caked with crusted ice she could barely make out anything.
