by P. J. Tracy
Hiding out in the Georgia woods, starving, overheated, and exhausted, he’d miraculously stumbled upon a clearing that seemed like Heaven. There was soft, silky grass to lie on and a small pond with purple flowers along the shore. Miss Lizzy had found him there, sound asleep. She was the oldest person he’d ever seen, with long gray hair tied back in a pink ribbon and a face so wrinkled he could barely see her eyes among the folds of skin. But she had a young smile and an open heart. She’d taken him to her little house on the edge of the clearing and fed him roast pork and pickles, then peach cobbler. When he’d started crying silent tears of relief, she’d told him about poetry, how it was salve for sorrow and lonely souls, like the two of them, and she’d read to him while he drank lemonade.
His phone interrupted his reverie and he felt a writhing panic in his stomach: good news never came early in the morning. Unless it was Magozzi, ready to share what they’d all been waiting for. The possibility soothed him as quickly as the buzz of his phone had agitated him.
But there was no signature on the caller ID, just “unknown number.” It was a call he’d normally never take, but the odd timing was enough to pique his curiosity. Maybe it was the boogeyman, and this would be his opportunity to tell him to go to Hell once and for all.
“Hello?”
“Mr. Davidson?”
The voice was generic male and vaguely familiar, but he couldn’t put a name to it. “Who’s asking?”
“This is Special Agent Dahl …”
“Dahl? Are you shitting me? It’s the crack of dawn.”
“I had planned to leave a message.”
“Well, you got me now. What’s up?”
Dahl cleared his throat in hesitation. “I’d prefer to meet in person.”
“Hey, I’m flattered you think so highly of my company, but I need a little more to go on. I don’t like cloak-and-dagger bullshit and neither do my partners.”
“It’s sensitive.”
Harley grunted. “Are you calling from the office?”
“No.”
“You’re calling from a burner phone?”
“Yes.”
“Okay, then. You’re secure on your end, I’m secure on mine, so give me a hint.”
“It’s an issue of national security. Does that interest you?”
Harley heard a pained sigh at the end of the line, as if Dahl had just thrown himself on a pike. As far as his upward career mobility was concerned, maybe he just had. Monkeewrench operated in the shadows, always skirting the fine gray line between justice and illegality, and feds weren’t supposed to inhabit the same domain. But Dahl was a true patriot—if you cut him, he’d bleed red, white, and blue. He’d taken a lot of career risks in the past to serve justice and his country and, for that, Harley admired him. “Hell, yes, of course I’m interested. In fact, we’re finishing up a little freelance project somewhere along those lines.”
“Excellent. I’d like to meet as soon as possible.”
Harley grabbed a bottle, one of his best. “We’re both awake, so how about now? I was just about to open up some port.”
“You’re opening a bottle of port now?”
“I’ve gotta sleep sometime and port is better than a pill any day.”
“At your place, then.”
“No place better, unless you want to meet at an all-night convenience store or a strip club. Isn’t much else open.”
“I’ll be there in half an hour. Try to stay sober.”
“You don’t get drunk on port, you savor it.”
“That was an attempt at a joke, Mr. Davidson.”
“I figured. But you need to work on your delivery. See you soon.” Harley hung up and rehashed the short conversation. Monkeewrench had worked with Dahl a few times before, never officially, and Gino and Magozzi were always the intermediaries ‒ the ones who contacted him first and brought him on board in the course of a homicide case that would benefit from federal assistance. This was different. For Dahl to deviate from established protocol and contact Monkeewrench directly meant he was desperate and there would be a good reason for that, which was unsettling.
As he ascended the stairs with a bottle of Niepoort Old Tawny, he tried unsuccessfully to shake the feeling that the boogeyman was getting closer.
CHAPTER
4
HARLEY HAD ALWAYS thought Dahl looked a little too California surfer to be taken seriously as a federal law-enforcement officer. His blond hair, perfect white teeth, and perennial tan just didn’t synch with the generic blue suit, the gun, and the rigid, charmless demeanor.
But Dahl wasn’t so pretty right now. Whatever was on his mind had taken its toll on his good looks. He still resembled a surfer bum somebody had cleaned up and dressed in a suit for church, but one who’d been on a beach bender all weekend.
Harley let him in and led him to the main-floor library. “You look a little roughed up, Dahl. You slept much lately?”
Dahl eyed the bottle of port sitting on a side table. “No.”
“I’d offer you a glass, but since you’re always on the job and alcohol is verboten, can I interest you in a wheatgrass shot? Some kale ginger carrot juice?”
Dahl took his time looking around the room, then leveled a shrewd gaze at Harley. “I’ll take a wheatgrass shot.”
“I’ll have to go out back and get some grass clippings from the compost bin.”
“Then I’ll take a port.”
Harley grinned and poured him a glass. “So you’re really going rogue, are you?”
“Temporarily. By the way, I don’t own a Vita-Mix and I don’t drink my vegetables. I prefer them intact, as God intended.”
“Well, then, we’ve got more in common than I thought.” Harley examined his glass of port. “When you come to think of it, this is fruit juice. What’s the difference?”
Dahl took a sip and closed his eyes. “The miracle of fermentation.”
Harley cradled his glass between his two big hands, more suited to wrenching at engines than precision typing on computer keyboards, but he was equally at ease with both. “So tell me what’s going on.”
“Nothing specific, actually. And that’s the problem.”
“So, no crime?”
“Not yet. But I don’t have a good feeling about the immediate future. Which is why I called you. We could use your expertise. Monkeewrench’s expertise.”
“Dahl, it’s just you and me, no eyes or ears. Spit it out.”
“Plain English, the Bureau is inundated with terror threats, many with actionable intelligence. Even if we tripled our manpower and resources, we still couldn’t keep up. We need to find a way to streamline the process, eliminate some of the eyes-on work, and bring in local law enforcement to follow up on what we can’t, or what we’ve had to mothball on a federal level. We simply don’t have enough people. The levee is breaking.”
Harley went to great lengths to keep his expression neutral, because the freelance project they’d been working on fit that description exactly. “I won’t argue with you on any of the above. So you’re looking for intelligent software. Maybe a new database overhaul.”
“That was my thought. Beyond that, we’re having some issues with security breaches that are further impeding our work.”
“Hacking, you mean.”
He nodded.
“Well, no shit, that’s a given. Have you been able to isolate a source?”
“Not exactly. Right now, we’re focusing on the usual suspects: Eastern Europe, Russia, North Korea, China …”
“Islamic State?”
“We haven’t found any direct links yet.”
“Of course you haven’t. ISIS has the oil money to hire the big dogs from hostile countries to get that shit done for them. Hackers are the new mercenaries, Dahl, so you and your people better start paying attention to that battle front. Computers are on the verge of becoming weapons of mass destruction without the plutonium-239.” Harley took a sip of port and let it linger on his tongue. “So, not on
ly do you need some new software to help streamline and restructure your domestic cases, you need better firewalls, more strategic than tactical. Which is smart, by the way.”
“In a nutshell, yes. Not a lot to ask.”
Harley snorted. “You’re getting funnier by the minute. Maybe I should pour you some more grape juice. Look, Dahl, I’m not going to promise you anything without input from my partners, but we’ve spent the better part of the past year working on a program just like the one in your fantasies.”
Dahl blinked at him. “Really? That’s … fantastic.”
“But it’s still a baby. We’re going to run the first beta test this morning, so we don’t even know if it’ll work yet. And if you want to implement something like this, it can’t be under the radar. We’re talking massive renovation here and it’ll have to go all the way to Washington.”
“I understand that.”
“So what are the chances your ideas are going to fly?”
Dahl bowed his head and rubbed his eyes. “Truthfully? Slim to none. I’ve come to realize that government bureaucracy is a quagmire mostly inhabited by people with no imagination or ambition beyond their own personal enrichment, so nothing substantive ever gets done. But if something gets presented that looks like it might solve some problems for them, and help their careers and their paychecks, the wheels can move. It’s all about the packaging.”
“Man, you’re almost as cynical as me.”
“Maybe more so.” He held out his empty glass. “I’ll take a refill, if you don’t mind. This is excellent.”
Harley freshened his glass. “You’ve stuck your neck out before, but this is a whole new level of crazy. First off, you’re going to make your superiors look stupid for not thinking of something this obvious in the first place.”
“Don’t worry, they’ll find a way to take full credit for it if it’s successful. If it gets implemented at all. And I’m fine with that.”
“But if it does get implemented and it’s not successful, you’ll go down in a spectacular ball of fire.”
“That’s the way things work in my world.”
Harley watched Dahl methodically swirling his glass counter-clockwise. He seemed hypnotized by the shimmying liquid, or maybe it was just a place to rest his eyes while he pondered more onerous realities. He was a good soldier and, like all good soldiers, he carried a heavy burden the average person probably couldn’t even imagine. But there was more to Dahl, some layers he hadn’t seen before, or maybe that he hadn’t allowed himself to see until now, prejudiced as he was by his appearance. “You think you’ll last until mandatory retirement?”
“I sincerely doubt it. I might be looking at the end of my career, but at least I’ll be able to live with myself if the chips don’t fall the right way and people die.”
Harley rose from his perch on the hearth and clinked glasses with him. “I don’t have a problem with a whole new level of crazy. So what else is on your mind?”
“What do you mean?”
“Come on. A long-term software overhaul is a fantastic idea but it doesn’t synch with your early-morning out-of-the-blue phone call or the fact that you showed up ten minutes later and are now polishing off your second glass of port. What’s really lighting your fire?”
Dahl dragged his hands down his face, displacing the puffy purple pouches that had taken up residence under his eyes. “We’re getting metadata and limited intelligence that suggest Minneapolis might be a terror target.”
“Jesus Christ. So why are you here drinking my booze instead of busting your ass tracking down the bad guys?”
Dahl glowered. “We have twenty-four-hour surveillance on all local suspicious persons known to us. But they’re not the source of the chatter. There’s a new breed out there, the kind of wolves that run in small packs, often rag-tag and without previous terror affiliation. Major overseas terror organizations are providing these individuals with financial and material support and giving them orders. We’ve seen this model in attacks in Europe, and it’s migrating here because it’s effective. And their greatest tool is the level of cyber sophistication.”
“I take it your wolf-hunting in Minneapolis isn’t going so well.”
“You know as well as anybody that the terrorists are going dark. Everything is end-to-end encryption now, the dark net, onion routers that bounce our cyber divisions all over the globe before they dead-end in a church computer somewhere in Bulgaria. We need to isolate the players, crack their encryption, and find them.”
Harley scoffed. “Come on, Dahl, the government has the best cyber surveillance and warfare capability in the world, and you’re telling me you can’t find some weaknesses to exploit? It’s a bitch to get through an onion router like Tor, but it’s almost always doable because human error is going to be a factor eventually. And you might not be able crack encrypted messages mid-stream any more, but you can hack the software at either end and get into their shit that way.”
“With over a thousand active cases nationwide, how long do you think that will take? We’ve had to divert existing personnel to new divisions that deal exclusively with this phenomenon. Which illustrates my earlier point—we’re drowning.”
“And you think we can help?”
Dahl held his gaze for a moment. “I know you can. First of all, you might be slightly less encumbered in your methods. And you would have the luxury of focusing solely on Minneapolis. Where is Minneapolis in the national triage right now? I can tell you, it’s far down on the list. We can’t pursue this further without warrants, and that’s not going to happen with what little information we’ve been able to collect.”
Harley’s brows inched up his forehead. “Oh, I get it. You want us to break federal and international laws because you can’t.”
Dahl shook his head. “I’m only asking that you take a look and see if you can help avert a potential disaster in our city. Preferably without breaking any laws.”
Harley let his eyes drift over the thousands of volumes sitting on his library shelves, all filled with vast amounts of important knowledge, none of which would help him right now. “I need to talk with Grace, Annie, and Roadrunner about this. And before we can give you an answer, we need whatever information you have to see what we can do.”
“I’ll work on that.”
“Work hard, because it sounds like the Doomsday clock is ticking a little faster.”
CHAPTER
5
THE SUN WAS low in the sky, sinking fast behind the mountains, and he pushed his aching legs harder, pumping on the bike pedals like his life depended on it. And it did ‒ if he got home after dark, Mom and Dad would be so mad they might even take away his Nintendo for a while, and what kind of a life would he have without it?
He started to panic when the sun slipped behind the peaks of the Maroon Bells. It was still sort of light, so he had time, but not much. At the last minute, he veered off the main road and jumped onto the shortcut path through the woods. He and Clara used to play here when they were little, and now it was where she sometimes came to make all kissy-face with her boyfriend. Yuck. He hoped he wouldn’t run into them.
He saw movement up ahead in the shadows between the trees, and as he got closer, he saw something lumpy on the ground and two men kneeling over it. He squeezed the brakes hard and felt his rear tire skid in the gravel, almost dumping him. The men must have heard him, because they looked up, startled. Then one stood and started jogging toward him.
He tried to turn around and pedal away, but his entire body felt frozen, like he was stuck in a big ice cube. He didn’t recognize the man, but he looked really mad.
“It’s a little late for a young boy to be out, isn’t it?” the man said menacingly, like the neighbors’ German shepherd that growled at him sometimes.
“I ‒ I’m on my way home.”
“You’d better hurry. But first I want you to listen to me—really listen, very carefully. Can you do that?”
He bobbed his head up a
nd down.
“Good. If you tell anyone—anyone—that you saw me here, something really bad is going to happen to your family. And then something really bad is going to happen to you. I’ll make sure of it. Do you understand?”
Tears stung his eyes and started rolling down his cheeks.
“DO. YOU. UNDERSTAND?”
“Y-y-yes,” he stuttered, through chattering teeth.
“Go home. Remember what I said. Don’t ever forget.”
Gus Riskin jerked awake in bed, his sheets damp with sweat and tangled around his torso. He took deep breaths until his heart settled into a normal rhythm, then groped on the nightstand for his glass of water and drank what was left. He’d had the dream for most of his life, but it’d been plaguing him almost every night lately. It had to end. And it would, soon.
He got up, turned on the bedside lamp, and cued up his favorite CD. When the ominous first movement of Gustav Holst’s The Planets began—Mars, the Bringer of War ‒ he dropped to the floor and started doing push-ups. He didn’t stop until he hit one hundred and sweat was sluicing off his body.
After he’d showered, he started a pot of coffee, then made himself a breakfast of fried eggs and toast in his tiny apartment kitchen. As he ate, he watched an orange puck of sun rise unromantically over the highway a few hundred yards from the building. He often wondered if the apartment complex had existed before the highway, or if some developer had thought that putting residential housing right next to a busy thoroughfare was a good idea.
The road was clogged with morning commuters on their pilgrimage to the daily grind. There was something comforting about witnessing the sameness of other people’s routines: the reliable ebb and flow of morning and evening traffic Monday through Friday, the weekend respite when weary workers stayed at home and off the roads. It was a modern communal ritual where the participants never actually communed with one another, except through the blast of a horn or the raising of an offensive finger.
It was pathetic, really, how isolated people had become even when they were in the midst of many others, and they didn’t know it. They were in their cars or in front of their computers or on their phones, and never thought for a minute about engaging the person next to them in face-to-face conversation. Gus never felt more alone and dehumanized than when he was in a city with thousands of people swirling around him, like uncaring extras in a movie scene. But the knowledge that some of those zombies wouldn’t survive the day for any number of reasons cheered him.
