A Stranger in Paradise

by Edward M. Lerner

I knew so much more now.

  The virus wreaking havoc had lain dormant for months, and the Carolinas were the epicenter of this attack. Marc had appeared here in Hadley, South Carolina, a few months ago. Marc knew computers—and his fugitive alter ego was wanted for cyber-terrorism.

  And still I dithered.

  Maybe I just couldn’t believe Marc was the criminal type. I sure as hell didn’t see him as a terrorist, cyber- or otherwise.

  No one in the café paid me any attention, my silent surfing no competition for the argument that raged at the counter. Despite myself, I couldn’t tune it out. I listened in growing dismay.

  The National Guard wasn’t merely stopping people at the nearby state border. You couldn’t cross, no matter how upstanding a citizen you were, without a government-issued photo ID and an up-close-and-personal scan of yourself and your vehicle. Many people refused.

  RFIDs? From Zachary’s blog, the tags were hidden in clothing labels, toll-road transponders, car tires. . . . RFIDs felt like part of the puzzle, but there had to be more.

  My booth gave me a view of the street outside the café. Across the road Jones stood speaking with two elderly passersby. Looking uneasy, they studied a paper in Jones’s hand, presumably with Marc’s picture. It was only a matter of time until Jones found someone who would point him toward Marc. Zachary.

  I had to know how Marc was involved.

  I cleared the web browser’s history file, cookies, and cache before slipping out the café’s back door.

  The Southern Hospitality Inne was old and run-down, with a Bates Hotel feel about it. The locals mostly referred to the place as the Southern Comfort, after a weakness of the owner. It was Hadley’s lodging of last resort, where half-vacant meant booming business.

  That day, the Southern Hospitality’s parking lot was oddly full. Most of the cars bore out-of-state plates. People milled around in the lot, and the motel’s tiny office was jammed.

  I ambled past, catching snippets of conversation. The Guard had turned these people back at the highway out of town. There was more talk about scanning as a condition of passage.

  Some of the strangers were mad as hell. More were scared. No one admitted to having seen it, but several claimed to have talked to someone who knew someone who had heard from someone else . . .

  Could the Guard be shooting people for trying to sneak past a roadblock? That was insane and yet somehow eerily believable. “Enemy combatant” was all too elastic of a term. Call someone an enemy combatant and due process went out the window.

  (Rumors of border shootings persist to this day, ever unconfirmed. I can finally find out the truth. It’s a scary prospect.)

  I studied the map tacked to the town Welcome sign, on the state highway just past the motel. National Guard checkpoints were prominently marked. Leaving my car in town had been a good decision. I figured a route around them and kept walking.

  An hour later I knelt by a familiar stream, fishing in the cool waters for a brew.

  “I could use another,” Marc called. He perched on a boulder beside the mouth of a small cave. From where he sat you could see half the sprawling forest preserve by day and half the starry sky by night. I wondered if we’d ever stargaze here again.

  We clinked cans, drinking in companionable silence until the words burst out of me. “Are you him? Did you do it?”

  He thrust out his hand. “Zachary Boyer. Zach to my friends.”

  “I wasn’t followed,” I said. I was mad at him for past deception, and mad at myself for ignoring the implied question.

  Of course he was my friend. He was practically the brother I’d never had. I had shared my hopes and dreams with him. I was young and self-absorbed enough to believe that entitled me to know everything, as though my banal ambitions merited him putting his liberty at risk.

  He didn’t sense my turmoil, or he chose to overlook it. “Good to know. Yes, I wrote a virus. I set it loose. You’ve seen sales terminals that read credit cards without swiping? The virus spreads wirelessly through them.” He paused for a long swig. “I can’t help noticing you didn’t ask me why.”

  Yet I had to know that. Why else had I come? “Cyber-terrorism is a far cry from robot explorers on Europa.”

  Zach winced. “Priorities.”

  “You’ll have to do better than that,” I said.

  “You’re better off walking away.”

  I stayed put and Zach sighed. “If you want to know, I’ll tell you. Excuse me for packing at the same time.”

  “RFIDs,” I guessed.

  “RFIDs.” Zach stood and I followed him several paces into the cave. With a grunt, he shoved aside a massive slab of stone. A food stash had been hidden behind it, everything dehydrated or freeze-fried. A wad of old bills nestled among the sealed packets. “I didn’t truly expect to have to hike out. I never imagined the quarantine would be established this fast.”

  He loaded a scuffed leather backpack as he spoke, methodically selecting packages and wedging them into place. “Anyway, about RFIDs. They’re tiny silicon chips embedded in credit cards, shoes, tires, E-ZPass transponders, you name it. Cash, even, in recent bills. If it’s new, it’s chipped.”

  “For faster checkout?” I guessed. “Counting cash in the drawer?”

  “And taking inventory with a quick radio ping. And access-control cards. Lots of reasons.” He kept cramming in supplies. “Anywhere the chips go—the feds know.”

  But he had gone undetected for months. I said, “Not everywhere, obviously.”

  “As it happens, Tim, I’m an electrical engineer. I’m pretty good at finding and disabling the damn things.” He winked, and for a moment he seemed like . . . Marc.

  As quickly, the moment passed. I said, “Then how did they track you to Hadley?”

  He shrugged. “I’m hardly a criminal mastermind. I really don’t know how. I’m surprised it took this long.”

  In the distance a train whistle blew, low and plaintive. I still didn’t understand. “So, RFIDs. How do they work?”

  “As feats of engineering, they’re actually quite elegant. Just a little silicon chip and an antenna. Mostly they don’t carry an onboard power source. Batteries would make the tags too bulky and expensive for widespread use. The chip holds part numbers and serial numbers. For more sophisticated applications, the chip might do a bit of computing, too.”

  “Back up a bit,” I said. “No battery?”

  “RFID readers emit low-power radio signals. Your typical RFID tag extracts enough energy from a query signal to wake up, decide whether to answer, and modulate the weak reflected signal into a response. Passive tags like that are dirt cheap; readers are expensive.”

  That was neat. “So what’s the catch?”

  “Chains and franchises. They have corporate headquarters eager to suck every scrap of information into big, juicy databases. Those databases . . . Homeland BS covets them.”

  Businesses didn’t come much smaller than in Hadley. We didn’t have a lot of chain stores. Maybe that explained Zach hiding here. But no, he said he could find and disable the tags.

  So: What about RFIDs? Subpoenaed or hacked, coerced or freely provided—federal access to the databases seemed entirely too plausible. And yet . . .

  “You hear that?” Zach paused in his packing.

  I shook my head.

  He swept the landscape with a small telescope. “It’s okay. Just Seth.”

  Seth came here, too? Once again, in my youthful self-importance, I felt disappointment.

  Soon we heard Seth’s shuffling, huffing approach. The short-but-steep climb up to the cave left him panting. He did a double take at finding me inside. “Hi, Tim.” Seth pulled a wad of crumpled bills from his chinos pocket. “From petty cash. All old bills without chips. Best I could do on short notice.”

  Seth was in Zach’s confidence! His hintin
g about RFIDs at the bookstore suddenly made sense. I felt more deflated than ever. “Why, Marc? I mean, Zach. What’s this really about?”

  Zach leaned against the cave wall. “It’s about the NARCC.”

  Junior year in high school, my World Civ class had a unit on dystopias. Animal Farm. Brave New World. 1984. Scary stuff, but relics of a bygone era. 1984 had come and gone before I was born.

  That day in the cave I learned how naïve I’d been. Big Brother was alive and well, only his true name was NARCC.

  The National RFID Consolidation Center.

  In my defense, who knew back then? Not Congress: Except for the intelligence oversight committees, Congress was in the dark. Not the press or the civil-liberties groups. Not the companies strong-armed into providing daily feeds from their corporate databases.

  The more intrusive the program, the closer to the vest Homeland BS held it. A secret data warehouse of most RFID readouts nationwide? It provided a window onto the lives of damn near everyone. That was the closest held program of all.

  Zach had heard rumors about the NARCC as a computer consultant at Homeland BS—a discovery that helped send him underground. No wonder Homeland BS was so eager to bring him in.

  No wonder the feds were so diligent about suppressing his web presence.

  They didn’t succeed, of course. The blog I’d skimmed was hosted on an offshore website. And yet the blog, for all its anti-RFID fervor, never mentioned the NARCC. To avoid drawing attention to Zach’s ultimate target?

  My mind reeled. RFID tags in my clothes and sneakers, even the money in my wallet, shouting my presence to every store I walked past. RFID tags in the tires of my car, potentially read and recorded at every gas pump and toll plaza I passed, even when I paid with cash. Not very often in Hadley, to be sure, but unavoidably in any big city across the land.

  But it wasn’t only me; it was three hundred million or so of my fellow citizens. Never mind unreasonable search and seizure. I was a wannabe history major; I couldn’t imagine how anyone might handle so much data.

  Only when I asked, Zach made it sound simple: Divide and conquer. Even my ancient iPod had an eighty-gigabyte hard drive, and Apple kept selling iPods by the millions. Parts Apple bought, the feds could, too. Storing vast amounts of RFID data seemed practical enough. But finding anything within it?

  “It’s no big deal with a parallel supercomputer,” Zach said. “The data streams start out time-sequenced, organized by the location where the tags were read. Companies would have to go out of their way to lose that presort. Correlating data across different sources isn’t that big a deal either. Credit-rating agencies do it all the time with consumer records.”

  I was in near-shock, but none of this seemed to surprise Seth. He and Zach were kindred spirits despite Seth’s technophobia—or in an odd way, perhaps because of it. It wasn’t especially warm today, but Seth was sweating. He wiped his forehead with his forearm.

  “And the NARCC is nearby?” I guessed.

  “NARCC is a distributed system.” Zach paused to knock back the last of his beer. “The primary regional center for the Carolinas is in Charleston. Its back-up site is in Charlotte.”

  Both cities were within the quarantine zone. That couldn’t be coincidence. But why this region?

  Seth wiped his forehead again. “You guys have more beer?”

  “Coming up,” I said, turning toward the cave mouth. There was motion in the bushes about fifty yards beyond the stream where the beers chilled. “Zach, it’s probably nothing but . . .”

  Zach looked where I pointed. “Seth, could anyone have followed you?”

  Seth frowned. “Honest, I was careful. I saw a late model domestic sedan parked up the street from your apartment building. Among all the pickups, it stuck out like a sore thumb. I assumed Jones and his Homeland BS friends were looking for you so I kept going.”

  “We’re in trouble, guys,” Zach said. “Seth, if you spotted a stakeout, the chances are someone spotted you.” And followed Seth here, logic continued.

  I had done nothing wrong, and yet I was terrified. The NARCC was apparently a deep, dark secret. What happened once Homeland BS reasoned I knew what Marc knew?

  I pulled the little telescope from an outside pocket of Zach’s knapsack. “There’s definitely someone behind those bushes.”

  I’d once imagined Zach had been drawn to this spot by the vista. I changed my mind when he revealed the food cache. There was another way out of this cave, and it emptied into rough terrain that extended up past the Tennessee border. Eric Robert Rudolph, the extremist behind the Atlanta Olympics bombing and several more besides, had gone to ground in Appalachian terrain like this—then avoided capture for five years.

  I picked up Zach’s backpack. “Time to go. Now.”

  He pushed past me, ignoring the pack. I turned to see what was so urgent.

  Seth had slumped onto the cave floor.

  Seth’s skin was clammy, his breathing shallow and labored. “Heart attack, I think,” Zach said. He rolled Seth onto his back and began CPR.

  “Get going,” I said, although my own heart was pounding. “I’ll look after Seth.”

  “Do you know CPR?”

  I didn’t. “Show me.”

  “Not the time for on-the-job training, Tim. I’m staying.” Zach did chest compressions as he spoke. “Do you have cell reception?”

  I checked. “No.”

  “If it’s Seth the feds followed, they may not know you’re here.” A pause for mouth-to-mouth. “Tim, your fingerprints are all over the beer cans. Wipe them off and go. In thirty seconds, I’m shouting for help. Maybe whoever’s watching can radio for a medevac chopper.”

  I went.

  I was scarcely out the cave’s back entrance when I heard the thp-thp-thp of a distant helicopter. I stayed under the leafy canopy as best I could, planning to approach town far from the forest preserve’s main entrance.

  My mind and stomach churned. So I happened to know a criminal. I hadn’t even lied to Jones, since he hadn’t deigned to question me. Why should I feel guilty?

  The better question was: Why shouldn’t I?

  I had abandoned a friend. I’d even been too self-absorbed to say he still was my friend, shame I would carry with me as long as I lived. My ignorance of CPR doomed Zach to capture.

  But more than guilt and shame and fear for Seth roiled my thoughts. Zach’s excuse, or explanation, or rationalization—I hadn’t decided which—had been interrupted by Seth’s arrival. Zach had admitted to setting loose the computer virus. That was unambiguously a crime.

  Yet somehow it was all about the NARCC. And not just any NARCC, but the Charleston regional center.

  I plodded through the woods, circling town, the deepening gloom an apt metaphor for my thoughts.

  Walking up Main Street, there was no mistaking the town’s ugly mood. Some people were worried. Some were scared. Everyone was angry—not at a computer virus, or the hacker behind it, but at the feds.

  There was an army base near town, and the army brats all went to Hadley schools. I was an army brat, too; I used the term affectionately, but one my “peers” had mostly grown up in New England. We called Kelly our foreign-exchange student. She dropped her R’s, thought grits were disgusting, and said of the Civil War, “Get over it.”

  Kelly’s family was long gone, but I found myself wondering what she’d have said about current events. In the Palmetto State, we took states’ rights seriously. Still. Washington calling up and federalizing our National Guard to keep us from traveling . . . that wasn’t going down well.

  Mayor Jackson was manning the figurative barricades. His great-great- (I forget how many greats) grandfather was Stonewall Jackson—something the mayor would let no one forget. “We will not surrender our freedoms,” he thundered as I approached the courthouse.

  I slogged past,
my circuitous hike the least cause of my exhaustion. By now Marc/Zach was in federal custody and Seth was . . .

  I hurried to Hadley’s only hospital, hoping that Seth was still alive.

  The volunteer at the reception desk sent me upstairs to the cardiac-care unit. “Hey, Clay,” I greeted the policeman standing guard in the hall. We’d known each other since the fourth grade. Clay looked as unhappy to be there as I to find him.

  Seth spotted me through the open doorway. “Come in, son,” he called. His voice was encouragingly firm. He had cranked the bed into a sitting position. The plastic tube under his nose was connected by a coil of tubing to a wall-mounted nozzle. Oxygen, I guessed.

  Monitors crowded the room. Something beeped softly. All my medical training came from ER reruns, but the slow-and-steady rhythm reassured me. “How are you feeling, Seth?”

  “Not bad. Well enough to be impressed by the speed of the grapevine.”

  That grapevine remark had to be for Clay’s benefit, lest he be reporting back to Homeland BS. I took my cue. “Yeah, someone in the Square mentioned it. I came as soon as I heard.”

  “Not surprising. I made a dramatic entrance.” Seth coughed, and something gurgled in his lungs. “Medevac chopper.”

  He had the energy and presence of mind to coach the potential witness; he couldn’t be too ill. Hell, he was exhibiting more presence of mind than me, rushing in here without an explanation prepared. He had made no mention of Marc/Zach, and I took that hint, too. It had finally occurred to me why Zach had been waiting by the cave. Not for me, and not for dark, but for Seth to arrive with that extra money. Getaway money. That might make Seth an accessory of some sort.

  “What are you in for, Seth?” I asked.

  “Respiratory arrest. It could have been a lot worse.” He managed a weak smile.

  Drawing again on my ER training, I took that to mean the chopper got him here before lung failure brought on cardiac arrest. “I should let you rest. I’ll drop by tomorrow.”

  “Hold the fort for me, Tim?”

  He’d asked me dozens of times to mind the store. “Of course.”

  “Sorry about this,” Clay said softly as I exited the CCU. “Not my idea, Tim. The feds want him watched.”