The Fall

by R. J. Pineiro

  Jack took several deep breaths, settling his system, regaining his focus. There had to be a logical explanation. There always was.

  Just as the motor home vanished around the curve, another vehicle approached in the opposite direction. Jack dropped to a crouch, his eyes narrowed, his mind racing.

  The car, which Jack recognized as a Toyota sedan, had Florida tags.

  Over the course of the next five minutes, he spotted three more Florida tags, two from Georgia, one from Alabama, and three more from northern states.

  He finally sat at the edge of the gravel, his back against the rough bark of a pine tree, the reality of his situation taxing his trained, logical mind.

  How could he be in Florida when there was no one here to greet him? The whole world was tracking his jump.

  Go home, Jack. Go home to Angie.

  The words flashed in his mind, washing down his anxiety. He needed to retreat, to reexamine, to think this through, and he needed Angie to help him process this.

  Jack decided to just start walking. He was obviously in Florida. He had landed where he was supposed to, but the same world that was tracking his epic jump with overwhelming interest as he had leaped off that pod had somehow vanished.

  The stars told him this road ran east-west, so he turned east, toward the ocean, walking on the gravel, left hand up in the air and thumb out every time a vehicle went by.

  Sooner or later, he would reach an intersection, a crossroads, a roadway sign—something that would show him the way home.

  Or maybe, just maybe, someone would be crazy enough to pick up a lone hitchhiker walking in the middle of the night wearing a camouflaged skin-tight battle dress and hauling a silvery backpack in the shape of the head of an alien.

  3

  PROBLEM-SOLVING 101

  When a truth is necessary, the reason for it can be found by analysis, that is, by resolving it into simpler ideas and truths until the primary ones are reached.

  —Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz

  The old hacker sat back in his weathered reclining chair and pet the black cat sleeping on his lap. He smiled and took a sip of coffee, listening to his feline companion purr while letting his scripts perform the heavy lifting.

  They were works of art, really, designed to penetrate, carefully but firmly—and most important, systematically—the traditional firewalls of cookie-cutter IT security systems such as the one protecting the online dating service that had just rejected his application.

  “Who do they think they are, Bonnie?” he asked the cat who had wandered onto his front porch as a kitten some years back in search for food.

  The feline looked up, shook its head, and went back to sleep while its master’s code did its magical work, stripping away defenses created by corporate programmers, people who followed industry-standard rules.

  Rules that made them quite predictable … and vulnerable.

  He sighed. There was a time long ago when he had been one of them, IT professionals with titles such as systems analyst, data modeler, Web master, and database administrator. He had developed his foundational skills in that environment until his desire to be different conflicted with the predetermined programming guidelines of the corporate world.

  He was good. In fact, his last supervisor had told him that he was one of the best programmers on their floor.

  Brilliant, was the word he had used.

  But they were letting him go.

  His methods to develop and refine algorithms, albeit quite efficient and elegant, clashed with the company’s well-established processes. In other words, his skills were too good for them.

  But that had been the party line. In reality, his job—as well as the jobs of many of his colleagues—had gone to India for a fraction of their U.S. salaries, plus they didn’t need to provide benefits. All in the name of controlling cost.

  Arturo Zepeda, a second-generation Cuban American, became Art-Z that day, on his way to his rented studio apartment in South Florida to develop some of the most elegant code ever written—code that allowed him to enter public and private networks completely undetected and siphon just enough funds to pay the bills, own his small home, his modest car—and the finest hardware and software money could buy.

  The hacker smiled at his companion and scratched her gently behind the ears while the code continued to bore into the firewall, like a digital drill. Most hackers chose handler names that had no resemblance to their real names. But then again, most of his brothers-in-arms also strived for fame and glory, boldly breaking into financial institutions, corporations, and government agencies to prove something, to wreak havoc, or steal millions. And then they even had the stupidity to claim responsibility in some chat room or blog.

  Not me, thought Art-Z, proud of the elegance of his techniques as well as of his handler name, which allowed him to operate anonymously while retaining some semblance of his identity, of his heritage. In addition, unlike his fellow hackers, Art-Z conducted his online activities right below the level where it was not financially justifiable for his corporate victims to devote the resources required to track him down—assuming that they could actually find someone good enough to do so.

  That philosophy had allowed Art-Z to stick it to The Man while safely living off his dark trade by the progressive use of a “rounding-down” technique, custom codes secretly inserted into the networks of targeted institutions to round-down bank deposits and transfer the excess funds into temporary accounts. Five hundred dollars from a bank in Laredo, Texas, with questionable affiliations to the Mexican cartel. A thousand from an exports-imports firm in Canada doing business with Cuba. Fifteen hundred from an insurance company in Western Michigan connected to the UAW, which Art-Z held responsible for bringing down Detroit. And even two thousand from the R. J. Reynolds Tobacco Company.

  The trick to long-term use of this age-old hacker technique, however, was in keeping the level of these temporary accounts quite low before closing them and transferring the stolen funds to one of three accounts in the Bahamas, Ontario, or the Cayman Islands via a globally mind-boggling maze of connections guaranteed to give the finest government agencies an unforgettable cyber migraine. But again, each of his actions always remained below the level of interest from authorities on the hunt for bigger fish to fry.

  Art-Z browsed through his arsenal of algorithms, programs written and rewritten through a lifetime of hacking for the sole purpose of accessing data, information.

  Which is far more valuable than money, he thought. Once spent, money was gone, but data could be used again and again to get more money.

  The hacker leaned forward the moment his code broke through, creating a narrow, protected conduit into the heart of the couple-matching algorithm of the dating service.

  “There it is, Bonnie,” he said, staring at the network’s core, beating with activity as nearly a third of its 23,456 registered members, ages eighteen to ninety-three, actively checked their daily matches.

  The cat looked up, stared at him with round hazel eyes and meowed once, before resting her head back on his lap.

  With the precision of a surgeon, the hacker injected a homemade digital potion tailored to alter the company’s crown jewels: its matching algorithm. Designed to connect couples based on common backgrounds, career interests, age groups, degree of sexual and romantic passion, spirituality, education level, and dozens of other attributes, this company claimed that its mathematical algorithm had resulted in over seventy percent of its customers entering long-term relationships, with forty percent of them leading to marriages.

  So let’s change that a little, he thought, as he guided his cyber poison across the network, altering results, creating matches where there shouldn’t be and vice-versa.

  In addition to getting even for his rejection, Art-Z took pleasure in the fact that this Web dating service was owned by a U.S. subsidiary of a Shanghai conglomerate.

  Second to sticking it to The Man, Art-Z loved doing it to the Chinese.

&n
bsp; Bastards think they own the world.

  It only took a few minutes before the e-mails began to pour into the site’s administrators. An eighty-three-year-old widow from Milwaukee was complaining about her last three suggested matches, men in their early twenties who had registered the highest sexual passion preference. One of the e-mails was from one of those men complaining about being matched to the old widow, who was simply looking for elderly companionship. A homosexual man in his early sixties complained about being matched to a dozen different girls, all eighteen and fresh out of high school. A recently divorced thirty-five-year-old mother of three was being matched to six men in their late eighties and four college freshmen. And so it went, until the network administrator took down the site a few minutes later.

  Art-Z grinned and logged off, having had enough fun for the—

  A knock on the door.

  He sat upright and the black cat jumped off his lap, landed on all fours with grace, and vanished in the dark hall leading to the bedroom.

  Art-Z stared at the front door, not expecting company tonight.

  In fact, he never had company and even went through the extra trouble of keeping a P.O. Box for his online purchases to avoid home deliveries.

  He pressed a function key across the top of his keyboard and a window materialized on the lower left side of his screen, linked wirelessly to six Web cams covering every angle of his house.

  A grin formed again under his beard as he magnified Web cam number five, providing a clear view of a woman standing on his front porch, arms crossed, while looking back to the street and then straight at the camera, raising her fine brows.

  Well I’ll be damned.

  Art-Z was very seldom surprised. He had spent most of his adult life making sure that surprises, like the day he was terminated from his one and only job, were the exception to the rule.

  He shut his eyes and opened them wide before staring at the image on the screen once more.

  Incredible, he thought. Tonight was certainly an exception.

  Nearly spilling his coffee as he set it down next to the keyboard, the hacker stood and walked over to the foyer with an energy he hadn’t felt in years, sandals flopping over dusty hardwood floors.

  He paused by the door, then opened it.

  Right there, like a ghost from the past, stood a short-haired woman wearing dark lipstick that matched her biker attire, down to the boots and fingernail polish. Those amazing lips that he remembered from long ago turned into a little frown as she tilted her head and raised her right eyebrow at him.

  “Hey, Bonnie,” he said, calling Angela Taylor by her old hacker name. “Long time.”

  “I’m in trouble, Art.”

  He nodded at his former girlfriend from a lifetime ago, then said, “You were in trouble the moment you chose to trust The Man. Is he trying to stick it to you?”

  She took a deep breath while looking back at the street again, where her bike was parked. Finally, she said, “Yep. Deep and hard. I’m probably all over the news by now.”

  “Have you been to the shop?”

  “Was planning to hit them up later. I need to get some info first.”

  “What kind of info?”

  “I think the military has taken my husband.”

  Art-Z slowly compressed his lips while regarding the woman who had broken his heart in another life.

  “Drive around back,” he finally said. “I’ll meet you in the garage. Let’s get that old bike out of sight first. Then we’ll talk.”

  * * *

  Jack couldn’t believe it when the truck’s brake lights came on, followed by its right blinker as it pulled onto the shoulder, its massive tires kicking up gravel, its diesel grumbling. It was a Peterbilt without a hitched trailer.

  He ran to the side of the tall cabin, opened the door, and stepped up and into the spacious interior, where the smell of tobacco, coffee, and cheap cologne struck him like a fist.

  “Come on in, son!” the driver shouted, a man well into his sixties, with thinning salt-and-pepper hair, a matching beard, and wearing faded jeans and a tank top. His arms, quite firm for his age, sported an assortment of military tattoos, including a USMC on his exposed right shoulder with an eagle perched over the Earth and an anchor through it. Beneath it another tattoo read VIETNAM ERA VETERAN.

  “Thanks for stopping.”

  “My pleasure,” he replied while chewing something Jack realized was tobacco when he smiled at him. “Where you headed?”

  “Anywhere near Cocoa Beach will work,” he replied with some hesitation since he still wasn’t sure where he was.

  “You’re in luck, son. I just dropped off a load in Orlando and am headed down to the docks in Miami to pick up the next one, so I can drop you off on the way.”

  “Perfect, thanks,” he replied, realizing that at least he had landed more or less where he was supposed to, which still didn’t explain why there was no one here to—

  “What are you hunting with that suit anyway, son?”

  Jack gave the odd but friendly stranger his best attempt at a smile as he unstrapped the backpack-helmet and set it inside the large foot well before sitting down and closing the door. “No hunting. It’s just the latest in hiking gear.”

  “Hiking my ass,” he replied as he steered the rig back onto the road, working through the gears with practiced ease. The Peterbilt accelerated into the night, headlights washing the darkness. “But that’s all right. You look like one of the good guys.”

  “That’s good, I guess,” Jack replied. “Who are the bad guys?”

  “Oh,” he said, briefly lifting both hands off the wheel before steering the rig around a bend in the road as he stared straight ahead, his jaw pulsating through his beard as he chewed. “That’s a long list, son. A very long list.”

  “For starters?” Jack prodded him, anxious to get this guy off the topic of his suit since he was contractually obligated to keep it a secret. It was one thing to mouth off to General Hastings. It was an entirely different thing to leak highly classified military secrets. While there was no way to keep the general public from seeing the outside of the suit, the high-tech battle dress layer he now wore—considered Manhattan Project–level at the Pentagon—certainly contradicted NASA’s press release about the OSS being just an escape vehicle for emergencies at the International Space Station.

  “AIDS,” the driver replied.

  “AIDS?” Jack replied.

  “Don’t let anybody fool you, son. HIV was created by the government as a biological weapon. A tool for genocide. But the thing got away from them.”

  This guy’s seriously off his rocker, he thought, but in a way, Jack found it refreshingly entertaining given his surreal situation. “Really? Which part of the government’s responsible?”

  “Well, the CIA, of course. Them spooks are always up to no good. And not for one second do I believe that the big man in the Oval Office didn’t know about it.” He gave Jack a sideways glance, lowered his voice, and added, “I think he was the brains behind the thing.”

  “Which president are you talking about?” he asked.

  “Well, Reagan, of course. He was planning to release the virus on the Soviet Union by contaminating their blood supply if the Politburo didn’t go along with Gorbachev in dissolving the Soviet Union. He was just going to let all of them Commies die off over the course of a year or two. But the thing backfired on us. Ain’t that a son of a bitch?”

  “Wow,” Jack replied as he stared out the window, finally spotting a road sign that seemed as bizarre as the brain firing inside this guy’s head.

  A chill gripped him as he read the sign again while starting to wonder if perhaps he was the one imagining shit.

  But the sign was for real, right there, on the side of this winding two-lane road.

  SPEED LIMIT

  75

  How could it be seventy-five miles per hour? The speed limit on an interstate in Florida was sixty-five.

  “What road is this?�
� he asked.

  “Forty-Six heading for I-95, son. Why do you ask? You lost?”

  “Yeah,” he replied. “Was hiking and I think I lost my bearings.”

  “You got lost on a clear night with all them stars up there?”

  Jack tilted his head.

  “Some hiker you are.”

  You have no idea, Jack thought, forcing a half-embarrassed shrug.

  “But Reagan’s ancient history,” the Marine veteran added as Jack tried to piece this mystery together. This was a side road that connected Orlando to I-95, and if memory served him well, the speed limit on it was around forty-five or fifty. Certainly not seventy-five.

  “The one that really gets me is the Clinton body count,” the driver continued.

  Really, dude?

  “Yeah,” Jack finally said, deciding that it was best to keep the guy talking while he did more thinking. “So, how many people did Clinton have killed?”

  “Oh, son, many more than the ones reported by the American Justice Federation. Many more. Many more, indeed. The man was ruthless, I tell you. Taking out Vince Foster and about sixty more of his close associates from previous business deals. Poor bastards. From suicides and accidental deaths to murders that remain unsolved to this day.”

  And so it went, for the next fifteen minutes, as this nameless driver continued down this dark road while covering Clinton, Obama, Reagan, the two Bush presidents, and then took off in the direction of MLK, JFK, and especially LBJ before diving even deeper into Nixon, Marilyn Monroe, Elvis Presley, John Lennon, Jimmy Hoffa, and Salvador Allende, who Jack learned was a former president of Chile.

  Finally, after what seemed like a deep and nearly endless discourse, the driver paused, frowned, and thrust an open hand in Jack’s direction. “Look at me. Where have my manners gone? I’m Lou Palmer,” he said, offering a smile of stained teeth adorned with greenish chewing tobacco.

  “Jack Taylor,” he replied, pumping the man’s hand, unable to think of a reason he shouldn’t use his real name.

  “Jack Taylor, huh?” the man replied. “Your name sounds awfully familiar,” he added.