by Grady Ward
There was somewhat more chatter about the Event among certain government agencies paid to monitor such things, and in due course, an assessment went up the chain of command to the President. In summary: the United States is vulnerable and remains vulnerable.
Despite the moderate interruption of the information heartbeat of the western democracies that would be remarked upon for years, it was a tiny fraction of the chaos that would have happened if Sam pressed “send” thirty seconds later.
Chapter 56 Boston, noon
Security Throne Jones, Parichoner Special Agent Sahas, and Joex Baroco were in the Lexus as it wound its way back to the airport. There were disruptions in traffic that slowed them in calm, muggy air. She had handcuffed Baroco with thick black plastic snap-wraps and had roughly frog-marched him down through the closed restaurant and out the front door to the waiting sedan.
Back in the apartment, Jimmy Hoffa phoned 911 and had slowed Xtance’s external bleeding. He hoped the medevac would hurry. Xtance was dying. He could barely feel the pulse in her neck and she, unconscious, was offering only quick, shallow breaths. “She doesn’t have much time. Not much of a chance even if they came right now,” Jimmy was crying.
But he liked to make lists and one of his lists included the complete urban first aid kit. Though not quite assembled, he had big powdery packets of Chitosan which he tore open with his teeth and dumped into her visible wounds. The intruder had missed Xtance’s heart and lungs, but certainly, her stomach and intestines were critically damaged. Maybe her spine. If the aorta was nicked, then likely nothing could save her. Jimmy knelt down and whispered in her ear “please, please, please, please, please.”
“What are you going to do with me?” Joex said, the sharp edges of the cuffs hurting his wrists.
“You are in luck today, Mr. Baroco, you are going to enjoy a supper with the leader of the Church of the Crux this evening. He will not be expecting you.”
Special Agent Sahas looked into the rear view mirror and his eyes crossed those of the Security Throne.
“Ha ha, in luck. Well, maybe luckier to be simply terminated,” Jones said almost jovially. “You are an Angel and I am sure that The First Celestial will have a penance especially for you. I do. You, I; we are all tools to a higher purpose.”
Chapter 57 Freetown, early evening
After sending the code off for amplified rebroadcasting into the ether, Sam had no idea of what to do next except savor his hunger pangs. So he stayed in the shadow of the Plaza until evening. Time passed toward sunset, the sun dropping directly into the Atlantic beyond the harbor. Sam grew sleepy as the flies buzzed around him and he held the smart phone as tightly as if it were a sword he had just drawn from stone.
As it passed into early evening, Sam turned on the phone again and logged on to Darknet. No messages for him either as Ouest or as Sam. Figures. Probably wasted my time with this whole job, Sam thought. “What is the use playing the trickster if I end up hungry?”
But, then, there was an article in the New York Times online, another on Slashdot, and two new Darknet threads regarding an Internet “event” that happened that afternoon. While Sam had slept and the oxcarts rattle hesitantly along the narrow streets and the market mamas organized their wares, much of Europe and the United States had experienced an Internet transcontinental disturbance, which only now declared over by reassuring governments (officials who could not possibly know what happened, Sam thought). Apparently, no permanent damage, they said.
There was flash crash of less than two minutes on Wall Street in the USA. It was reversed. Exchanges and regulators were already calling for another investigation. There were reports of other seemingly unrelated incidents in the smooth flow of life and commerce in the U.S. Other than calm reassurances, there were no other details from the government. Of course.
The Germans, on the other hand, were blaming hackers from Europe’s periphery for what appeared to be a temporary outage of the Internet. But the Darknet articles mentioned a wave of other disturbances in the infrastructure. So Sam understood the significance of a “mere” Internet glitch that also went hand in hand with a phone glitch, power glitch, and a hundred other unusual events that occurred that afternoon over the span of a very few minutes.
Sam heard shouting over from the Communications building. Two small groups of ragged security officers were shouting and pointing in the direction where Sam lay hidden among the war debris; Sam could see the silhouettes of at least a half-dozen guards jogging in a determined manner in his direction. Sam took a breath, popped up, and threw the smart phone as hard as he could toward the group. He wheeled around pointing downtown, toward the harbor, and lit off sprinting on his long legs and lean body that in the West would be called a marathoner’s build, but in West Africa wasn’t called anything.
Once more into the sparkling twilight ocean dimming in the west, he ran, seeking both escape and nourishment.
Epilogue
Two months later: Washington, Portland, Freetown, Cambridge
The President of the United States took the call in her office. It was from the First Celestial of the Church of the Crux.
“Speaking,” she said, “how may I help you?”
First Celestial Cassandra Jones spoke to the President as if she were an old friend who had gone differing ways, but perhaps shared the welcome memories of schooling or a demanding sport. “Madame President. It is so nice to speak with you. I trust that the Progression Toward Liberty Pac has received the Church’s first contribution?” The First Celestial listened to the pleased sounds and added, “We would like to put this matter entirely behind us, considering the tragic suicide of Michael Voide after his treating the Church as his own criminal enterprise. Be assured we are making sweeping changes so that will never happen again.” The First Celestial looked up and with a flicker of coded emotion on her face glanced at her Security Throne. “That’s right. Everything. No more secret files. Transparency. That is the new prayer for us at the Church. Transparency.” This time the First Celestial surveyed the clerestory with its hot screens of data and broke into a broad grin. The tone of her voiced was unchanged. “Thank you. I am very grateful for that. Let me know if we can be of service to your administration and your re-election committee in any way. Anything further we can due to facilitate the PIC treaty? No? I trust the data from our Churches in Haifa and Moscow have been useful for your people? Good. Thank you. Good-bye now. Good-bye”
As she powered down the mobile that she was given by her Security Throne, she looked amused at his face, dark among the light-sapping folds of velvet lining the room: the new Security Throne Special Agent Andrew Sahas. She said to him “What a fool. The Games Machine will be in every home ten years from now. Soon after that, the chimplants. Unlike people, you can’t betray an idea, nor can an idea betray you. And that is why the Games Machine is going to crush them.” The First Celestial stretched out her right hand, fingers splayed.
“Fuck me now, Andrew.”
In a hospital in Cambridge lay an old man with the usual noisy clutter of machines and piped fluids around his bed. He was severely emaciated but had already lived longer than his lung cancer predicted. His head was freshly shaved like a new boot recruit. A raw recruit at the onco-academy.
Around his bed was Joex Baroco, dressed in new Carhartt work clothes, Xtance, sitting stiffly, pigtails to the front, wincing occasionally from pain that she steadfastly refused to medicate. It apparently issued from elastic bandages covering her abdomen that were decorated with a variety of insects and flower stickers that had been put on by Jimmy Hoffa over the weeks that he shuttled between Xtance and Margaret, who recovered quickly from the rough handling she received during the Omega.
Around them, the hospital had a chemical odor in its air as if an additive to make its patients preserved, unspoiled, whole. It was not meant to be frightening.
Finally, there was a teenage boy with them. He was dressed in a t-shirt with some graphic of a person impaled on wha
t looked like the golden pins of a giant square central processing unit. He was quiet and polite, and looked as if he were cold in the air-conditioned hospital air. His eyes darted from bed to the cables to the clear piping and paused on the control faces of the machines surrounding the bed. The morphine pump made a reciprocal wheeze when it periodically administered another dose into the old man’s IV.
“Sam, this is my father, Ed.”
To Sam all of this was wonderful and new: within days of his final escape at the Communications building, he was in fact tracked down again. But this time it was the authorities from the US Embassy along with an official from Sierra Leone Consular Affairs who knew his Cousin Siloi. The official spoke to Sam in English. They didn’t come to arrest him, as it turned out, or to turn him over to cousin. A school in the State of Massachusetts, the Computer Laboratory it says, learned your age and position. It has given you a scholarship for studying computers. They would like you to travel immediately so you can begin the summer term in the town of Boston. Your Cousin has already been compensated for losing your fine computer services,” the Consular official said in the monotone cadence of a paid-for tool. He added at the end, in Mende, “You are a God-damned lucky black bush bastard, McNamara.”
Sam didn’t correct him on any point. Nor did he believe him until he personally held a new passport, with a United States “F” visa, on board the Air France jet to New York City. Some members of the shadow lab were eminently well-connected, it seemed.
The attenuating of the Event— the Celestial Instruction, as it came to be called privately within the government—was materially aided by Sam’s botnet re-distribution, if not by his trickster codicil. The codicil caused any server with pattern residue of the stack trojan itself to do a complete hard drive dump to the Internet using old Usenet protocols. Not all Chinese servers had avoided this and, in particular, not every one linking a nondescript pink building in Hangzhou with Beijing and the rest of the pacific rim. Among the copious data dumped to the Internet was huge quantity of purported confessionals and ops alleged to originate in turn with the International Church of the Crux, Portland.
Over the days that followed, the administration played the Event down even as its computer security researchers frantically analyzed and made recommendations. The Church publically denied authenticity of any documents concerning its Ecclesiastical acts: it was just a tragic coincidence that First Celestial Michael Voide took his own life with a Church registered Glock 30 on the evening of the Event, witnessed by his own Security Throne Cassandra Jones and her associate, Angel Special Agent Sahas.
That had nothing to do with the true culprits, a Chinese spy ring, the Church said. The Chinese government in turn denied any knowledge of such a ring and declared that information security mattered as much to them as to the United States; moreover they had traced the attack as originating from eastern Europe. A deranged over-the-hill hacker named Hu with no connection to the government of any kind was solely responsible for any re-broadcast attacks from China, they said, somewhat contradicting their previous categorical denial. After a swift fair military trial Hu was executed for crimes against the state, they added.
As for Joex Baroco, he was dumped at the airport strip in Portland, Jones having been briefed on the failure of the Chinese coup during the flight. Whatever information he had or who he might tell was instantly extinguished into irrelevance.
“Back to obscurity with you. You are a daemon, banished from all Church properties. You are hereby released from your vows,” somewhat prematurely arrogating the power that belonged to the First Celestial alone. “Be glad I do not rule you an apostate.”
Joex had no problem with that. It would have been trivial to drift back into a lazy decline. Once again, he made the trip back to Cambridge after fetching the remainder of his money buried in a dirty PVC tube. Something was awake in him: not just the threat being a target, not just Xtance nor her Jimmy, or even Margaret’s craft. Ashamed, he barely could admit it was his session with the Games Machine as well. He needed it or something like it. Maybe at the Shadow Lab or maybe the Cataract project, which no one seems to know much about, except that it somehow countered both the Games Machine and the Perpetual International Copyright Treaty? But it was something he had to do. Besides he had to earn money to help buy a biplane for a young man in Idaho named Bill. A promise that he was reminded of when he read the news of the accident of the small plane carrying the heads of the major three financial ratings agencies that happened just days following the Event. Joex did not see the back-page notice of the accidental death the same day of assistant US Attorney Jim Rauchmann on a misty Portland street. The car responsible later found that night with the driver, a ringer for Joex, dead from alcohol poisoning—a man whose DNA matched that found at his poor sister’s home.
Despite the upheaval in Joex’s life and his sister’s death, the manhunt and the threat to his own life for something he did not even know that he knew, his cross-country excursion and international convulsion of conflicting titanic forces, Joex paradoxically emerged rested, assured, positive and eager to meet the world again. It was as if a switch was thrown; a control wheel nudged forward.
Joex, surrounded by Xtance and Sam and Ed, no longer had a need to play with matches.
“Dad, I came by to say ‘hello’ with my new friends,” said Xtance to the dying man.
“You mean to say good-bye,” Ed tried to smirk, which turned into a soft bubbling cough, which he had to turn on the pillow so the drool would not run down his chin.
“Dad, you are a biologist so I am not going there. The only thing you need to know is that I love you and I have loved you my entire life. And I will love you for the rest of my life and the lives of everyone around me.”
“You know I believe I have loved you your entire life as well and that we are the shadows in the cave, merging and playing together, as long as there is light.”
Ed was quiet now. His eyes focused on his daughter.
“But now, Dad, close your eyes; I have a story for you. It is about a Sultan who united the seven eastern lands and found true love forever.”
Afterword
This was a work of fiction. Reality may be uncomfortably coincident.
Two headlines on February 14, 2012, just as this book was completed:
● Nortel hit by suspected Chinese cyberattacks for a decade
● Flaw Found in an Online Encryption Method: random number generator used for years for virtually all email, banking, and Internet commerce found flawed.
We are getting used to seeing these kinds of headlines. It is what we do not see that frightens me.
The United States is vulnerable to a fateful attack and will remain so for the calculable future.
Table of Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45<
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Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52 Beijing 12:30 AM, thirty minutes before the event
Chapter 53 Boston 11:30 AM, thirty minutes before the event
Chapter 54 Freetown 4:30 PM, thirty minutes before the event
Chapter 55 New York, minutes before noon
Chapter 56 Boston, noon
Chapter 57 Freetown, early evening
