by Adam Hamdy
‘Remember what I told you,’ he warned.
Ash focused on him, and her quadruple vision diminished to double before it returned to normal.
‘You didn’t have to kill him,’ she said.
‘Who? The man that was with you?’ Pendulum asked.
‘He was a good man.’
‘They were all good men. Assistant SAIC Hector Solomon, Supervisory Special Agent Arturo Alvarez, Hale, Nelson, all of them,’ Pendulum replied.
Outwardly, Ash remained impassive, but she felt her innards ripped away by the revelation, and grief swelled in the void they left behind.
‘They’re all dead,’ Pendulum said flatly, before rounding on Ash, filled with sudden animosity. ‘Because you wouldn’t back off. Turn every weakness into a strength, that’s what the Army taught us,’ he continued more calmly. ‘The manhunt you instituted was problematic, until I realised I could use it as a lure to get the Feds focused on entirely the wrong thing.’
‘You didn’t have to kill them!’ Ash protested.
Pendulum crouched beside her and raised his fist. Ash thought he was going to strike her again, but instead he reached out and stroked her cheek with the tips of his gloved fingers. They trailed down her face and came to a halt on her bottom lip, where they lingered for a moment, before they were suddenly withdrawn. Pendulum grabbed at his mask with both hands and pulled it off, revealing his true identity: Max Byrne.
‘Sometimes it gets too much. Sometimes I just can’t breathe in this thing,’ he observed, drawing close to Ash. ‘I did have to kill them, Agent Ash. It was the only way to ensure my own survival. Everyone’s going to think I died in an explosion at Dan Alosi’s house. Nobody will be looking for me any more. A new identity will leave me free to continue my work.’
‘Your work? All those people . . .’ Ash lamented quietly.
‘All those people,’ Max mocked as he drew within inches of her. ‘What do you think this is?’ He gestured to the vast array of servers surrounding them. ‘We’re at war. We’re at war with a machine. A machine that no one asked for. A machine that has marched over the face of the Earth. Billions of narcissists crying out for attention, gratifying their most disgusting urges, destroying all that is beautiful.’ As Max spoke he grew increasingly agitated. ‘Do you even know what this is about?’ he asked angrily.
‘No,’ Ash replied quietly. ‘Why don’t you tell me?’
The gentle hiss of escaping air sounded like a hurricane when Finley pulled open the pressurised security door. Wallace followed the police officer into the server room, where row after row of computers stretched into the distance, their blue lights glowing like cold eyes, watching as he and Finley crept deeper into the dark cavern. As they moved further away from the door, Wallace heard the resonant tones of a man’s voice.
‘Two years last September, my sister posted a video on YouTube,’ the man said, confirming Wallace’s worst fears. ‘She looked for validation from total strangers and asked them to rate whether she was hot or not.’
Wallace recalled the mess he’d been in the night he’d broken up with Connie. He recalled his drunkenness, his rage at hearing that he’d been discredited by the Masterson Inquiry, the self-loathing he’d felt at having pushed Connie from his life.
‘They tore her apart,’ the man continued. The words that followed confirmed his identity. ‘Six of them, they ganged up on Erin, trolling her with hateful comments, and when she tried to argue with them, they attacked her, humiliated her, hounded her until they’d convinced her that she’d be better off dead.’
Max’s words stirred Wallace’s memory. He had a dim recollection of trawling through YouTube that night, looking for trouble, seeking to spread his misery. He couldn’t recall exactly what he’d done, but he remembered becoming so disgusted and enraged that before the night was through, he’d smashed his computer to pieces.
‘You know about John Wallace, Kye Walters and Stewart Huvane,’ Max said. ‘There was also Shane Boyce, a financial adviser from Perth, Danielle LeRoy, a stripper from Cape Town, and Joshua Logan, a college student from Gainesville. John Wallace is the only one still alive.’
‘They couldn’t have known what would happen, how fragile Erin was.’ Wallace recognised Ash’s voice, but she sounded weak and fearful.
‘We’re all just one heartbeat away from death. We’re all fragile,’ Max countered. ‘They didn’t care. They thought they could hide behind their anonymity, but I found them.’
‘You can’t be sure they were responsible,’ Ash protested.
‘Erin’s suicide note quoted words they’d used about her. I hacked her YouTube account and deleted the video, which removed the comments and concealed the role those people played in her death. I didn’t want them to be found out. I didn’t want them to be shamed, or made to feel guilty. I wanted them to die the way she had. In her note she said she was worthless, that she had nothing to offer the world. Those were the things they’d said about her. They put her in her grave.’
‘What about the others? Bonnie Mann? Ken Pallo? Zach Holz?’ Ash asked.
‘Zach Holz was a casualty of war. He had nothing to do with Erin’s death; I just needed information from him. But the other two were involved. Bonnie Mann failed to respond to Erin’s abuse complaints. Not just from Erin, but from other users who saw what was happening and tried to stop it. Ken Pallo secretly ran a suicide advocacy website, Next Life. Porn wasn’t enough for him; he used to get his kicks telling people how to die. My sister went looking for a way to kill herself and, when she found his sick site, Pallo spent hours convincing her that hanging was the answer.’
‘I’m sorry.’ Wallace heard the sadness in Ash’s voice.
Her response triggered a tremendous sense of remorse and Wallace’s surroundings spiralled into insignificance as he realised his role in the dark events that had destroyed his life. He should have recognised Erin Byrne, but he didn’t. He’d devastated an entire family with casual, rage-fuelled venom that he’d been too drunk to remember. All of it, everything that had happened, could be laid at his door. Connie. Wallace felt his body heave as he suddenly realised the part he had played in Connie’s death. His cruelty had set everything in motion. He leaned against a server rack for support as his legs gave way beneath him.
‘You OK?’ Finley whispered, glancing over his shoulder.
Wallace nodded and pushed himself upright, before following the tall policeman further into the darkness.
59
‘I don’t need your pity,’ Max growled as he returned to the computer terminal. ‘You think this is just about Erin, but you’re not thinking big enough. She was the impetus. The final falling snowflake that set the avalanche in motion. Her death got me thinking clearly for the first time. It made me realise I had to bring it all crashing down. I’m going to free people from the grasp of the beast. Free them from the chains that bind them to a life they never wanted.’
‘This isn’t about freedom,’ Ash countered. ‘This is murder.’
‘There is no murder in war!’ Max yelled. ‘I’ve seen the consequences of our enemies congregating in the shadows of the digital world. I’ve seen attacks in Paris, New York, London, Boston, all organised from those shadows. Islamic State, Hamas, al-Qaeda. We have given our enemies a strategic weapon to use against us. What I’m doing here will cripple them.’
‘You’ll set the world back thirty years,’ Ash retorted.
‘This world is sick!’ Max spat. ‘Pornography in every bedroom. Gambling in every home. Children watching people being decapitated. Watching other kids being abused and killed. Murdering friends to please a Slender Man. Secret markets for drugs, weapons, body parts. Corporations making hundreds of millions of dollars destroying families, encouraging husbands and wives to cheat on each other. This,’ Max gestured at the computers that surrounded them, ‘has brought nothing but evil into the world. And governments sit by and let it happen because they think it makes money, but people are poorer now than they’ve
ever been. The riches of the world are concentrated in the hands of the few.’
‘People like you,’ Ash pointed out. ‘People like your father.’
‘Don’t you talk about my father!’ Max snapped.
‘You can’t reverse progress,’ Ash said.
‘Just because it’s new, doesn’t mean it’s progress.’ Max calmed himself as he continued to type at the terminal. ‘Sometimes civilisation can take a wrong turn, and when that happens, we need to return to the fork in the road and take a different path.’
‘None of this will bring Erin back,’ Ash tried.
‘But it will stop the same thing happening to another innocent, Special Agent Ash. Alice—’
‘Don’t ever call me that,’ Ash interjected. ‘How did you find out about me? Those records were sealed.’
‘Sealed!’ Max hissed contemptuously. ‘Privacy is dead, Agent Ash. Binary lays bare all our secrets. Did Marcel Washington remind you of your father? Is that why he had to die?’
‘You can stop this,’ Ash said quietly, trying to change the subject. ‘I understand why you’re in pain.’
‘This isn’t about my pain. It’s about correcting a mistake. Human existence has changed beyond all recognition. The Internet exposes every single one of us to the entire world. All the good. All the evil. None of us were prepared for it. Nobody asked whether we wanted it. It just happened. And we’re not ready. We can’t cope. A young teenage girl alone in her bedroom, vulnerable, searching for a place in the world, looking for love, for hope, for something to believe in. She’s bombarded by a Twitter feed full of vacuous nonsense, by narcissistic Facebook friends timelining the illusion of their perfect lives, by advertisers promising things that they cannot possibly deliver. Darkness that previously existed in the concealed corners of the world is all out there in the open, ready to be found by anyone, by that sensitive girl. You think it’s not going to change people? All that noise. All that violence. All that evil. There’s a mental health epidemic devouring people, making them vulnerable. And when, bewildered by it all and desperate to fit in, that young girl exposes herself to the world, looking for approval, she’s hit by a barrage of hateful abuse from people who tell her to kill herself. Strangers who think the world would be better off without her. I’m giving my sister justice.’
‘This isn’t justice,’ Ash countered.
‘I’ve spent years developing this virus. The dissemination program is compiling. Once it’s finished, it will spread through my network and every Facebook account on the planet. All the noise. All the hate. All the evil. Everything will simply stop. Then, in the quiet that follows, we can decide what kind of world we really want. This is justice, Agent Ash.’
‘The one you uploaded to the Bureau took out communications, power and security systems,’ Ash said, looking at the status bar marking the progress of the compiler. It was five percent complete. ‘You’ll shut down power stations, hospitals.’
‘And why are power stations and hospitals online? People need to realise the dangers of a connected world,’ Max replied. ‘Sometimes it takes a sharp shock to wake people up, and, if some die in the process, well, that will only serve to make the experience more memorable. I’d like to stay, Agent Ash, but this is only the beginning. I must help shape the new world that rises from the ashes.’ He produced a Beretta M9 from within the folds of his coat.
Ash crawled on to her knees. ‘Who are you working with?’ she asked, gratified to see that the question unsettled her captor.
Max glowered at her and swung the pistol towards her head, his thumb popping the spring-loaded safety switch. Ash didn’t wait for his arm to reach the end of its arc. She pushed up and back with all her strength and collided with Max’s torso, throwing him off balance. A gunshot rang out and a bullet tore through a nearby rack.
Ash started to run, but her feet were knocked from under her as Max executed a sweeping low kick that brought her tumbling to the floor. She rolled on to her back to look her killer in the face as he drew alongside and raised the Beretta.
Ash flinched when she heard the gunshot, but when she opened her eyes a split second later she saw that Max had been hit in the back. A rapid volley of blasts followed, sending Max flying forward. As he barrelled over her, Max turned and unleashed a hail of bullets at his assailant.
Ash sat up and saw Finley, the big police officer, go down with multiple gunshot wounds. She got to her feet and kicked the fallen Max in the head. A second kick sent his pistol flying, and a single thought filled Ash’s mind: reach the gun. She chased after it as it spun towards the computer terminals. Behind her, Max got to his feet and drew a second Beretta from a holster concealed beneath his coat. He raised it, took aim and opened fire. Ash felt the scorching agony of a slug slicing through her abdomen, and the force of the shot sent her sprawling, just shy of the fallen pistol. She touched her wound and felt warm liquid on her cold fingertips. She drew them up to her face and saw they were covered in dark red blood.
Ash realised that her breathing was shallow and fast and wondered whether it was panic or the approach of death. She watched as Max drew near, willing her legs to push her along the floor, to bring her within reach of the pistol, but her feet just slid around ineffectually. My wiring’s fucked, she thought darkly.
She cast around, desperately searching for a way to stay alive, and caught sight of something between the servers to her left: a pair of eyes at her level. Ash recognised Wallace, his face outlined by blue server light. Max had not seen him, so she had to be careful. When she glanced in Wallace’s direction and locked eyes with him, she recognised the fear that filled his eyes. It was the same look she’d seen in the eyes of countless frozen rookies, and she knew that Wallace stood little chance against a seasoned killer like Max. She had to find a way to help Wallace save her.
Max raised his gun.
‘Wait!’ Ash exclaimed, as an idea sparked to life. ‘Tell me one thing. What was John Wallace’s suicide note going to say?’
Wallace heard the question echo around the vast room. He longed to move, to take Dorsey’s gun and kill the man out there, but he couldn’t. Instead, he shook with fear, his mind replaying every death he’d witnessed. He’d experienced the terrible moment of feeling his life slip away, and knew that he didn’t have the strength to face it again. He tried to focus on Connie, to use her memory as leverage to induce his frozen body to move, but the thought of her death only terrified him more. He looked between the racks and saw Ash lying wounded. Shame overwhelmed him at the thought that he was going to let her die at the hands of the man who had already taken Connie.
‘John Wallace is a coward,’ Max Byrne said in reply to Ash’s question, his words cutting through Wallace’s paralysing fear.
‘John Wallace watched Afghan men, women and children get murdered,’ Max continued. ‘Worse than that, he had photographs that could have brought the killers to justice, but he allowed them to destroy the evidence and ruin his credibility. John Wallace’s suicide note would have told the truth; that he was a weak man who could not live with the guilt of his cowardice.’
The words scorched Wallace’s soul, sparking an uncontrollable fury.
As Max brought the Beretta up towards her head, Ash saw a bullet tear through his shoulder a split second before she registered the sound of the report. Another bullet cut into a gap in the body armour that covered his back and shredded the muscle beside his neck. A third shot hit Max’s throat, ripping it wide open. Ash saw Max’s face contort in bewildered agony as he pawed at the horrific wound. He dropped to his knees and looked at Ash with hatred blazing in his eyes. He tried to raise his pistol, but, as it came level with Ash’s head, a final gunshot echoed through the room and a searing hot bullet tore through his skull.
Ash watched Max’s lifeless body crumple and staggered to her feet to see Wallace holding a smoking pistol. The look on his face turned from one of shock to horror when he took in the severity of her wound. Ash collapsed as Wallace sprinted
over.
‘Hey,’ she smiled weakly. ‘You did good.’
‘We need to get you to a hospital,’ Wallace said urgently.
Ash shook her head. ‘No. We need to stop that.’
Wallace followed the line of her index finger, which pointed towards one of the computer terminals standing at the heart of the huge room.
‘Alosi’s outside,’ he told Ash.
‘Get him,’ she commanded.
Wallace hesitated.
‘Go!’ Ash exclaimed with sufficient passion to get Wallace’s feet moving.
Ash watched Wallace cast her concerned looks as he hurried from the room. She dragged herself over to the computer terminal, where the status bar showed that the program was fifty-three percent compiled. Ash leaned against the monolithic machine and looked at the blood oozing out of her right side, offering a quiet prayer that she would stay alive long enough to put things right.
The persistent wail of the fire alarm merged with the sound of approaching sirens as Wallace crossed the building threshold. He ran through the scorched, shattered entrance, stumbling over fallen masonry and broken glass, and saw the police car parked near Dorsey’s body, but it was empty. Wallace cast around the parking lot and saw a small group of about two dozen men and women clustered some distance from the vehicle. Occasionally someone would steal a look in the direction of Dorsey’s body. Six or seven of the group were on their cell phones.
Wallace ran forward. ‘Alosi! Dan Alosi!’ he yelled.
Alosi pushed through the group and looked at Wallace uncertainly.
‘I need you inside,’ Wallace said urgently. ‘We have to stop it!’
As Alosi took a step back and shook his head, Wallace remembered he was holding a gun and brought his arm up, aiming the weapon at the man’s head.
‘Move!’ Wallace yelled. ‘Or I swear I’ll shoot!’
Alosi looked at the people around him, who all took a step back as Wallace grabbed his collar and pulled him forward.
