by Chuck Wendig
That’s when her machine—running a malware-sniffing program in the hopes of scanning for more nastiness connected to the original keylogger she found—catches something. A red alert. Blinking text.
“Oh, hello,” she says, leaning forward.
A rootkit. A piece of software that, when installed, allows a secret visitor privileged access. All the way down to the—hence the name—root account and directory. It’s like carving a little hidden door in someone’s house that they won’t know about, but that you can use to sneak in and out to steal food, riffle through files, snatch up family photos.
This one, it seems, is worse than a little door. It’s sitting right there in all the kernel processes, right down to ring zero, which makes it more of a tumor on the brain—it’s drawing blood to it, forcibly sharing what goes to the brain for its own purpose.
Aleena unmasks the rootkit with her own toolkit, and it exposes a host of other directories—sure enough, the keylogger, packet sniffers, all kinds of file grabbers and data hunters. Whoever installed this is—
Her machine blips. Whoever installed this is still here. Here with her. Logged in, right now.
Well, that’s interesting. She runs a scan, finds a second IP address. This has to be whoever installed the rootkit. Invisible handprints seen only when she waves a black light over it.
Aleena tracks the IP address. It’s gotta be a fake, routed through one or several proxies—so she gets a series of moving targets. First scan: Toronto. Second scan: Sacramento. Third scan: Cape Town. A clever deception. Also impossible for her to trace. At least easily. The only real way to do it is to find the proxy that they’re using and hack the proxy—but, of course, proxies are well protected because hackers pen-test those things all the time to make sure they’re sealed up nice and tight.
If she wrote a bit of JavaScript, dropped it into the files they’re stealing, and they took it and—programmatically or by hand—opened it, she could trace their—
A little file appears in the directory she’s looking at.
eatmedrinkme.txt
Oh, ha-ha. Images of Alice tumbling down the rabbit hole go through her head. She hated that book as a little girl. Told her mother: “Why are all the stories about little white girls?” And her mother said: “Because white men with little white daughters run the world.” Aleena was only nine years old when she found the author on Wikipedia—Lewis Carroll—and then went to her mother and told her: “This man is a pedophile, Mother. I do not want this book any longer.” She handed the book over and that was that.
But the dilemma that faced Alice faces her now as well. Alice didn’t know whether to eat or drink what was placed before her, and Aleena isn’t sure if she should click this file. Any mysterious file runs the risk of being a Pandora’s box, and you couldn’t pay her to open it on a system she owned.
Then again, this isn’t her system, is it? She clicks open the text file. It contains three lines of text and a signature:
Who
Is
Typhon?
—The Widow
Aleena feels her breath catch. It can’t be.
Behind her, the pod door pops, hisses, starts to open. Aleena scrambles fast, closes the text file, force-quits her connection to the Infinitest servers.
Metzger stomps into the room. She’s smiling in that smug way that says, I’m gonna enjoy this, and Aleena thinks she’s about to be dragged out and thrown into the Dep, but all Metzger says is “C’mon, honey. Copper wants to see you.”
CHAPTER 18
Pants on Fire
COPPER’S OFFICE
We got a problem,” Copper says.
On the screen, Golathan sips noisily from a cup. “Tea,” he says. “Oolong. You should drink tea, Agent. The caffeine in tea metabolizes different from that in coffee. Keeps you alert, but calm. No jitters.”
“I don’t drink coffee or tea,” Copper says.
Golathan arches an eyebrow. “You should start. So what’s the problem? You’ve been at the Lodge for about seventeen seconds, and already I’m hearing problems.”
“The problem is—” All of them, Hollis thinks, but doesn’t say. “The problem is Aleena Kattan. And, I think, Reagan Stolper.”
“Uh-huh.” Golathan sips his tea. Flips through some papers on his desk.
“You listening? Am I bothering you?”
“You are. But go on.”
Hollis explains that they caught Aleena doing . . . well, something. They don’t know what, exactly, not yet, not without a little due diligence. But suddenly they couldn’t track her keystrokes anymore. And the monitor mounted above the pod door—the one that looks at her monitor—couldn’t detect what was on-screen. “Whole thing, just flickering,” he says. Then he tells him that Reagan maybe hacked Chance, and—
“Let me stop you,” Golathan says. “And further, let me explain that I unreservedly do not give a rat’s red rectum about any of this, Agent Copper.”
“They’re breaking the rules.”
Ken makes a face like he’s drinking sour milk instead of oolong tea. “Gee, you think? They’re hackers. They hack. They hack everything. They’re like termites. Chewing apart anything they get their teeth on.”
“And you’re okay with this.”
“Within a certain context, yeah.”
“Context?”
“Tiger can’t change his spots, Copper.”
“Stripes. Tigers have stripes.”
“I’m not a zookeeper, Agent, but you are. Keep the animals in line, but remember that they still get to be animals. As long as they do the rest of what they’re supposed to do, let them play their little reindeer games.”
“Some of the other guards don’t feel so cozy about that.”
“Same goes. Let the hackers be the hackers, and let the hacks be the hacks. You can’t hold their hands on the playground. These people you’re with, they’re all basically underdeveloped, stunted adults, which more or less makes them children. My kids say mean things. They steal each other’s toys. And to a certain point, you have to let them work that stuff out.”
“To what certain point?”
“To the point where they’re knocking each other’s brains out with choo-choo trains or bubble mowers.” Golathan tests the tea again, then, apparently satisfied, swigs it back. “Anything else, or can I go do some real work?”
Hollis’s nostrils flare. He wants to say something about the person he saw in the woods that first night, but Golathan will think he’s nuts. Maybe that’s a good thing. Maybe he’ll send you home. Nah. Ken’s too cruel for that.
With nothing more to say, Copper stabs down with a thrusting finger, ends the call. Golathan disappears.
Copper sits for a while, just chewing on his thoughts. Going over them again and again.
Eventually, there’s a knock at his door and Metzger indelicately pushes Aleena Kattan forward into his office, then proceeds to stand there, arms folded, chin up. Copper tells her she can go and he sees the look of disappointment cross her face before she (reluctantly) turns and leaves.
Copper studies the hacker for a moment.
“What?” Aleena asks, obviously irritated. But something else, too: flustered. Nervous. Like a kid who got caught in the cookie jar pretending it’s your fault.
I know what you’re up to, he wants to say to her. But not only is that a lie, but Golathan doesn’t want this punished. “Just checking in,” he says. “You’re kinda my ace player here.”
“I know.”
“Your humility is overpowering.”
“We both know I’m the best in the pod.”
He clears his throat. “Yeah. Well. How’s it going?”
“Peachy.”
“Said with some sarcasm.”
“Said with all sarcasm.”
“You’re very hostile.”
“I’m the victim here, not the aggressor.”
“You really believe that, don’t you?” He leans forward. “You really don’t think you bro
ke any laws.”
“What I think is that some laws protect people and some laws protect the government and I have no time for the latter.”
“So, you can just disregard the laws you don’t like? I bet a serial killer feels those pesky laws about not murdering people are in the way of all that murder he wants to do.”
She makes a face at him—it’s a face he’s seen before, though this one has the volume turned up all the way. Lips pursed, eyes squinting, brow furrowed so deep you could plant seeds in it and grow corn. It’s like she’s trying to understand exactly how stupid he really is. “You’ve got me here, so what I think doesn’t matter,” she says finally. “Why am I standing here in your office?”
“I want you to know my office door is open. In case you ever need to talk. Or make requests. Let’s call you the liaison. From your pod to me.”
“Fine.” She pauses, looks up as if she’s accessing parts of her brain. “Chance Dalton is going to wash out, you know.”
“I’m worried about that, yeah.”
“He needs help.”
“What do you propose?”
“I don’t know. He’s good with people. He can’t hack systems but he can hack people. At least, better than I can.”
Hollis hesitates. This is against protocol, but . . .
“What if I gave him access to a phone?”
“I thought you didn’t do phones here.”
“We don’t. But maybe I can pull strings.”
She nods. “Good.”
“You hiding anything, Aleena?”
“That’s a little out of left field.”
“My door’s open if you ever need to talk.”
But the look she gives him—it’s the look a teenager gives to a parent who just made a dumb, unenforceable request. “Sure, Agent Copper. Sure.”
CHAPTER 19
Golathan
KEN GOLATHAN’S HOUSE, TYSONS CORNER, VIRGINIA
Lucas makes buckteeth at his sister, Mandy—because, of course, Mandy has buckteeth and she’s very sensitive about it and because Lucas, like all children, knows how to really make an insult count.
Mandy is quick to revenge: “Well, at least I can eat candy, lard-butt.”
Because Lucas is diabetic. He’s not fat—actually, he’s got the snap and leanness of a fresh-picked string bean. But some ugly switch in his genes that shouldn’t have gotten flipped got flipped anyway. Now it’s all glucose meters and blood tests and insulin injections before every meal.
Ken and his wife, Susan, share a look and a shrug. Susan says: “Kids. Kids. Eat your food. But first, say something nice to each other.”
The kids give her looks in the classic aww, mom vein.
“Honey,” Ken says, jumping in. “C’mon. Niceness is a little . . . overrated.”
Susan gives him her own look: Ken, don’t do this, not now.
“Kids,” Ken says. “Listen to your mother.”
Lucas and Mandy suck it up. He tells her he likes her teeth, whatever that means—he’s six, though, so half the things out of his mouth don’t make a lick of sense. Mandy says she’s proud of him for finally learning how to swim. Ken recognizes in there a little knife twist of passive-aggressiveness (you’re late learning to swim, dummy; I learned to swim when I was three, ha-ha-ha), but Lucas is satisfied, so hell with it.
It’s then that the phone rings. The home phone. “I’m not answering that,” he says.
“You’re going to make me answer it?” Susan asks.
“No—I mean, nobody should answer it.”
She sighs. “Somebody calls, you never know. It might be important. Your great-aunt Ginny might’ve died and left us some money.”
He rolls his eyes. “I don’t have an aunt Ginny, and we don’t need money.”
“Your mother, then. Sick. Fell down in the shower.”
“Don’t we pay that retirement home enough that they can go over there and—” He laughs. “I’m arguing an entirely theoretical point. Fine, I’ll answer the phone.”
He goes into the other room and picks up the receiver. Before he can say anything he hears her voice. “Golathan.”
Ken wishes he hadn’t picked up. “Leslie,” he says, voice low. “You called my home number.”
“I have a problem. I knew you’d be eating dinner.”
It is one of his personal rules. Man’s gotta have a code, and his code says dinner every night with his family. Even if that means Skyping in at their dinnertime from fucking Abu Dhabi. “This isn’t appropriate.”
“Who else am I supposed to call?”
It’s not a bad point. “Fine. What?”
“This problem is in your backyard, Kenneth. Beallsville.”
His blood goes cold. “What the hell happened?”
“There was an accident.”
“An industrial accident? What the hell’s in Beallsville, Leslie? No manufacturing there, no server banks—”
“A car accident.”
“I don’t follow. Why were you down in Beallsville?”
A pause. “I wasn’t. An associate of mine was.”
“Who? What ‘associate’?”
“That’s not relevant. The point is, there is now a dead police officer and a stolen police vehicle. State police. There will also be a burned van. A 1998 Nissan cargo-style van. Plate YBT-8918, registered to a Martin Biedermann.”
He can feel his heartbeat in his goddamn teeth. “A dead . . .” He lowers his voice. “A dead police officer? What in the name of all that’s holy are you talking about? Leslie, to call this irregular is an understatement. Explain.”
“I don’t have to. Just fix it.”
“Leslie, damnit—”
“All roads lead to Typhon, Ken. Including this one. Clean it up.”
Ken holds the silence, thinking she’s going to break first—but she doesn’t. She waits it out. Suddenly he’s not even sure she’s still there. “Leslie—”
“I’m told the penetration test is going well,” she says, finally.
He feels dizzy. Mouth gone cottony. “Yeah. Yes. Everything at the Lodge is squared away. We got the new pod in—”
“They’re already doing their job. Now do yours. Clean up the mess.”
Then the line goes dead.
PART THREE
THE STØRM
CHAPTER 20
The Calm Before
THE LODGE
The part of the Hunting Lodge they’re pretty sure doesn’t have cameras is around the far side, just past the lap pool and the basketball court—there’s this small section where the fence goes wide to accommodate a heap of three boulders. Above the boulders stands a big, leaning leafy tree—Wade calls it a “tulip tree,” and then he adds before anybody can ask, “Is it really a surprise that an old man likes to garden now and again?”
The cameras mounted on the fences have a wide sweep, but the two on each side fail to get as far as this far corner. The whole place is rigged with bugs, too, but so far, nothing here. Other hackers hang here sometimes, but whenever the Zeroes get free time at the end of a day, they reconvene here. Dipesh confirms for them that he’s never seen any bugs here—and he says he’s hacked the cameras to see, and, sure enough, they never quite get far enough.
They meet here every day. All of them except Reagan.
On Day 29, they get let out of their individual pods early, at 3 P.M., to have some “rec time,” as Hollis puts it, because tomorrow, he says, it’s time for what he calls the Pressure Cooker. Means they’re transitioning. Moving from individual tasks—which has pretty much been a month of penetration tests for an unholy host of companies spanning the gamut—to pod missions. Working as a team for the first time.
Chance is frankly amazed he’s still here. Like, he’s not a Christian so much as he’s an occasional churchgoer who likes crackers and grape juice, but being here for damn near thirty days has been nothing short of a bona fide miracle. He’s about ready to handle some snakes, build an ark, cut a couple of babies (or
at least baby dolls) in half.
He heads out with the pod. Wade, as always, trails behind, off in his own world a little bit. He mostly sits back, listens, offers commentary that ping-pongs between grumpy and jokey, and otherwise doesn’t contribute much. The core trio is Aleena, Chance, and DeAndre.
At the boulders, they clamber up onto their individual perches. DeAndre grabs a chip of stone from the base of one rock and then, on the turtle-shaped center boulder, finds their markings and adds another hash. “Almost at thirty days,” he says. “Just another 335 to go after that.”
Wade growls: “And then they double-tap each of us and throw our bodies into a ravine somewhere.” He draws a deep, satisfied breath. “The sweet release of death.”
“Man, shut up,” DeAndre says. “They’re not gonna kill us.”
“How do you think this works?” Wade asks. “We wash their dirty laundry and then get to walk away and go back to our various legal deviancies? We’re not operatives. We’re not soldiers they’ve spent time grooming. We’re assets. Cards you play and then burn so that nobody else can play them. Mark my words: we’re dead hackers walking.”
DeAndre just rolls his eyes. “Pssh, whatever.” He turns to the other two. “Hey, I got something.”
“Me first,” Aleena says, smiling big.
“Why you gotta jump in my grave?”
“Because I’m small and quick. Guess what happened?”
Chance interrupts: “Hey, whoa, hell no—you two always do this. I’m going first with the news this time because it’s not gonna be half as impressive as what the two of you have and I always end up being the big old yawn at the end of the story.”
DeAndre and Aleena share a look. She laughs—a rare sound, but Chance is hearing it more and more, and then she looks at Chance and he thinks: Wait, hold on, is she giving me eyes? He’s never sure.
Then, as always, it’s gone as soon as it arrives. She says, almost coldly, “Go on.”
His pulse kicking in his neck like a wild horse, he swallows hard and says, “Sarno’s missing.”
