by Chuck Wendig
DeAndre’s face wrinkles up like a deflated basketball. “Who’s Sarno?”
“Man, really? You guys don’t even listen to me at all, do you.”
It’s Wade that jumps in—he’s sitting over on the farthest rock, whittling a stick with a sharp stone. “Sarno’s the self-help guru. Chance actually managed that pen test.”
“That’s right,” Chance says. That one was slow-pitch, but they’ve been getting harder. Aleena getting him the phone helped—they monitor the calls, of course, so it’s not like he can go ringing up the Citizen-Times newspaper or MSNBC or whatever, but either way, sometimes it’s nice to just talk to somebody. And he’s amazed how much people will tell him after a few small lies. Wade told him: You know, this is how the old-school hackers did it half the time. Wasn’t about toolkits and programming tricks. They called up people at the phone company or banks or wherever, and got them to give away passwords, account numbers, personal data. Hacking isn’t always about hacking systems, son. Sometimes it’s about hacking people.
Of course, even with hacking people, he’s still barely hanging on—he’s lucky if he nets a C grade. Usually he’s in the D range. Still. He isn’t dead yet.
“Sarno’s missing,” Aleena says. “I don’t know if that’s connected to . . . any of this.”
“He some kinda big deal?” DeAndre asks.
Aleena nods. “Bestselling author. Had a TV show back in . . . 2005? I remember watching it when I got home from high school. It was like Oprah, but worse. I think his star’s been falling for a while. Like, he’s a joke now.”
Wade, again: “How’d you figure out he was missing?”
“That’s the funky bit,” Chance says. “I was pen-testing this company called BrightFlow—they’re all about predictive search queries. Making more efficient search engines and stuff.”
DeAndre snaps his fingers. “This little search engine start-up called Glassboat has a partnership with them. Or did, anyway.”
“Well,” Chance continues, “one of the programming team members of BrightFlow is this guy, Bryan Sarno. I thought, huh, okay, Sarno, I know that name. So I did a little digging—called up their front desk, and the receptionist didn’t wanna tell me anything but I pretended I was a distraught relative and hinted at there being a death in the family, and I dropped the name Alan, said, Alan gave me this number, said you’d help me. And then I heard her gasp.”
“Because Alan went missing.”
“Uh-huh. She said, You talked to Alan? She told me that sure enough, he went missing about six months ago. And his brother, Bryan, died from a heart attack.” A pause. “Faulty pacemaker, apparently.”
They all take a moment to hover over that. “I don’t know what the hell it means,” DeAndre finally says. “Or if it even matters.”
“It matters,” Chance says. “It has to, man. Has to.”
DeAndre laughs. “You just wanna be part of the Scooby Gang, is all.”
“Damn right I do! I’ll be Thelma. Is it Thelma with the bowl cut and the turtleneck? Just let me in the Mystery Machine.”
“It’s Velma,” Aleena corrects. “Velma Dinkley.”
“She had a last name?” DeAndre asks.
“They all did. Velma Dinkley, Shaggy Rogers, Fred Jones, Daphne Blake.”
“Are we seriously talking about Scooby-Fucking-Doo?” Wade asks. He inches closer, tosses the stick and rock over his shoulder. “Pay attention, nerdlingers, come on. Think! All this nonsense isn’t nonsense. It’s connected somehow. Don’t you get the feeling that we’re not pen-testing individual companies but something much bigger?”
Chance thinks he’s right. He doesn’t understand it all, but he’s right. Aleena nods too, says: “We can’t see the bigger picture yet. But something does connect it all.”
“Ring around the roses,” Wade says.
“Be nice if we knew what Reagan has seen,” Chance says.
“Forget her,” Aleena says. “She’s Shane’s little puppy now.”
“Check it,” DeAndre says, lifting his chin in a gesture. They follow his gaze and, sure enough, there’s Reagan and Shane. Off toward the Ziggurat. Watching them.
“Smile and wave,” Aleena says. They all do, giving obnoxious little finger-waggle waves, the kind that Reagan so often gives them. “And three . . . two . . . one . . .” They all turn their waving hands into middle fingers.
DeAndre nods. “I’m gonna find out what’s in that bitch-ass folder. The one from that German geothermal company.” He bites his lower lip. “That thing’s shut up tighter than a goat’s asshole around a couple of hillbillies, but damn if I did not figure out a way to crack that motherfucker when I was trying—and failing—to sleep last night.” He grins big. “That’s my news, by the way. Tomorrow, I’m gonna crack it. And y’all is gonna cover for me since we’ll be in the same room and all.”
Aleena says: “Now you jumped in my grave.”
“Was mine to begin with.”
“It’s fine. My news is better.”
“Oh?”
“Oh.”
She lowers her voice. “The Widow contacted me again.”
“The plan still the plan?” Reagan asks.
Shane stares out over the basketball court. He’s got this look on his face, this thousand-yard stare. As if he’s watching the Zeroes but also staring straight through them. He says in a flat, quiet voice, “We can’t get to Dalton like we did before because, if I’m being honest, your skills aren’t up to snuff.”
“The little terrorist twat is tricky.” She hmms. “That’s a helluva tongue twister, isn’t it? Terrorist twat is tricky. Terrorist twat is tricky. Teowwist trot is twicky—”
“She’s not just tricky, she’s good. She’s skilled. Aleena Kattan is no bullshit. She—herself, all by her lonesome—executed a merciless, ongoing denial-of-service attack on the Baathist government of Syria. She’s exposed a dozen or more honor killers, rapists, kidnappers. She flattens firewalls like they’re made of aluminum foil, granting Net access to protesters and rebels. She’s the real deal, Reagan. Show some fucking respect.”
“Oooh. Aren’t we a little tetchy.”
He gives her a look sharp as a pair of scalpels. “Aleena blocked our access to Chance, but we can use her against him just the same. It’ll just take a deeper hack. The kind you’re really good at.”
She is. She knows she is. So far, her time here has been about penetrating systems and testing them for their weaknesses—but, truth is, she much prefers doing that to people, instead. Poking at them with sharp sticks until they yelp. And she and Shane do have some sticks sharpened to damning points.
“I gotta know,” she says. “Why do you have such a hard-on for Dalton?”
“He’s a poser. An amateur pretending to be a professional.”
“You sure it’s not that he took some spotlight in your absence? Maybe that . . . chafes your ball-bag a little bit?”
Shane wheels on her. “It’s not just about that. It’s about bigger things. There’s a design at work. And this is part of it. This is—”
From not far away comes the sound of weeping. Reagan turns, cranes her neck, sees Miranda and Dipesh walking up. It’s Dipesh that’s crying. They head down toward the empty basketball court. Reagan watches Miranda try to pull Dipesh into an embrace, but he pulls away, then buries his face in his hands and begins pacing in erratic circles.
“Someone must’ve pissed in his—”
Dipesh yells—a roar of frustration and rage through the tears.
“—curry,” she finishes.
“Some hackers can’t hack it,” Shane says. “C’mon. I have something to show you.”
Chance, Aleena, and DeAndre hop down off the rocks and head away from the boulders, toward Dipesh. Wade remains behind on the rock, watching as if he’s a spectator at a sporting event.
“Yo, hey, Dipesh Mode,” DeAndre says, jogging forward. “What’s wrong, man?”
Miranda holds up a hand and shakes her head. Her smi
le is strained. “We’re okay. Really.” Then, to Dipesh: “Come, Dipesh.”
Chance approaches from the other side, puts a hand on Dipesh’s shoulder. “It’s all right, dude. Whatever it is, just let it all hang out. No judgment here, brother.”
Aleena hangs back, shifting uncomfortably from foot to foot. Chance gives her a look, tries to do that thing where you psychically convey a message: You okay? She must get enough of it, because she gives an awkward nod, then looks away.
Dipesh stands up straight. Fishes out a mealy tissue from his jeans, blows his nose. Wipes his eyes with it, too. “Thanks, guys,” he says, his words sticky. “It means a lot.”
Miranda puts her arm around him and he leans his head on her shoulder. He stares out, not at anyone, but rather, over them. Miranda says: “It’s just been a hard day.”
A bitter bark from Dipesh. “Hard day?”
“What happened, D?” DeAndre asks.
“We can’t talk about it,” Miranda says just as Dipesh opens his mouth.
“Miranda, we have to tell them.”
“Don’t make things hard,” she pleads. Her voice cracks and some emotion bleeds in, too. “Today was hard enough, like you said.”
Chance and DeAndre share looks. Chance says, “I gotta admit, I’m a bit lost.”
“You’ll see,” Dipesh says. “You start your pod missions, right? You’ll see.”
Miranda starts to pull Dipesh away.
“Who is Typhon?” Aleena asks.
Miranda and Dipesh halt, shell-shocked by the question. Deer in the headlights of an onrushing Peterbilt.
Aleena asks it again. Louder this time. “Who is Typhon?”
Miranda says, almost sadly: “We don’t know.”
“But we want to find out,” Dipesh says.
And then they really are gone. They whirl away, the unanswered question lingering.
Suddenly, Wade’s off the boulder and with them, too. He grunts at them: “Dinnertime, kiddies.”
Shane runs his key card through the slider next to the door, which pops open with a hiss. Reagan enters, reverent. Shane’s cabin is like a palace. A temple. A place worthy of awe. The rest of the cabins at the Hunting Lodge are nice enough, she guesses: simple, utilitarian. But Graves’s cabin? Decked. The. Fuck. Out.
First, he lives alone. Like, nobody else here but him. And he has an access card that allows him entrance. Nobody else gets that. Nobody.
Then, he’s got a bed in the loft. A flat-screen TV downstairs with a video game console hooked up (“Last gen,” he says somewhat disappointedly, like a rich kid who has to play with last year’s toys). A small couch (white pleather, ugly as a sun-bleached whale carcass) sits across from it, and next to the couch is a mini-fridge. Full of water, soda, lunch meat, shit like that. Posters on the walls show movies from the eighties and nineties. Some popular (Ghostbusters, Gremlins 2, and, of course, Fight Club), some obscure (The Osterman Weekend, Robotrix, Lost Highway).
But the real kicker? He has a laptop. All his own. It’s not connected to any network, so it can’t reach outside the Hunting Lodge, but nobody else is afforded the privilege. Giving a laptop to a jailed hacker is like giving any other prisoner a hunting knife, some rope, and a loaded shotgun. (When she first saw that he had it, he remarked: “Ironic, because if I had gone the other way—taken my chances with the legal system—they would’ve banned me from using a computer for ten, maybe twenty years.”)
Two of Shane’s crew are on the couch, playing some racing game. One of the Need for Speed titles, she guesses. They’ve probably been in here all day. The one is Daryl Scafidi, aka “the Warlock”: he’s a thick-necked halfwit with acne scars so bad Reagan teases him that if he’s not careful NASA will try to land on him, plant a flag. Next to him sits the LARPer: Shiro, the Tokyo-born goth who online—and often in person, particularly when he’s role-playing—goes by Kuei-Jin Orochi, White Worm of Hokkaido. Both turds.
“Shandor, ’sup,” Scafidi says, lifting a fist over his head as Shane passes. Shane ignores the fist bump and keeps walking. Reagan loves that about him: he so doesn’t give a shit. And the more he ignores his own pod, the more they love him for it.
“Get out,” Shane says finally.
Scafidi looks to Reagan and says, “You heard the man.”
Reagan makes a V out of her index and middle finger, then waggles her tongue in the space between them. Scafidi makes a face like he just caught a glimpse of 2 Girls 1 Cup, then goes back to his game.
Shane, voice louder: “I mean you, Warlock. You too, Shiro.”
The two of them scoot past Reagan on the way out. She bites her lip and makes a lusty face at them as they hurry by. “Scurry, little mice, or I’ll gobble you up,” she says. “Nnnngh.”
“You’re fucked up, Stolper,” Shane says, going to the desk on which his computer sits. He opens a drawer, riffles through it.
“So, what’s the deal?” Reagan asks. “How do you manage all this stuff? You can give up the ghost. I’m on your side by now, you know that.”
He pauses. “The hacks need things. I get them things.”
“Like, what, you buy them beer? Nudie mags?”
“Jesus Christ, Stolper, no. Take Roach, for instance. Roach is going through a bad divorce. Apocalyptically bad. She’s making all kinds of accusations about him—which, you know, are true, because James Roach is a scumbag. But Roach needed a little counterbalance, so I hacked his wife’s accounts, found out she’s been cheating on him with her boss. Or—consider our minder, Rivera. You actually see much of Rivera?”
She shakes her head. “Nope. Just at mealtimes. And I think he jerks off in the supply closet near the rec room.”
“He leaves us alone because I’m getting him paid. Shiro hacked a few cryptocurrencies—Simoleons, Spec-Coin, Chimpcharge—and cashed out in Rivera’s name. Now Rivera doesn’t even look in our general direction. I could kick a puppy and he’d look the other way.”
Reagan shrugs. “You’re the king. What can I say.”
“I have to be. Like I said: bigger designs at work.” He walks up, slaps a USB key into her hand. “Tonight, dinner. Get this into Dalton’s pocket.”
“Uhhh.” She snort-laughs. “How am I supposed to do that? I’m not a master thief.”
“Just get it in his pocket. You do that, you’re in.”
“I’m in?”
He nods and gives her an odious half smile, a look that conjures a sense of disappointment in the ugly compromise he’s making. “I’ll get you in my pod, yeah.”
Bingo.
CHAPTER 21
The Trap
THE CAFETERIA
Aleena is in line with her tray. Chance is behind her, and DeAndre is off “draining the dragon” (his words, not hers). Wade is sitting down because he likes to wait till everyone else is done, then take his sweet time picking food.
It seems like there’s a pall hanging over the cafeteria. Some dark, invisible thread she can’t quite tease out. Maybe it’s Dinesh. There’s not even a hundred people here in this room—some news travels fast. Though, they’re also a secretive, hush-hush bunch, so maybe not. Still, Dinesh, Miranda, and the rest of their pod are absent. Their normal table sits empty—a notable absence that has a kind of black hole gravity to it.
It’s affecting her, too. So many things going on inside her head. There’s an excitement—the Widow of Zheng contacted me. There’s fear—I don’t know what’s going on at home, or with Qasim, or with the protests. There’s . . . something else. And there she looks back and sees Chance just behind her in line and he gives her a smile and she gives him a smile, but then she frowns because she doesn’t want him to think she likes him. (You don’t like him. This she repeats, a strange mantra.)
That’s when she feels it. A hand. Right on her ass. She thinks: It’s Chance. A spike of anger lances through her and she wheels around and sees Shane Graves standing there. Lips puckered in a cheeky smirk. “I know you want it,” he says.
“Get yo
ur hand off my ass,” she growls. She reaches down, grabs Shane’s wrist—
And a tray comes out of nowhere, hits Shane square in the face. A cob of corn and a burger pinwheel in the air.
Graves staggers back and Chance presses the attack, raising the tray again.
“That’s your freebie,” Shane snarls—just as Reagan passes behind him, hot-stepping out of the way. Graves kicks out with a leg. The heel of his foot snaps hard into Chance’s knee. Chance howls. Then he plants the wounded leg back and brings the tray down again upon Shane’s head.
That’s the last hit Chance gets. At that point, Shane takes Chance apart with the mercilessness of a butcher. He knows some kind of martial art—what looks to Aleena like Krav Maga. He stabs out with the flat of his hand, catches Chance right in the throat. A knee to the side. A knee to the groin. Then he throws Chance into a table—which flips over, knocking the book Wade was reading up into the air.
Aleena reaches behind her, grabs the fork off the tray. A voice inside her makes clear what’s going to happen next: I’m going to kill Shane Graves.
That’s a curious thing, that thought, because she’s wanted to kill people before but not quite this viscerally—and not in a way where she could really act on it so fast. She steps toward Shane—who has his back to her—and twirls the fork so the tines face down—
Reagan steps in front of her.
“Move,” Aleena hisses.
“Not now,” Reagan hisses. “The hacks are coming.”
“Reagan, get out of my—”
Reagan holds up a key card. “You want Shane? I’m in. But you gotta sit still for now and”—she gently plucks the fork out of Aleena’s hand—“stand. Down.”
And then: boom. The hacks are in the room. Roach grabs Chance just as he starts to get up, throws him back against the table. Metzger steps in front of Shane, waggles a finger, says, “Nuh-uh, sweetheart.”
Aleena feels gutted. Like she could’ve acted—should’ve acted—and didn’t. But then, in another moment straight from Bizarro World, Reagan is shouting and pointing at Shane. “He’s got a weapon! Back pocket!”
