by Chuck Wendig
Things feel slippery, topsy-turvy, when Metzger spins Shane around and begins to pat him down. Shane protests and gives Reagan a look that has fangs.
“Hey, what’s this, Graves?” Metzger says. She pulls a USB key from his back pocket.
Suddenly the rest of Graves’s pod is there—stepping up, yelling, shouting. The rest of the hackers start yelling, too. It’s chaos, like something out of a primate house at a zoo—everyone smells blood in the air and the coppery tang has them thrashing against the bars of their cages. Aleena watches, dazed and confused, as one of Graves’s pod—Daryl something or other, she thinks they call him Warlock—rushes Roach and gets a Taser in the gut. He shakes like an epileptic, piggy-squealing as he drops.
Reagan hooks Aleena’s arm in her own. “Now’s our chance, c’mon.”
And Aleena is dragged along for the ride.
Chance struggles. Elbows out, legs kicking, anything to make it harder for them to drag him back down through the woods. But halfway to the springhouse, Roach has the others hold him up as he grabs Chance’s hand—or, rather, grabs all four fingers and straightens them out just before bending them back. Pain like an arc of lightning goes from Chance’s hand to his shoulders. “Quit thrashing around like a fish,” Roach growls, “or I’ll break these. Gonna be a lot harder to do all your typing with a hand full of broken fingers, yeah?”
Chance nods. “I’ll stop. I’ll stop.”
“Good.” Roach nods to Chen and another guard—this one a strip of human beef jerky named Ashbaugh—and they carry him back down the forest trail.
“Look at the footage,” Chance says. “Shane attacked Aleena. You’ll see. You’ll see, c’mon. And God, he was beating my ass and—” He hears the desperation in his voice, each word corroded by fear.
Suddenly they’re at the springhouse. Door open. They don’t drop him by the chair. They take him to the Dep. Chance tries to scrabble for the door, but Roach kicks him in the side.
The other two open up the Dep. The seal pops. A wet smell tinged with chlorine fills the air. Ashbaugh grins. “You know they use these in Guantánamo? On high-value suspects. Cool, huh.”
Roach pops his Taser, fires one into Chance’s chest. Everything goes full-tilt pinball.
Roach says, “I think given our last meeting in here, it’s time to go right to twelve hours. Don’t you think, Chen?”
Chen just laughs.
They toss Chance in and close the top over him. It drops, pops, and locks. And suddenly he’s alone with himself, the water, and the darkness.
Chance screams.
DeAndre comes back from the bathroom, finds the cafeteria in disarray. A handful of chairs overturned. A table, too. Food is splattered around and the Lodge janitor—big flabby guy named Pike—is lazily pushing a mop.
Wade sits on one chair, has his feet up on another. He’s reading a book. Watership Down.
“The hell happened in here, man?” DeAndre asks.
Wade shrugs. “Some kind of pissing match, the ramifications and permutations of which remain blissfully hidden to my old eyes.”
“Man, whatever.”
Wade goes back to reading.
Hollis sits across from Shane Graves. It’s just the two of them.
“Shane Graves,” Copper says. “I do not believe we’ve been formally introduced.”
The hacker sits there, arms folded across his chest like an impudent child. “We haven’t met, but I do my homework, Agent Copper of the FBI. Ex-wife: Shiree. Son: Kyle. Been in the Bureau for . . . thirty years? I haven’t even turned thirty yet.”
“Next year, though.”
“Hm?”
“Next year. You turn thirty.”
“Yeah. That’s right.”
“I liked my thirties. I feel like I really grew up in my thirties,” Copper says. “Feels like you know yourself. Know what you want. Know just who you are.”
Shane sneers. “I already know who I am, thanks.”
“I know who you are, too. I can do my homework. I know you’re a wet-nosed punk who thinks he’s some kind of celebrity. Getting on YouTube and showing people how you hack into airplanes and insulin pumps and all that shit.”
“Vimeo. Not YouTube.”
“I give a shit. I know you. I’ve seen you. Rich white kid who’s somehow convinced himself he’s the underdog. Just you against the world. Daddy was a cheat. Mommy was a pillhead. Makes you mad. So you go out, do your thing, pretending you’re some kind of iconoclast hero, some champion of the common man when really, really, all you’re interested in is getting high off your own shit-stink. Meanwhile, you start gathering enemies. Because you’re like a stage magician who decides to expose the magic tricks of your fellow illusionists.”
“I just speak truth to power.” Shane shrugs. “People don’t like it when you show them how vulnerable they are.”
“Is that what you’re doing?”
“Everything’s connected, Copper. Every day we plug another part of our lives into the grid. We have refrigerators that connect to the Internet, for fuck’s sake. People fill those refrigerators using handheld Wi-Fi scanners from their favorite big online retailer, and all that stuff talks to each other. Your thermostat talks to your smoke detector which talks to your phone which talks to a thousand different things, and each of them talks to a thousand more, and soon you start to realize how your fucking garage opener is connected to the stock market by a very tenuous string of ones and zeroes, bits and bytes, and all I have to do is jump into the stream somewhere.”
Hollis blinks. Fakes a yawn. “I gotta be honest, I faded out there in the middle.”
“You should pay better attention. Everything is connected to everything else. Like a spider’s web. Pluck a thread on one end? The spider feels it on the other. Twenty years ago, Copper, no way I would be able to tell you that I saw what happened at Fellhurst.”
A cold knife, invisible, slides into Hollis. His fingers and toes tingle. Every part of him wants to panic. Instead he just tightens his jaw. “What?”
“Fellhurst, Agent Copper.”
“I don’t know Fellhurst.”
“I’m pretty sure you do.” Shane smiles. “I know what you did there. I know what you did to that woman. I know that it wasn’t long after Fellhurst that your wife left you. I know that your performance reviews after Fellhurst went up, not down—indicative of throwing yourself into your work. Driven by guilt, maybe. Or maybe because you got a secret thrill, you sick fucking—”
Hollis stabs out with a hand, catches Shane’s throat. He squeezes. Shane starts to flail, hands into fists, but already the FBI agent has his pistol out and the gun pressed against Shane’s breastbone. “Shut up. Stop moving.”
The tension doesn’t leave Shane’s body, but the fight does.
“You don’t know rat shit from a rubber hose,” Copper seethes. His face feels hot. He lets go of Shane’s neck, pushes him back into his chair, then sits back into his own, holstering his Glock.
Shane, stung, wounded, rubs the skin around his neck. Already Hollis can see the gears turning behind the hacker’s eyes. This one’s got an eye for vengeance. Best to cut his legs out from under him.
Hollis pounds on the wall next to him. Shane gives a quizzical look, but understands soon enough when the door to Copper’s office—er, “office”—opens up and Rivera steps inside. Rivera’s a field gone to seed. He’s ex-DEA out of Tucson. Unshaven. Hollis isn’t sure what Golathan has on him. But it doesn’t matter.
“Finally,” Rivera says. “I can handle my own pod, Copper.”
“Not anymore you can’t.”
“What?”
“You’re done. You get to go home.”
“Shut up and quit fuckin’ with me, Copper.” Rivera laughs, but it’s a nervous laugh, a stuttering heh-heh-heh. “You’re not my boss, brother.”
“No, but Golathan is, and turns out even he isn’t willing to turn a blind eye to you doing absolutely not one iota of your job these days. So pack your sh
it. You leave tonight. Metzger will drive you to the Allentown airport. Also, so you know, the agency put a hold on your bank account to examine it for untoward criminal activity. Seems someone’s been hacking money into your account—surely as some sort of ploy to incriminate you, since I know you’d never willingly accept bribes. Right? Good news is, they’ll shut that account down and clean all of that naughty hacker money out of it.”
Rivera’s eyes squeeze shut in a flare of anger. He’s about to speak, but Copper gets ahead of that:
“I wouldn’t say anything more except ‘thank you.’ Thank you, Agent Copper, for doing your job and exposing those who would have done me harm.”
Through gritted teeth, Rivera says: “Thank you, Agent Copper.”
“Good. Now scoot.”
And then Rivera’s gone. Leaving Copper and Graves alone once more.
Shane licks his lips. Chuckles a little. “That’s cool. Rivera was weak meat. I like a challenge.”
“A challenge. I’m glad you said that, because, like they say on those infomercials, but wait, there’s more.” From his pocket, Copper pulls out the USB drive taken off Shane. “A list of all the guards here. Spreadsheets showing their bank account numbers and home addresses and other bits of pertinent data.”
“I . . . took that off Chance.”
“Chance Dalton? Who couldn’t hack a candy bar in half?”
“I hear he’s doing better.”
“Just the same, this is naughty business, Shane. If you were anybody else you’d be washing out to some supermax prison right now. But you’re not. Golathan likes you. He reminds me that you aren’t like anyone else here. You wanted to be here. You offered yourself up to us.” He sees Shane shift uncomfortably in his seat. “Trying to get away from those enemies I was talking about?”
“I’m just a proud American.”
“Well, now you’re a proud American who really is like everyone else.”
“I don’t follow.”
“I’m balancing the books with you. Taking away all your tricks and treats. All your little luxuries. Now you get to return to the basic privileges everyone else has. And the guards will be told about what you had on that USB drive.”
“You’re making a mistake.”
“Am I? Is that a threat?”
“Just a statement.” Graves hesitates. “This is a ploy. Reagan Stolper is doing me dirty. You check right now. Check my cabin. I’ll bet she’s there.”
Hollis shrugs. He turns around, pulls up his computer. Takes him a few awkward minutes to figure out how to pull up the camera feeds and navigate to them—at first he feels a little embarrassed, but then he notices how it’s agitating Graves. Copper once read that when people watch other people make mistakes often their own brains react as if it’s them making the mistakes—they internalize the errors of others. Owning the mistakes personally. And it makes them uncomfortable, embarrassed, frustrated. So Hollis delays a little, dicks around, opens solitaire, pretends he doesn’t know what he’s doing. Finally, he gets around to opening the camera feeds.
The camera pointing to and inside Shane’s cabin is just static.
“See?” Graves says.
Copper shrugs. “Malfunctioning cameras. What a shame.”
Reagan swipes the card. Shane’s cabin pops open.
Aleena hesitates.
“Hey, Kardashian,” Reagan hisses. “Come on.”
“I don’t know why you keep calling me that. The Kardashians are hot.”
“They’re not. Okay, Kim’s kinda hot. But that one sister looks like a shaved Wookiee. She’s basically a giant thumb with a wig.”
“So you’re saying I’m ugly.”
“No, I’m saying I have a stupid-ass nickname for you that means essentially nothing except I keep using it because it upsets you. Are we seriously talking about this? Jesus, c’mon.” Reagan grabs Aleena and pulls her in.
“What is all this?” Aleena asks, looking around.
Over by a laptop, Reagan says, “These are the thousand luxuries of Ivo Shandor.”
“No, I mean, what’s this? What’s your angle? Why am I even here with you? You hate us. You’re a horrible monster.”
For a moment, Reagan actually looks stung. Then she frowns and waves it away. “I’m helping us.”
“Are you helping us or hurting Shane?”
“Ennnnh, six tomaytoes one way, half a dozen tomahtoes the other way.”
“Are the cameras really off?”
Reagan nods. “Dumb-ass gave me a cryptophone to shut them off.”
“Are you just setting me up?”
“Not this time.”
“I don’t believe you.”
Reagan shows her teeth like a cornered animal. “God, fuck, can you just help me over here? The guy’s got a laptop, a drawer full of USB drives, another drawer with a handful of fucking Floydphones. Shane Graves has had it too good for too long. Thinks he’s David Blaine or some shit. So he can go piss up a flagpole.”
Hesitantly, Aleena steps farther into the cabin. She’s half afraid that at any second some comically large iron cage is going to drop over her, but she admits curiosity. She steps forward, opens one drawer, and sees the USB keys. Opens the other drawer, and sure enough: black matte phones. Cryptophones. No carriers. Entirely encrypted. Hacker treasure.
“Is this why you’ve been messing with Chance?” she asks Reagan.
“The answer is more complex than ‘yes,’ but for now, sure.”
Aleena feels a faint shudder in her feet a few seconds before she hears footsteps on the planks outside. She throws Reagan an angry look, but Reagan is already grabbing her shoulder and pulling her down behind the desk. “Get down!”
Chen and Ashbaugh slink by—Chen laughing, haw-haw-haw, Ashbaugh’s words muted, but it sounds like he’s telling a story or maybe a joke. They stop in front of Shane’s cabin. Aleena can only make out a few words: . . . believe . . . shit Graves . . . ? . . . punk owns us. Then, more clearly: He’s Copper’s problem now. Her blood turns to an icy river when Chen says: We should go take his stuff.
The door starts to rattle.
Ashbaugh: Cameras, Chen. Cameras. You want Copper on your ass, too?
Chen is again all heh-heh haw-haw, oh yeah okay, and then the footsteps retreat until they can’t be heard any longer.
Aleena presses her thumbs in her eyes so hard she sees blue stars smearing across her vision. “That was scary.”
Reagan stands, says, “Scary? Don’t you, like, hack tyrannical governments and mess with terrorist organizations and whatever?”
“Yes. But this is different. That’s . . . distant. This is personal. They catch me . . .” She feels tears hot at the edges of her eyes. “They catch me, I don’t know what happens to my family. What happens if they catch you, Reagan?”
There’s a moment of quiet between them. Uncomfortable, tense, uncertain. Reagan finally shrugs and says, “Nothing. I got nothing to lose, nobody to love. And I like it that way.” But the way she says it, Aleena isn’t so sure.
“Graves is going to go to war with us over this.”
A manic smile spreads across Reagan’s face. “I know. But it won’t matter.”
“Why is that?”
She holds up his laptop. “Because he’s going to help us escape.”
CHAPTER 22
Tick-Tock
NSA HEADQUARTERS, FORT MEADE, MARYLAND
Golathan checks his watch. 10:15 P.M. Night’s gotten its claws in. The building here is mostly empty. He sits in his office, feeling tension coil around his neck and shoulder muscles like a python.
Then his monitor goes from dark to light. And there on his screen is Leslie Cilicia-Ceto.
“Leslie,” Golathan says. “Was beginning to think you weren’t going to call.”
Her smile is pinched—the smile of a tired, suspicious woman. “I apologize. Caught up in diagnostics.”
“Typhon,” he says—a question by way of a statement, a question to which he alre
ady knows the answer.
Her pinched smile relaxes slightly. So, yes: Typhon.
“Leslie, I should be there. I need to be on-site. I need a demonstration.”
“We’re almost there. Patience, Ken.”
Off-screen where she can’t see, he wraps a hand around a stapler and squeezes. He has a momentary fantasy where the stapler crushes up like an empty Coke can. He sucks air between his teeth and says, “Leslie, I like to think I’ve been patient. But we’re about a hundred miles past that. I’ve got people perched on my back like rabid monkeys, and they’re all chattering for bananas or blood. I need some bananas, Leslie, or I gotta give them blood. Which means I need to do a site visit, and I need to see what’s going on there.” He lowers his voice. “The thing with that mess in Beallsville—”
“Was an error,” she interrupts. “And I’m thankful you corrected it.”
“A cop died. Other cops don’t just look the other way when one of the boys in blue gets got. They will continue to kick the shadows till something squeals.”
“Nothing will squeal. Everything is buttoned up. Thanks, in part, to you.”
“Leslie, is Typhon not working?”
She opens her mouth but then closes it again, as if thinking better of what she was about to say. “Typhon is operational. But a real test, a true test—”
“We’re not doing that. You have the environment to test. We’ve given you as much as we can, Leslie. The Hunting Lodge—”
“Has been invaluable.” Another interruption. It’s not really like her—she seems agitated tonight. Normally she’s as placid as a mountain lake. “In fact, I am willing to predict that the Lodge’s purpose will soon be fulfilled.”
“The penetration test is complete?”
“Almost. Collectively they’ve uncovered far more vulnerabilities than we had imagined—and with each discovery, the castle grows stronger. Typhon is already smart, but I am happy to know that the system is also safe. So thank you for that.”
“I need to do a site visit, Leslie. Soon.”
She nods. “I know. Soon! I promise. I just don’t want to show you a program operating at eighty percent. I want to show you the butterfly, not the chrysalis.”
