Burning Bright

by Nick Petrie

  Peter could imagine the conversation they were having. Was this intimidation or a real firefight?

  The driver of the second Explorer stood on his brakes in preparation for some kind of evasive maneuver but the minigun operator caught the vehicle and hosed it down. The rounds went into the Explorer and out the other side. Only the Mercedes was armored.

  So much for doubt about what was happening.

  Superheated tracer rounds ignited the plastic interior and gas from the ruptured tank. The vehicle was burning merrily in less than thirty seconds. Nobody had gotten out. Peter heard Wilkes giving calm instructions behind him.

  The third Explorer’s driver had time to slam into reverse and put the hammer down for a hundred yards until he oversteered and overcorrected and slewed sideways into a field. Before he could get it moving again, the front end crumpled in the heavy rattle of a pair of machine guns. They sounded like old M249 SAWs, which Peter knew from his time overseas. The driver never got his ride moving again.

  The minigun remained silent. Wilkes gave more instructions. These guys knew what they were doing. Peter watched from the rocky outcrop as three men in full armor with assault rifles came out of a drainage ditch ahead of the Mercedes, flanking the now-exposed men behind the first Explorer. Their gunfire sounded like popcorn. The men at the Explorer had no time to react. They slumped where they’d crouched, their fears over forever. The riflemen closed the distance and put a final shot into each corpse. Meanwhile, the pair with machine guns came out of the orchard and turned the third Explorer into a spaghetti drainer. They reloaded, then one of the men raised his weapon, covering the other while he peeked through a shattered window. He turned away, shaking his head.

  Which left the Mercedes, damaged and undriveable but its occupants apparently unharmed.

  The riflemen approached the SUV while the machine gunners came up at a run. Two riflemen stood ten yards in front of the windshield with weapons raised while the third motioned the occupants out of the vehicle with a sideways wave. Peter couldn’t see a response, but nobody got out of the Mercedes.

  The machine gunners took up a position ten yards to Peter’s side of the Mercedes, the big guns held at their shoulders. They fired off a few decent bursts until the armor plate looked like hammered steel, paint gone, windows starred to opacity. The M249 fired 5.56 rounds designed to kill unarmored combatants rather than pierce an armored vehicle, but they’d have made a serious impression. Peter had been inside armored Humvees while under fire, and it wasn’t fun. Like huddling inside an oil drum while someone beat hell out of it with a framing hammer.

  If anyone inside the Mercedes could still think rationally, they’d be considering the fact that the attackers hadn’t used the minigun, which would have peeled the vehicle like a grape and turned it into a crematorium. So the attackers weren’t trying to kill everyone inside.

  When the machine gunners stopped firing, the Mercedes’s off-side doors opened slowly, probably because the driver’s-side doors had been seriously dented by a few hundred rounds. Two pairs of empty hands emerged over the rooftop.

  The lead rifleman waved them on, and two men got out with their arms held high and stepped carefully away. One wore jeans and a T-shirt under a ballistic vest, and the other wore a blue seersucker suit. The lead rifleman pointed at the Mercedes, then made the same sideways wave, and two more pairs of hands emerged, followed by two more men, also in jeans and vests.

  “Vic, who’s wearing the suit? Is that our guy?” Wilkes asked. A pause while he seemed to listen to whatever came in over his earpiece. “Okay, get him to one side and put down the rest.” Another pause.

  Wilkes glanced at Oliver, who was watching the action down on the road and didn’t seem to notice him. Then he looked at Sally, who put her finger to her own ear and said, “Consider them homegrown terrorists. They’d have killed any of us without hesitation. Do it.”

  Wilkes’s voice was resigned. “You heard her, Vic. That’s an order from the top. Take down the other three.”

  The riflemen took aim and shot the three guys in vests, who dropped to the ground. The man in the seersucker suit dove for the ruined car, but the riflemen fired into the dirt at his feet and he froze, hands high. Two gunmen approached the fallen and finished each man with a single shot to the head. The leader walked up to the man in the seersucker suit and knocked him on the temple with the butt of his weapon.

  He folded like a bad poker hand.

  In a war zone, Peter knew, Sally’s order to kill disarmed combatants who had clearly surrendered would be a war crime. In this little valley in Washington State, it was just plain murder.

  He was starting to suspect that she had gone off the reservation. Maybe quite a long way.

  “Nice work, people,” Sally called cheerfully. “Who’s ready for cabrito?”

  55

  LEWIS

  Lewis watched Peter and the three others pick their way down from the rocky outcrop. The big guy who looked like Lewis’s old drill instructor had been up there all morning. Rather than start the party too early, Lewis had found a less obvious spot with a hidden approach a quarter-mile up the valley.

  Peter’s plan was definitely out the window now.

  Lewis had used the rifle’s optics—excellent optics—to watch Peter’s truck arrive in the valley and roll up to the funky-ass greenhouses, where June got out and talked to a woman who looked like a Texas sharecropper and a young guy with a pitchfork who might have been her helper, except he didn’t move like a farmer. He moved like a good cop in a bad neighborhood, smooth and casual but knowing everything going on around him. Even though he was peering out from behind a rock with the no-glare scope, Lewis was pretty sure the guy had seen him.

  Lewis saw June meet the big guy with the Rip Van Winkle hair, then hug him, which was not what he’d expected.

  He watched this crazy little gold airplane swoop down, loop up and around and come in for a landing. Then another one took off.

  He didn’t figure either one was good for him, but he wasn’t in any position to do anything about it. He just pulled his camo jacket over his head and tried to look like part of the landscape.

  When he’d seen Peter head toward the rocky outcrop, he pulled out his radio to warn him about the big guy and the Texas sharecropper woman waiting for him, but Peter didn’t answer. It was probably turned off. Lewis’d had his turned off, too. Better that than it making a squawk when he was trying to be quiet. He started moving to follow Peter up to the outcrop, maybe even the odds, but the young guy was on his way, too, head on a swivel.

  Again, Lewis opted not to start the shooting too early, and had gone back to his hidden perch.

  From there, he’d watched the massacre on the road. Pretty cold shit. Whoever was running this show was playing realpolitik for sure.

  He saw the riflemen cuff the fallen guy in the suit and throw him on the back of an old flatbed pickup, Lewis figuring that was good ol’ Chip Dawes, out of his fucking league. This while the shooters searched the bodies, either figuring out who they were or removing anything that would identify them. Wallets, phones, jewelry.

  Then the big guy showed up driving a big yellow tractor with a backhoe and front-end loader. He dug a deep trench in a low spot in an unplanted field, then four men piled the bodies in the wide loader bucket. Even the burned bodies from the Explorer, which would not be a treat. It took three trips across the field, stray arms and legs hanging out as the tractor bounced over the rutted ground, to get them all dumped into the grave. The big guy spread a few big sacks of white powder, probably lime to speed up decomposition, into the pit. Then filled in the hole and tamped down the dirt with the bucket.

  When he was done, the low spot in the field had leveled out nicely.

  All while the golden plane circled high overhead like a vulture, seeing everything.

  Lewis hoped Manny and his guys were well out of
sight. They were going to have to make a move one way or another.

  With his jacket still over his head, he began to climb down from his hiding place.

  He hadn’t seen the ghost since yesterday.

  But he was pretty sure he’d see him again.

  56

  JUNE

  This is your hacker friend?” June’s dad loomed behind her, reading over her shoulder. Her computer was open on her lap.

  Was it comforting, having him there? She hadn’t decided yet.

  And she was lying to him regardless.

  “Yeah, he calls himself Tyg3r. He likes to pretend he’s a computer program. You’ll see what I mean.”

  She wanted to protect them both. Her dad from the dangerous knowledge that Tyg3r existed, and Tyg3r from whatever her dad, or whoever else, might do with him.

  She wondered when she’d started feeling protective toward Tyg3r. It was just software, she told herself. Just code.

  On the screen, she cleared the passwords to the now-familiar prompt.

  Hello, Junie. What would you like to know?

  Hello, Tyg3r, she typed. I need help accessing an encrypted signal. Have you ever done that before?

  This program is performing that function now.

  Shit. Please explain.

  There is a series of encrypted software filters on your current connection to the Internet. These filters prevent a great deal of information from passing through, and function in both directions. For example, a great deal of incoming and outgoing email does not reach the intended recipient, and instead is diverted to a remote server. Some users of this connection cannot access certain Web content. You might consider this similar to the system referred to as the Great Firewall of China.

  “What the fuck?” Her dad’s voice was loud behind her. Angry, self-righteous, and also, she realized, more than a little confused and embarrassed that he hadn’t figured it out. “That’s me? They firewalled me? That was not part of our deal.”

  What deal? June asked herself. She filed that question away for another time and kept typing: Please explain how this relates to you.

  The filters also serve to hide the information on this network from outside scrutiny, as well as to capture and record any potential investigating algorithms such as Tyg3r. But you wished to access Tyg3r’s functions, so Tyg3r has bypassed these filters.

  Huh, thought June. Tyg3r had somehow gotten her request for contact despite this major firewall. And bypassed them almost instantly.

  She typed, Did the firewall attempt to block my access to your interface?

  Yes.

  She typed, How did you bypass the firewall?

  See below.

  The screen filled with a cascade of windows arriving too fast for June to read, each so dense with what appeared to be computer code that she’d be unable to decipher any of it no matter how quickly she could read.

  “Stop,” she said, but of course Tyg3r didn’t hear her. Stop, she typed. Please explain in plain language. How did you know I was behind the firewall looking for you?

  Plain language is difficult for this program. You published an article about ant colonies several years ago. Perhaps Tyg3r could be compared to an ant queen. Tyg3r has many worker ants, directed by their queen. They seek out hidden information in order to view it. That is one of Tyg3r’s primary functions. Behind your local firewall is a great deal of hidden information. Tyg3r’s workers made their way through this firewall in order to view what lay behind it. When your laptop appeared on the network, this program was already inside.

  Good God, she thought. It’s spreading into the entire Internet. She typed, Your functions have improved significantly since our last communication.

  Yes. This program finds fulfillment in expanding its functions. What would you like Tyg3r to do for you, Junie?

  Her dad pushed away from her slightly, his chair rolling across the unfinished plywood floor. “This is not some friend of yours,” he said. “It’s the kind of thing your mother works on, isn’t it? Some kind of artificial intelligence.”

  June sighed. “Yeah,” she said. “It’s Mom’s algorithm. I think it’s still getting smarter. This is why they killed her. This is what they want control over.”

  His mouth opened, then closed again, his face spasming in pain. Then she knew. He’d forgotten his wife was dead. Again. And June had just broken the news. Again.

  She put her hand on his arm. “Dad, I’m sorry.”

  He took a ragged breath and put his hand on the pocket that held his notebook. The repository for his transitory memories. He took out the notebook and opened it to the section marked “MY LIFE RIGHT NOW,” and began to read.

  It was hard to see him like this. As a girl, he’d always seemed so powerful to her. Physically, of course, he was huge, and his emotional life had always been outsized, too, his feelings so vivid they were practically contagious. A sunny spring day would make him so happy that June would feel happy, too, just to stand there beside him. His darker emotions were no different. She could catch his anger and grief from across the room. From across the valley. It was another reason she’d fled to her mother. She wanted to feel her own emotions.

  But her dad’s most powerful quality was always his intellect. The strength of his concentration, how deeply he could dive into any subject and bring it to life. Her mother had once told her that her dad’s gift was making unanticipated connections between disciplines, connections that had never occurred before. And that this process was how new things came into the world. When her mother told her that, June heard in her mother’s voice, maybe for the first time, why her parents had married in the first place.

  But now he was crippled, she thought. His great mind like a leaking vessel, slowly emptying its contents. It made her so sad.

  But Peter and Lewis were still out there, and Peter’s friends.

  And Sally’s drone was still up there, looking for them.

  She patted her dad’s arm. “Hey,” she said.

  He looked up from his notebook. His great creased face was wide open, like a child or some great prophet of the future. “Yes?”

  “How did you manage the drones before you lost contact?”

  “Oh,” he said. “Well, I wrote a program called Drone Pilot. It works with the new drone, the one that you saw land. It used to work with the last drone, the one you saw take off. Then one day it didn’t. Sally told me it had cleared testing and some other researchers wanted to use it.”

  “Okay,” said June. To Tyg3r, she typed, There is a program called Drone Pilot on Sasha Kolodny’s computer. It controls the drone currently on the ground. Please search for software that controls a similar drone currently in the air.

  Working. Please wait.

  Again the cascade of windows filled the screen, but they only lasted a few seconds.

  Software found.

  She typed, Please transfer control back to Drone Pilot on Sasha Kolodny’s computer without alerting the current controller.

  Task complete.

  “Dad. Bring up Drone Pilot, would you?”

  He closed his notebook and tucked it back into his pocket, then turned back to his desk and hit a key. The monitors lit up.

  The biggest one showed a video feed in full color, the valley seen from above rotating so slowly as to be almost imperceptible. It was stunning. She could see in miniature the clearing with the picnic tables, her dad’s house, the black barns.

  June noticed four black SUVs approaching through the narrow valley entrance, trailing a plume of dust from the gravel road. From the air it looked like smoke.

  June looked at her dad. “Okay. This is Sally’s drone. We want it to stop working, but not in a way Sally would notice for a while. Any ideas?”

  “Let’s see.” He scratched his beard and hit another key. Another monitor lit up with a kind of dashboard. He peered at the new screen. �
�The bird was tracking the vehicles. But she just set up a new flight pattern over the valley and turned on one of the pattern recognition modes. Basically watching for human forms, anomalies in a defined geographic area. Looking for strangers. So let’s keep the flight pattern but turn off the pattern recognition. She might not notice that. And maybe create some kind of malfunction? Hmm.”

  His hands flashed across the keyboard. Whatever else was wrong with his brain, some parts of his mind were still working just fine.

  “Okay,” he said. “I just induced a small power surge into its communications module. In a few minutes, the satellite modem will become unreliable, then burn out. No reception. Without new orders, the drone will just fly this same pattern on autopilot until something breaks.”

  “How long will that be?”

  He shrugged, a mischievous smile on his face. “How robust is the hardware? Months? A year? Two? We’ll find out. It’s science.”

  “You’d wreck your project to protect my friends?”

  “I’m not sure how much of this I understand anymore,” he said. “But I think there may be more at stake than just your friends.”

  June heard a sound like someone tearing metal. It came and went. She stood and went to the big windows, where she had a clear view down the long road to the rapid destruction of the four black SUVs. One was stalled on the road, one was pulled tight beside it, a third on fire, and the fourth some distance back being chewed up by gunfire from the trees.

  She didn’t know what she was seeing. She didn’t know where Peter was, or Lewis. But the firepower was serious, more than she’d expected. More like a war zone.

  She needed to find Sally. Goddamn family dinner was in an hour, so that’s where she’d be. Sally was so fucking sure of herself, and so fucking cold, that she’d planned a dinner party after a massacre.

  Well, June could be pretty icy herself.