by James Phelan
The shooting stopped. The sound echoed. Walker got up and checked himself over. His hands were covered in blood, but it was just the blood running down one arm and trickling down his fingers, and it was the blood from that same wound now on the opposite hand as he’d used it to clamp the wound.
He started up the tunnel and his leg nearly gave out.
He fell down.
A small entrance tear in his black jeans, in his mid-thigh, at the front, slightly to the side of his femur. He opened it a little more and saw the wound. It was either a bullet or shrapnel, he couldn’t tell which. There was no exit wound. It bled but it was nothing like Monica’s arterial wound.
He looked up the tunnel and ran as fast as he could, but by the time he’d made 200 yards he was feeling dizzy. He saw a door, another 200 yards ahead. No Jasper. He ran for the door.
•
Jasper held the Glock in his right hand, behind his back, and he used his left hand to hold onto the handrail as he made his way up the concrete stairs. It was a narrow staircase, and steep, and there were thirty-six steps. At the top was a steel door, and it had a bar across it that said to “Push to exit.” He paused, composed himself, and pushed.
100
Walker got to the door at the end of the tunnel. It was a fire door made from laminated sheets of fireproof sheet-rock and had a small wire-mesh glass window set in it. There was no sign of Jasper beyond, but there was no-where else he could have gone, so Walker pushed open the door and started up the stairs. Pain shot up through his leg and he felt light-headed.
There were thirty-six steps, and at the thirty-second Walker slipped; his leg couldn’t carry all his weight, so he shifted his weight to the other one and used his wounded arm to support himself. His hand, coated in thick, tacky blood, repeatedly slipped on the handrail, but he dragged himself forward to the steel door that had a “Push to exit” bar. He pushed it gently and put his weight behind it to force it open.
It stopped about a foot away. It was noisy outside—very noisy, like a giant street party and a sporting match rolled into one. Walker pushed harder and opened the door enough to slip out, and he immediately saw why it hadn’t opened.
Two uniformed police officers were on the ground, dead, each shot twice through the head. One had fallen against the door.
Walker bent down and picked up his Glock and cell phone from the closest. The phone was powered on but there was no signal.
Walker looked around. No sign of Jasper.
Then he saw the orange jumpsuit, crumpled on the ground. His gaze was drawn further out, to the street, which on this side of the NASA block was a mixed-use residential and business street. Then he saw where the noise was coming from: at the end of the street a full-blown riot was taking shape. There were two Humvees, and numerous National Guard troops, under the only light around, their own big strobes.
Walker saw the glow of fires and the fury of people throwing bottles and stones at the Guard troops. The opposite end of the street had a similar scene, but further away, and with fewer people.
Walker headed toward the busier area. If Jasper wanted to disappear, a big crowd was better. And he would be in the open for less time, hobbling along.
Walker too was hobbling. And struggling. And he nearly slipped on something—a cell phone.
Then he saw more of them. People had been throwing them at the Guard troops, and as Walker scanned the people’s faces, he saw their anger and frustration directed toward what they saw as representatives of a government that had let them down through inaction against a terror threat. Everyone, young people mostly, massed there, facing the Guard troops. A few hundred people were acting as one, chanting and yelling and full of fury, fire burning in their eyes. The Guard had a front line of men with riot shields and a second line with M4 assault rifles, maybe loaded with riot rounds, maybe not. Walker headed into the crowd.
•
Jasper was pushing his way through the mass of protesters. The Glock was tucked into the pocket of his jeans. He wore only a T-shirt and thin cotton hoodie with jeans, so he was cold, but that didn’t bother him. He had the hood pulled over his head, so he was near invisible as he made his way toward the back of the crowd. It was hard going, with the mass moving against him, but he was just over halfway through and already thinking about how so many of these idiots, so quick to get to the action and add their pitiful voices to their cause, would have left cars double- and triple-parked on the streets beyond, with doors open and keys in the ignition. In an hour he would be in his safe house north of the city, and he would stay there until he felt it was safe to venture outside. That may take months, but he was prepared for that. This was his opus. The sum of all his work for the government. All that disappointment he’d ever encountered and felt. All the bullying from his father about doing his service. All the crap he’d gone through during boot camp, in the infantry, and the cyber division and the NSA. Now the whole world would know just how capable he was.
Then, he looked back, over his shoulder. Human instinct. He had to be sure that he was not being followed.
101
Walker saw Jasper’s face. A figure in a black hoodie, glancing back over his shoulder, for a split second, and then there was recognition there, in his eyes, and Jasper turned away and tried to move faster.
But he couldn’t. If you move rhythmically through the mass of an oncoming crowd, filling spaces and having people weave around you as you move your own way, you’ll get somewhere. But try pushing and muscling your way through, and you’ll end up bumping and knocking and bouncing into people—people who then bounce and knock and bump into others, and then things get tense, and angry, which was where things were now headed.
Then, the whole world changed.
The streetlights came on.
Flickering, one by one, linking up and illuminating the streetscape. And then the building lights.
Walker kept moving. Hobbling his way toward Jasper.
A noise started up. At first a chime, then a cacophony. Cell phones. It started with a few, then several, and then dozens and more. The sound of people trying desperately to call loved ones and reach out to anyone in the darkness that had covered the country for the past fifteen minutes.
“Hey!” someone shouted up ahead as Walker made up some ground in his pursuit of Jasper Brokaw. “It’s him! It’s the guy from the TV—the captive!”
“Look!”
“It’s him!”
“Help him!”
“That’s him!”
“Hey, man!”
“Look!”
The crowd changed. Changed mood, changed direction. It was fast becoming an inward-looking, swirling mass, a school of fish swarming around a middle point, encircling Jasper.
Walker could see and hear the hubbub start to die down as he moved against a tide that slowly stopped. The crowd started to thin. People were picking up cell phones and answering calls and seeing news feeds on social media and videos of what and how Jasper really was. Suddenly the night was near silent, for the briefest of moments.
And then it changed again.
102
“We’ve got Monica and Paul,” Somerville said, hanging up a phone. “Monica’s in bad shape but she was stabilized on the scene and they’ve started transfusions—she’s being medivaced as we speak. Paul is unharmed.”
McCorkell nodded, watching live footage of the riots at the National Guard lines near Ames Research Center, followed by a cut to an anchor who reported that power had been restored across the country, with some states and counties having to rely on workers to manually throw circuit switches in certain areas of the grid to reset. The anchor then put a finger to his earpiece and spoke.
“This, just in, breaking news from outside NASA’s Ames Research Center in Palo Alto, where the now confirmed terrorist, Jasper Brokaw, has been staging his own capture and . . . and I believe we have footage coming in live, we’ll—yep, we’ll see the scene now in a live cross . . .”
•
Walker had moved to within reaching distance of Jasper when the terrorist stopped and pulled out his Glock. He fired up into the air to spook the crowd, who were now leering and heckling and throwing things at him—and nothing happened. Emptied, on those two cops earlier.
Walker watched.
“That’s him!” someone shouted, pointing at Jasper.
“That’s the son of a bitch there!”
“He’s the terrorist!”
“Get him!”
Soon it was dozens of voices. Then hundreds. Chaos.
Jasper looked to Walker as the first cell phone was thrown and hit his head. Blood trickled down. Then a rock. A bottle. A shoe. More phones.
Walker gave him nothing. He backed away.
The crowd moved in. Punches were thrown, people were yelling and shouting.
Those outside the first couple of rings of people were holding their cell phones up, filming the scene, the sight like a modern-day rock concert where people experienced the act filtered through tiny screens and crappy audio quality to play back again at a later time on a tiny screen with crappy audio. History was being made and it was being recorded, but those present were less participants than conduits.
That footage was being streamed live, being grabbed online and being played on social media; memes were already starting to spread like a virus. The world knew what Jasper Brokaw really was.
Countless people were filming Jasper getting his butt kicked. Walker didn’t need to do anything more; Second Amendment and all that.
Walker turned and limped away.
103
Walker hobbled down the road. He saw a phone on the street, discarded or thrown earlier when it was still useless.
He picked it up and touched the screen. It was locked, but he needn’t worry. He looked at the ground and the discarded cell phones like leaves in the fall, littering the ground, tossed away in some kind of mass movement against all that was happening. He picked through them until he found one that was not locked.
Walker rubbed the blood from his hand and dialed a number he knew by heart. And on the third ring it was answered and he heard the voice that he never wanted to forget, never could forget.
“Hello?”
“Eve . . .”
“Jed?”
“I . . . I’m . . .” Walker stumbled from the loss of blood and the phone clattered to the ground. The world started to spin as he tried to focus on the phones around him, to locate the one he had used. Sights and sounds began to blur and dim.
“Are you okay? Jed? Jed? Walker—Walker!”
Walker could hear Eve’s voice as he bent through doubled vision to retrieve the phone. Blood coated his hands and he fumbled until he wiped them on his jeans, and then he grasped the phone and brought it to his ear and sat down on the footpath. He lowered himself down, gently, onto his back. The ground was hard and cold, the sky was dark, most of the streetlights still yet to come on, a sea of stars above.
“I . . .” Walker said into the phone, his voice rasped breaths. “Eve, I’m sorry.”
“Where are you?”
“I just wanted you . . . to tell you . . .”
“Tell me where you are.”
“I wanted you to know that . . .” Walker blacked out for a second. He saw two National Guardsmen running toward him. “You—you need to know that I—how I . . .”
“Jed?”
“I wanted to tell you, Eve, I . . . that I . . .”
“I know. I know. Me too.”
EPILOGUE
Walker was in a bed in Stanford University Hospital. A nurse checked him over, helped him sit up and left the room. McCorkell and Somerville were standing by the foot of the bed.
“The ICANN members?” Walker asked.
“They were housed at Los Alamitos Army Airfield in LA,” McCorkell said.
“The same place Harrington’s crew used,” Somerville added.
“They were taken there by Team Black?” Walker asked.
McCorkell nodded, said, “Apparently they were told it was a forty-eight hour security exercise.”
“And if the Internet had been shut down?” Walker said. “What then?”
“Team Black would’ve been free of safeguarding Jasper and all that, so who knows?” Somerville said. “Bullet to the head? Locked away somewhere a little more permanent? We may never know.”
“Only General Christie could answer that,” McCorkell said.
Walker said, “Ask her.”
“We have,” McCorkell said.
“Repeatedly,” Somerville added.
Walker said, “Be more persuasive.”
Somerville said, “She’s pleading the fifth.”
“Makes you appreciate the good old days . . .” Walker said. “An extraordinary rendition flight to Egypt or Syria would do the trick.”
“She’ll talk, eventually,” Somerville said.
“When she talks, we need her trigger,” Walker said. “What made her start this when she did.”
“Does it matter after the fact?” McCorkell said. “It’s too late. We have to keep moving forward.”
“You won’t find patterns if you only look forward,” Walker said. “What was General Christie’s Zodiac go-signal. We find that out, we may start getting ahead of this, maybe preventing what’s next before it starts playing out.”
“Perhaps there is no pattern,” Somerville said.
“There’s a pattern,” Walker said. He winced as he shifted his bandaged leg. “My father’s involved so there had to be. The NASA key ring and where it played out. He knew what was happening, and where.”
“On that . . .” McCorkell looked to Somerville.
“They’ve found your father,” she said.
Walker said, “Where?”
“Malta.”
“What’s in Malta.”
“Nothing much.”
“Who found him?”
“Interpol hit. We got lucky. They’re surveilling him. The government here knows. FBI wants to be there on the ground, they’ve just sent a snatch team. They want to bring him in.”
“When?”
“This time tomorrow,” Somerville said. “I’m on a flight in an hour. I’ll be there when it goes down.”
“I have to get there.” Walker made to get out of bed.
McCorkell waved him down.
“Book me a flight,” Walker said. “Fastest you can get.”
McCorkell watched as Walker steadied himself on his feet. His thigh was wrapped in a tight bandage. The color had drained from his face with the exertion.
Walker said, “My father is Zodiac, right? He has to be. And I’m the one who’s going to bring him in.”
Walker took a step. His leg gave out and he caught himself on the bed.
McCorkell said, “You can’t do this.”
“Stop me,” Walker said, trying to stand un-aided and failing. He steadied himself on the hospital bed.
“There’s another way,” McCorkell said. “I have a contact on the ground there in Malta—an old friend. And he can get to your father. Get him moving, buy some time. Maybe another twenty-four hours.”
“Do it,” Walker said, sitting down on the bed. “Get us another day. I leave tomorrow. This ends with my father. This ends the day after tomorrow.”
