Mad Skills

by Greatshell, Walter

  Trying to scream, Maddy came awake.

  It took her a minute to figure out where she was, another to realize something was happening. The cat was going nuts. For a long time, it had been curled under the blanket with her, but suddenly it was up and galloping around the house, making groaning noises as it dashed from window to window, pawing aside the curtains.

  There were hurried footsteps outside, the furtive crunchcrunch of gravel. More than one set of feet.

  Rolling off the couch to her hands and knees, Maddy crept to the window and peeped out. Catching a glimpse of black-helmeted figures with guns fanning across the yard, she ducked back down and thought, Oh shit.

  Scuttling into the kitchen, she took a few items from under the sink and wrapped them in a wet cloth, then she stuffed this parcel into the still-hot woodstove. As the coals hissed, she hurried down the steep basement stairs in the dark, shutting herself in just as the front door was knocked down. The whole house shook.

  Maddy remembered from the grand tour where everything was … except the cat, which popped up underfoot and nearly caused her to break her neck. But of the basement itself—the hanging bicycles and chain saw, the raincoats and camping gear, the washer and dryer, hot-water heater, carpentry area, and metal shelves—she remembered everything. Of particular interest to her right then was the gas valve in the corner.

  Turning off the valve, she coupled a garden hose to the gas inlet and set the other end by the exhaust flue, which was a vertical steel pipe that ran straight up out the roof. Next, she quickly gathered a few items together: a jerry can of gasoline, a sparking tool, a bag of deicer crystals, a box of mothballs, a box of roofing nails, a bucket of sealing compound, and some sawdust and metal filings from the trash.

  She could hear trampling and screaming from upstairs. I’m sorry, Maddy thought, hoping Donna and the girls weren’t being traumatized for life.

  Just as someone started pounding the basement door, there was a series of metallic concussions as the aerosol cans in the woodstove exploded, filling the house with acrid smoke and blasting flaming-hot embers and metal shards at the invaders.

  Shouting “PULL OUT, PULL OUT,” the assault force retreated to the yard, dragging the terrified family to the safety of the vehicles. Perfect—Maddy had hoped the police wouldn’t keep them standing in the cold with only their nighties on.

  Soaking the mothballs in gasoline, she dumped them into the sealant bucket and coated them as though enrobing bonbons in chocolate. Then she added the deicing crystals, the nails, and the wood and metal floor sweepings, tossing the balls in the mixture until they were thickly encrusted. Naphthalene, benzene, cellulose, potassium chloride—mmm, yummy. She loaded them into empty caulking tubes and pushed them up the exhaust flue with the jerry can’s metal spout. When they were all in there, she snaked the hose into the can’s filler valve and turned the house gas back on.

  As gas fumes filled the can, Maddy stood well back and applied a spark.

  With an underwhelming whump, the tubes shot up the pipe and burst from the roof like roman candles, peeling open as they emerged to rain a hail of sticky, exploding fireballs on the clay-tiled roof and everything else in the immediate vicinity.

  Pelted with these napalm poppers, the strike team scrambled for the cover of their vehicles or batted at each other’s burning clothes. They had no idea what was going on or where it was coming from. When a small, hooded figure came zooming out the back door like a witch on a broomstick, they were scarcely in any frame of mind to notice, much less block its escape. Before even the most alert of them had raised his weapon, the noisy specter was gone through the trees.

  RIDING as fast as the modified bicycle could go, zigzagging down alleyways and narrow side yards all the way to downtown Cheyenne, Maddy glanced back to make sure she wasn’t being followed. Spotting a Dumpster, she cut the motor and coasted to a stop, detaching the chain saw from the bike’s rear sprocket and flinging it into the trash. Then she pedaled away, rain poncho flapping. Innocent-looking as the Morton Salt girl in the rain.

  Almost there, she thought. Almost there.

  TWENTY-NINE

  LOCUST

  FORGETTING. That was the key.

  Turn trauma into a temporary file, click delete. Memory was the critical component of fear, and fear was the prime mover when it came to human behavior. Fear could overcome reason; it could overcome love. Fear was the main cause of greed and hate and addiction and self-destruction. Fear also engendered complacency, the tendency simply to tune out. It made people stupid and vulnerable to manipulation. Hence, fear—the conscious or subconscious memory of trauma—was the root of all evil.

  At Braintree, they manipulated fear, induced or relieved it at will. That was nothing original—every politician, priest, and marketing director exploits human fears. At Braintree, they might have taken it to the nth degree, but the same basic mindfuck was for sale on any street corner at five bucks a hit.

  By monkeying with people’s pain centers, you could get them to do anything. Anything at all.

  Maddy understood the principle perfectly well, so when she first walked into the biggest little meth lab in Denver, she knew exactly what it was about. Not the graffiti-scrawled rooms it occupied, not the filthy mattresses on the floor, not the sharp reek of toxic chemicals or the overflowing toilets. Not the dead-eyed dealer who sold her the address or the female zombies slaving over the distillery within. They were all lost children, huddled against the cold. Maddy knew the feeling. There were a few things she would have liked to forget herself … starting with the fact that her family was a lie.

  You fucking jerks, she thought. You evil rotten creeps.

  Maddy was still in shock from that one. She was not herself—literally. If her life was not her life, her parents not her parents, then who was she? It was a hard thing to wrap your mind around.

  She had made the discovery purely by accident, trying to find a way into Denton. The FBI had the town under heavy surveillance; it was a big mousetrap, and her house was the cheese. Using a computer in the lobby of a motel, Maddy had plumbed the Quantico database and extracted the whole operation. It was surprisingly haphazard. Internet connections, mail, phones, streets, vehicles, businesses and homes of family and friends were all being monitored, but nobody was looking at the bigger picture, nobody was connecting the dots back to Braintree. She could circumvent some or all of these things, but not without risk—the database itself might be a plant. The human factor was so annoying that way; you couldn’t even count on people to be stupid. What she needed was an intermediary, perhaps some old family acquaintance who only her folks would recognize, to deliver a private message.

  In the FBI file was a cache of Grant family photos, pictures of her growing up. Maddy was familiar with them: They were scans of pictures her mother kept in a photo album and dragged out on special occasions. It was a dreaded holiday ritual.

  To a casual observer, there would have been nothing unusual about these pictures, but Maddy was not looking at them casually. She was hunting for a mole. Immediately, she noticed something strange. In all the earliest pictures, those of her as a baby or toddler, her parents’ faces had been digitally altered. But why would they be altered to look like themselves? It was almost as if these were some other family’s photos, with Beth and Roger Grant’s faces grafted on.

  The fakery was subtle, and at first she couldn’t believe it, thought it must be some pixilation problem with the file. Yet the more she studied the images, the more she realized it was a deliberate cut-up job. Why? These were the exact same pictures she had been looking at all her life, so if it was a fraud, it was her parents’ fraud … and a sophisticated one at that. It didn’t make sense.

  Searching her parents’ public and private histories, she traced down every visual record of them up to the time she was three. There was not much out there, just a few official documents like passport photos and driver’s licenses, but what there was only confirmed for her that their ident
ities were forged. It was a little terrifying.

  And then she found it.

  Lost and forgotten among the photo archives of a defunct newspaper called the Providence Eagle was an un-doctored photo of Beth and Roger Grant. The real Beth and Roger Grant.

  The truth did not set her free. The truth hurt, and Maddy left that ugly motel lobby in search of something, anything, to dull the pain. To forget. To kill the knowledge that she was truly alone. Fortunately, there was a specialist waiting right outside, eager to help her find peace. And with a little incentive, he gave her directions to the Home of Happiness.

  Entering the place, she immediately realized it was a microcosm of the culture outside, just a little more transparent: a tidy façade disguising a cesspool of abject misery. At first glance it was row of perfect little town houses with flower boxes and children’s toys on the lawns—this apparently was what the mouth of Hell looked like.

  Locust’s operation was a factory of forgetting—a wholesaler of temporary amnesia. All the guns, motorcycles, scary people, and stench of ammonia and sudden death were just bulwarks against the ultimate bogey monster: the specter of childish dread. Dread born of generational poverty and abuse and educational neglect and the latest travesty: a half-cocked war cooked up by oilmen and military contractors, spawning in these damaged female veterans a self-justifying philosophy of predatory capitalism to cash in on the one commodity they had in abundance. You use what you got, and the hard-riding membership of Faster Pussycat Kill! Kill! had the franchise on cracked souls.

  Maddy came to them with a proposal.

  You guys aren’t even scratching the surface, she had said. You’re stealing from the poor—how dumb is that? Wouldn’t it be better to go where the real money is?

  They laughed, amused by her ambition, if not her intelligence. The girl had a death wish; they could respect that. They thought they were making plenty of money from their many and varied criminal enterprises, but Maddy convinced them to hear her out.

  They humored her.

  Borrowing a stolen laptop, she had quickly designed a smart bug, a fractal fruit fly that generated infinite variations of itself, weeding out the weaklings, replicating and further refining those that survived, promulgating these larvae through untraceable proxy servers to financial networks all over the world, using a quantum algorithm to challenge the laws of statistical probability, demolishing the security codes.

  Craving only rotten fruit, the bug sought out vast reserves of old money, private capital amassed through centuries of corruption. Money so full of holes from shady accounting it could be riddled further without giving immediate alarm. Slavery money, railroad money, alcohol, oil, drugs, arms, water, and power—it was often all in the same hands, everybody’s fingers in the same pie, and Maddy’s flies swarmed the picnic, channeling and rinsing the hoarded wealth through unwitting intermediaries, ten million clone computers and dummy accounts, rendering it untraceable.

  Except that Maddy designed it to be traced. She left footprints, deliberate tracks in the silicon jungle that led neither to her nor the FPKK, but straight to the back porch of Braintree, Inc. Clues not immediately apparent, nothing too obvious, but stuff that a really determined seeker would happen upon in good time. And as soon as those crumbs were sniffed out, the hunt would be on. Oh yeah, there would be an investigation that would wring that joint inside out and snap it like a wet towel.

  Clickety-clicking away on a laptop at two hundred words a minute, Maddy had to smile—she had never done anything like this before. It was fun!

  The whole operation took about twenty minutes. When she was done, she gave a few dummy account numbers and fake IDs to the leader of the band, the heavily tattooed ex-Marine and half-breed Seminole Indian named Locasta Pursleigh—known within the club as Locust. Maddy had found her on the FBI’s Most Wanted list. Locust sent her “manager,” a private attorney named Chica Kazantzakis, aka Chickasaw, out on a tour of area banks. An hour later, she returned with a million dollars in cash.

  There’s a lot more where that came from, Maddy said. But first you have to help me solve this problem I’m having.

  What kind of problem?

  It’s kind of like if somebody steals your lunch money, and after that, they act like it’s your job to give them your lunch money, and before you know it, they want everybody’s lunch money.

  Lunch money, Locasta said, looking at the million bucks.

  Right. Well, I think it’s time to tell them they can’t take anybody else’s lunch money.

  And what happens when they tell you to go pound sand up your ass?

  Maddy just smiled.

  She demonstrated in twenty-two easy steps how to modify a laptop computer, a cell phone, and a satellite dish so that they could not only monitor but jam selected radio transmissions, including police signals. After that, she showed the gang how to build a simple Faraday cage out of tinfoil to shield electronics from powerful electromagnetic discharges. This was in preparation for her next tutorial, which was how to set off a homegrown EMP—an electromagnetic pulse—strong enough to crash all unshielded electronics within a thousand yards.

  Then for the fun part. Maddy had once had a fondness for cooking shows—she loved the Food Network, particularly Iron Chef. For that day’s challenge, she had a few basic recipes:

  Using the meth distillation plant and a few basic household supplies, she whipped up three concoctions: a nonlethal aerosol nerve agent, a stable plastic explosive, and a somewhat unstable rocket fuel. The latter two were based on a bleach derivative called sodium perchlorate, which reacted violently when combined with sucrose, so the final product—a six-foot-long missile made from a heating pipe and carrying an EMP warhead—was powered by a bottle of Aunt Jemima pancake syrup. It was launched out of a bathtub.

  The last thing she needed to do was send out an invitation.

  THIRTY

  SMOKE AND MIRRORS

  TWO doctors from the Institute were on hand for the raid. The task force commander, Senior Agent Bradley Cook, had agreed to take them along in case negotiations were necessary. They rode in a convoy of several cars and vans, a combined force representing both state and federal authority. Helicopters circled overhead. It was an impressive thing to see so much manpower working on their behalf. It couldn’t help but inspire humility.

  “Oh my God,” said Dr. Plummer. “Poor Maddy.”

  “I know, honey,” said Dr. Stevens. “But don’t worry, these guys know what they’re doing. They’re trained professionals—they won’t hurt her.” Dr. Stevens looked like she had a head cold, her eyes puffy and her nose packed with gauze.

  Agent Cook said, “No one’s going to get hurt. You two did the absolute right thing in notifying us as soon as she contacted you. Miss Grant is a danger to herself and others, and the sooner we bring her in, the sooner she can get the help she needs.”

  “But she told us to come alone,” Plummer said.

  “Of course, sir, but who’s to say she’s alone? There is evidence she is hooked up with some organized group, perhaps criminals or terrorists. Plus, she may be hyped up on drugs, which would exacerbate her mental condition. The letter she sent you is proof of paranoid delusion, inventing that whole town and the conspiracy against her. She clearly blames both of you for all her troubles, so I wouldn’t go to any private meetings with her. Not unless you want to end up like those unfortunate folks in Bitterroot.”

  They pulled up before a strip of identical, town-house-style duplexes, each with a small front yard and a satellite dish. Except for the run-down surrounding neighborhood, the buildings could have been mistaken for luxury condos. But this was government-subsidized, low-income housing—what the zoning laws referred to as Section 8. The residents were accustomed to disturbances at all hours of the day—stabbings and shootings and every variety of dope-fueled mayhem. The arrival of a fleet of armed commandos barely merited a glance out the curtain.

  The ATF leader seemed to be having some sort of problem
with his radio, fiddling with it and getting nothing but static. “Ten-one, Ten-one,” he said. “I’m getting some interference here—is anyone reading me?”

  Sitting behind him in the command vehicle, the two doctors watched as a squad of sweating, Kevlar-plated ATF agents charged the door of Unit B-7. From years of cop shows, the couple knew what was coming next: doors battered down and stunned, half-naked perps dragged from their filthy dens into the light of day. Order restored.

  But as the point man ran up the walk to the porch, he hit something—perhaps a transparent strand of fishing line. From everywhere at once came a sudden eruption of billowing whiteness: fountains of smoke shooting out of the sprinklers with a screaming rush like a hundred fireworks. The men disappeared in the thick, spreading clouds, which rolled toward the street and enveloped the nearest vehicles.

  At the same time, there was a loud whoosh, and some kind of rocket streaked from the building’s skylight, exploding high overhead with a tremendous, reverberating BAM.

  “Pull back, pull back!” someone shouted, and last thing the two doctors were able to see out the car windows was a roiling wall of smoke, bearing down fast.

  “Put these on!” Agent Cook shouted, thrusting a pair of gas masks into the doctors’ hands. Trying to move the car, he found that the engine wouldn’t start. “Come on!” he said, pounding the steering wheel as the opaque fog settled over the windows like a cotton sheet. Visibility fell to zero, and all of a sudden Agent Cook slumped sideways in his seat, twitching.

  “What’s going on?” Dr. Plummer cried, pressing the gas mask to his face.

  “I don’t know,” Stevens said. “Just stay put so they can find us.”

  Everything suddenly went very still. Only the vacant hiss of the car’s police scanner broke the muffled silence. As the heavy smoke parted, swirling, they could see other vehicles sitting like abandoned hulks, doors hanging open and men sprawled on the ground. There was no sign of life. Even the helicopters were gone.