Besieged

by A. J Tata

  “What happened?”

  “She started convulsing. Flatlined for a moment. The team applied the paddles, and she’s back.”

  “You’re leaving something out,” he said.

  Casey looked away and then looked him in the eyes as she put her hands on his shoulders. “She talked. It sounded like ‘Find Misha.’ Then she went back under.”

  “Is she still in a coma?”

  Casey hesitated. “I’m trusting you here. I saw your mind spin and decide whether you could trust me, and I saw you left it as undecided. Promise is my patient when I’m on duty, and you’re not next of kin, which means I could be violating federal law by giving you information. Understand?”

  He did. And he sensed some kind of quid pro quo in her comment.

  “Yes. And I will do the same with you?”

  She nodded, understanding that he had just committed to sharing intelligence with her, if he figured it to be relevant.

  “Yes. She is still in a coma. I’ll let you know more tomorrow.”

  “When can I see her?”

  “I go in at ten in the morning. I’ll call you . . . if you care to share the number to that double top secret phone you carry around.”

  He wasn’t into sharing anything with anyone at the moment.

  “I’ll get a burner cell phone,” he said.

  And then his mind went back to the moment he’d had Promise and Misha safe and secure. Then the bombs had gone off, and he’d been knocked out. Why hadn’t he moved more quickly?

  As if reading his mind, Casey said, “You saved hundreds of children today. Don’t forget that.”

  “I didn’t save the one person I came there to protect, but thank you,” he said. “Give me your number, and I’ll text you at work in the morning. In the meantime, can I crash on your sofa?”

  “Sure,” she said, cocking her head. “Let me grab you some pillows and a blanket.” She disappeared up the stairs and returned with a stack of sheets, a towel, and a washcloth.

  “The bath down here has a shower,” she said, pointing at the closed door off the hallway.

  They stared at each other for a full moment, eyes locked, myriad thoughts cycling through their minds, he was sure. He was simultaneously taken by Casey’s beauty and empathy, while also struggling to balance a hard-earned natural distrust of most people. Plus, his concern for Promise and Misha never left orbit in his mind.

  He had no idea what was cycling through her mind, but she leaned up and kissed him on the cheek before she said, “Good night, Mahegan. Get some sleep.” She rubbed the smooth back of his head as if he was a child, and then she was gone. He watched her ascend the steps, feeling as though he was missing an opportunity. He made his bed, reclined on the sofa, and shut his eyes.

  He analyzed the events of the day, thinking of Promise, Misha, the two car bombs, and the suicide bomber. How did they all come together? Why, for example, was Promise carrying a pistol at school when it was expressly forbidden? True, her father had taught her to shoot, as Mahegan had also done a few times, but she was a good woman and would break the rules only for a good reason. She must have detected a threat, perhaps related to Misha?

  Next was Misha herself. She was a genius, according to the research Patch had on file and according to the Smart Board files Casey and he had seen. Having studied math in college, he understood that the equations, algorithms, and code that she was writing and solving were beyond anything he had studied. Next, her mother had mentioned the murder of Misha’s father, as had Ximena De La Cruz, for whom he had worked as a security professional. What kind of security? And what had been the tenor of Misha’s relationship with her father? Then there was Paul Patterson, the detective with the trench coat and bad suit. Was he following the same parallel path as his own, he wondered, thinking that Roger Constance’s death and Misha’s disappearance were connected?

  The autonomous vehicles’ involvement in the attacks at the school had to be in some way related to the attacks using autonomous weapons against the ships. Very few people knew about the overlap between the two. It was not public knowledge yet that the swarming birds were explosive. Lots of rumors and conspiracy theories were on the Internet and the talk shows, but nothing had been confirmed. Therefore, the FBI would not necessarily be putting the two pieces of information together, though perhaps they were. As he considered this point, he decided that at his meeting with Ximena De La Cruz tomorrow morning, he would accept her job offer.

  He needed to see what secret had killed Misha’s father, especially if it was related to Misha’s disappearance or the spate of attacks today.

  He rolled toward the open end of the sofa and saw that Casey Livingstone was standing in front of him like an apparition. He knew his hearing had been better than decent even before sleeping lightly had become a job requirement, but he hadn’t heard her approach. The woman was stealthy.

  “Couldn’t sleep,” she said.

  “It’s been ten minutes.”

  She slid onto the sofa with him and kissed him full on the lips.

  “I’m not—” he began.

  She bit his lip and said, “I know who you are and who you aren’t. This isn’t some fantasy of someone else. You’re Jake Mahegan. You’re a bighearted man who saved a bunch of kids and teachers today. And I want to kiss you.”

  He wasn’t going to stop her.

  CHAPTER 6

  MISHA CONSTANCE

  MISHA KNEW THAT SHE HAD KILLED HER FATHER AND HAD DONE so on purpose.

  Even so, after the second explosion the men in black ninja suits, as she thought of them, thought they had kidnapped her. Technically, she guessed they had, but still she had tricked them and was exactly where she wanted to be.

  Misha found the entire situation interesting. They had snatched her from the elementary school, using a fake ambulance at first. Ten minutes later they had moved her to a car in a warehouse. She knew this because she had counted to sixty ten times when they strapped her in the back of the ambulance and blindfolded her. They had thought they knocked her out, but she had held her breath and had faked passing out when they placed the handkerchief over her nose and mouth. They had done it again once she was in the car, and for sure she’d been knocked out then, so she had no idea how long they had traveled after they left the ambulance in the warehouse.

  But now she woke up in an eco-pod on the grounds of the car factory where her father had worked. She could see out of the Plexiglas bubble the big, new building in the distance.

  The eco-pod was actually a capsule. It had originally been designed for researchers studying nature in the wild. It was bigger than a tent but smaller than a singlewide trailer. There were display monitors, two chairs, a bunk, a refrigerator, and a toilet. The pod was like a small spaceship that had landed in a field, which Misha could see through the pod’s Plexiglas canopy. What she knew was that they needed her to write more code for their Cefiro automated cars. She had helped her father write the code. Well, truthfully, she thought, she had written all of it, but her father had had to give it to a man, and that was when Misha had killed him.

  She had seen these eco-pods in a National Geographic, a magazine that her mother always read. Misha liked reading about the outside world. Her parents said she was mostly an “inside your head” kind of person, so everything she could import into her brain helped her to visualize what everyone else must be experiencing. Ms. Promise had said she just didn’t process her exterior environment the way everyone else did.

  The doctor had told Misha she was autistic. Several had called her a savant. That might be, but her father had always told her to be proud of who she was. Quiet did not mean reserved or withdrawn, he would remind her. The way she saw it, she was always just herself. She loved her parents and had a few friends, just like other kids her age did. But Misha could see she was also different. Her mother homeschooled her some of the time. Her father had let her work on his computers in the basement all the time. She could do things other fifth graders couldn
’t do, even though her parents had held her back a year.

  If someone was looking at her right now, she thought, they would see her rocking back and forth, feeling most of her environment through every one of her senses: touch, smell, hearing, eyesight, and even taste. She experienced sensory overload every minute of every day, which was why she wore the high-tech glasses. Her father had invented and patented the glasses. He had called them Misha-Wear, and she liked that name. Misha was proud that her father had been really good at inventing things. He and her mama had spent a lot of time trying to help her be more normal. Her mother had gotten frustrated, but her father had stuck with her, the way Misha saw it. She had been his best buddy, as he’d called it.

  The glasses helped deaden some of the sensory overload. They had a special antinoise device in the tips behind the ears to filter the millions of sounds Misha could hear every second. She had tried on his Bose headset once, and he had seen that the antinoise feature helped her calm down a bit, because she used to always move, always flail her arms, trying to swat away the noise. He had used a heads-up display in the glasses to help her filter the hundreds of images she could see in a single second. Visual overload was a particular problem for her. She could see things at about four hundred times the rate a “normal” person could. It was sort of like the difference between a new ultrahigh-definition smart television that could have dozens of channels playing at once and a ten-year-old color TV with a single picture. Her father had built a video recorder into the frame so she could play back what her mind had just recorded and what she should have seen, or what a “normal” person might have seen. Often, the images in her mind were more crisp and clear and memorable than what the video showed. Instead of glasses that helped her vision improve, they were glasses that helped her filter the constant overload. The nose bridge even carried a small electrical pulse that deadened her sense of smell, which carried over to taste and helped with touch.

  These glasses were his first prototype, but they worked for her. Misha knew that when people looked at her, most probably thought she was mentally challenged. Well, she thought that she was mentally challenged, challenged not to be so much smarter than everyone else, which she just gave up on trying to do. She could hear the whispers right now. She’s not right. Misha’s slow. How do her parents deal with her?

  Misha had four things she really loved to do:

  Write computer code with her father.

  Look at and figure out maps.

  Solve problems.

  And, of course, make lists.

  She rarely communicated using her voice. A hug, though, meant she was happy to see you or maybe scared or even thankful. She’d liked the pressure of her father’s hugs. The tighter he’d squeezed, the better. It was almost like his bear hugs had been so powerful that they made everything else stop for Misha and let her focus on one thing: her belief in him.

  The need for pressure was also why she had asked the big man in the school to hold her tight this morning. She had been scared. When her father had learned that this helped her, he’d built her a small place in the basement where she could squeeze between two mattresses and feel the pressure. Not even her mother knew about this place hidden in the corner, behind her father’s server racks.

  Walking away from someone meant she needed distance, or perhaps she was afraid about or not comfortable with what she was hearing. Staring away from someone meant she was listening, most likely, or sometimes assessing. Staring at someone meant they probably weren’t staring at her. She wasn’t great with eye contact, mainly because she felt like she could see right through the person into their mind. When she was younger, and her behavior was not as calm as it was today, she’d imagined she avoided eye contact because she was embarrassed at not being able to communicate as well as she wanted. To solve problems, though, required listening, and she was an intent listener. The glasses had helped her get to this point, because a few years ago she had been pretty out of control all the time.

  One of her lists was of her favorite people. They were:

  Daddy

  Temple Grandin

  Henry Cavendish

  Katniss Everdeen

  She knew Katniss was a character in a book called The Hunger Games—which she loved—and wasn’t real, but Misha’s viewpoint was that people’s minds created their own reality, and in her mind Katniss was an inspiration. Not unlike her, Katniss fought against tremendous odds every day. Temple Grandin was a grown lady with autism. Misha had read every book she’d ever written and had watched every video she’d produced. Reading her words, Misha figured most people would never know Temple was ever autistic. Temple found comfort by being with cows in the field. Misha found comfort by being with computers in her father’s basement. Henry Cavendish was one of the smartest men ever to live, and he was autistic before they had a name for autism.

  Daddy loved her unconditionally.

  Temple mentored her (without knowing about it), enabling her to understand herself.

  Henry motivated her to live to her full potential.

  Katniss inspired her to be brave.

  The eco-pod was very comfortable for her because it was built for an adult, and she was just eleven years old. Plus, it was compact, and she could squeeze herself into a corner, getting the pressure she needed. Was she scared? Sure. Without the glasses, she would probably be beating her head against the Plexiglas of the eco-pod right now. But she had learned to use information to comfort herself, especially when her mother had begun to pull away from father and her, which she hadn’t understood at first.

  Another of her lists was about computer hackers. She had made a list of the youngest computer hackers ever caught. She was one who hadn’t been caught, at least not by the police. Her list:

  Christopher von Hassel, age five, United States, hacked Microsoft

  Anonymous Boy, age twelve, Canada, hacked Canadian defense

  Jani, age ten, Finland, hacked and patched Instagram bug

  Wang Zhenyang, age thirteen, China, hacked the Chinese military

  cOmrade, age fifteen, United States, hacked NASA

  MafiaBoy, age fifteen, Canada, hacked E-Trade

  Her father had joked that instead of being convicted in China for hacking China’s own defense systems, Wang would be hacking the White House next and would be rich one day.

  Her daddy. She missed her father, and she was upset because of what she had done to him.

  She needed to reconcile. That was what her mother always said about people who had done bad things. They needed to reconcile. Their Day of Judgment would come, so they better reconcile. She guessed that there were various ways to reconcile, but she hadn’t fully figured that part out yet. Her mother had said it was about balancing the scales.

  So, really, Misha figured she had to balance the scales, which meant do more good than bad. And that was why she was here in the eco-pod. She needed to see for real what she had seen in the Cefiro database. Misha knew she had done something adult, so she couldn’t balance that in an eleven-year-old way. It had to be in an adult way. Her mind worked more like an adult’s, anyway, even better than an adult’s mind in many cases. She decided to make a plan and practice, just as she did when she prepared for something that was hard for her in school. To reconcile for killing her father, she had to go to the beginning, to his job.

  Her father had been an Internet information assurance specialist. He had prevented hackers from stealing trade secrets from the new car company, Cefiro. Cyber attackers stole information and business from big companies, so the companies needed people like her daddy to keep the information private. Cefiro was the first company to mass-produce autonomous cars, and her father had been the best in the business. She used to read her father’s report cards from the companies he worked for before Cefiro, and they were all really good. Plus, her father had been working on cars that drove themselves so that people could ride in them and do what they did, anyway, when they were driving: text, talk on the phone, read the n
ewspaper, think, and put on makeup.

  Misha had read on one of the blogs she subscribed to that autonomous vehicles were 20 percent safer than vehicles driven by humans. From riding with her mother a few times when she was late, she thought it must be true. In North Carolina alone there were about fifteen hundred fatal car accidents a year. With 20 percent fewer accidents, there would be three hundred fewer accidents that killed people every year. There were kids her age being killed in those accidents, so her father had believed autonomous cars would save kids’ lives.

  He had initially taught her how to write code, and though he hadn’t done it on purpose, he had taught her how to hack. All her hacking up until recently had been focused on fun stuff, like writing game apps and then seeing who the users were, and exposing anonymous bloggers who criticized things her father had liked. He had liked to play Fantasy Football, and he’d won a lot—with her help—and the bloggers would call him names. She had found out who they were by getting behind the firewall of the football Web site and finding the registration addresses and names for his main critics. Then she had anonymously posted their real names online. She and her father had never heard from them again after that. She could get into the Deep Web—some called it the Dark Web—but she stayed away most of the time. Murderers, sex traffickers, and other people an eleven-year-old girl should not know about were in the Deep Web. But Misha wanted to know how to code and bypass firewalls and work her way downward, like in a reverse Super Mario game, so it was fun for her to figure out.

  Thinking about her father encouraged her to look down at the keyboard in the pod. It was a standard American keyboard on a tray that could slide out and in, to conserve space. Above it was a large monitor, maybe twenty inches wide. She looked for the processor and couldn’t see one. She guessed it was in the dash of the pod, which actually looked like a car dashboard, with dials and gauges for the air pressure, oxygen level, and temperature.