DEAD BEEF (Our Cyber World Book 1) (14 page)

Of course, it was, Odehl reflected. He remembered the recovery message.
Switch-out: Node recovered courtesy of Sasha Javan with help from Martin Spencer.
Together, Martin and Sasha had found a better way that did not include Julian’s non-deterministic solution. Odehl hoped that it would hold.

He turned to Thompson, “You and I need to make a phone call.”

“To whom?” Thompson asked, looking a bit perturbed because perhaps the Collections team would soon be out of a job.

“To the secretary of Homeland Security and/or his staff, or the president himself if I have to drag him out of whatever he’s doing. As of right now, at least as far as Martin Spencer is concerned, we need to immediately recall the recovery effort.”

“On what basis?”

“On the basis that Collections agents can’t recover a power grid if the whole world’s existence depended on it.”

“And now for case C,” Sasha whispered into his ear.

“I was afraid you were going to say that,” Martin said, smiling. He was beginning to enjoy this. He felt like ideas were bubbling from every fiber of his brain, like he could see all possibilities at once, sort them, understand them, and attack them in sequence or even in parallel. Martin was in the flow, and it felt exhilarating, a feeling he hadn’t had for quite some time. For a brief moment he wanted to shout something about the young and innovative crowd back at InfoStream.

Sasha brought him back to reality with, “The problem there is that you have no OS. Without an OS, you have no easy access to RAM, and you can’t do what you did with case B.”

“Right, but again, through the backdoor, I can write a tiny snippet of bootable code that let’s me access at least a portion of RAM. I don’t need much, just enough to then load more sophisticated code... Yeah, I see how that will work.”

“The trick will be the different CPUs,” Sasha noted. “You would have to write machine code for each type.”

“It’s going to take a while.”

“Or not.” She pulled away, and started working on her laptop. “Here, I have some bootable stub code for several of the major CPUs out there. I bet this will cover most if not all of the CPUs we’re dealing with.”

Martin looked at her screen, then back at his, then back at hers. “Actually, I think that will take care of all of them.”

It took another two hours to initiate recovery sequences for the remaining nodes. All but five recovered successfully. About those, Martin said, “They were probably damaged somehow in the outage, or they don’t have power to them yet. My bet is on damage. They’ll have to be brought up manually after re-installation of hardware and software.”

“Five out of over ten thousand nodes,” Sara noted. “I’d count that as noise, declare victory and say we earned a good night’s sleep.”

Sasha brought up a live CNN video feed on her laptop. Martin did likewise for NBC on his laptop. Together they watched over the next twenty minutes, eventually learning that power had been restored or would soon be restored to over ninety-five percent of the Los Angeles and surrounding areas. Other areas in California were recovering as well.

“I think it’s time to unplug,” Sasha said, and without waiting for Martin’s approval, she killed the two satellite Internet feeds they had been using. Martin took the cue and powered down both his laptop and hers. Sasha rebooted the network modems then turned them off.

“I didn’t pick up any successful back-traces,” she said. “But it’s good to be safe, and up here, you get to the point where you enjoy being offline and off the grid.”

“OK, if you say so,” he said with a smile.

Sasha was about to say something when the phone tied to the third satellite feed rang. Sasha answered it, putting it on speaker. “Ranger Estrada speaking.”

“Hi, Jeannie. It’s me Silvia.”

“Hey, Silvia. What can I do for you?” On a small white board hanging above her video monitors Sasha wrote, “Waitress from café” in large red letters.

“I just wanted you to know. Late tonight someone came looking for that blond guy with the pony tail.”

“Oh?” Sasha said.

“Yeah, this lady, about your height, with an awful dye job, you know, dirty blond. She showed me two pictures, one of this clean-cut guy with brown hair, and another of your guy. Asked if I had seen either of them. Made it sound like she thought they might be together.”

“And what did you tell her?”

“Just like you told me. I said he’d been there this morning, asking for the quickest way to get to Utah and Bryce Canyon. Told her he had tour books for Utah and Colorado.”

“And what else?”

“Again, like you told me. That he was in a real hurry to leave. That I asked him if he was staying in town and if he needed any suggestions of spots he could visit. And that he wasn’t interested at all, in a real hurry to drive to Tahoe. I told her he sounded like he was meeting someone out there, and that maybe that’s why he was in a hurry. To get there by a certain time. That was my idea to say that last part about him meeting someone, but I thought it flowed good.”

Sasha rolled her eyes. “And what did she say?”

“She asked me if the blond guy had said who he was meeting? I told her that was just my guess, you know, thinking outside the box. She asked me if I could think of anything else, and I just told her what he ordered, and that he didn’t leave a tip.”

“That’s great, Silvia. Super, really.”

“You mean it?”

“Oh, yeah, that was perfect. Listen, one tiny little favor? You wouldn’t mind getting a snippet of your surveillance video that shows her, you know, what she looks like. Just a snippet, it doesn’t have to be the whole thing. That would be too big for email, anyway.”

“I already asked Ralph to work on that for me,” Silvia said. “I also took a picture of her with my iPhone, without her knowing. I went by the window where she was sitting, making like I was answering a call from my boyfriend? And then without looking at her or the phone, I took the picture.”

Sasha grimaced. “I hope your phone didn’t make the click sound?”

“No, I always have that silenced because I like taking pictures of my cat, and the click sound spooks him.”

“Good, good. Listen, Silvia, I told you already, but it’s really important that you don’t tell anybody about this.”

“I know, I know. We want him through and out of town, right?”

“Right.”

“Because he’s Mexican.”

“Because we think he’s working for the Mexican cartel,” Sasha said. “I’m Mexican.”

“Right, because he was pretty fair. And so are you, though you do get nice color in the sun.”

Sasha rolled her eyes again. “OK, I think that’s enough on that topic.”

“Right, because talking on the phone... Well, we should be careful.”

“Exactly. Thanks again for all your help today. You really helped me deal with that creep and avoid him coming here, where he might snoop around.”

“I’ve been meaning to ask you something, Jeannie.”

Sasha gritted her teeth and closed her eyes. “Yes?”

“How did you know what he was going to order?”

Sasha sighed. “It’s a long story, and I’m tired. The short of it is he’s a creep, and probably one with a gun. I’m just glad he’s gone.”

“OK, me too. Good night, Jeannie. Be careful up there.”

“You, too, Silvia.”

Sasha hung up the phone and said, “So... that conversation has a backstory for which I need to fill you in.”

“You read my mind,” Martin said.

Chapter 21

After she left the café, Cynthia noticed that a car was following no more than 20 yards behind her. She drove around a full city block, and it was still there. A tail, she figured, one by incompetent goons, or goons that didn’t care she knew they were tailing her.

She drove around town for a few more minutes, slowing down at times, even pulling over and stopping at one point. The tail just stayed put, right behind her. Cynthia reached behind the passenger seat of the truck and pulled the Uzi to lay it on the passenger seat. She rolled down the driver side window and pulled on her sunglasses.

Eventually she found a street wide enough to support a U-turn, and she gunned the engine, shrieked around to make the U-turn, then slowed down, now traveling in the opposite direction, her left hand on the wheel, right hand on the Uzi which she calmly placed on her lap at the ready.

In her mind she recorded the license plate and kept her face pointed straight ahead, while her eyes aimed at the oncoming car. It was also moving slowly. The two men, also wearing sunglasses were looking right at her. The driver’s heavily tattooed left arm hung out over the door. She recognized the Mexican Mafia markings.

The car went past her uneventfully then also made a U-turn to follow her again. Cynthia thought about making another U-turn, but at this point, that just would be pushing her luck and their bravado a bit too hard. Instead she opted to drive out of town at a normal rate of speed. When she got to Highway 395, she headed south toward Bishop.

If they wanted to have it out, she’d rather do it in open road where the altercation wouldn’t give her presence away. However, after driving for ten minutes or so, she saw their headlights turn at an off-ramp she had just passed.

She wondered what that was all about, and figured that was the kind of tail intended to say, “this town ain’t big for the two of us.” But why? Because she had gone around showing Martin’s and Julian’s pictures? That was odd. As odd that Julian had been the one identified at the café and nowhere else.

She figured that if Julian had been making it public he was going to Tahoe, Utah and Colorado, chances are he was heading south. But that didn’t make sense either, since he’d come from L.A. and would have already gone past Bishop, home to a nearby trail head leading to the Pacific Crest Trail.

A lot of this just wasn’t adding up. She went back to the Mexican Mafia tail. Did Julian and Martin have associates of that caliber keeping an eye out for them? And would Julian and Martin have them run interference in such a blatant way? Unlikely.

Something really didn’t add up. The fact that this something centered at Mammoth Lakes told her she shouldn't drive south to Bishop. The trail, wherever it started and wherever it led was north, not south.

Cynthia pulled over and waited twenty minutes. Then, she found a turnaround point and headed back to Mammoth.

All the lights were out, and Sasha and Martin were half sitting, half lying in their beds. Sasha had just finished reminding Martin how Marijuana crops had for years been an issue in the national forest, and how after California legalized medicinal Marijuana, proponents of legalization had promised that the problem would subside.

“Well, yes, and no,” Sasha said. “In some parts of the national forest the problem diminished, but in others, where rarer, more specialized and prized strains are grown, strains that could not grow just anywhere, the problem persists.”

“I’m guessing that one of those strains grows here.”

“You guess right. For another 20 points, care to guess the name of the strain?” she asked.

“Mammoth blast.”

“Well, more like, High Sierra Dream, or HSD, or High Sierra for the shorthand version. Doesn’t that have a nice, familiar ring? HSD?”

“It sure does. Much better branding than I could dream. I always sucked at branding.”

Sasha smiled before adding, “As it turns out, one of the principal HSD plantations is around here. The forest service hasn’t been able to find it, and I sure haven’t been inclined to look for it and would prefer to keep my ignorance in full force.”

“But?”

“But once those cameras went in for the lookout, certain locals learned of their look-around capabilities, and I was approached to see if I was amenable to keeping an eye out for intruders and away from certain patches of forest where would I please not zoom unless there was a fire.”

“I see,” Martin said. “How much do they know about you?”

“They know that since they approached me, I’m scared about these intruders and what they might do to a lone woman up here in this cabin all by her lonesome. They offered to keep an eye out for me. Anyone shows up asking for me by name or by picture, I get a ring or an email or a tap on the shoulder when I drop into town.”

“Nifty. You tied it to their mess, and not your situation.”

“I learned well, didn’t I? Hide it in plain sight.”

“I take it these intruders are Mexican cartel.”

“Sure. They’d like a piece of the action up here, because this specialized strain has far more commercial value than mere medicinal use would command.” She turned on her side, facing him. “By the way, since the Mexican cartel pays us visits, the DEA makes occasional appearances, too. So far between the DEA snooping and the locals doing the Heissman, the Mexicans have made no inroads.”

“Just when I was thinking I was safe and secure.”

“No worries. At night the cameras go into Infrared mode, and I point one at the trail we took in. Actually, my software automatically does it at sundown. That same software then examines the feed and if it detects anything humanoid coming up, it triggers. In daytime, it’s a bit trickier,” she added. “I usually watch all screens as part of my regular job, but the tree canopy makes it hard to detect someone coming up off-trail. But as you saw earlier today, the trail itself is quite challenging, and going off-trail is a sure way to bust an ankle or break a neck. On most days, some of the local, shall we call them, farmers, have sentries along the walk-in trail. If someone’s coming, they blow a horn. We have a signaling system setup with number of times the horn blows, etc. I won’t bore you with it. Bottom line, in the twelve years I’ve been here, I’ve yet to have someone sneak up on me.”

“Do you get any tourist visitors?” Martin asked. “People vacationing, backpackers—”

“Not many. Look at the guest log book for yourself. Two so far this year. You’re the third. It’s just too much of a pain to get in here.”

As if to punctuate their conversation, a loud thump sound followed by the snapping of branches came from outside the cabin.

Martin sat up and looked at the video screens. “Bear,” he said when he recognized the shape in one of the four screens.

“Just strolling by,” Sasha said with a voice that trailed off. Seconds later she was breathing heavily, already asleep.

Martin lay on his side and closed his eyes, listening as the crunching of pine needles and snapping of branches faded into the forest. For a few minutes he traded thoughts of Julian, Cynthia and Sasha until he too fell asleep.