ZerOes (11 page)

THE LODGE

T
he Lodge shuts everything down at 9
P
.
M
. A female voice over a loudspeaker tells them that everyone is to be back in their cabins by nine thirty, at which point the cabins lock.

Reagan is missing.

At first, fine, whatever. Everyone's nervous, it seems, but nobody really wants to acknowledge it. They keep peering out the door and the windows. All the other hackers—the prisoners, they have to remind themselves, since most of today it felt like they were just students on some kind of college campus hidden in the mountains—have gone to their pods, and only a few mill around. None of them seem to be Reagan.

“She's gonna get washed out, first day,” DeAndre says.

“Good,” Aleena says as she climbs the ladder to the loft. “Let her.”

Chance says, “Couldn't that hurt all of us?”

“It does seem like our fates are intertwined,” Wade says. “She messes up, we all gotta do the push-ups, you know?”

“Crap,” Aleena says. “You think?
Crap
. She's going to screw us.”

9:25
P
.
M
. Still no Reagan. Everyone shuts up. Like speaking will somehow scare her away. The uncertainty in the room is killing them.
What happens if she's not accounted for? Do they all wash out? Get packed back in SUVs and sent to prison?

DeAndre hurries around the room, whispers in everyone's ear—Chance assumes everyone gets reminded of the same thing: “They probably got mics or cameras in this room. You feel me?”

Nine thirty rolls around. The door seals with a vacuum
foomp
. There's a loud rattle as the lock engages. The lights in the cabin go out with a buzz and a click.

“Good night,” Aleena says. And then she names them one by one until finally she says: “Good night, Reagan.”

Time slows to a crawl. Like sap oozing from cold pine. Chance lies there in his cot. DeAndre and Wade nearby. Wade's asleep. When the old man snores, he sounds like someone throwing kitchen appliances into a wood chipper.

DeAndre's not making any noise, so Chance takes a, well, chance, and says: “You awake, DeAndre?”

“What? I am now.”

“Sorry.”

“Whatever, man, I wasn't actually asleep.”

“I think I'm screwed.”

“Huh?”

“I'm way out of my depth, man. I don't know what they're gonna have us do, but first day I'll be the guy who drowns in a puddle.”

“You'll be all right.”

I don't think so
, Chance thinks. He's about to say something else, but from the loft, Aleena hisses:

“Shut up. I'm trying to sleep.”

“We are, too,” DeAndre says.

“Doesn't sound like it!”

DeAndre snorts a laugh. Chance does, too. But that's the last they speak.

Eventually, sleep reaches a tentative, hesitant hand and takes them all.

Hollis walks the nighttime perimeter of the Hunting Lodge. The forest is loud with chittering bugs. It's isolated up here. Way too isolated. Hollis doesn't do country mouse very well. He's a city mouse—born and
raised in D.C. The Hunting Lodge feels too remote. So far off the grid you start to forget there's a grid in the first place.

Hunting Lodge
, he thinks. Given the targets they go after, it's an apt name, if a little cocky. He wonders what his five hacker charges will think about that—they haven't seen what's coming down the pike. They don't know what they'll be asked to do. Up until now, everything's been theory. But tomorrow, it starts.

He doesn't have high hopes. Aleena is capable, but too principled. Reagan is a mystery—she claims she's just a troll, but his file on her is thick as three thumbs and it isn't just trolling. Earthman is old school, old tech, old man; wouldn't surprise Hollis to see him wash out. DeAndre's probably their best bet, here—capable, savvy, so far seems to know he should shut up and do the time. He puts on a good show, but Hollis thinks DeAndre is scared. That's good.

Chance, though—Chance is a worry. They should've just let him be. If the law brought charges against him for hacking into some e-mails, so be it. Let him tangle with the justice system, take his shot—the court of public opinion would be on his side (at least outside his own town, where they were ready to crucify him for screwing up their football season). But this kid doesn't really know what he's doing, and—

Somewhere not far away, a branch snaps.

Hollis stops. Listens. Peers out into the dark woods. Behind him, the lights of the Lodge shine bright—while it's lights-out inside the cabins, the pods, and the Ziggurat, out here the electric lights buzz and hum and shine. They cast fingers of light out into the trees, but that only goes so far, and—

Snap
. Another branch cracks. There's a flutter of feathers—some night bird takes flight, is gone.

Hollis feels the weight of his Glock 21 hanging pendulous at his hip. The weight of consequence. He's taken his gun out too many times to count, even taken a few shots here and there, but he shot and killed someone only one time:

Fellhurst. Back when he and Golathan—

A rustle of leaves.
Just a deer
, he thinks.
Or a bear
. Are there bears here? Moose? Elk? Jesus, he doesn't know. He knows rats, pigeons, city raccoons, and skunks.

Still. Hollis pops the holster latch, draws the gun. Heads down the steps toward the first fence. He thumbs the soft switch on the tactical
light hanging from the front of the .45, and a beam of garish white light punctures the darkness like a pin. Casting a chain-link shadow as it shines: a series of dark diamond outlines.

Hollis shines the beam side to side. Nothing. His thumb reaches to turn off the tactical light—

Movement. Off to the left. He pivots, points the pistol. A person is out there. On the other side of the fence. Running almost silently through the trees. Hollis catches a glimpse of a thick frame, hunched over, a muss of dark hair, and then the figure is gone.

Hollis yells. Curses under his breath. Who the hell could be out there? The Hunting Lodge has
two
fences. Nobody gets between them—though, is the five-mile outer fence really guarded well? Probably not.

Hollis grabs the radio and calls in for backup. Time to do what the Lodge's nickname demands.

Time to go hunting.

THE CABIN

T
he alarm—it's not a clock radio going off, clicking over to some nineties-era one-hit wonder (that insidious earworm about walking five hundred miles), and it's not the happy chime of an iPhone. It's a honking Klaxon, a sound like what someone hears when they're in a submarine and the XO is yelling
dive, dive, dive!
Aleena sits up in her bed, her heart like a rat in a cage that just suffered an electrical shock—it beats so fast she thinks it's going to break out of her chest and run for the door.

By the time she covers her ears, the Klaxons outside stop. Everyone is sitting up in their beds except Wade. And that includes Reagan.

Aleena looks across at the smug, self-satisfied face. Reagan smirks, eyes squinting. She yawns, rubs her face. “What's up, little Kardashian?”

“I'm not a—what? I'm not Armenian. They're Armenian.”

“What are you, then?” Reagan picks at the edge of a nostril. Flicks something away, maybe a bit of skin, maybe a booger.

“I'm
American
.”

“Fine, whatever, I meant what nationality—”

“Syrian.”

“Syria and Armenia share a border, so I was close.”

“They do not share a border. Turkey is in the middle—”

Reagan giggles. “Like a sandwich. A delicious, Arabic, Muslim sandwich.”

“Armenians aren't Arabs—I think they're just Armenians. And they're not generally Muslim, either, it's a Christian country—wait.
Wait
. This is what you do, isn't it? My brother does this to my mother. He winds her up. You're just winding me up.”

“It's kinda my jam.”

Aleena makes a frustrated noise. Down in the cabin, Chance and DeAndre are both standing over Wade. Wade is still rolled over, snoring like a grizzly bear with a bad case of sleep apnea.

She turns back to Reagan. “Where were
you
last night?” she hisses quietly.

Reagan presses a finger to her lips. Then leans forward as if she's gonna share a secret: “Nunya. Fuggin'. Business.” Suddenly she's standing up, stretching and yawning in a loud, obnoxious way (Aleena realizes that this is Reagan's default setting: loud and obnoxious). Then she claps her hands and says: “Today is eval day. As I understand it, that means a simple black box
pen test
. You know the deal: an hour to shower and then a day to shine. Let's move.”

“What do you mean a black box pen test?” Aleena asks.

“C'mon, little girl, you know what that is. Right?”

“Yes, damn it, I know what it is. But how do
you
know that's what's happening today? Nobody told us that.”

Reagan pops a finger in her mouth like she's slurping on a lollipop, then holds it up in the air and says: “I just know which way the wind is blowing, sweetie pie.”

Chance and DeAndre stand over Wade's snore-roaring body.

“If he wasn't making that awful sound, I'd think he was dead,” DeAndre says.

“He sounds like someone moving furniture across a broken floor.”

“I know, man. I can feel it vibrating in my feet. In my
teeth
.”

DeAndre nudges Wade in the middle of the back with a knee. Nothing.

“Hey,” Chance says, voice low. “What the hell's a . . . black box pen test?”

“You're joking, right?” DeAndre asks. But the look in Chance's eyes tells him this ain't no joke. “Oh,” DeAndre says. “Oh, you really
are
screwed. A pen test is a penetration test. Like, you hit a company to see how vulnerable it is to . . . well, people like us.”
Like me
, he thinks, but doesn't say. “White box means you get all the info you need to do the job. Black box means they're not telling us shit about the test. Means we go in blind, you feel me?”

“I don't feel you. Because I don't know what the hell I'm doing.” Chance shakes his head. “It's fine. I'll . . . I'll figure it out.”

“Okay. Cool.” DeAndre doesn't hear a lot of confidence in the dude's voice, but it is what it is. He can't be sticking his neck out for somebody. Especially somebody he doesn't know from Adam. “Hey. What's the deal with Troll Girl up there? How'd she get in last night?”

“Damn, man, I dunno. She seems to be playing her own game and I'm not sure if we're allies, competitors, or pawns on the board.”

“I hear that. I'd say that describes our situation in this whole
place
.”

Behind them, a llamalike bleat as Wade Earthman rolls over and stares up at them through a curtain of gray ringlets. “Would you ladies kindly shut up? I am doing my damnedest to get some beauty rest down here.”

“You snore like two pigs fuckin' in a cement mixer,” DeAndre says.

Wade yawns. “Good morning to you, too, sunshine.”

Hollis comes for them not quite an hour later. He looks haggard, like he hasn't slept. Even his sideburns look rough.

Aleena is still drying her hair, and starts to complain about how they only have one shower and bathroom for five people—

Hollis says: “I had a long night. Say one more thing and I'll pack your ass in an SUV and dump you on Rikers Island without a whiff of ceremony. Let's. Move.”

Breakfast. Hollis stands off to the side, eating a banana. He needs the potassium. He keeps getting leg cramps after last night's tromping
through the woods. By the time he and the other two guards—that thug, Roach, and another dim bulb named Chen—got back from scouring the woods (and finding neither shit nor Shinola out there), he just wanted to sleep. But leg cramps woke him up every hour, on the hour.

Of course, not finding anything out there haunted him, too. He saw something. He saw some
one
. Hollis put in a call early this morning to have a couple of guys go along the fence's perimeter to see if they could find a breach—but he could hear that they were just giving him lip service. Like it was some kind of joke. And maybe it was. After an hour out in the woods not finding so much as a single footprint, Roach and Chen looked at him like he was some doddering old man.

I just turned fifty
, he thinks.
I'm not old
. But his leg cramps maybe tell him otherwise. So does the arthritis in his wrists. And his hips.
Shit
.

He finishes his banana, looks up, sees the pod sitting around, looking mostly mopey, tired, confused. Scared, too. Everyone but Reagan—and, frankly, Hollis is starting to think that one doesn't get scared. Maybe she's a sociopath. The rest of them, though—hell, he suddenly hopes they
all
wash out today. Send 'em home so he can go home, too.

Maybe I am getting too old for this
, he thinks.

Each of the smaller pod buildings is modular. Rounded corners. Eight-by-eight space. Not much there: a desk, a chair, an all-in-one desktop—no touch screen—with Ubuntu Linux as the OS. Mouse, keyboard, not much else. Behind the monitor is one camera. Behind the chair is the other. Both the operator and the monitor are therefore on camera. The five “Zeroes” are informed that every system is mirrored and tracked, and every aspect logged: every key tapped, every nudge of the mouse, even the ways that the
eyes
twitch.

By each computer is a folder that contains written instructions for the day's task.

The five pods in this group are all within ten feet of one another. Hollis opens the doors to each, says that if they have an emergency, they just need to say something out loud—the microphone on the cameras will hear. Otherwise, he says, he'll see them at lunch.

They all step in. The doors lock behind them.

And so begins their first day.

Aleena opens the file folder. Inside is a single sheet of paper. On it, printed in bold Helvetica:

PENETRATION TEST
:
CMG
(
CENTINAL MEDICAL GROUP
)

She reaches for the keyboard. Her fingers hover over the keys without touching them. Her skin feels cold, clammy, covered in pinpricks. This isn't her. Working for this government? A government that doesn't mind what it does to her people? To
any
people who don't register as white, male, and, increasingly, upper class?

She has an urge to just push it all away. Shove the computer onto the ground. Get up, walk out, tell Hollis what he can do with his pen test, then drop the metaphorical microphone and wait for them to pack her into an SUV.

But then what? Will she go home and await the law? Will they just throw her into jail? Will it be a jail that people can visit, or will it be some
Silence of the Lambs
–style hole in the middle of nowhere, not on any map? The United States doesn't have a very good reputation when it comes to dealing with those it considers
enemies
.

And what will happen to her family? Ummi and Abbi—her mother and father? And oh gods, what about Nas? Nasir thinks he's all tough—little pot-smoking thug in training, listening to Jay Z and Kanye, pretending like he doesn't also sometimes watch
My Little Pony
when he gets really high. Prison would eat him up.