ZerOes (18 page)

THE LODGE

T
he part of the Hunting Lodge they're pretty sure doesn't have cameras is around the far side, just past the lap pool and the basketball court—there's this small section where the fence goes wide to accommodate a heap of three boulders. Above the boulders stands a big, leaning leafy tree—Wade calls it a “tulip tree,” and then he adds before anybody can ask, “Is it really a surprise that an old man likes to garden now and again?”

The cameras mounted on the fences have a wide sweep, but the two on each side fail to get as far as this far corner. The whole place is rigged with bugs, too, but so far, nothing here. Other hackers hang here sometimes, but whenever the Zeroes get free time at the end of a day, they reconvene here. Dipesh confirms for them that he's never seen any bugs here—and he says he's hacked the cameras to see, and, sure enough, they never quite get far enough.

They meet here every day. All of them except Reagan.

On Day 29, they get let out of their individual pods early, at 3
P
.
M
., to have some “rec time,” as Hollis puts it, because tomorrow, he says, it's time for what he calls the Pressure Cooker. Means they're transitioning.
Moving from individual tasks—which has pretty much been a month of penetration tests for an unholy host of companies spanning the gamut—to pod missions. Working as a team for the first time.

Chance is frankly amazed he's still here. Like, he's not a Christian so much as he's an occasional churchgoer who likes crackers and grape juice, but being here for damn near thirty days has been nothing short of a bona fide miracle. He's about ready to handle some snakes, build an ark, cut a couple of babies (or at least baby dolls) in half.

He heads out with the pod. Wade, as always, trails behind, off in his own world a little bit. He mostly sits back, listens, offers commentary that ping-pongs between grumpy and jokey, and otherwise doesn't contribute much. The core trio is Aleena, Chance, and DeAndre.

At the boulders, they clamber up onto their individual perches. DeAndre grabs a chip of stone from the base of one rock and then, on the turtle-shaped center boulder, finds their markings and adds another hash. “Almost at thirty days,” he says. “Just another 335 to go after that.”

Wade growls: “And then they double-tap each of us and throw our bodies into a ravine somewhere.” He draws a deep, satisfied breath. “The sweet release of death.”

“Man, shut up,” DeAndre says. “They're not gonna
kill
us.”

“How do you think this works?” Wade asks. “We wash their dirty laundry and then get to walk away and go back to our various legal deviancies? We're not operatives. We're not soldiers they've spent time grooming. We're assets. Cards you play and then burn so that nobody else can play them. Mark my words: we're dead hackers walking.”

DeAndre just rolls his eyes. “Pssh, whatever.” He turns to the other two. “Hey, I got something.”

“Me first,” Aleena says, smiling big.

“Why you gotta jump in my grave?”

“Because I'm small and quick. Guess what happened?”

Chance interrupts: “Hey, whoa, hell no—you two always do this.
I'm
going first with the news this time because it's not gonna be half as impressive as what the two of you have and I always end up being the big old yawn at the end of the story.”

DeAndre and Aleena share a look. She laughs—a rare sound, but Chance is hearing it more and more, and then she looks at Chance and he thinks:
Wait, hold on, is she giving me eyes?
He's never sure.

Then, as always, it's gone as soon as it arrives. She says, almost coldly, “Go on.”

His pulse kicking in his neck like a wild horse, he swallows hard and says, “Sarno's missing.”

DeAndre's face wrinkles up like a deflated basketball. “Who's Sarno?”

“Man, really? You guys don't even listen to me at all, do you.”

It's Wade that jumps in—he's sitting over on the farthest rock, whittling a stick with a sharp stone. “Sarno's the self-help guru. Chance actually managed that pen test.”

“That's right,” Chance says. That one was slow-pitch, but they've been getting harder. Aleena getting him the phone helped—they monitor the calls, of course, so it's not like he can go ringing up the
Citizen-Times
newspaper or MSNBC or whatever, but either way, sometimes it's nice to just
talk
to somebody. And he's amazed how much people will tell him after a few small lies. Wade told him:
You know, this is how the old-school hackers did it half the time. Wasn't about toolkits and programming tricks. They called up people at the phone company or banks or wherever, and got them to give away passwords, account numbers, personal data
.
Hacking isn't always about hacking systems, son. Sometimes it's about hacking people
.

Of course, even with hacking people, he's still barely hanging on—he's lucky if he nets a C grade. Usually he's in the D range. Still. He isn't dead yet.

“Sarno's missing,” Aleena says. “I don't know if that's connected to . . . any of this.”

“He some kinda big deal?” DeAndre asks.

Aleena nods. “Bestselling author. Had a TV show back in . . . 2005? I remember watching it when I got home from high school. It was like
Oprah
, but worse. I think his star's been falling for a while. Like, he's a joke now.”

Wade, again: “How'd you figure out he was missing?”

“That's the funky bit,” Chance says. “I was pen-testing this company called BrightFlow—they're all about predictive search queries. Making more efficient search engines and stuff.”

DeAndre snaps his fingers. “This little search engine start-up called Glassboat has a partnership with them. Or did, anyway.”

“Well,” Chance continues, “one of the programming team members
of BrightFlow is this guy, Bryan Sarno. I thought, huh, okay, Sarno, I know that name. So I did a little digging—called up their front desk, and the receptionist didn't wanna tell me anything but I pretended I was a distraught relative and hinted at there being a death in the family, and I dropped the name Alan, said,
Alan gave me this number, said you'd help me
. And then I heard her gasp.”

“Because Alan went missing.”

“Uh-huh. She said,
You talked to Alan?
She told me that sure enough, he went missing about six months ago. And his brother, Bryan, died from a heart attack.” A pause. “Faulty pacemaker, apparently.”

They all take a moment to hover over that. “I don't know what the hell it means,” DeAndre finally says. “Or if it even matters.”

“It matters,” Chance says. “It has to, man. Has to.”

DeAndre laughs. “You just wanna be part of the Scooby Gang, is all.”

“Damn right I do! I'll be Thelma. Is it Thelma with the bowl cut and the turtleneck? Just let me in the Mystery Machine.”

“It's
Velma
,” Aleena corrects. “Velma Dinkley.”

“She had a last name?” DeAndre asks.

“They all did. Velma Dinkley, Shaggy Rogers, Fred Jones, Daphne Blake.”

“Are we seriously talking about
Scooby-Fucking-Doo
?” Wade asks. He inches closer, tosses the stick and rock over his shoulder. “Pay attention, nerdlingers, come on. Think! All this nonsense isn't nonsense. It's connected somehow. Don't you get the feeling that we're not pen-testing individual companies but something much bigger?”

Chance thinks he's right. He doesn't understand it all, but he's right. Aleena nods too, says: “We can't see the bigger picture yet. But something does connect it all.”

“Ring around the roses,” Wade says.

“Be nice if we knew what Reagan has seen,” Chance says.

“Forget her,” Aleena says. “She's Shane's little puppy now.”

“Check it,” DeAndre says, lifting his chin in a gesture. They follow his gaze and, sure enough, there's Reagan and Shane. Off toward the Ziggurat. Watching them.

“Smile and wave,” Aleena says. They all do, giving obnoxious little finger-waggle waves, the kind that Reagan so often gives them. “And three . . . two . . . one . . .” They all turn their waving hands into middle fingers.

DeAndre nods. “I'm gonna find out what's in that bitch-ass folder. The one from that German geothermal company.” He bites his lower lip. “That thing's shut up tighter than a goat's asshole around a couple of hillbillies, but damn if I did not figure out a way to crack that motherfucker when I was trying—and failing—to sleep last night.” He grins big. “That's my news, by the way. Tomorrow, I'm gonna crack it. And y'all is gonna cover for me since we'll be in the same room and all.”

Aleena says: “Now you jumped in
my
grave.”

“Was mine to begin with.”

“It's fine. My news is better.”

“Oh?”

“Oh.”

She lowers her voice. “The Widow contacted me again.”

“The plan still the plan?” Reagan asks.

Shane stares out over the basketball court. He's got this look on his face, this thousand-yard stare. As if he's watching the Zeroes but also staring straight through them. He says in a flat, quiet voice, “We can't get to Dalton like we did before because, if I'm being honest, your skills aren't up to snuff.”

“The little terrorist twat is tricky.” She
hmm
s. “That's a helluva tongue twister, isn't it? Terrorist twat is tricky. Terrorist twat is tricky. Teowwist trot is twicky—”

“She's not just tricky, she's good. She's
skilled
. Aleena Kattan is no bullshit. She—herself, all by her lonesome—executed a merciless, ongoing denial-of-service attack on the Baathist government of Syria. She's exposed a dozen or more honor killers, rapists, kidnappers. She flattens firewalls like they're made of aluminum foil, granting Net access to protesters and rebels. She's the real deal, Reagan. Show some fucking respect.”

“Oooh. Aren't we a little
tetchy
.”

He gives her a look sharp as a pair of scalpels. “Aleena blocked our access to Chance, but we can use her against him just the same. It'll just take a deeper hack. The kind you're really good at.”

She is. She knows she is. So far, her time here has been about penetrating systems and testing them for their weaknesses—but, truth is,
she
much
prefers doing that to people, instead. Poking at them with sharp sticks until they yelp. And she and Shane do have some sticks sharpened to damning points.

“I gotta know,” she says. “Why do you have such a hard-on for Dalton?”

“He's a poser. An amateur pretending to be a professional.”

“You sure it's not that he took some spotlight in your absence? Maybe that . . . chafes your ball-bag a little bit?”

Shane wheels on her. “It's not just about that. It's about bigger things. There's a design at work. And this is part of it. This is—”

From not far away comes the sound of weeping. Reagan turns, cranes her neck, sees Miranda and Dipesh walking up. It's Dipesh that's crying. They head down toward the empty basketball court. Reagan watches Miranda try to pull Dipesh into an embrace, but he pulls away, then buries his face in his hands and begins pacing in erratic circles.

“Someone must've pissed in his—”

Dipesh yells—a roar of frustration and rage through the tears.

“—curry,” she finishes.

“Some hackers can't hack it,” Shane says. “C'mon. I have something to show you.”

Chance, Aleena, and DeAndre hop down off the rocks and head away from the boulders, toward Dipesh. Wade remains behind on the rock, watching as if he's a spectator at a sporting event.