ZerOes (22 page)

“Whatever it is,” Aleena says. “I bet it's Typhon.”

They get to work.

DeAndre sits back down, starts figuring out a fresh take on what he calls his “Master Hacker, Mother-Cracker, Death Star Laser Program.”

Wade dives into the Deep Web, looking for so-called dark-news sites—places that compile all the hidden and hush-hush government secrets.

Reagan works on the Iran problem. Nobody knows what the hell she's doing, only that she's “got a plan,” and it makes her giggle uncontrollably.

They put Chance on Google duty. They hack a path through the search engine to clear the way for unblocked, unmitigated searching and tell him to start putting together the companies they pen-tested in various search strings. See if he can drum up any more connections between them. Anything that points to whatever the hell Typhon is.

Aleena has one job: contact the Widow. If anybody knows anything, it's her.

The Widow of Zheng.

Historically, that title falls to one Ching Shih, a Chinese prostitute taken off her floating brothel home to be the wife of the pirate Zheng Yi. Zheng Yi died not long after, in a tsunami—a whole fleet of his boats taken out.

That should've been that, but Ching Shih had other ideas. She took over the so-called Red Flag Fleet. Her rules were iron-clad: no raping, no sex, no stealing from the common man, no fighting on any of the boats. Any violation of her rules resulted in a variety of wretched punishments: tied to a cannonball and fired into the sea, beheaded, stomped to death on deck, fed to gathered sharks or orcas. Deserters suffered, too: they were hunted down and disfigured.

Under her care, the fleet didn't wither. Its power multiplied. Its ranks swelled. She took the fleet from six hundred boats to eighteen hundred.

She set up a pirate government, controlled every aspect of piracy, and ran a criminal empire spanning the entire South China Sea. When other pirates attacked her, she stole their ships and used their own crews against them. The military couldn't stop her, either: She outran them. Outgunned them. Out
thought
them at every turn.

The military's only weapon against her was amnesty. They offered her a chance to walk away from it all with all her loot and total freedom. She took the deal. She was thirty-five years old at the time and lived another thirty-four years managing the same floating brothel from which she had been taken.

Ching Shih was one of the most successful pirates of all time. And now, a hacker has taken her name and title.

Aleena's known about the Red Flag Fleet—the hackers, not the actual fleet of boats—for years now. They've been at the edges of hacker society for a decade, as much a myth as a confirmed presence. Their deeds are legendary: hacking the United States infrastructure, shutting down various satellite launches via NASA, even uploading a worm to the International Space Station that threatened its air supply and docking mechanisms. Some folks think they're part of—or at least backed by—the Chinese military, but Aleena never thought so. Their footprints were all over the hacking of China's own aerospace program. They have routinely made North Korea a target, sometimes forcing missile launches into nowhere (which the DPRK always claims is intentional, some kind of threat and test of their might).

The RFF are wildly effective. And, like the actual pirate fleet before it, they have a code.

So when Aleena received that message—
Who is Typhon?
—signed by “The Widow,” she almost couldn't believe it.

It was only days later that the Widow appeared again. This time, in a much bigger way. The lights in Aleena's pod shut down. Then the cameras. Everything but the screen. The Widow appeared streaming on-screen—a terrible feed, unclean and distorted by pixilation and blocky artifacts. The sound was warped, too. But what Aleena saw behind the shifting, chameleon-skin distortions of the video feed was a girl almost as young as she was. Long hair, straight as a rain of arrows. Face white like chalk.

She said: “Aleena Kattan. You are a pawn. A piece moved about by invisible enemies. Find—” Voice distortion. Aleena tried speaking
back, but her words went unheard, and then the Widow's voice emerged anew: “Find Typhon. Reveal it to the world. The monsters in the dark wither when exposed to the
liiiiight
—” That last word, prey once more to distortion, drawn out as if in slow motion, stuttering—

And then she was gone. Lights back on. Cameras, too.

When Aleena told the story to the others, Wade asked:
How do you know it was really her?
The answer, at least to Aleena, was clear: Who else could hack into the Hunting Lodge so boldly?

Now, Aleena needs to find the Widow of Zheng again. Thing is, how do you find a hacker mastermind? What does that search even begin to look like? This isn't just an act of finding a needle in a haystack. It's conjuring a ghost—summoning a demon. She sits at the computer for a while and just stares.

When a hand falls on her shoulder, she actually jumps. Wade says, “You look like you saw a ghost.”

“More like, I'm trying to summon one, and I'm failing.”

“Speak English.”

“I was born in America, racist.”

“No, I mean—” He sighs, defeated. “Sorry, I just mean, I don't know what the devil you're talking about. Just . . . tell me what you're doing.”

“Oh.” He seems genuine? Hm. “I'm trying to find a way to contact the Widow.”

“Huh. Sure she's not watching us right now?”

“If she is, she's not jumping in to say so.”

“Here's something. Before your time and a bit after mine, the hacker-cracker pool was much smaller than it is today. Back in the eighties and nineties, you didn't have these giant carder markets or whole hacker fleets so much as you had lone wolves and little cabals trying to break into banks, mess with IBM, phreak the phone company, what have you. Groups like the Warelords, the Masters of Deception. Along with the Kevin Mitnicks and Phiber Optiks and whoever, early on there was this Bay Area hacker, called himself Emperor Norton. To track him down you used old hobo code—you'd scratch a sign into the sidewalk or on a BART seat or whatever with a bit of chalk, maybe a stone. You didn't find him. He found you.”

Aleena says, “So I should let her come to me.”

“But not before leaving a trail of bread crumbs.”

“Good idea.” She never thought she'd be saying this, but: “Thanks, Wade. Whatever happened to the Emperor?”

“Turns out, he was a homeless guy. Fucked up like so many of us are. He eventually jumped in front of the trolley after it reopened in 1984.”

“Oh.”

“Uh-huh.” He shrugs. “Good luck with your hunt. Leave good bait.”

And then Wade goes back to work.

Good bait
. Aleena knows what to do. Reagan spoke about an image she saw:
IMAGO TYPHONVS
. On some old woodcut or something. Didn't take Aleena long to figure out that it was from a seventeenth-century book called
Oedipus Aegyptiacus
, by Athanasius Kircher. She grabs that image file, starts popping into every Deep Web forum she can find with a question:
Who is Typhon? The Widow knows
.

Time to go fishing.

He has a task at hand, but Chance isn't doing it.

He knows he should be, but Google. Oh man, sweet Google. It's a window to the outside world, and he hasn't looked out that window in all too long now. The Hunting Lodge is like a bigger version of the Dep. It's not like Chance was particularly connected to the world outside, but suddenly what few connections he had feel all the more precious, and here's a chance to find them.
You deserve this
, he tells himself.

He searches for himself on Google. He's been outed. He knew it was coming. Soon as he got his ass kicked in his own driveway, he had to figure his name would leak. Copper said as much. But here—oh man. News stories. Blog posts. Postings across endless forums. Digging up his life, his address, his everything. Talking about how his mother died from cancer—and they keep calling her a “failed actress,” which only makes him grit his teeth so hard they could snap (even though a smaller voice inside him acknowledges the truth of the statement). Talking about how his father killed himself—and then he sees that's what a lot of people think
Chance
did, too. They think he killed himself. Like they'll find his body bobbing in Lake Norman one day, or
some dog will drag his half-eaten body out from underneath some overpass somewhere.

Worse, a lot of folks
hope
that's what happened. Turns out, pissing off the fans of a football team is a good way to get yourself threatened with death. Never mind the fact that he outed a goddamn
rape posse
—a crew of jock monsters who had zero problem stalking girls like they were zebras on the veldt, getting them drunk or roofied, raping them, then ditching them on their lawns like an empty, half-crushed beer can. (One comment on Reddit: “You ask me Chase Dalton should get raped then killed then raped again but only after he has to watch a video of his own mother taking it in all her holes.”)

It's not everybody. He sees posts in support of him. Some blogs calling him a hero. But none of that outweighs the tide of toxic shit slung his way. Doubly awful are all the people who support Bogardian and the others: petitions to get them released, to get their sentences cut, goddamn
love letters
to a handful of rapist shits.

Chance feels overwhelmed by it all. He tells himself to stop looking. He knows he did the right thing, and that should be enough. He didn't do it to be a rock star. It's not like he wants Marvel to turn him into a superhero comic book. He did it because it was the right thing to do. (
And because you had a debt to pay
. That voice from You-Know-Who.)

Then he goes and does it. He Googles the name: Angela Slattery. He knows what he'll find, and he does: There's her obituary. Young girl, sixteen, dead from self-inflicted gunshot wound—

“Whatcha lookin' at?”

Chance about pisses himself. He quickly closes the browser. He looks behind, sees Wade damn near sitting on his shoulder like a hawk. “Nothing. Don't you have things to . . . things to do? Jeez, man, warn a guy before you come up on him like that.”

“You all right?” Wade asks. “You seem off.”

“Fine. Yeah. Just great.”

“That Dep is pretty bad, huh.”

Chance hesitates. He doesn't want to talk about it. “Yeah.”

Wade puts a hand on his shoulder. It's warm, reassuring, unexpected. Chance is about to say thank you, but then DeAndre says: “I did it. Holy shit, I did it!”