ZerOes (26 page)

THE LODGE, COMMUNAL POD

T
he pod door hisses open, thanks to Aleena's Floydphone. They stole the digital keys to this place from Shane (all those USB keys and hacker phones give them free range), so it's time to use them. They hurry inside, then she closes the door and reengages the locks. They wait for Reagan, who was hurrying back to their cabin to grab Shane's laptop.

Aleena checks the time. Reagan is taking too long. What if they catch her? They'll throw her in the Dep, too. Take the laptop away. Fear crawls into Aleena's stomach, curling in on itself like a rattlesnake.

But then the door hisses open and Reagan hurries in, laptop hidden under her shirt. She whips it out, sits down, hides it on her lap under her desk, snaps her fingers. “Let's loop it,” she hoots.

They all sit down, make it look like they're working. And 3, 2, 1—

Loop on. Cameras off.

It's a clumsy patch—the video Aleena's looping isn't even from today. It's from yesterday, when they were wearing different clothes, so hopefully whoever is watching ends up distracted by whatever the hell is going on in the cafeteria. Aleena just hopes it isn't Hollis. He
wasn't there—they didn't see him in the cafeteria at all, actually—and though he's not too sharp on the technological side of things, he still always seems to be ahead of the other hacks.

But there's no time to worry about that. She claps her hands. “All right. We need leverage and we need it today. We need to
find Typhon
. Kick over every log. Flip over every stone.”

She tells them each what they're going to do.

Chance needs to start making calls. Ring up all the companies they pen-tested. Find anything that connects one company to all the others. They find a common thread, they can pull on it, maybe find Typhon.

Reagan will scour Shane's laptop. Start putting together an escape plan. Pick up where he left off—he was obviously trying to get out, so follow his lead.

DeAndre and Aleena share the same job: while Chance calls the companies, they go back to the well and start hacking into them again. Look for connections internally—inside the systems themselves. She's on the tech-heavy companies: Infinitest, Glassboat, Centinal. He'll tackle the tech-adjacent companies: the German geothermal company, Arcus, ConGen.

As Aleena works she keeps an ear tilted toward Chance. She tells herself she needs to check his work, in case she needs to steer him along a little. She can hear him feeling the margins with every phone call. Trying to find a way in. He's striking out, every time. She can hear the frustration in his voice. She's about to get up, maybe coach him a little, give him a script.

But then: He's on the line with Centinal. The medical tech supply company. “Hey,” he says. “Betty? Hi! How are you today?” Pause. “Me, yeah, I'm good, thanks. Listen, I need to check on a purchase. Purchase order number? Ahh, hell, hold on.” He points at Aleena, mouths to her:
I need a purchase order number
.

She looks to the computer then back to him in a panic, and shrugs.

He clears his throat. “It's, ahhh, PO number 564 . . . 987.” He gives her a shrug back. “That's not a valid PO? Uhhh. Damn.
Damn
.” He bites his lip. He taps his thumb against the keyboard, agitated. “All right, dang, there's been a screw-up on my end and—you know what? It's not your problem. Hey, lemme ask you, though: your accent sounds familiar. You from North Carolina?” He laughs and nods. “See? I thought so. Wait, wait, lemme guess. Gastonia? Outside Charlotte?” Another
laugh. “Shelby! Whoo-boy, I was close, though, huh? You ever been to Red Bridges BBQ? What am I saying, of course you have.” He claps his hands and now he sounds like he's really into it. “What? You prefer the
chicken
? It is good, but you better be careful—people will TP your house you say that too loud.” Pause. “Huh? What's that? You'll look up the PO for me? Ma'am, I gotta tell ya, you may have just saved my can. Who am I with . . . ? Uhhh.” He gives Aleena a panicked stare.

Aleena remembers cracking Centinal. CMG had a big client—someone she didn't expect. Who was it? Ah. Right!

Aleena grabs a marker, writes on the whiteboard:

DOT

Chance's eyes go wide and he says: “Uhh, I'm with Dot?”

Damnit! She hiss-whispers at him: “Not
dot
. Dee-Oh-Tee!”

“Haha, yeah,” Chance says into the phone. “Right, right, Department of Transportation, that's right. Uh-huh. Okay, okay—”

On the whiteboard, Aleena scribbles:

ASK THEM FOR EMAIL ASSOC W/ ACCT

“Hey—what e-mail address you guys have on file for us? Uh-huh. Edna-period-Burns at dee-oh-tee dot gov. Got it. Thanks, Betty. You are a peach. Maybe one day I'll see you at Red Bridges. Uh-huh. All right. See you.”

He ends the call.

Reagan speaks up: “Edna? Sounds like Etna.”

DeAndre, typing fast, asks, half distracted: “So?”

“Zeus threw a fucking
mountain
on top of Typhon. The mountain was Mount Etna.”

“And Burns could be a connection, too,” Aleena says. “Wikipedia says Typhon's name comes from the Greek word meaning to smoke—or to burn.”

“Got it!” DeAndre says. “I ran a search on all the companies—that address pings in all of them. I haven't pulled anything up yet, but in just this list I see purchase orders, contacts, e-mails—Edna Burns has been awfully active with these businesses, man.”

“DOT,” Aleena says. “Federal DOT in D.C. Typhon is there. Makes sense.”

“Wait,” Reagan says, waving her hands in the air. She's staring down at Shane's laptop, her round face bathed in the glow. “Whoa, whoa, whoa, what the slippery fuck. Shane knew. He knows. He's on the same trail.”

They gather around. She spins the laptop, shows them the screen. On it: an exploded file folder, plus Evernote pages, showing him trying to hack the DOT servers in D.C. Aleena leans forward. “He tore it apart.”

“And,” DeAndre says, “didn't find a damn thing.”

Chance comes up. “Guess Ivo Shandor isn't the legend he thinks he is.”

“But it means he was doing more than just looking for an escape,” Reagan says. “I think he was pulling the same shit we're trying to pull right now.”

DeAndre: “Then we better do it
first
.”

Aleena turns around. Chance is standing there. He gives her an awkward smile. “I do okay?” he asks. A sincere question by the sound of it, not bait.

She hugs him, impulsively. “You did
awesome
.”

Reagan, from the sidelines, mutters, “That'll do, pig.”

Aleena lets go of Chance, gives her the finger.

“So,” Chance says. “If Shane didn't find anything at the DOT—couldn't that mean there wasn't anything there? The e-mail address must be fake.”

Aleena
hmm
s. “It's all he had to go on, I guess.” She sighs. “It's all
we
have to go on, too. They delivered stuff
to
the DOT address, right?”

“Hold up,” DeAndre says. “Man, listen. We're thinking like the government. We gotta be thinking like
hackers
.” He spins around on his chair. “I knew this guy, right, he'd order shit online using people's stolen cards, but you usually gotta go through all this extra bullshit to change the delivery address. So he'd just have it sent right to the home, to the billing address, right? It was easier for him to hack FedEx or whatever and have them deliver it to some drop-off spot where he'd be waiting. Eventually
easy
turned to lazy and he started having shit delivered right to his apartment, so they busted his ass.”

Chance snaps his fingers. “Someone is rerouting the deliveries.”

DeAndre nods.

Chance grabs DeAndre's head in a headlock, gives him a noogie. “You are amazing, dude. Seriously amazing.”

“You love me,” DeAndre says. “I'm irresistible, I know it.”

Aleena's already bored with their bro-flavored love-fest, so as they're speaking, she's pushing DeAndre aside and sitting in front of his computer to mine the data he's already pulled up. She finds what
she needs: a delivery from Unterirdisch Elektrizitätssystem GmbH—in this case, a two-ton geothermal heat pump. She snaps her fingers, points to the screen. “Check this out. It flies from Hamburg, lands at Dulles. Gets on a truck—”

“Big damn truck,” Chance says.

“—and goes, sits in a warehouse for a couple days, then goes out for delivery to the DOT. But here's the tricky bit: it doesn't stop there. It's a line item on the delivery list, but it isn't the final destination. It goes—” She pulls up Google Maps, types in an address. “Here.” She flips the map over to satellite view.

DeAndre leans in. “The absolute ass-end epicenter-of-nowhere, West Virginia.”

“That's a farm,” Chance says. “And that's the barn. Silo right there. Squint hard enough, you can even make out a hay wagon.”

Aleena checks the address. “They've got Internet service there. Through satellite.”

Reagan spins her chair over. “That means there's a computer. Or a network. Probably a router. Ping it till it squeals.”

And with a few more keystrokes . . . There. A single system. Aleena does a quick scan of it. It's nothing fancy. They all see what she's seeing: it's an off-brand, maybe home-built PC. Runs on Microsoft Windows, of all things. Midrange, baked-in graphics and memory. Only thing that stands out is a top-shelf SSD—a solid state hard drive doesn't have to spin up like older drives, so it moves like lightning. But even that isn't
totally
strange—if someone wanted to splurge on something when building a box like this, an SSD wouldn't be out of the ordinary.

DeAndre shoulders his way in. Aleena protests and he mutters an apology, but starts pulling up stuff, pushing her aside. “There's nothing here. It's a box with an operating system.”

“There's
something
,” Aleena says. “The hard drive shows that it's almost full.”

“Packed with data we can't see?” he says. “We need root access—whoa, what the hell, man, this thing is locked up tighter than Hannibal Lecter. Look at all these permissions and shit.”

Reagan scowls. “Well, start picking the locks, Houdini. You need an invite? Somebody to hold your hand?”

DeAndre leans forward, starts to open a bunch of his hacker
programs—the digital-world analog of lockpicks and safecracker tools. The screen flickers. “Hey,” he protests. “What the—”

The screen goes dark. The lights in the pod go off. Only light left in the room is the one from Shane Graves's laptop.

“Jesus,” Chance says. “I think I let out a little pee.”

Aleena says, “Someone's doing this to us.”

“It's gotta be Graves,” DeAndre says.

“They're doing it to us like we did to—” Aleena starts to say, but doesn't finish.

The screen in front of Aleena flickers on. Then, so does every screen in the room, one by one—first a bright square of white light, which then starts to resolve into an image.

A woman's face appears. Young. A neck long and narrow like that of a wineglass's stem. Her face, too, has the curves and thinness you'd find in a champagne flute. Long dark hair framing her face like the open blades of a pair of scissors.

The woman says: “Like you did to Iran.”

“Who the fuck are you?” Reagan asks.

Aleena's heart about stops. She answers for the woman. “You're the Widow.”

THE DEP

W
ade's trying not to have a heart attack.

It runs in his family, heart disease. His father died at the kitchen table one day. Pissed at Little Wade for knocking over a glass of lemonade—glass tipped, shattered, lemonade everywhere, on the food, on the floor. Dad was always yelling at him for being clumsy. Which only made him clumsier.

His father's face got so red yelling at Wade he looked like one of those angry zits about to pop—except, he couldn't pop. Couldn't let it out the way it needed to be let out, and that pressure must've crushed his heart like a vise. A vein stood out on his head like an earthworm in shallow dirt. His neck tendons looked like bridge cables. He made a sound like he was trying to say words, but they were hissed through clenched teeth and sounded like something the Devil might say to scare off an angel.

Then he clutched his chest and landed face-first in a plate of mashed taters.

Wade's grandpop, too, died from a heart attack. Deep-sea fishing. Took a header overboard after fighting to haul in some bluefish.

And now, Wade thinks, he's gonna die, too. He's gonna die in this goddamn box.

He's been in here, what, less than an hour, and already he can feel it. His heart feeling like a waistline hugged by a too-tight belt. The tingling in the tips of his fingers. His pulse drumming like horse hooves.

The deprivation chamber is darker than dark. Black as a bad man's soul. The water laps at him, feels like it's eating him, like it's
alive
—creeping up, ready to pull him down into the deep and drown him like his father did those kittens that one time. He remembers a time, too, crossing a river outside Hanoi—not a river, not really, but the rains had been so bad the stream became a river—and it was like this then, too, the feeling that it was gonna grab him and drag him down.

It's funny. Not
ha-ha
funny but
oh, isn't that curious
funny—Vietnam for him was a middling thing. He knows some guys, Green Berets in particular, who thought Vietnam was a fucking thrill ride and talked about it like they'd been in
Rambo: First Blood Part II
or some shit. Other guys, you couldn't even say the word without them having nightmares for a week, without them needing to get far the fuck away from you so they could go light up a smoke and think about something else for a while.

Wade ended up in 'Nam late. Around 1970. He didn't see the worst of it. He remembers being scared, though. Young, dumb, ready to die. Felt like he was being fed into a meat grinder, ready to be chewed up in service to his country.

That's what he feels right now, too. Control lost. Fear's hands around his neck. Being thrown into something he doesn't understand, that isn't his fight.

He's not young now. He's old. And he's not dumb, either. He's smart, too smart, smart enough to know how this ends—and suddenly a full-bore fear of death rises up inside him, like he's not ready to go, it's not time, not yet, God damn it—

He shudders. The whole world rumbles and rattles.

No. It's not him. It's the deprivation chamber. It rattles, bangs, and then he hears locks being undone.

It opens up—

At first, Wade can see only bright white. Then the light resolves into the long, carpenter-nail body of Hollis Copper.

Copper offers a hand. Wade takes it without reluctance.