ZerOes (8 page)

DeAndre laughs, but it's not a happy sound. “Man, you really don't know this stuff, do you? White hats: good-guy hackers, hacktivists, SJW social-justice types. Black hats: thieves and pirates and all that scum and villainy shit. No? You're here to offer me a deal but you don't know dick about this stuff?”

“Think of me as a
collector
.”

“What I see is a brother who's really a white dude done up in Grade A, high-quality blackface. A traitor to the skin.”

Hollis scowls. “Don't try that solidarity shit with me, son. Won't fly.”

“You didn't grow up poor?”

“My father was a dentist. I went to Princeton. You and me, we aren't alike.”

“Okay, okay.” DeAndre swallows hard. “You're telling me you don't have a moms you want to take care of?”

“Not one who'd like me paying her in stolen money. If I tried that, my mother would whip my ass till it turned baboon blue.”

DeAndre sighs. “Yeah. You and me got
that
in common, at least.”

“The deal is, you work for us, and your ‘moms' gets to keep that
house. Don't worry, she doesn't know anything. Yet. I met her at the house, told her you're working with us on special contract. She can go on believing that her son is a productive member of society, that she raised you right. And you can avoid prison. Or, well . . . You probably got the money to afford a sweet lawyer, but no matter what happens, your mother will know who you are. She'll see through your bullshit to the con artist you are.”

“Fuck you, man.”

“Take the deal, DeAndre.”

“Fuck you, man!”

They sit there in silence for a while. DeAndre looks edgy. Itchy. Like he knows what he's got to do but doesn't want to be the one to do it. So Hollis does the work for him. “I'm going to assume by your silence, you're in,” he says. “If that's a true statement, then all you got to do is sit there, stay silent, keep staring at me like you want me dead.”

DeAndre says nothing.

Hollis nods. “Welcome to the team.”

Hollis: “So what happened to you, Wade? You're sixty-three. Been working with computers since they were, what, the size of this room and ran on programs made out of paper punch cards. Promising programmer. Could've been a Steve Jobs, Bill Gates type. Now look at you. You look rough, Wade. Like a field gone fallow.”

Wade: “I think I'm pretty.”

“Come work for us,” Hollis says.

“I'll pass.”

“You won't. We know what you've been up to. We know about the Doorstop worm. We know about the Globe hack. We know about the Shadowlands, the Liberty Bell, all that. We know about every soldier and spy and government file clerk who comes to you with a classified unredacted memo in hand, and we can plug every leak and burn every one of those traitors. But that's not what matters. Not to you. They get sacrificed as part of the cause, you're okay with that because you've done it before. But you
do
care about
her
. You care about Rebecca.”

And here he slides that photo across the table.

Wade flinches.

Good
, Hollis thinks. Wade probably thought he had severed all the threads and tethers to Rebecca. Wade's
daughter
. But nothing stays secret, no matter how deep you bury it. Thanks to Typhon.

Wade tries to lie—“I don't know anybody named Rebecca”—but Hollis hears the shake in his voice, hears how Wade's throat tightens with emotion.

“Rebecca doesn't know who her father is, Wade. But we'll tell her. Hell, we'll
show
her. Daddy with his crazy online bulletin board systems and his cache of guns and ammo—that's right, we know how much ammo you've been buying up. Daddy with his explosive barrels buried in the desert. Daddy the traitor. The crazy man. She'll think she's the daughter of a real Waco wacko, some Tim McVeigh type.”

“That's cold.”

“Life's hard, Wade. You know that. You were in 'Nam, right? You've worked for us before. So come on back. I'm offering you a year's worth of good clean government work putting your skills to use. And I know you're going to say yes, because the second you tell me no, I'm going to get on the phone and tell Rebecca just who her daddy really is. It'll break her heart. She seems nice. Be a real shame.”

Wade doesn't have to say anything. All he has to do is nod, and that's it.

Hollis: “I'm a little behind on the times, I admit, but everything in your file says you're a Class A Internet troll, responsible for no end of hacking and surveillance and online bullying and an all-around attitude of mucking about in people's lives—”

Reagan: “I'm in.”

“What?”

“I said I'm in.”

Hollis blinks. “If I may be honest, I don't understand.”

“You're here to offer me a deal. And it's some weird under-the-table, off-the-books thing because you put a hood over my head and flew me here and I haven't seen a lawyer and your identification doesn't have any agency listed—which suggests NSA, or some ghost agency nobody's ever heard of—and so since you haven't killed me (and, honestly, why would you?), I can say with some certainty you're going to offer me a deal. Probably a job.”

She must see the look on his face, because she says, “Oh, what? Think I don't know you guys like to scoop up black-hat hackers and crackers and scammers and trolls and make them turn tricks for John Q. Law? You're offering me a job and I'm taking it.”

He eyes her warily. “I don't have to convince you?”

She shrugs, grabs a Fig Newton. “I quit my job a few weeks ago. I hate my apartment. I hate my town. I have a cat somewhere, and I hate that cat. He's weird. He reminds me of Gollum. Piss on my old life. I'm in.”

Well, that's five out of five. Though Reagan is one he needs to watch. She's
too
eager. She's a snake you invite into your house, then wonder why it bit you.

Golathan—that prick—will be happy.

NSA HEADQUARTERS, FORT MEADE, MARYLAND

L
ocked and loaded,” Hollis says, throwing down five folders on the desk. Ken Golathan looks up with a cheek bulging with half-eaten PowerBar. He pauses midchew, fans the folders out like he's about to do a card trick, then keeps chewing.

“Good, great, yes,” Golathan says, his interest already flagging. That's how he is. Always sounds like he's only partly present, only temporarily invested in the conversation at hand. “So we're solid, then. Another five guests at the Hunting Lodge.”

“Where'd you find these people, anyway?” Hollis asks. “They're not exactly high value. I gotta admit, Ken, I'm feeling like my talents were a little bit wasted here. You don't bring out big guns to shoot pigeons off your mailbox.”

“You a big gun now? The ego on you.” Golathan sniffs, squints. “Trust me, this was curated at the highest level.”

“Typhon selected these people. That's what you're telling me.”

Golathan gets a mean look. Vulpine. Vicious. Like he's about to tear a chicken into wet gobbets and red feathers. “We don't talk about that, Copper. We don't just throw that name around. But yes. That's how it
came about. Like I said, this has been curated. They've been selected. You're not important enough to worry about what's going on here, you feel me?”

“You're an asshole,” Hollis says.

“That I am.” Ken shows off his big white teeth in a celebrity smile.

“Whatever. Consider our time together done. It's been fun.”

“Mmm. Fun ain't over, Copper.”

“I'm sorry?”

“You're still on the hook.”

“Listen, I did what you told me to do. I've got work back at the Bureau. I've got a partner. I don't work for you.”

“Oh, but you do.” The NSA administrator stands up, plants both hands on the desk, and leans forward like he's leering down a teen girl's shirt. “I got you on loan.”

“You have your own people for this.”

“Eh. We're not real
out-amongst-the-people
types. Plus, with a Fed on my payroll, even temporarily, everything looks neat and clean and interagency.”

“I'm part of the CYA.”
Cover your ass
.

Golathan picks a bit of granola from a molar. “Mm-hmm.”

“Last ass I want to cover is yours. I want out.”

“Door's thataway, then. Except, let's remember, I know things about you. So until I say so, you're on my hook, little Copperfish.”

Inside, Hollis is picturing a dartboard with Golathan's face on it. He bites back any further comment and asks, “What other geniuses you want me to wrangle up?”

“Same five geniuses. You're going to be their babysitter.”

Anger spikes like a hot pin through Hollis's heart. “What?”

“That's right. You're going to the Lodge. You're going to watch these little turds and make sure they all roll in that same direction. You brought them into this world, and you're going to stay with them all the way to the end.”

“Why are you doing me like this, Ken? This about Fellhurst?”

Golathan sneers, doesn't answer the question. “I got a job to do, chief. I see a hammer nearby and I need a hammer, I'm going to pick it up. I'm going to use it until I'm done with it or until it breaks. So stop asking me stupid fucking questions and get back on the plane and
usher our new ‘hires' out of their hidey-holes and to the Lodge where they belong.”

Hollis stiffens. He feels the pressure of Golathan's boot on his neck. This is about Fellhurst. Has to be. And Golathan will punish him for it. Again and again. Hollis knows he has to find a way to turn the tables. Get one over on Golathan.

But for now, he does all he can do: he grits his teeth and says, “Done.”

ALEXANDRIA, VIRGINIA

T
he house feels empty.

Gordon Berry paces, and each footstep echoes through the halls of his home, like the
clop-clop-clop
of a nervous horse. He pops his knuckles, and the pops echo, too.

He has the sense of being sucked downward—like a misstepping adventurer in an old serial, caught in a pit of quicksand. He remembers his parents, who grew up in Pennsylvania's “coal cracker” region—the band of coal-mining towns upstate—telling stories about coal silt. Like quicksand, but black as the devil's heart. Sometimes, they said, it would pull you down like a child popping a gum bubble and sucking it back into his mouth—so fast you'd blink and the person would be gone. Other times it was slow and crushing, like wet concrete. You'd breathe in, then out, and the slurry would tighten like a constricting snake—no way to get another breath. You'd suffocate long before the mire filled your mouth and throat.

That's how he feels. Like he's being pulled down. Slowly. Surely. Everything constricting—with every breath out it gets harder to breathe.

He's losing it all. His home. His wife, Janine. His daughter, Sue—graduating this year from Georgetown. His
practice
. The lawyers have made sure of that. His wife has made sure of the rest.

He knows that if she's been vile to him, he made her that way. His indiscretions with patients whetted her into a serrated blade. Bright and flashing and angry. And now she's sawing his life apart.

He doesn't blame her. He hates her, a little. But he doesn't blame her.

It's this pacemaker. That's what he blames. He's got an arrhythmia. An uneven heartbeat. For a long time the meds worked well enough—enough to control the fainting spells and shortness of breath. But then he had the heart attack. Tachycardia. Again, that feeling of being crushed in a vise, by a snake, under a hard and heavy boot. He thought he was dead. He
was
dead—clinically, for twenty-three seconds. And those twenty-three seconds—meaningless in any other context—changed everything. They changed his world. His outlook.

He was alive again. A second chance.

Some folks become newly religious. Gordon became something of a hedonist. New foods. New exercise equipment. New trips abroad. The indiscretions. Nine of them.

Now he's living through lawsuits and divorce and—

A light flutter in his chest stops him in his tracks. It's a tickle. No—an itch. Deep, beneath the breastbone. The kind of itch he can't scratch, though he's certainly going to try. He has this moment, this revelatory, Saul-becoming-Paul-on-the-road-to-Damascus moment,
this sudden epiphany
when he thinks he should call Sue, should call Janine, should call all his patients and tell them he's sorry.

But that doesn't last long. Because suddenly his limbs seize. Pain goes through his chest as if a locomotive is punching a hole through the mountain that is his body. He feels like a Christmas tree lit up from tip to stump, every branch and needle alive with pain and electric with fire.

One moment he's standing. The next he's on the ground. Trying to speak. Trying to say something.
My heart
, he thinks. No.
The pacemaker
. Damn thing. He always said it was too weird, sticking something like that in his chest. His computer gives him a blue screen full of illegal operations twice weekly. Last week his toaster shorted out, almost caught fire. And he's supposed to believe a pacemaker won't go south? Now it has.

He tries to get up, but he's weak. The world wobbles. He hears
sounds. Like his own pacing footsteps still echoing, even though here he is, flat on his back.

A shadow falls over him.

Those aren't imagined footsteps. They're real.

A ghoul stands tall over him. A man, or something that was one once. Greasy dark hair barely managing to cover up the unevenness of his skull—like someone bashed him in the side of the head with a bat, collapsing the bone without ever letting it heal. His eyes are cold and dark, like chips of flint. A scar runs from the base of his left eye all the way down to his thin, froglike lips—lips that, on that side, tug upward in an uncomfortable facsimile of a half smile. Tattoos like ants crawl up arms that are long and lean as braided ropes—inked all the way from his wrists to the sleeves of his black T-shirt. Little symbols. Words that don't make sense. Numbers, too. Like a code, a cipher.

Gordon tries to say something.
Help
.
Get away. Who are you?
But all that comes out is mush-mouthed burble, his lips stuck together with strings of spit, his tongue like a roll of bloody gauze in his mouth.

He reaches out. Paws at the monster man's steel-toe boot.

The boot rises, lands on his hand. The bones pop and break. Gordon cries out.

“Don't need your hand,” the man says. His voice is devoid of inflection, empty of emotion. “Just need this.” He grabs Gordon by the back of the head. With his free hand, he sticks a syringe in the side of Gordon's neck.

Everything starts to slew sideways, like a car on black ice. Gordon hears snippets of a conversation, one-sided. Then a handful of words, clear as a bell ringing in the darkness:

“It's done,” the man says. “We have number thirteen.”