“You sure?” Don’t gawk, close your mouth, Damon instructed himself. Act normal. Damon grinned. Or did his best to.
Terek went to the coffee pot on the marble kitchen counter. He reached for a cup, which was right next to a large wooden block of knives. Damon’s eyes followed his friend’s hand as it passed the blades and picked up the cup, then filled it from the pot.
“Looks like we’re here all alone.” Terek smiled and took a sip.
Was that a friendly smile, or a menacing one? Wind howled beyond the glass. The house suddenly felt massive and empty.
What did Terek go upstairs to get?
Damon scanned the pockets of his friend’s jeans, looked for anything that might be a gun or weapon. Did he know yet? That Damon knew he knew about him? But what exactly did he know?
What was going on?
The skin on Damon’s exposed arms prickled as his friend took another sip of his coffee and smiled.
That lopsided grin, the big mop of unruly brown hair, the puppy dog eyes, the constant mimicking and questioning. Like the younger brother Damon never had. But were the boyish looks a sheep’s cloak, concealing a predator?
Damon needed to get in touch with Mike and Chuck. Tell them something wasn’t right with Terek. What about Irena? Was she involved? Damon didn’t know more than that Terek was stealing data from the meshnet app—but that meant he was also monitoring the messages on it.
Or could be.
Probably was.
If he was, he would certainly be monitoring any messages from Damon to his friends.
Terek asked, “You okay?”
He sat down across the table, at his usual spot.
Damon eyed the cable connecting their computers, the umbilical cord between twins that he’d become so used to. He wanted to rip it out, guts attached, but he said lightly, “How’s your wife? Not going to call her?”
“She’s fine. I just messaged her from my other laptop. Did you get a pingback from the GenCorp satellites?”
Quiet for two heartbeats.
“Yeah, I did.”
“You going to share?”
“Gimme a second.”
Terek asked casually, “Do you have the latest data from the Space Surveillance Network?”
“Not yet.”
Damon glanced at that cable again. Blood could flow both ways through an umbilical cord.
He angled his screen away from Terek and opened a new sandboxed UNIX terminal. If Terek knew already, then it wouldn’t matter, but if he didn’t—Damon didn’t have much time.
Damon’s fingers danced over the keyboard, their quick drumming earning his friend’s curiosity.
Terek’s eyebrows raised. “Writing me a novel?”
“Finishing an email. I’ll send you the data file we got back from the GenCorp satellite.”
The hack was quick and dirty but should do the trick. He attached a small payload exploit to the text file, which he’d converted to PDF. His finger hovered over the send button.
He looked up at Terek.
This was too obvious.
Why would the text file arrive in a PDF? That would raise flags to anyone, even if they were absolutely trusted. Stupid idea.
If Terek was up to something, he would be on alert for anything unusual, and the USB “accidentally” falling onto the floor already qualified. He needed to get something onto Terek’s machine in a way that wouldn’t be suspicious, dangle something of value that he would take apart. This wasn’t good enough.
Damon deleted the file, attached the uncorrupted text file, and pushed send.
Terek’s machine pinged.
“It’s strange how there’s such a long delay,” Damon said.
What was Terek up to? Damon needed to buy some time. Why would his friend be doing this?
When he asked about Terek’s wife, did Damon detect tension? Had something happened to her? Was somebody coercing him into this?
He couldn’t imagine Terek betraying him.
Damon wasn’t sure if his friend—if he could still call him that—was just being an inveterate hacker, unable to resist the opportunity to smash and grab data. He realized he really didn’t know this person. Chuck was right. Damon had barely questioned how and why Terek had connections to a Russian hacking group that had access to the GenCorp network.
“You have any theories?” Terek took another sip of his coffee.
“About what?”
“How they’re controlling the satellites.”
Damon stopped typing and sat up in his chair. “I do, actually.”
Terek put down his coffee with his right hand. “I’m listening.”
“I think they disconnected the entire constellation from ground control, and then rewired them so they’re using the satellite-to-satellite laser link.”
“All ten thousand?”
“I think they made it one big cluster.”
Damon watched Terek’s eyes.
His friend glanced up and left. Neurolinguistic programming theories of the mind said that when right-handed people looked up and right when they thought about something, it was an unconscious reaction as they searched for a constructed memory. A lie, in other words.
But up and left?
That was something remembered.
Terek looked up and left. “Interesting. Go on.”
“That’s why they can’t overload the signal-to-noise ratio and disable those satellites by jamming them. There’s only one, or maybe a few, that still communicate to the ground. And I bet they added a new control condition for security, a specific ground coordinate.”
His friend looked up and left again, and grabbed his coffee with his right hand.
Then again, the latest update Damon had read said that neurolinguistic programming might be a load of garbage. What did his instincts tell him? That painful knot twisting in the pit of his gut?
Then another thought.
Gibberish.
Terek was monitoring the meshnet, and there was no quick way to block him without raising suspicion. Damon could switch encryption keys, but this might make Terek take some other unknown defensive action.
If Damon wanted to keep any kind of advantage, he needed to communicate in the clear with Mike—with the full knowledge that an adversary was reading the messages.
A voice broke the silence. “Reports coming in now that Hurricane Dolly has made landfall on the Virginia coast.”
Wind lashed the palm trees and heaved foaming brown waves against a cement seawall. The images were vertical, the videos taken on someone’s cell phone and then uploaded over the internet. With no satellites and no mobile, the networks weren’t able to get a camera crew out there.
The CNN announcer said, “The weather services lost track of the storm as it headed out over the Atlantic more than a week ago. They believed that Dolly had played itself out.”
“Did you get in touch with them?” Terek asked.
“Just that they arrived,” Damon replied.
“Nothing since then?”
Damon shook his head. No, nothing since then. Was it the storm, or had something else happened?
Terek had found the picture of Lauren, and then matched it to images of that area. At the time, it had seemed ingenious, but now it seemed a little too clever. Too quick. Had he fabricated the images? Was that possible? Had he sent Mike and Chuck out to the coast? Did he know the storm was coming?
A 3D computer-generated view of the East Coast appeared on the screen, with a TV presenter standing in the middle of a swirling mass offshore. “Doppler radar has been tracking the storm front as it approached the coast, but only in the past few hours has the magnitude become apparent. Hurricane Hunter aircraft were dispatched from Tampa early this morning and are now returning—”
“I hope they’re okay,” Terek said.
“Me too,” Damon mumbled.
“With eyewall wind speeds approaching 180 miles per hour and 880 millibars of pressure, this hurricane has been fueled b
y the unusually hot temperatures through September that have also fed the fires in Appalachia,” the announcer said. “A complete evacuation of the Virginia and Maryland coast has been ordered, but without much warning and without mobile emergency alert systems, there’s not much that can be done to get people—”
“Unbelievable,” Terek said.
Damon stared at the person he’d thought was his friend. It was unbelievable. What about that big dish in the picture of Lauren? Could that be used as a ground station? How many coincidences before the unbelievable became believable?
The CNN announcer said, “The hurricane is making landfall now. As this coincides with high tide, meteorologists are predicting a fourteen-foot storm surge.”
“Nothing we can do,” Terek said. “We better get back to it.” He turned and headed to the kitchen.
Nothing we can do? It seemed an odd turn of phrase when you had just sent your sister into the teeth of a monster storm.
Damon checked his phone. No more return messages from Mike since the one saying they’d arrived, despite two more that Damon had sent out.
The TV switched to another image, this one grainy and filled with confused, jumbled waves crashing into each other. “Here we have a webcam on the Virginia Pier,” the announcer said.
Damon turned on his heel and followed Terek.
Webcam.
He reached the kitchen table and turned his laptop screen away from Terek, then opened a trace on the meshnet app. He found the router in the house near Atlantic Avenue. He logged in.
Damon stared at his screen.
“Did you hear from them? Mike? Chuck?” Terek asked again.
“No,” Damon replied.
He hadn’t heard from them, but that didn’t mean he didn’t know what was happening.
On Damon’s screen. A pixelated image. Rain sluiced across a glass pane. The picture was from the BullyBoy’s dash cam. In the distance he could make out a group of people walking through knee-deep water.
Damon looked up from his laptop at Terek—to make sure he didn’t get up—but he appeared to be lost in work on his own screen. Damon looked back at the image.
Two women with their arms held out in front of them, bending their bodies into the wind. A group of men behind them. The image was grainy, but he would recognize those guys anywhere—Mike and Chuck.
With four other men behind them, holding assault rifles.
“Damn it,” Damon whispered.
“What?”
“Nothing.”
What could he do? Nothing from here.
But there was something he could do.
Hundreds of millions of people might suffer, maybe even starve, if they couldn’t stop the destruction in orbit.
He eyed the cable connecting him to Terek.
“I just got the Space Surveillance Network data,” Damon said.
“Why did you say damn it, then? Isn’t that a good thing? Send it over.”
“It’s encrypted. Classified.”
Terek sat up. “Oh yeah? Why?”
“Has military satellite locations on it. I can’t share it.”
“Send me a copy? Maybe scrub it?”
“I better not. This is classified. My eyes only. I’m secret-rated.”
“Seriously? At a time like this? What am I going to do with it?”
“We’re in a senator’s house. They send people to jail for disclosing stuff like this.”
In the image in the video, the short man behind Mike shoved him with his rifle muzzle. Asshole. Another of the men started wading through the water toward the truck.
Damon had to hurry, whatever he was going to do.
There was still a spotty connection to Mike’s phone, even if his friend wasn’t able to answer it. Which meant he had access to more than only this camera and microphone.
His earlier idea resurfaced. He hoped Mike would remember. Mike better remember. Who could forget Egglish?
CHAPTER 40
I GRITTED MY teeth and leaned into the onslaught.
The churning wall of cloud had enveloped the coast and submerged the streets into a boiling twilight.
The teeth of the raging animal closed around us. The frenzy transformed from something simply atmospheric into a wild beast that ripped at my face and skin and spat spray in blinding sheets as we were force-marched through the knee-deep water.
Waves rolled over the sand embankment. Foam spilled into the street.
I held one hand out and squinted to battle the stinging spray.
“Lauren,” I shouted, “are you okay?” I staggered back in a blast but felt the sharp jab of a rifle muzzle in my back.
“Keep moving,” said the neck-tattoo guy Lauren had called Billy. He kept step behind us.
“Hey,” he shouted to one of his men, “someone go get into that truck they came in.”
The man asked, “Are there any more of them?”
Tattoo-Billy shook his head.
My wife waved a hand at me and held it out.
I tried to grab it but fell forward. I’d twisted my ankle in that scuffle, and more than that, I had pain in my ribs, my elbow, and my face, where Tattoo-Billy had punched me after I’d gotten up off him. My face was numb where he’d hit me, my mind off-kilter, my senses wobbly.
Climbing a set of stairs at work usually got me out of breath, but a dragged-out fistfight followed by fighting a hurricane? Despite the wind hammering me, it felt like nothing came into my lungs. I sucked air, my chest burning, my eyes stinging. Five more minutes of this and they would have to carry me feet-first through the door.
More likely, they would let me drift off into the raging surf. I made sure to keep my balance and planted one foot in front of the other.
Every now and then, I glanced behind me.
Tattoo-Billy might have been small, but the guy looked unperturbed by the roaring squalls that almost tipped me over. His eyes straight ahead, grim, his face streaked with blood from the head wound Lauren had inflicted.
With a clattering squeak, bits of aluminum siding ripped free from the house next door. The strips of metal cartwheeled in the air, joined by shingles and palm fronds and anything else the wind could dislodge or pick up and turn into projectiles.
Chuck and Agent Coleman made better progress. They were fifty feet ahead, at the edge of the two-car garage. On the next street, I now saw an eighteen-wheeler semi-truck with its back doors open. Men were stacking boxes inside it and closing the doors. The deep growl of the truck’s engine was audible over the wind’s howl.
“Did they hurt you?” I yelled to Lauren.
“How did you get here?”
“Came to rescue you.”
Despite the lashing wind and the men at our backs with guns, she managed a grim smile. “I assume there’s a cavalry coming?”
The rifle muzzle poked my ribs again. “No speaking,” Tattoo-Billy said.
That accent. Was it Chechen? It sounded Russian, but then Chechens were Russians, right? My mind tried to follow a thread as it was beaten by merciless hammering wind. Why on Earth would satellite-attacking Chechen terrorists want anything to do with my family?
Satellites.
The only connection was through Damon, but it was a solid one. His secret project at MIT involved the military. Drone satellites or something. He never seemed able to be more specific and I never asked him to be.
What did they want with him? And how were they getting it? I answered my own question: They were using Terek to gain access to Damon’s networks. Maybe the satellite position data?
Which meant they had been planning this a long time.
I glanced over my shoulder at Irena, who brought up the rear. The right side of her face was swollen from the blow she’d taken to her face. She kept her hands up. Another man walked behind her with a gun.
We advanced up the driveway and out of the water.
The doors of the large two-car garage were now open. One Humvee in each bay. A procession of men in camo loade
d black crates into the backs.
I heard snippets of words, things I thought were in another language. The men talking saw me looking at them, and one hissed, “English,” under his breath, too low for him to have assumed I could hear it.
They kept talking, this time in a language an American could understand, about how the wind had ruined the operation. No, said, another, they just needed another location, that it shortened up the timeline.
Behind me, Tattoo-Billy gave me another poke in the ribs.
“Shut up,” he said to the two men, and indicated a staircase for me to climb.
The wind screamed up another notch.
Sopping wet, the five of us stood in the middle of the forty-by-forty open main room of the vacation rental. Lauren was next to me, Chuck and Agent Coleman ten feet away with their hands behind their heads. A beaten-looking Irena held a blood-red towel to her swollen face.
I was sure whoever was renting this place out wouldn’t be thrilled about twenty Chechen freedom fighters as guests. That was about how many men I counted. Airbnb had restrictions on parties, but from now on, military operations should be added as a banned activity as well.
These guys were definitely not getting their insurance deposit back. They had drilled holes into the faux-old wooden floors across the open area for their computer racks, which they were now in the process of dismantling.
My phone pinged in my pocket, but with my hands up, I wasn’t about to try and retrieve it. These guys seemed trigger-itchy already. It had to be Damon, asking us where we were.
A blast of wind buffeted the structure. I was sure the roof would suddenly rip off and reveal a maelstrom beyond.
The ceiling was twenty feet high and sloped with the roof to the apex. There were no windows, except skylights and high slits at the tops of the walls. Perfect if you didn’t want to let people see in. There was a second-floor mezzanine with three open doors. Men were moving equipment out of them. The rooms looked like they would make perfect offices. A command center.
“Billy, we need to move, right now,” said a man coming down the stairs. He held stacks of papers.
Lauren said, “What’s your real name?”
“Tie them up,” Billy instructed.
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