by Scott McEwen
“What kind of place is it?”
“Don’t know.” Jalen looked at the steel door, which was spray-painted white with Chinese characters. “But I’ve lost sight. What do we do?”
“Could she leave out the front?”
“It’s possible, but she won’t, right? She doesn’t have time—she needs to log in.” Jalen kicked the steel door hard.
For a few seconds, they just listened to each other’s breathing. Jalen scrambled up a dumpster, thinking if he jumped, he could reach the cement ledge of the second-story window above him. He leapt, but it was still a couple of feet within reach, and he dropped hard to the street.
“My god,” Darsie said. “Encyte has hacked into the network.”
“What’s happening?” Jalen dusted himself off, still looking for another way in. “What do you see?”
“He’s cloning the school systems, the camera feeds, every piece of data coming in and out of the school … downloading them onto the on-premise…” Darsie muttered. “Through a VPN tunnel to another IP address. Yes.” Darsie paused. “Encyte is watching.”
Jalen banged on the steel door.
“Just wait. I’m coming right now. I can see your address. You’re just a few blocks away. My team will trace the hack and follow the IP trail. I’m coming for you.”
“I’m going to try the front door.”
Jalen ran down the filthy alley. He pulled the handle. “Locked! Dead-bolted from the inside! There’s no way I can get through.”
“Okay, hang tight. Be there in three minutes.”
CHAPTER 58
Never in his life had Wyatt seen anything like the Red Trident company jet, aka the Red Trident Spy Plane. As one might expect, it was outfitted with all the technology in San Francisco, but modified with Darsie’s own personal touches: polished leather, gold fixtures, and wall-to-wall screens showing various footage. Inside the cabin, forty thousand feet above the earth, the brightest computer minds in the world were frantically hammering on keyboards, in a very complex virtual game of cat and mouse.
Wyatt sat behind the pilot, his gaze shifting from the clock on his iPhone to the blinking control panels, then back to his phone. Outside, all around them, nothing but white. The jet bounced and jerked, the Red Trident team buckled tight into their seats so as not to be thrown from their makeshift desks by the turbulence.
Darsie’s plane—his secondary form of transportation—had been converted to a mobile NOC. Over the beeps and dings of computers, Wyatt listened to the layered voices: Darsie at Red Trident, Avi in the surveillance van, the comms where his Valor team was waiting for the fake shooting, and even the auditorium where the recorded symphony played.
“All right, you guys,” Wyatt heard his father’s voice over the radio. “She’s in. Be ready.”
“She’s in?” Wyatt said in horror; he tried to scrambled to the front of the plane, but the turbulence knocked him down.
The pilot kept his eyes on the small window of glass in front of him. “I’m sorry,” he called back to Wyatt. “The summer air is so turbulent over the Midwest! It’s going to be tight. Not sure if we are gonna be able to get your boots on the ground by 4 p.m.”
* * *
Leigh Ann waited in the stall, looking at her watch, convincing herself she would not run away before the signal. Two signals, in fact. The first from GrievingDad_12 to say that the operation was a go, and the second from the SecDef’s security team, letting her know that they detected Encyte in the network.
GrievingDad_12 came through first, the Wickr message buzzing on her Apple Watch: Good to go.
A second message immediately followed the first: We found the hack. He’s in. Take your time. Follow the plan. God bless.
Leigh Ann took a deep breath and told herself for the hundredth time that this was her penance. With the mind-altering drugs now completely out of her system, she was now painfully aware of her own culpability. Some deeds are so horrific that the very meditation of them makes one guilty.
She left the stall with the huge rifle at her side, feeling what so many killers before her must have felt: a surge of adrenaline, almost disorienting, as she put one foot in front of the other, determined to elaborately act out the evil she’d originally planned.
Unnoticed, her heels clicked down the quiet hall from the bathroom to the auditorium, and she pushed open the doors. The children were on stage on the far side, in midrehearsal of Bach’s March in D Major. The stand-in kids could not play instruments, of course, but they went through the motions as a recording played. Leigh Ann closed her eyes and listened. Only for a moment. The notes so perfect, swirling to heaven like the souls that would be if she failed.
She made it to center court and raised the bump stock to her shoulder. She put her eye to the cold scope, seeing first the stand-in band instructor. A beautiful woman with pinned-up red hair, whipping the conductor’s baton back and forth as though she’d done so all her life.
From there, Leigh Ann shifted her scope until she found the one she was told to hit first: the stand-in for the Henryson girl. A small girl. Dark hair, probably only half the size of her cello.
Leigh Ann breathed, then opened fire. The girl dropped instantly, the squib—a small firework inside a packet of fake blood—exploded and covered the little girl with the sticky red liquid. Around her, other kids began screaming, the music stopped as they flailed around on stage. As she was told, Leigh Ann methodically shifted her scope, moving to the next kid—a dark-skinned boy who stood at a drum set. The squib hit him in the chest, and he dropped alongside the girl. The pattern continued: the gun jumping in Leigh Ann’s hands, the kids banging against the locked double doors below the green exit sign. Leigh Ann had completely lost herself, pulling the trigger over and over, seeing the bodies go down.
A minute and forty-five seconds later, she executed the last part of the plan, and with great relief, she reversed the gun to point the barrel at her own chest. “I’m so sorry for all of this,” she whispered as she pulled the trigger. Instantly, two bags filled with fake blood and triggered by squibs detonated under the clothes at her chest and behind her back as if a bullet had passed through her body. She slumped to the ground.
CHAPTER 59
Darsie bypassed the elevator and went straight for the stairs, four of his top security men falling in step behind them. A private police car was waiting outside, flashing red and blue lights, and the traffic was already cleared. They were going over eighty miles per hour, through the narrow San Francisco streets, grabbing air and bottoming out. When they reached Chinatown, the men were out of the car, running.
Darsie tossed Jalen a bulletproof vest and a Glock. Jalen slung on the vest, flipped off the gun’s safety, and waited for the battering ram.
One, two, three—the metal door swung off the hinges, and the team ran, in SWAT formation, down a dingy hallway. They could hear voices speaking Chinese. Jalen’s mind raced. Oh my god. This is big, bigger than a lone wolf. What if it’s the Chinese mafia?
The team entered a room where thirteen Chinese people sat, cross-legged and shoeless, in a circle, blinking at him. In the back of the room, coffee was burning in a cheap pot and a few men smoked. Hi Kyto sat next to a woman, holding her hand. Jalen recognized the woman instantly, from the night outside the casino in Vegas.
“Mrs. Chen?” Jalen sighed.
Seeing the men with the guns filling the room, the women began crying, and the men yelled, “Get down, get down!”
There was a folding table, covered with coffee mugs. Several big blue books, and a large art easel with a poster board, half in Chinese, half in English: NARCOTICS ANONYMOUS.
Narcotics Anonymous? She’s a … drug addict?
Jalen let the Glock drop to his side as the SWAT team held guns in the faces of Mrs. Chen and Hi Kyto. “Put your hands up and lie down on the ground!”
“Mr. Darsie!” Hi Kyto’s face flushed. “What are you doing here?”
“Face down with hands behind your head!” a SWAT guy shou
ted at Hi Kyto.
She did as she was told, belly down beside her crying mother, as her hands were zip-tied hard.
“What’s happening?” Hi Kyto said and managed to lift her head, and her eyes met Jalen’s, tears filling the corners of them. “Who are you?”
* * *
The SWAT team searched the entire building and found no weapons of any kind. “Yeah, seems they’re using this building for a church…” the SWAT leader said to Darsie. “Other than some evidence of gambling in the basement, I hate to tell ya, we got nothing.”
Darsie let out a long breath. “Okay, let them go.”
Zip ties were cut. Confused recovering addicts rose to their feet, muttering, angry, relieved.
Jalen offered Hi Kyto his hand but she batted it away, and pushed herself up.
“Why’d you jump out of the car?” he asked.
“My mother,” Hi Kyto said, eyes still burning with fury. “She was addicted to Zovis. She’s been clean for a month now, but since I’ve been hanging out with you, she’s started to worry … that I would give up my studies, that I was taking the wrong path.”
Jalen glanced at Mrs. Chen sitting in a chair, a woman consoling her.
“She texted me this afternoon that she found an old bottle she’d hidden, so I told her to meet me here, at the nearest meeting I could find on my phone.”
“But why couldn’t you just tell me?” Jalen asked softly.
“The secret wasn’t mine to tell. My mother is a well-respected woman—at Stanford, but also in the Chinese government. She was ashamed … and if this got out, she could lose her fellowship, or get deported.”
“I didn’t know.”
“Yeah, well, you could’ve trusted me … but what about you? Here you are, leading a SWAT team against my whole family and our church! Who the hell are you, anyway?”
Jalen opened his mouth to speak, but Hi Kyto held up her hand. “You know what? Don’t. I don’t care. But whatever this little game is, I bet it has something to do with him.” Her eyes cut away to Darsie.
“You don’t have the exact address?” Darsie shouted into his phone, listened, then hung up. “We know he logged in somewhere in the Bay Area using a mobile connection,” he told Jalen. “But we don’t have an address. Damn it.”
“What’s going on?” Hi Kyto asked.
“Encyte is close,” Darsie said. “And if it’s not you…”
“Not me?” Hi Kyto rose up and shoved Darsie in his metal-plated chest. “A terrorist! Oh my god, this is good. You guys thought I was Encyte!”
Darsie took the phone off speaker and put it to his ear. “What do you mean you lost the signal? Keep looking!” He ended the call and looked at Hi Kyto. “Julie, please. I know you’re angry, but I can explain.”
“I think I’ve heard enough.”
“Please.” Darsie caught her arm. “Give me one hour. Meet me in my office.”
She looked at Jalen, then back at Darsie. “I’ll meet you at the Ocean Guardian office. I want Morgan as a trusted third party to witness whatever you are going to say…” She stared at Darsie, her eyes narrow behind her glasses. “I’m never going to be alone with you again.” She then looked at Jalen. “Or you.”
CHAPTER 60
As planned, news of the shooting was intentionally leaked, and with only immediate law enforcement agencies and FBI aware that it was fake, the campus was put on full lockdown. Reporters flocked to the scene, cameras rolling just outside the police barricades. But inside the school, there was only silence. Smoke hung in the air. Deathly quiet. And yet not dead at all.
“Leigh Ann,” a voice said in the earpiece. “This is the team leader from Valor, Cass. Don’t move. Try to speak without moving your mouth. Are you okay?”
“Yes,” Leigh Ann said, keeping her lips closed like she was told. She turned her head to the side and saw the blurry carpet on the auditorium floor, layered with broken glass. And the stage where children posed dead in front of the heavy velvet curtain. “Where are you?”
“Lying in front of you,” Cass said. “By the podium. Thirty feet ahead.”
Leigh Ann glanced up and saw the redheaded band instructor covered in blood—fake blood.
“Mary Alice … Samy…” Cass began rattling off the names of her team, and each of them responded with an “okay.”
Leigh Ann fought tears as she heard their names. She leaned up slightly, trying to see the faces of the bloodied kids.
“Stay down,” Cass said. “We’ll be outta here in no time. Good work, guys. Let’s just hope they got this guy.”
* * *
Frank Henryson had just finished up his eighteenth hole at Congressional in Bethesda. He’d shot an eighty-five—not terrible—especially with his lower back soreness. Toweling off his face, he strode over to the bar where his wife was perched with a chardonnay in front of the TV. Frank squinted, reading the white letters scrolling across the bottom of the screen. Another School Shooting.
“Shit,” Frank sighed. He signaled the bartender, who began filling the cocktail shaker with ice. It was going to be a long day. A long couple of days. Months even. He would be doing press, defending the NFA against all the nuts who blamed the Second Amendment every time a deranged person got hold of a gun. In Frank’s opinion, it was a matter of more and better arms training and arming folks in schools that would solve the problem.
“Hey, turn the TV up,” someone said to the bartender. Frank wanted to turn around and punch the guy. Couldn’t he get one moment of quiet before the storm? Before the press conferences.
“The usual.” The bartender slid the martini glass in front of him.
Frank sat down by his wife and lifted the cold gin to his lips, intentionally avoiding the TV screen. “Honey,” he said, noticing his wife’s pale, blank stare. “Barb?”
Her eyes were glued to the TV, jaw hanging like an epileptic fit. He followed her gaze to the screen where a jerky cameraman showed children crying, fleeing a campus. A campus he knew well, as it was in his neighborhood, Fairfax Middle School. On one hand he was devastated to think of the parents of the children at the school, some of whom he was sure to know. And on the other hand he was relieved—his kids went to a private boarding school. But what confused him is the school was out for the summer, wasn’t it? Why were kids at the school? Thank god his kids were at band camp. And then in a rush of terror and panic he remembered—the rehearsal was moved to today. Suddenly Frank could not pull his eyes and ears away from the TV.
“We don’t know anything for certain,” said CNN’s Mario Bombisuito, “but at this time, it’s believed that the twin son and daughter of Frank Henryson, president of the NFA, were targeted in this attack during a summer camp activity. A band rehearsal.” He paused. “Up to a dozen children are reported dead, the Henryson twins thought to be among the victims.”
A wineglass slipped to the floor, shattering as Barbara Henryson wailed.
* * *
The SecDef’s office in the Pentagon was still in utter chaos. While Leigh feigned dead on the video feed, teams frantically tried to track the IP address of the hacker, essentially chasing a white rabbit through a Byzantine network of point-to-point communication, data-packet traveling, satellites, buildings, IP address to IP address, somehow managing to find the thread no matter where it went.
The news played on low in the background and the SecDef sat at her desk, taking a minute to decide what to do. Already, the folks on the left touted that this was to be expected, and folks on the right, while grieving, still doubled down on Second Amendment rights.
The shooting was over, and now it was time to call the parents of the students at Fairfax and tell them their world was not. That their children were actually sitting in a warehouse, perfectly safe, pawns in the game to draw out a terrorist, but no longer innocent in the ways of the world.
The SecDef opened the manila file with the list of numbers, and decided she would call the Henrysons last. Let them feel this, she thought. She lifted the p
hone from her desk, but then glanced over at the photo of Ming Lu in the gold frame on her desk, in her school uniform plaid, hands crossed in her lap. What if it had been Ming?
She’d hardly had time to contemplate when Mr. Yellow came running over. “There’s a second shooter!”
CHAPTER 61
“Looks like he’s logged out,” Avi said on the crackling radio. “Okay, boys, it’s a go.”
Eldon had been waiting for the call. He nodded at the SWAT team, and they moved silently and in formation, guns drawn, clearing rooms per protocol, making sure there was no other madman or -woman—or Encyte himself—hidden in the building.
They worked their way across the east wing and down the long hall. “All clear,” Eldon said in the comms. “We’re going into the auditorium.”
Eldon kicked the door in, gunpowder and smoke spilling into the hallway.
“Dear god.” Eldon looked around the silent auditorium. Though he’d seen many gruesome things, both as a hostage and in service to his country, there were few sights more horrible than his young team—bloodied and sprawled out dead on the floor.
He stepped around the fallen kids. Rory, Samy, Mary Alice … accounting for each in his head. Pierce, Rayo … Eleven.
“Guys, we’re one man down,” Eldon said into the radio, his heart hammering, and then he saw at the far end of the stage: Cody, face up, T-shirt drenched in fake blood. His blue eyes were opened wide, like in death.
“Hi, Dad,” Cody muttered into the comms, still playing dead, but angling his head slightly toward his father. He gave a quick smile.
Eldon cleared his throat. “All accounted for,” he said into his radio. “We’re all clear on the—”
The sound of gunfire echoed through the silent auditorium. Eldon spun around. “Everybody down!” he screamed. “We got a shooter!”
* * *