by Derek Milman
“We would have been way more surgical. That was a mess. Honestly, I’m a little insulted they’d play that off as us.” He starts laughing. “Gosh, Aidan, are you sure you haven’t had any Special Ops training? Gotta say, I’m impressed.”
“Nope, no training, Scotty.”
“Ah, you’ve been debriefed—how charming! I like that you know my name. Brings us closer together. Now listen, hun, they’re going to tell you they need you to make a drop.”
“A drop?”
“They’re going to tell you they need you to hand over a flash drive containing broken computer code to us. But it’ll actually be spyware so they can get inside our system.”
I don’t trust anyone, and it’s terrifying. I don’t know what’s real anymore. There are no good guys—only shades of immoral, compromised liars, everyone trying to play me to their own ends.
But I can’t help thinking about Shiloh’s oblique little message, and my neck gets all prickly.
And I have a growing hunch about something else.
I bite my lip. “You know, don’t you?”
After a brief pause: “That you’re a decoy? We figured that out a while ago.”
“So why have me try to give you code you know I don’t have?”
“Because I want you, Aidan.”
“But you keep trying to kill me!”
“No, hun. You need to see the big picture. You became a liability to the government as soon as you fleshed out their little fiction. Can you imagine the fallout? Their whole counter-terrorism division would have to be flushed, rebuilt from scratch, years of work down the drain.”
I have to remind myself that even though he can make logical sense and expertly tie pieces of fact together, Scotty is deranged—and dangerously persuasive.
But what if he’s right?
And what if he isn’t?
“You’re everything I want,” he purrs, “source code or no. A smart kid who’s sympathetic to our cause. A smart kid in need of a family.”
“I never said I was sympathetic. And I have a family.”
“What was coming out to them like?”
I pause. “One level below conversion therapy.”
Scotty snorts at that.
“You seem like you’re doing just fine without me,” I say. “That sniper attack in Kansas was pretty ballsy.”
“Go big or go home.”
“But you have the wrong idea about me.”
“We have enough in common where I can trust you. Because I feel I know you. To me, that’s gold. We both think we break people, Aidan.”
“… I don’t think that.”
“Your brother—”
“Stop.” I press the phone hard against my ear.
“That older gentleman… poor thing… what was his name again?”
“Seriously, stop.”
“These people were already broken in their own ways. Even though you loved them. But you didn’t break them, Aidan.”
“You won’t win my trust by bringing them up. It just feels manipulative and cruel. That’s a fail.”
“We can take away your pain. Give you purpose. The unthinkable isn’t unthinkable anymore. Before you know it they’ll throw us in camps next to the refugee babies. We have to fight these craven hypocrite evangelicals. This is a war, hun.”
“Your war, not mine.”
His voice gets tight. “Don’t be naïve. You and I are the same to the craven hypocrites. Time to pick a side. The feds used your brother—and that whole tragedy—as a lure. They have no respect for him, or what he was to you. But I know that pain. I’ve felt it.”
“How far are you gonna take this, Scotty? Mass murder is still mass murder.”
There’s a knock at the door.
“I’M IN HERE!” I shout.
“Don’t take too long,” a voice says.
“Listen,” says Scotty. “The most dangerous thing you can do right now is tell the feds we figured out there was never any Mr. Preston.”
“Uh-huh,” I say, somewhat dismissively, but he knows I’m listening.
“Sometimes you have to do ugly things to make change in this world. We did a lot of ugly things to win World War II. We firebombed Dresden. But we won the war.”
“Those were the Nazis—”
“Are these evangelicals, wrapping themselves in their sad religious-freedom laws, any better?”
“Maybe a little?”
“They underestimated me, just like they underestimated you. Shiloh is still alive. Come find him. He’s a beautiful swan now. And you will be, too.”
Oh shit, Shiloh. I lean my head against the wall. “Is he okay?”
He snaps his fingers. “We’re running out of time. See if things play out the way I told you. That’s how you’ll know you can trust me. In that moment, when you know for sure I’m right… cross the line.”
“What does that mean, Cross the line?”
“Capture the Flag.” He laughs a little.
“What—”
“They’re about to knock one last time. We’ve been talking too long.”
“I’m done being played, man. I’m taking myself off this chessboard.”
“Oh, look at you, hun, all grown up.”
He hangs up.
Someone immediately knocks on the door. “Hey kid, you okay in there?”
Are you fucking kidding me?
I stare at the closed door. “Yeah, sorry, upset stomach!” I flush the toilet.
“You’re not making any calls, are you?”
“Haven’t even charged the phone yet.”
“Someone thought they heard you talking to someone.”
“Someone was wrong.”
They sit me down on the big plush couch in the middle of the suite. Schwartz comes over, surrounded by a bunch of other agents (it’s like they’re multiplying), hands on his hips. The pouring rain outside, reflected by the watery lights of the city at night, trickles dark shapes down his face.
Schwartz explains that the feds, posing as Preston, have been in further communication with the Swans. Since the Swans obviously know what I look like, it has to be me personally who makes the drop.
“Sorry, but what convinced them not to murder me this time?” I ask.
“We worked them over,” says Schwartz.
“What the hell does that mean?”
“We think they tried to kill you at Mohawk because they didn’t trust you anymore, didn’t believe you were really one of them.”
I draw in a sharp breath. Is he listening to himself? “They’re right.”
The most dangerous thing you can do right now is tell the feds we figured out there was never any Mr. Preston.
“So,” says Schwartz, “continuing to pose as you, as Preston, we fed them fragments of actual malware to prove our legitimacy, our allegiance, and regain their trust. The FAA and the DoD were able to assist in this regard.”
“Wait. What do you mean fragments?”
“Enough code for them to believe you’re a legit black hat sympathetic to their cause and would have the know-how, for the right price, to finish the script. The rest of the malware will need to be delivered by you on a flash drive.”
My hands fly to the sides of my head. “Sorry—you gave them actual code they need to hack military drones?”
“Some of the executable code needed to successfully sabotage military-grade encryption, yes. Problem is, now there’s a ticking clock. Their hackers, who are simply more sophisticated than our team, could piece together the rest of the code fast and mount an attack within weeks.”
“I see.” This sounds utterly insane to me.
“You’re going to make the drop in an hour with what they think is the rest of that code. But the flash drive you hand them will actually contain a different type of malware.”
“Spyware?”
“Right.”
Exactly what Scotty said. Jesus.
“Once we’re inside their system, we can shut them down real fast
. We’ve had our intelligence analysts go over this scenario again and again, and their recommendation is that this is our best course of action.”
I’m so scared right now. Scotty can’t be right.
When all the agents scatter, holding notepads, talking on phones and into earpieces, I pull Schwartz aside.
“Dude. I’m not feeling good about this plan.”
“It’ll all be over soon,” he replies, pressing two fingers to his ear. “And then you can go back to your life.”
He’s not hearing me. “They already tried to kill me multiple times. You’re seriously going to put me in their sights again? THEY JUST WANT ME DEAD.”
“They won’t get a chance to hurt you. We’ll be shadowing you every step of the way. We’ll have snipers on all the surrounding rooftops. And you’ll be wearing a vest.”
Right on cue, an agent with a ponytail steps forward and fits what she says is a Level II ballistics vest on me. The Kevlar is hot, but it’s not as heavy as you would think. They give me new clothes: a loose white T-shirt with a red anarchist symbol (an A trapped in a circle) that fits over the vest, a pair of dark jeans that fit pretty well, work boots, a black hoodie.
I roll my eyes. It’s like they Google-image-searched “hacker.”
Another agent with surgical gloves comes over and tells me to open my mouth.
“It’s a microchip,” says Schwartz, circling me, “a GPS tracker with a wireless audio link. We’ll be able to hear what’s going on. Every word.”
“Why do I need this?”
“For your own safety.”
“What if I say no?”
Schwartz sighs, pats down his pockets. “Are you saying no?”
“I have that right, don’t I?”
Schwartz nods, looks around. “Look, this is our shot. If we don’t take it now, they’ll just find you again. You may not be so lucky next time. What’s wrong? Talk to me.”
“What’s wrong? You don’t give a shit about me. I know the attack on the visitor center wasn’t the Swans. It was you guys.”
He looks genuinely startled. “What are you talking about?”
“Shiloh left a message on my Notes app.”
“How do you know it was Shiloh? Lots of people had access to your phone.”
Okay, I didn’t think about that. I guess anyone could have written that note.
“If it was Shiloh,” says Schwartz, “he could have just recorded a voice memo. So you’d know for sure it was him.”
Okay, that’s true, too, but who checks their voice memos?
“What did the note say?”
“‘Attack on visitor center was us.’”
Schwartz frowns and mulls that. “Us… that’s rather vague.”
I give him an exasperated look.
“You really believe the FBI tried to kill you at Mohawk, Aidan?”
“I don’t know what to believe anymore.”
“Think logically. You think we would have attacked children with tear gas? Killed a state trooper—”
I made that argument already—to Scotty. Maybe things got messy. “That part was an accident—”
“Chased after you in a national park with crossbows—”
“I don’t know.”
“He called you, didn’t he?”
I fold my arms.
“They’re all strung out on drugs,” says Schwartz. “They’re slowly unraveling. They’re desperate. They’ll say anything.”
But I wonder who’s more desperate.
“You knew he’d call me,” I say accusingly. “And you knew what he’d say. You’ve done plenty of profiling on him. If he persuaded me to join the Swans, you’d get another man on the inside with an audio link. Is that what you want now that you’ve lost contact with Shiloh?”
He looks tired. “I’m going to be straight with you, Aidan. At some point, this could get taken out of my hands.” He shows me his palms to physicalize the bureaucratic metaphor so I really get it. “Digital Dust gets dissolved without a trace, we scatter, and the feds make their own determination. The Swans are ghosts. And then you’re looking at Murder One. Evidence tampering. Grand larceny. Espionage. Whatever they decide to throw at you.”
“That sounds like another threat.”
“We may have lost Shiloh,” he says. “He may have been killed, may have been turned, we don’t know.”
Everything he says is another escalating tactic to get me to cooperate, risk my life for them.
“Turned? I thought he went all the way to the Adirondacks to save me!”
“We don’t know his true motivations. Our operation was nearly shredded. No matter his reasoning, he broke protocol.”
“Look, I barely know him. It wasn’t my fault he—”
“It’s not entirely about the military drones,” he says.
“What do you mean?”
“The Swans have something else planned that they’re going to execute much sooner. That’s what Shiloh’s been trying to find out. The Swans put parallel plans into motion and compartmentalize info, and they do it well, so not everyone in this rather loose organization knows what’s coming next.”
That’s when I remember, from the flash drive, that the drones were Phase 3.
We might still be in the middle of Phase 2.
“What are they planning?”
“Soft target. We think they’re targeting children.”
I think of the families in the visitor center. Annabelle, Sam…
Uncle Aidan!
Go big or go home.
“Do you know any specifics?” I press.
“Hold on,” he says, glancing at his phone. “I have to take this call. Give me one second.” As soon as he steps away, the agent with the ponytail comes over, adjusts the Kevlar under my clothes, and dangles the transmitter they want to put in my mouth.
“What is that really for?” I ask her.
“Just so we can hear everything going on, in case something gets said, in case we lose eyes on you.”
I look around the hotel suite, at all the agents milling around. “Why was Schwartz chosen to lead this operation out of everyone in the FBI?”
“Schwartz is a good agent,” she says, not answering the question at all. “You can trust him.”
I clear my throat. “But it seems like, I don’t know, he was specially chosen to work with me or something. Is that a thing you guys do?”
She’s not really listening, crouching down and adjusting every inch of my clothing so the Kevlar is as invisible as possible. “He was assigned…”
“Is it because he has a gay son?” I offer, unsure.
“Son?” she says, still focusing on my clothes.
I tap my tongue against my front teeth. “Eli?”
“No. He has a daughter. I was at her bat mitzvah last year.” She stands up, nodding. “You’re looking good.” She’s checking her text messages as she speaks. “Schwartz is a good man, a family man. He’s one of our best. You’re in good hands.” She pats me on the shoulder, walks away.
Schwartz returns. The Family Man. He looks up, sees my face, and hesitates.
He flashes me this phony reassuring smile and walks toward me with a quick shake of his head, like I’m a child objecting to soccer practice and he’s about to school me about letting the whole team down.
That’s when I step forward and slug him in the stomach with every ounce of my strength.
Fuck. That felt good.
Schwartz stumbles back with a huffing wheeze. The whole suite goes quiet. Everyone’s eyes are on me, phones flat at their sides.
I stand there in the middle of the room, unmoving, staring at him.
Schwartz curses under his breath and waves away a couple of agents who were taking tentative steps toward me.
“My family, my friends—you’re isolating me,” I say, no emotion in my voice anymore, everything drained away. “I don’t like it. I don’t trust you. You’re nothing but threats and lies, lies and threats. And I’ve just been a
pawn. Guess what, I’m done. It’s time for me to become a knight.”
CHAPTER 14
The Handoff
We used to write each other cards.”
Schwartz turns around with a muted smile.
“My brother and me.”
I’m in the back of a Lincoln Town Car, and we’re swooshing through the city in the rain in the night, an FBI agent at the wheel. I’m in back, next to another agent. Schwartz is in the passenger seat. Everyone has Bluetooth devices in their ears.
I got them to change the T-shirt. It’s just an extra-large plain white tee now, under the hoodie, billowy enough to cover the Kevlar. No anarchist symbol. That was just fucking stupid.
Schwartz nods, vaguely. “Oh. I see.”
He doesn’t see.
“I know you think I’m just a means to an end. But there’s more to me than all the pain and the shit in my past. My brother… Neil and I would write each other cards.”
My parents used to send out Christmas cards to all our family and friends. But they’d always buy too many. So there would always be this huge stack of generic cheesy drugstore Christmas cards bursting out of the bottom drawer of my mom’s desk. Neil and I would write cards to each other. It would be like Memorial Day, and Neil would write “Merry Christmas, I hope you’re well!” and stick the card under my door, and then I’d write one back to him. We found this hilarious.
I explain this to Schwartz. He’s nodding along, but mechanically.
“If he knew I’d had a bad day, if my mom told him something, he would try to make me feel better. So sometimes he’d get home late from practice or whatever. I would already be in bed, and then a Christmas card would get slipped under my door: ‘Everything will be okay, I promise! I’ll see you tomorrow and we’ll play GTA and run from the cops and blow shit up.’ He never wanted me to be unhappy. Never. And if he knew I was, he would say something about it to lift my spirits. My mood, what I felt, actually affected him.”
“I’m sorry you lost your brother, Aidan. He sounds like a great kid.”
“I’m afraid I’m going to forget what he looked like. Not just in photos, but what he looked like in person, how he smiled, how he’d blink his eyes. The sound of his voice is already starting… to fade away. I’ve saved all the old voice mails I have from him. I don’t have many. I listen to them over and over. And I keep asking him, in my head, what I should do now… because I do that, I ask him shit, sometimes I just talk to him… and there’s nothing coming back now.”