by Chris Holm
“Yeah. Pulling it up now.”
“Is that what I’m looking for?”
“Yup. That’s our Bessie, all right.”
Hendricks smiled despite himself. “You really want to make that happen, don’t you?” She’d called the damn thing Bessie the whole drive north while they were hashing out their plan.
“What else are you supposed to name a COW?” she asked. “Have you reached it yet?”
“I’m headed toward it now,” he said, head down, snaking through the crowd. “What next?”
“There should be some kind of control panel.”
Up close, the cell on wheels looked to be part cargo trailer, part TV-news van, and part moon lander. It was a wheeled box of road-grimy white maybe four feet high with a ladder at one end and a trailer hitch at the other. From its center, a telescoping antenna pointed twenty feet into the air, and a triangular brace extended from each of its four corners, like landing gear, to hold it steady.
“The whole thing’s panels,” he said.
“The one we want would be waist height or higher. We’re looking for electronics, not anything mechanical, and no designer in her right mind would put an access terminal at ground height.”
Hendricks raised his phone into the air toward the tower as if he had just lost the signal and started to circle it slowly, taking pics and texting them to her. In the distance, an equipment tech in his midtwenties eyed Hendricks with confusion and then began walking toward him.
“There!” Cameron said. “Stop. Go back. Not the last pic you sent, the one before. Top left.”
The panel Cameron directed him to looked like the door of a breaker box, except that it was white, not gray. There was a keyhole beside the recessed handle. Hendricks tried the handle anyway, hoping for a bit of luck. It was locked, because of course it was.
“Hey,” the man headed toward him called, not angry yet, but agitated. He was taller than Hendricks by a few inches and well muscled beneath a layer of baby fat. He wore a tool belt low around his waist and soon was close enough—thirty yards or so—that Hendricks could make out its contents. Screwdrivers. Wire cutters. Voltmeter. Electrical tape. An assortment of pliers. They clanked and rattled as he walked.
Hendricks set his phone down atop the cell on wheels, reached into the right thigh pocket of his cargo pants, and took out Cameron’s electric toothbrush. He’d come across it when they were taking inventory of their belongings on the plane and couldn’t help but laugh. “What’s so funny?” Cameron had asked, reddening.
“Most outlaws aren’t so diligent about their oral hygiene,” he’d replied.
Hendricks had removed its brush head and filed down the metal spindle on the curb while Cameron doctored up his windbreaker. Now he carefully inserted it into the lock.
The man was twenty yards away, the cell on wheels between them, so Hendricks was partially obscured from his view. “Hey!” he shouted. This time, several people glanced up at them.
Hendricks thought, Please work, over and over, a silent mantra.
Hendricks was not a seasoned lock picker. Give him a set of rakes and torsion wrenches, and he’d get through a door eventually, but not with any speed or grace. Lock-bumping—in which a specially made key is inserted partway into a lock and then rapped with a mallet so that the vibration causes the pin stacks inside the lock to line up momentarily—was far more reliable for an amateur like him. But each make of lock required its own bump key, and the process was far from stealthy.
Thanks to recreational lock picking’s rise in popularity, Hendricks was able to learn a trick or two online. For instance, he’d found out that you could insert the spindle of an electric toothbrush into a lock and use its high-speed vibration like a computer hacker uses a brute-force attack. Instead of one rap of the mallet, one chance to turn the lock, the constant shaking knocks the pin stacks around until they line up just right.
At least, that was the theory. Until today, Hendricks had seen it only on YouTube. The guy who’d posted the video warned that the average electric toothbrush spindle was too short to work on a door lock and too thick to fit inside most keyholes. He’d also warned that if you filed the spindle down too far, it’d snap off and the lock would never open. But done right, he said, anyone could pick a lock this way, and to demonstrate, he’d popped open half a dozen padlocks, lockboxes, and storage lockers in seconds flat.
At the time, it had seemed impressive to Hendricks. Now he hoped he didn’t wind up getting caught because he’d been dumb enough to believe something he saw on the Internet.
The tech was fifteen yards away and agitated enough that he’d attracted the attention of some nearby personnel. Hendricks pressed the button on the handle of the toothbrush and winced as the motor hummed to life. The spindle rattled in the lock like pennies in a cup holder.
He held his breath.
Twisted the handle.
To his surprise, the lock opened.
Inside the panel was a keyboard. A bunch of lights, toggles, buttons, and ports. A small display screen, green writing on black background, lines of data scrolling by.
“I’m in,” he said quietly. He glanced up. Ten yards and closing fast.
“You see a USB port?”
“No,” he said. Her tense silence spoke volumes. “Wait—yes. What now?”
“Pop in the thumb drive that I gave you.”
“Done. Now what?”
“Is the screen giving you a prompt of any kind?”
“Uh…”
Cameron sighed. “Just show me.”
“How?”
“Jesus, you’re hopeless. Hang on.”
Hendricks’s burner began to vibrate atop the cell on wheels, spinning a minute or two clockwise with every pulse. He picked it up and clicked the notice. One of the apps Cameron had installed on it launched, and her face popped up on his screen. “Hold me up so I can see it,” she said. He complied. “Okay, listen carefully.”
She told him what to type. He set the phone back down and punched the characters into the keyboard, hunt-and-peck-style, with his index fingers. “Uh, the screen just went blank. Nothing but a blinking cursor in the top left corner.”
“That’s expected,” she said.
“What do I do now?”
“Nothing,” she said. “Once the exploit’s done uploading, remove the thumb drive, close the door, and get the eff outta Dodge.”
“How will I know the exploit’s done uploading?”
“Just watch the screen.”
“For what?”
“You’ll know it when you see it.”
“Uh, buddy?” The tech had reached the other side of the cell on wheels. “You want to tell me what the hell you think you’re doing?”
Hendricks eyed the screen. Then the tech. Then the screen again. Nothing on it had changed that he could see. “I don’t know what you mean.”
“I mean, why are you fucking around with my machine?” He began to circle around to Hendricks.
“Oh, that,” Hendricks said nonchalantly. “My signal keeps cutting out. I thought it’d get better the closer I got to the tower, but no such luck. So then I figured there’s gotta be some kind of knob on this thing somewhere that’ll turn it up. But the goddamn thing is locked.”
The corner braces forced the tech to swing a little wide. Otherwise, he would’ve seen the open panel door and called to the guards—who were already a little too interested in this exchange for Hendricks’s liking.
Hendricks glanced down. Saw the screen flicker. The code vanished, replaced by a message in block letters made of zeros:
HELLO MY NAME IS BESSIE
Then the message disappeared, and code began to scroll by once more.
Hendricks removed the thumb drive. Pocketed it, along with the electric toothbrush. Eased the panel door closed as the man rounded the corner. It locked automatically with a click.
The man had an ID badge on a lanyard around his neck declaring him to be Aaron Stanton of the NCSC�
�Homeland Security’s National Cybersecurity Center. “This thing’s locked for a reason.”
“Which is?”
“So morons who can’t stop the clock on their microwave from blinking twelve don’t fuck with it and knock out our whole damn communications network,” he said.
“Listen, asshole,” Hendricks said, affecting umbrage, “I’m not some dipshit off the street—I’m a special agent with the FBI.” He was always amazed at how well a little bit of swagger sold a flimsy grift.
“Oh. Sorry,” Stanton said, his words dripping sarcasm. “I didn’t realize you were a Feeb. I’ll try to talk slower.”
Hendricks leaned in close and grabbed Stanton’s ID badge. He made a show of scrutinizing it closely. “Hey!” Stanton exclaimed, snatching at it. “What the hell?”
“I want to make sure I spell your name right when I report you,” Hendricks replied.
“For what? Doing my job? You’re lucky I don’t report you. If you’d so much as pressed a button on this baby, I would’ve. So how about you get the fuck away from her before I change my mind?”
“Fine. Have it your way. I don’t have time for this bullshit.” Hendricks turned and walked off. Once it became clear the argument was over, the attention of the crowd began to wander. Stanton, though, was still suspicious. He looked the cell on wheels over carefully, even opening the panel door and checking inside.
When Hendricks was twenty paces away, Stanton shouted, “Hey, dipshit—not so fast.”
Hendricks tensed. Reddened. Turned. Those near enough to hear Stanton turned too, their gazes focused on Hendricks once more. A few placed their hands on their guns. Hendricks broke out in a nervous sweat.
“What now?” he asked, as casually as possible.
Stanton smiled like a grand master declaring checkmate and waved something at Hendricks. “You forgot your phone.”
Hendricks didn’t have to feign embarrassment; his rattled nerves made his performance as convincing as it was effortless. He jogged over to Stanton and took his phone. Once he had it, he set off walking west—toward the nearest off-ramp, toward anywhere but here.
26.
YANCEY SET HIS items on the counter beside the register and flashed the teenage girl behind it a smile. She was young, pretty, and Somali. Her skin was light brown. Her hair was hidden beneath a vibrant head scarf of orange and pink. Her clothes were otherwise indiscernible from any reasonably modest Western teen’s. She was chewing gum and texting someone as he approached, thumbs flying across her cell phone’s screen. But when she turned her attention to him, her face went immediately expressionless. “That it?” she said, eyeing the items he’d set down, her tone bored, her accent Californian.
“Actually, little lady, I’d also love a book of matches, if you please.” He cranked up the wattage on his smile and threw in a wink for good measure.
The girl snapped her gum, rolled her eyes, and rang him up. Then she grabbed some matchbooks from beneath the counter and tossed them in the general direction of his bag, her eyes glued once more to her cell phone’s screen. A couple of the matchbooks landed inside. The others missed. One bounced off Yancey and landed at his feet.
The smile died on Yancey’s face. He snatched the cell phone from her hand and launched it across the room. It ricocheted off a magazine rack and shattered when it hit the floor.
“Hey!” the girl exclaimed. “What the—”
Yancey flipped aside his sport coat to reveal the wooden grip of his revolver. The girl’s eyes widened and she shrank a little behind the counter. Her chin quivered as tears threatened.
“T-t-take whatever you want, just please don’t hurt me.”
“I ain’t gonna hurt you, honey—I’m one of the good guys. I keep this country safe so people like your folks can pour across our borders and take advantage of our social services. But I draw the line at letting ’em raise their kids to be spoiled brats. If you’re gonna live here, you better learn to show some goddamn respect.”
He fished his wallet from his pocket and tossed a twenty on the counter. “Ditch the scarf and use the change to buy a baseball cap,” he said. “This is America, for Christ’s sake.” Then he snatched up his bag and headed for the door.
The air outside the convenience store smelled of exhaust. Yancey lit a cigarette on his way across the parking lot and then waited at the curb for the traffic to clear. Once it did, he jogged across the street to the mosque.
The place didn’t look like any mosque he’d ever seen. There were no domes. No minarets. No ornamentation of any kind besides the banner hanging off the roof with lettering in Arabic. It was just a squat, ugly commercial building that used to be a second-run movie theater—though the letters had been removed, the words DAYMARK CINEMA were still faintly visible in negative on the building’s dingy facade—in a commercial stretch of Daly City, ten miles south of San Francisco.
Today, the mosque was closed. Its expansive lot—sun-bleached and in need of repaving, tufts of crabgrass sprouting through the cracks—was nearly empty. The only vehicles were his rental, a plum-colored Cadillac ATS; two unmarked Bellum Industries Humvees, identifiable as Bellum’s only by their license plates, BI23 and BI27; and a green late-1980s Chrysler LeBaron with a Bondo’d front-right fender that likely belonged to the imam. Two Bellum men, both thickset and clad in sleek black body armor, flanked the front entrance.
Yancey headed toward the door. One of the men opened it for him before he arrived. He stepped inside, exhaling smoke, and looked around.
They hadn’t done much with the place since its movie-theater days. Same carpets, same walls, same lights. The concession stand was dark, its glass case empty. There was a set of shelves beside the door for shoes, a couple pairs left on it, even though the imam was the only one here. Yancey wondered how the fuck somebody managed to walk out without his shoes. These people were a mystery to him.
He kept his on.
The lone theater had been converted into a prayer hall, its seats removed, its floor recarpeted but not leveled so it still sloped gently toward the curtained screen. Its entrance was to the left of the concession stand. Yancey headed right, to the imam’s office—originally the theater manager’s—and went in without knocking.
The imam was inside, zip-tied to a folding chair.
His desk—metal, institutional, painted antacid green decades before and left to flake—was shoved against the wall, as was the thrift-store office chair that normally sat behind it. Office chairs were lousy for interrogations. Always rolling away or slowly spinning around. They blunted the force of a good punch, and made it hard to intimidate the subject by walking in and out of his field of view.
The imam was in his early forties, tall and thin, with long limbs and delicate hands. He had a well-trimmed beard, black flecked with white, and wore a loose-fitting white button-down with no collar, a white skullcap, and gray trousers. His wire-rimmed glasses rested on his desk blotter. An oozing cut split his right eyebrow. His face showed anger. His feet were bare.
Yancey schlepped his grocery bag across the room and set it on the floor where the imam could see it. “He give you any more trouble since we last spoke?” he asked the black-clad man who leaned against the desk cleaning his fingernails with a carbon-steel tactical knife. Another Bellum man stood, silent, in the corner of the office behind the imam.
“No, sir. He hasn’t said a word.”
“Good.” Then, to the imam: “I hear you gave my boys quite a fight.”
The imam said something in reply but too quietly for Yancey to hear.
“What was that?”
“I said you cannot smoke in here. It is a place of worship.” His voice was calm. Quiet. Full of rage and hurt, well mastered.
Yancey took a good, long drag. Let the smoke flow freely from his mouth. Inhaled it through his nose. Held it, savoring. Then blew it out again, smiling. “Seems to me, I can smoke in here just fine. And anyway, from where I’m standing, this place looks more like a porno theater th
an a place of worship. Now, you wanna tell me why you went all Taliban on my boys when they came knocking?”
“I did no such thing. I merely attempted to flee. When one is Muslim in America, one learns to be distrustful of masked men with guns. Given the proximity of their arrival to yesterday’s tragedy, I surmised—correctly, it appears—that they were here in a misguided attempt to lay blame for this horrible attack at my feet.”
“Seems to me that distrust cuts both ways,” Yancey said. “We wouldn’t come knocking if you people would stop attacking us on our own soil.”
“The soil is as much mine as yours,” the imam replied. “And I resent the implication that I am anything like the men who did this. Those men are zealots, savages, lost souls corrupted by leaders whose teachings are an affront to the true message of the Koran. I am not like them. I am a man of faith. A pacifist. Neither I nor Allah condone what happened yesterday.”
“A damn shame those savages look so much like you, then.”
“On that,” the imam replied, “I do not disagree. Although I hasten to point out that I am not the one to resort to violence today. These restraints are unnecessary. Perhaps you’d consider removing them and having your men wait outside so that we two may continue this discussion in a civilized manner.”
“Civilized,” Yancey said. “Right. Listen, Muhammad—”
“Rafiq,” the imam corrected.
“—as much as I’m enjoying our little chat, I don’t have time to dance with you all day. Here’s how this is going to work. The restraints stay on. My men stay where they are. I’m gonna ask you some questions. You’re going to answer them. My satisfaction with regard to those answers will dictate how the rest of your day goes.”
“I would like a lawyer,” Rafiq said.
“Would you, now.”
“Yes. If you wish to question me, it is my right.”
“Well, would you look at that,” Yancey said to his men, “Rafiq here knows his rights! Only here’s the thing, Rafiq. I’m private sector. Your so-called rights don’t mean shit to me. So, as I was saying, I’m going to ask you some questions, and you’re going to answer them.”