I really, really wish I could preen. Instead, I shrug. “Nothing special. Just look for weaknesses.”
“No,” Haswell says with messianic certainty. “It’s not nothing special. It was something very special. I’m impressed. Don’t be full of shit. You and I both know that whatever you did, it was clever. And very few people can do it. You’re one of the select.”
Well . . . he’s not wrong. But I’m still not giving him anything.
Haswell leans back, his handcuffs clinking. “Does it ever bug you?” he asks.
“Does what bug me?”
“The bullshit. This job of yours. When you could be doing something superior. I was sunk the moment they noticed me, long before I went after the senator. You remember those kids from Steubenville, Ohio? They passed that drunk girl around and fingered her, took pictures and laughed because they were the jocks? You know the hacker who got the pictures? He faces more jail time than the rapists got. Because corporations wrote those laws, you can get in more trouble for copying a DVD than raping someone.” Haswell leans forward between us. “Doesn’t that make you just want to get out on the street and rage?”
“It makes me want to send donations to politicians who aren’t idiots,” I lie.
Haswell sighs and slumps dramatically into the back seat. “You mean the same kind of people who can’t even remember their password properly unless they call tech support or have it on the back of a sticky note on the side of a monitor? You think they’re fit to pass laws about technology? Are half the other useless empty-headed illiterates out there fit to have an opinion on technology and law? You know, most people can’t even explain how a light bulb works.” He hits the back of Toto’s chair. “Either of you know how a light bulb works?”
Toto, jolted out of his trance, sets his jaw. We can’t bring our marks back to their county of residence with any bruises, but Toto knows how to fuck them up without leaving a trace. I wait for him to hit the brakes and pull over. But he doesn’t want to lose time. “I usually just flip the switch,” he says.
Haswell doesn’t think that’s funny. “Sure. So do they. But they don’t even know what that really means. Yet they’re going to explain to me how evolution is fake and climate change isn’t real. Give them half a moment, and they can’t even disprove the dark-sucker theory of how a light bulb works. It’s just magic. Flip a switch, there it is, you’re right. Send them back in time, they’d never be able to recreate it. They’d be lucky to figure out fire. Because they’re parasites that live off the largesse of the greater minds that came before them.”
“So it’s time to kill them, like that senator? You think that will solve things? Seems to have just ended with you handcuffed in our back seat.”
“Okay,” Haswell says. “I wasn’t thinking, then, just lashing out. I wanted people to realize that the internet was under attack. Literally. And that if war had been declared, people online needed to realize it. Before the internet could fight back, it needed to realize a war had started. I thought I could get some attention to this. But I wasn’t thinking clearly. Not like I am now.”
“What are you thinking now?” I ask.
“It’s time to reboot,” Haswell says. “Time to put in a clean operating system. No more patches. No trying to get old buggy code to work. A fresh upgrade. Everything has to be wiped out for it to work properly. Now that I know you all are getting close, it’s time to hurry and press the power switch.”
“Societies aren’t computers,” I say, but I have to admit that his metaphor is chilling.
Haswell wants to argue that, but Toto looks up. “Potty break!” We take an exit quickly, getting off the ramp and pulling into a small gas station. The bathroom keys are attached to a giant wooden canoe paddle.
We refill the car with gas, Toto’s camelback with bottled water, and get back in the car and on the road. Toto pauses at the stoplights before the ramp, waiting for the light to change.
“Huh,” Toto mutters, right before a white electric company truck emblazoned with a familiar logo blows through the red lights and slams into us.
• • • •
“It’s not your fault,” Toto tells me later. After we had been stunned by the impact, our faces covered in airbags. After Haswell’s two overall-wearing friends smashed in the window and spirited him off before we’d had time to register what had happened.
Who would have expected the crazy loner in the cabin to have a posse?
“Shut the fuck up.” I wince as I say it, feeling bad. But I don’t apologize. I’m on my phone, typing with my thumbs like a possessed demon because the laptop’s screen is cracked and useless.
“We should get you to the hospital to have someone look at your eye.”
“Fuck my eye,” I say. The bandage over the cut to my eyebrow has stopped the bleeding. It just throbs now. As does the rest of my head. I can still taste the smoke from the airbag in the back of my sinuses. There’s a slight tremble to my fingers.
“You might have a concussion,” Toto starts.
“I’m fine.”
“Happens to the best. We couldn’t have known what he was doing.”
I look up at Toto. I’ve brushed most of the glass out of my hair, and the adrenaline has long since faded and left me with the jitters. “I should’ve thought to check for other signals. Like a small GPS pip hidden somewhere. Can’t we go faster?”
The Corolla is vibrating and shimmying around. Wind whistles through cracks and warps in the doors. Toto shakes his head. “Barely in one piece,” he says. “We’ll shake apart.”
“We go back to where he lives, and we find his gear. I want to strip out every password, every user account, every one and zero he’s ever touched,” I tell Toto. “There’s going to be a mistake in there somewhere, and then we’re going to pick the bastard up again.”
I’m so full of fury. I feel like a bell that was rung when our car got hit; and that I haven’t stopped vibrating. That fury builds as we show Haswell’s photo around town to ferret out where he’d hunkered down. And that fury bleeds away into a dull sense of confusion when we find, waiting for us at Haswell’s apartment door, three FBI agents, a SWAT team with really big guns, two Department of Homeland Security officers, a local sheriff, and last but not least: the barista from the coffee shop.
“That’s them!” the barista says.
And all hell really breaks loose.
When it’s all settled, Toto and me are zip-tied to a table, and one of the blue-suited FBI agents eases into a chair across from us. Until they ran our info and realized we were skiptracers, they’d assumed we were working with Haswell. Coming back to pick up his computers for him. Now they were just pissed.
“We finally had Haswell staked out, and you got him right out of town under our noses.”
“Jesus,” one of the FBI suits keeps saying, rubbing her forehead and sighing as she paces around us. Then she grabs Toto’s shirt, and shouts into his face. “Do you have any idea what this man is currently into? When you created this algorithm to look for his writing, did you stop and read it?”
“I didn’t have time!” I protest, trying to get her away from Toto. “I was working on the match possibilities. I basically cobbled together a bunch of scripts . . .”
Her attention is on me, and I flinch. “So you didn’t bother to stop and read?”
“No,” I say. “Like I said . . .”
“He’s openly talking about trying to crack fucking nuclear missile codes. Sure, he did it under a handle, but you’re not the only one running text analysis. We found him as well. Only unlike you amateurs we actually stopped to read him.”
I remember snatches of text. Reactionary, rich Silicon Valley stuff floating around the net. Nothing I didn’t see in most anonymous forums. Between that and the anarchists, I mostly just tuned it all out as the background static that came with interfacing with a hacker community.
“Lot of idiots say a lot of stupid things,” Toto says. “Do you chase down every idiot ca
lling for armed overthrow online? Because you’d end up wasting a lot of time at certain news sites . . .”
The agent’s attention is back on Toto. “This one is for real, has already struck, and you let him get away!”
One of the other agents pulls her away from us and tells her to calm down. The entire environment is really hostile.
This is feeling electric, and scary. Haswell has been getting into some seriously stupidly high level dangerous stuff online.
“He had a GPS chip on him, so his friends could find him,” I defend myself. “And he had some way of triggering it. Maybe a simple check-in sequence online. I don’t know. Maybe you can back trace that.” I’m trying to help clean up. But no one looks happy. I’m grasping at straws.
“You let him get away,” the agent repeats, and kicks a chair.
“Is it even possible?” Toto asks. “You can’t really think he’s able to hack into our nuclear launch system?”
His eyes widen as he reads the room. Everyone in here believes it.
“To get into the nuke codes.” I look at them, following Toto’s thinking. “Aren’t there, like, daily changes of the code. Security. Chain of command. Two people to turn the switch and all that?”
The FBI agent stares down at me. “Well, Haswell thinks he’s found a way around it. And seeing as that he was able to take over someone’s car to try and kill them, we can’t afford to take the chance he’s bluffing, can we?”
Haswell had said he was going to push the power switch. System reset. What kind of system reset do you think a guy like Haswell’s planning if the FBI says he’s trying to get his hands on nuke launch codes?
A chill runs down my spine.
• • • •
They cut us loose a few hours later. We flee town, tails tucked between our legs.
“Goddamnit, Toto. This is worse than Florida,” I shout. My laptop’s been seized, as well as my phone. I’m probably going to have a criminal record. The suits ensconced in their air-conditioned, glass palaces would throw me out the door twice as hard now. No normal office job life on the table now, not even as a back up.
And that didn’t even matter, did it? I’m freaking about the wrong shit. Because Haswell might be trying to launch nukes. Or sell the codes. Hold us all hostage. Or something horrific. Whatever he’s going to do once he gets them, it can’t be good.
“I’m sorry,” Toto says softly.
“Fuck!” I hit the dashboard. “Why’d you have to try and fix everything? If you’d just left it alone. Let me keep trying for an office job.”
“I’m sorry,” Toto says again. He looks beat, head bowed and shoulders slumped.
I soften. “No, I’m not being fair. Not your fault. I should have scanned for signals. Should have . . .” I stop. I’ve been thinking about how to track him. How to hunt down his trail. I want to stop this from fucking everything up even more.
But now I’m thinking we need to find where he’s going. We need to skate to the puck.
“Overalls,” I say to Toto. “Overalls.”
• • • •
We don’t have a phone. We don’t have a computer. We have a car, and I make Toto spin us back around. There are ICBMs hiding underground around the small town in concrete silos, scattered between the farms. Strange crops. Blank spots in the map. “Since budget cuts, they’ve been outsourcing some plant maintenance for the military. Risky, so the background checks on it are high, but the money is good. No one gets to touch the missiles, but obviously Haswell’s found a way in. He was wearing overalls for one of the companies handling silo maintenance.”
Toto speeds up. Something falls off the Corolla and bounces into the ditch. We’re wobbling like a bad amusement ride but making good time.
“No one’s gonna listen to us, a couple of crazies showing up at a secure military installation. We should go into town and tell the feds.”
“We forced Haswell’s hand. He’s going to hurry now.” Reboot the machine, he had said. “Let me talk to the guards when we get there.”
“They’re gonna shoot you,” Toto predicts.
I’m quiet for a while. They’ll be armed. Won’t take any kind of threat peaceably. Hell, they’ll kill Haswell if they realize what he is up to.
Which is why, I realize, Haswell isn’t going to be trapped in the silo when the damn thing surprisingly launches.
“Stop. Stop! Now!”
Toto obliges. “What?”
“He doesn’t want to get shot.” I kick the door open, as it doesn’t want to swing on its warped hinges. Toto has stopped on the shoulder of the road.
I clamber onto the back of the Corolla and onto the roof, surveying the flat horizon of land stretching away. It’s approaching dusk. I’m looking for something tall enough Haswell can broadcast from.
I spot blinking aircraft hazard lights hanging in the air.
I jump down to the ground. “There.”
Haswell needs line of sight, and somewhere to swamp the world with a powerful wireless signal to access the electronics he’s snuck into the missile silo . . . or silos. Haswell needs a tower. I start trying to wave down passing cars, and up begging to borrow a phone for a second off a wary looking older man in a minivan.
I can’t reach the sheriff. The FBI puts me on hold. I leave messages for them both, give back the cellphone, and head back to the car.
We’re going to have to do this ourselves.
Toto sees the look on my face and knows. Once more into the breach.
I drive, hunkered down over the wheel and looking up into the dusk for the blinking lights that will guide us in. He kicks the glovebox with a knee and pulls out a thick, gray revolver with what looks like a forearm-long barrel.
As we pass from asphalt into dirt service road, the car skidding and kicking up dust, Toto flicks the chamber open and calmly, expertly, inserts six bullets.
“You can get out,” I say, voice quavering slightly. “I can go in alone.”
“It’s my mess, too. I’m not leaving your side.”
I hide my relief. A minute later I slam the car through a wire mesh fence and come skidding to a halt near the electric company truck that slammed into us earlier. The front end of it is all twisted up from the impact. There’s another truck just past it, near the foot of the massive radio antenna. Thick coaxial cables snake out of the van and up to the tower’s base.
There are computers lined up on folding tables, all plugged into thick bundles of fibers. They’re being powered by a large bank of batteries on the ground under. It’s a full mobile server setup.
The Corolla’s hood starts leaking steam, obscuring everything. The engine coughs, sputters, and then dies. Sorry Toto. I’ll try to make this up to you. Somehow.
But Toto doesn’t seem to care. He’s out through the door with that massive gun, lips pressed tight, murder in his eyes. And I’m suddenly seeing the enforcer. The guy who, if he isn’t teamed up with me, lapses back to that other person. The person who causes people to step aside nervously.
“Stay behind me,” Toto orders.
I do as I’m told.
“Hey!” one of the men who crashed into us yells as he steps out from around the van. He has a pistol in his hand, and Toto doesn’t bother saying anything back. He aims the revolver and the world splits apart with a crack. Blood splatters the logo on the side of the white van and the man clutches his chest.
Toto keeps walking forward. He shoots him again, in the knee and yanks the man’s pistol away from his trembling hands.
“Safety’s still on,” Toto notes in disgust. He pushes the small lever and hands me the acquired pistol. “If it moves, shoot it.”
“Stop!” someone shouts. “There’s no reason to hurt anyone.”
Haswell steps out in the open, hands up. He looks a bit pale.
“Where’s the other one,” Toto growls. “Tell him to come out.”
“Danny!” Haswell shouts. “Drop the gun and step out.”
A young man steps
around the van, holding a shotgun. He tosses it into the dirt.
“It’s too late,” Haswell says to us. “It’s already running, so there’s nothing you can do now. It’s all over.”
And he smiles. Wide, terrifyingly enthusiastic, and full of vision.
• • • •
I’m rooting around the servers, Toto by my side, trying to figure out what I can do. Trying to figure out what the fuck Haswell has done. Toto’s got both men covered by the large revolver, but he’s looking over at me.
“Well?”
“Give me time,” I mutter.
“It’s too late,” Haswell shouts at us.
“To undo killing that many people? I sure as hell hope not!”
There’s a pause behind me. I glance back at Haswell, who looks at me like I’m an idiot. “Kill them? I’m not going to kill anyone. I’ve set the missiles to burst in the air.”
Our eyes lock.
I get it.
Reboot.
Decades ago, when scientists used to test nuclear bombs out in the open, they set one off high in the atmosphere over the Pacific. And electronics died all throughout Hawaii and up to the West Coast. That’s how we found out that some bombs set off an electromagnetic pulse. Not as big a deal in the 1950s.
But today?
The electromagnetic pulse will slag most consumer-grade electronics. No more iPhones. No more internet. No more fancy car with GPS and collision-avoidance. No more flatscreen TVs. No more cable.
“Those fucking anti-intellectuals, the ones who can’t live without all the things the nerds invented, how will they make it now?” Haswell asks. “They decry our checking into social media; they mock our favorite shows. But they all depend on us. And you know what, we carry them no more. People like you and me, we’re the natural leaders. We are the inventors, the tinkerers, the ones who should lead it all.”
“Can’t lead shit if all our toys are dead,” I say, stepping forward. I can’t recall the missiles, I can’t change where they are headed. I need more time to understand how to undo it all, and time is something we don’t have.
The End is Nigh (The Apocalypse Triptych) Page 14