Staring back into the eyes of the team, Crowne’s face fell. He conjured the energy to take a few sluggish steps, stopping at the edge of the pit.
Outside the window, a wave of deep thudding beats filled the air as flecks of red and blue begin to appear against every glass surface in the room. Crowne once again heard the heavy bass thumps of helicopter rotors, this time much louder and clearer.
Turning to face the full wall of windows, Crowne saw two police helicopters, equipped with heavily-armored soldiers hanging out either side, tilting their pitch to land in the courtyard.
“Execute the D procedure,” Crowne said to the team with an exhausted breath, looking back out past the windows, his face now lit with police lights.
“But sir,” one of the engineers said, “that means….”
“Yes, I know what it means,” Crowne said, “Burn it down. Burn the whole place down. Start with the server room.”
The engineers exchanged looks and then sprinted towards the server room, grabbing a thick case from the wall marked ‘D’ on their way in the door. Crowne crumpled back against the wall at the pit’s edge, unbuttoning his jacket and sinking onto the floor with a slump of his shoulders.
He looked down to the pistol in his hand. The dull shine of its barrel reflected the onslaught of lights now shining back into his eyes with hypnotizing beats of color.
As the room lit with the orange glow and heat of fire, Crowne lost himself in the dancing lights, highlighted by strobes of white, gliding and twisting and melting together like nothing else he had ever seen.
Like nothing he had ever dreamed of.
> > > > >
“What just happened?” Haylie asked as she rose to her feet. “We weren’t supposed to go dark. What did you do?”
“I changed a couple of things,” Caesar said, reading the final lines of the script’s output.
Haylie took a few steps towards him. “You did?”
“The Project script was designed to take out the systems of every continent while keeping each Bilderberg Group location around the globe fully functional,” Caesar said. “I just reversed the script. Now each headquarters for The Project has gone dark, while the rest of the world watches on, fully powered up.”
“For a minute, I thought….” Haylie stopped herself before she could say the words out loud.
“What, with these guys?” Caesar said with a smile. “Please. These guys are assholes.”
Walking over to check Caesar’s screen, Haylie felt a wave of relief fall over her. She gave her brother a sideways hug.
“Let’s get out of here,” she said with a sigh of relief, peering through the window at the commotion outside. Two military helicopters sat in the courtyard, rotors still spinning, as soldiers forced their way into each wing of the mansion. “Let’s go home.”
Caesar shut his computer and plucked his messenger bag off the floor, sliding the computer in and zipping the bag shut. “I’ve got other plans.”
“What?” she asked, spinning to face her brother. “What are you talking about?”
“Before I came here,” he said, “I thought I was doing important stuff, that my work actually mattered. But now I know that I was wrong—there’s this whole other world that I never knew existed. My eyes have been opened. The Project was a horrific concept, but the things they built along the way were actually pretty amazing. I’ve got their code … I erased it all from Crowne’s servers, but I kept a copy. All of it. Access to every system in the world. Imagine the good we can do; this stuff can have a huge impact in the right hands.”
“We need to hand that over to the police,” Haylie said. “I don’t trust that code with anyone, including us. What if someone else managed to get a copy? Just delete it, let’s be done with all of this.”
“You think the authorities—the police, the FBI, Interpol—they’re going to forget what happened here tonight?” Caesar said. “They’re going to lock us both up. We’re dangerous to them now. That’s what Raven taught me—didn’t it teach you anything?”
“They’ll understand,” Haylie shot back.
“They never understand,” Caesar said. “Listen, I pulled aside the best people from my team here—good people. They’ve already left, we’re meeting up in East London tonight.”
She stared back at him, silent.
“Haylie,” Caesar said. “This whole thing—it’s not our fault; but it still changes our lives. No matter which way we go, our worlds will be different tomorrow. You don’t have to come with me, but you need to know that the feds will be looking for a scapegoat. You can trust the government, or you can trust me.”
“I can’t do this anymore,” Haylie stammered with a shake of her head. “I need to go home. You can come home, too.”
Suddenly, Haylie’s nostrils filled with the smell of burning wood mixed with charred plastic. She saw smoke pouring through the open hallway door.
“There’s no way that this works out for me,” Caesar said. “We just saw the leaders of the free world try to seize complete power. And you don’t think they’ll come after us for what we know?”
“You need to trust them. You need to do the right thing,” Haylie pleaded. “You’ve changed.”
“We all change,” Caesar said as he threw his bag over his shoulder, smiling. “You’ve changed, too. Change is good.”
He walked over to her and gave her a hug. “I’ll be in touch. I’ll be fine. Don’t worry about me. Watch out for yourself.”
Haylie’s eyes welled with tears as she hugged her brother, hoping to God that it wouldn’t be for the last time. “Stay safe,” she said.
“I will,” Caesar said, looking up to the smoke hanging down from the ceiling. “Crowne must be burning all the evidence. Let’s get you out of here.”
They sprinted down the hallway and came to a T-intersection. Looking behind her, Haylie saw the growing orange glow of a wall of flames mixed with black smoke rolling in behind them.
“The courtyard is that way,” Caesar said, pointing to the right and coughing, choking on smoke. “Just a few turns and you’ll be there.”
Giving Caesar one last hug, Haylie nodded, straightened her jacket and stood back. She gave him a quick wave, turned and ran.
She twisted down the hallways, fighting to bring her mind back from her brother’s words and onto the task at hand. She worked her way into the smoke, feeling through the darkness with each step and searching for corners.
Finally, she saw two glowing, illuminated squares of the exterior door windows. She sprinted, pushing at the doors with both hands, running into the cool, fresh evening air and out of the mansion. Two figures stood at the middle of the courtyard, facing the fire and watching her approach.
She slid in next to them, taking in the scene. All three floors of the mansion, wrapped around them, fire spitting out of each window. Beams falling and smoke seeping out of every corner it could find.
“Not exactly how I thought this would all turn out,” Benjamin said. She looked back at the brothers, their faces both smeared with black, their hair full of the falling ash that drifted down on the courtyard like snowflakes.
“Haylie,” Walter added, leaning in towards her ear. “We should talk about what we’re going to tell the police; get our story straight. I mean, you don’t think we’re like Crowne, right? We know that what we did was….”
“Shut up, Walter,” she said staring into the fire. “Just shut up.”
A pair of helicopters appeared over the mansion, blowing smoke and cinders into swirls and dust devils across the courtyard. Two spotlights shot down from above, lighting up Haylie as she stood and watched the mansion burn.
CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE
The University of Texas
Austin, TX
September 30th, 1:32PM
“Wait up, dummy!”
Haylie turned as the familiar, British accent rang down the crowded hallway. She saw Vector pushing his way past the mob of students headed in the opposite direction
.
“You look like one of those salmon swimming up stream,” Haylie said. “We walk on the other side of the hall over here.”
Huffing, but still managing a smile, Vector finally caught up to her. “Old habits die hard.” He pulled out his phone, doing a quick check of email.
Reflexively reaching into her pocket for her device, and feeling an empty space where the phone was supposed to be, Haylie paused and shook her head.
You’re right about that.
Haylie was still getting accustomed to each of the wonderful terms of her surrender that she had agreed to six months ago. Interpol and the FBI had shown her a good amount of mercy, mostly thanks to her help in taking down The Project.
Prime Minister John Crowne had taken himself out of the equation back at Titanhurst before the police reached him, but most of the other members of the Bilderberg Group, even with the evidence Haylie had found on Crowne’s phone, had escaped prosecution in one way or the other. Some were still on the run, never to be heard from again; others were still in power, somehow implicating their staff or deputies while expressing regret for the situation, but not recognizing any knowledge of The Project. Powerful people tend to stay in power, it seems, and justice was not always a black and white result.
Haylie’s deal had been negotiated over the course of a few weeks, with plenty of help from the Sterling brothers’ high-priced legal team; she was allowed to remain out of prison, but would be heavily restricted in her access to anything connected to the Internet for the next few years.
She was now allowed to go online for only two reasons: one, as any core part of her computer science studies, and two, for any assistance the U.S. Government asked for with hacking-related research. The second piece of the agreement was one of the big bargaining chips for the government’s legal team—they made it clear that they would be asking for Haylie’s help frequently, and that she’d better pick up her landline when they called.
The only point of negotiation that Haylie had fought for was standing next to her; the government had agreed to pay for her college expenses, but she insisted that Vector be part of the deal as well. Having him attend school alongside her was non-negotiable, and as foreign as he felt in the middle of Texas, both of them knew that they could use a few calm years of college life after the events back in London. His gunshot wound had healed well and he barely even mentioned it, other than noting the occasional discomfort when his backpack was too heavy with textbooks.
As they made their way down the hall and towards their next class, students stared at them with mouths wide open, grabbing their friends, pointing fingers. Haylie was no longer that girl in your high school class that was quiet and smart and sitting in the back corner; her face had been on display across every newsstand in America over the past few months with headlines like “Crash: The Girl Next Door that Just Saved the World.”
The government had gone public on almost every detail of The Project except for one: Caesar. Haylie still hadn’t heard from her brother since that night at Titanhurst. He had fallen off the face of the earth, along with the team of eight engineers that went with him and all the code from The Project. She wondered about where he was and what he was doing every day.
They passed a group of students working their way down the hall and Vector was suddenly nudged in closer to Haylie’s side. As he brushed up against her arm, he gently grabbed her hand with his. She slapped it away, shooting him a nasty glance.
“Stop that.”
Haylie squinted through the reflection in her glasses as she gazed past the hallway doors and into the warm sunlight pouring in from the quad. As she deflected the attention from the passing sea of students—some posing for quick selfies, others throwing up random high-fives and fist bumps to her or Vector—she felt the heat hit her as they escaped outside, the fresh fall breeze blowing her hair back across her shoulders.
They made their way across campus to their Computer Science 204 class, finding a space in the auditorium directly behind a group of four classmates.
“Hey, you made it,” the girl on the left said as she spun to face Haylie with a wide smile. “We’re still on for movie night tonight, right?”
The guy sitting next to her turned to face them as well. “We’d better be,” he said, “I got a torrent of WarGames. It’s some old movie that’s supposed to be awesome.”
“Um, you haven’t seen WarGames?” Haylie shot back with a grin. “Don’t even talk to me, loser.”
“Please,” the girl said, laughing. “You’re the one who didn’t know about Firefly. It’s like, you’re lucky to even be talking to me right now.”
“Whatevs,” Haylie said with a laugh. She looked up to the front of the classroom to find the agenda for the day’s lecture projected on the screen. She broke a smile as she read the presentation’s title slide.
It read:
Coding Beyond the Basics:
Now that you can do anything,
what will you do?
> > > > >
Continue the Haylie Black story
with the second book in the series,
Crash Into Pieces.
Available now in paperback and Kindle.
> > > > >
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> > > > >
About the Author
Christopher Kerns has spent more than twenty years advising top companies on technology strategy. His thoughts and opinions on tech and data have been featured in The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, CNBC, and USA Today. This is his first novel. He lives with his family in Austin, TX.
Twitter: @chriskerns
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/ChristopherKerns.author
Visit http://www.chris-kerns.com/ for more information on the technology and history referenced in Crash Alive.
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Crash Alive, Copyright © 2016 Christopher Kerns
http://www.chris-kerns.com/
Old Ballard Press, PO Box 842, Manchaca, TX 78652
ISBN: 0692575715, ISBN-13: 978-0692575710
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, businesses, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or used in any manner without the expressed written permission of the publisher.
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