Feral: An Our Cyber World Prequel

by Suastegui, Eduardo

  “Like old times, then,” Chana said.

  “I suppose.”

  “Did he at least seem interested in your little adventure?”

  Sasha walked past Chana and stepped into the kitchen. Chana followed.

  “Something to drink?” Sasha asked.

  “Water. Sparkling, of course.”

  Sasha pressed a glass against the refrigerator’s water dispenser. “Straws are in the drawer over there. Grab one, stick it in, and blow yourself some bubbles.” She handed Chana the glass, and started pouring herself another.

  “So it didn’t go so well, then.”

  Sasha turned to face her. She rested her back against the refrigerator, feeling the humming of the internal motor go through her.

  “He was a little tweaked about me using his code.”

  Chana raised an eyebrow. “His code?”

  “It will take some time. It’s not like I can yank him around. You know that. We were never really in love.”

  “We?”

  Sasha started to sip, but lingered to take in a full swallow, draining her glass about halfway. “It will take time.”

  “Because Martin will take some convincing, because his situation is… tricky? Or because you want to siphon a little bit more cash for your benevolent cause?”

  Sasha took another few seconds to drain the rest of her glass. Then she turned to access the water dispenser again.

  With her back to Chana, she said, “That’s pretty much all I have to report. If anything changes, I will let you know.” She turned around and faced Chana. “And if you break into my apartment again, we’re done.”

  “Easy, now, Sasha.”

  “It’s careless. What are you trying to do? Burn me?”

  “Let’s not forget who pays for this nice pad of yours.”

  “You’re the one that needs to start realizing: I have other sources of funding now, don’t I?”

  Chana let out a short-lived chuckle. Then she handed her still full glass to Sasha and walked out.

  Sasha tried to watch a little TV. But her mind registered none of it. Sitcom, commercials, news reports. It all blended into the same blob. Thoughts of Martin rushed through her head.

  How had he seemed? Distant at first. Put off. Then tender. Though not for long.

  She knew he resented her. Oh, he’d convinced himself to take the proverbial bullet for her. He hadn’t turned her in when he’d gotten caught in the middle of their joint hack. She had told herself that showed he cared for her. He had wanted to protect her. Or she’d wanted to believe that. Desperately so.

  Looking into his eyes earlier that night, though, she’d detected something else. How dare she use his code? How dare she unsettle his little cooperative arrangement with the feds? He hadn’t said it, not all the way, but his eyes and body language told it clear enough.

  But she sensed more than that. He wanted to believe that the hack—their hack—had been all his. His innovation. His knowhow. His cleverness. His code. Down deep he knew that not to be the case. But her showing up burst that. It reminded him someone else had taken part, someone else had thought things through, someone else had done as much coding as he had. Maybe more. Perhaps even the parts that mattered most.

  Maybe that’s why he’d turned himself in. To take full credit. To make it all about him. And that fit, didn’t it? He’d always made things all about him and for him. To him, she’d been nothing more than a cute girl who happened to own the brains to play his favorite games.

  Sasha turned off the TV and dropped the remote at her side. She stayed there, on the couch, under a blanket she pulled all the way up to her neck. She closed her eyes and tried to imagine a world in which Martin cared about her.

  None materialized. Instead, Sasha was left with a world where she had to manipulate him in order to get access to whatever project he was developing for his handlers. Was she up for that? Could she do it?

  She turned this way and that on the couch, trying to fall asleep. No use going to bed. She knew she’d struggle the same way there. No sense in messing up the fresh linens she’d fitted on and smoothed that morning. Something rattled nearby. Eyeing the end table to the left of the couch, her mind connected the buzzing with the cellphone that she kept at the base of the lamp that stood watch there. The phone she never used, but kept wired to its charger, ready for use should her Iranian suitors call, as they apparently did now.

  Phone in hand, she read the text message. She ripped the charger’s cord off and took the phone with her into the bedroom. There she took a fresh change of clothes into the bathroom. After a quick shower she dressed and headed out and into the night.

  Martin hadn’t been asleep for more than ten minutes when his phone rang. The landline phone, he realized, recalling a second later that he wasn’t home. The front desk calling, perhaps? He hoped, having little confidence in it.

  In fact, he knew it was them calling. Like they did at all odd times of the day and night in his apartment. Like they probably had tonight, only to discover that, oops, he’d taken off on them. He should’ve felt guilty about that. He’d broken the rules, after all. But instead, he let himself get angry at the way they controlled him.

  “Hello,” he said, letting all that anger ring in his voice.

  “Hey, Martin. It’s me, Stan. We need you to come in.”

  “Now?”

  “Yeah. Can’t wait till morning.”

  “What is it?”

  “Can’t discuss over this line.”

  “Ah, that kind of thing.” Martin swung his legs over the side and sat on the edge of the bed. “That thing we were working before?”

  “Can’t discuss over this line,” Stan repeated. But from the way his voice sounded this time, Martin could more than guess the answer.

  “Well, that’s going to be a problem.”

  “Oh, yeah?”

  Martin sighed. How nice of Stan to not call him out, giving him a chance to come clean. “I’m in Los Angeles.”

  “Wow, really?”

  “Cut the crap, Stan.”

  “Yeah, how about we all settle down and do that.”

  Martin sighed again. “I’m game if you are.”

  “It’s not a game and we shouldn’t be playing one.” Stan let that hang. “Get dressed. Transportation on the way.”

  12» Rogue Code

  Half groggy from not having awakened all the way and still under the influence of one too many glasses of room service wine, Martin rushed to get dressed. A pounding on his room’s door made him slip on his shoes without tying them. He opened the door to find two guys sporting crew cuts. They didn’t wear their customary black suits, but they should have. Their deep blue workout suits wouldn’t fool anyone.

  “This way,” one of them said.

  Martin knew better than to object or whine about it. It would amount to little more than so much wasted saliva.

  His escort guided him toward the elevator. One of them held the door, the other did all the button pushing, and they stood at either side of him on the way down as if to ensure he wouldn’t leap out through the top of the elevator.

  “Things must be getting tense,” Martin said halfway down.

  Neither man replied. Martin supposed he should’ve known better than to try and make small talk. He didn’t from that point on, not when the elevator’s doors slid open, not when they walked through the hotel lobby, not when they met a third guy standing by a black gas-guzzler SUV, not when he opened the door for him, and not when once all in, the fourth guy stomped on the accelerator to speed away.

  Wedged between two muscular men, Martin sat in silence throughout the fifteen minute drive to the Westwood FBI field office where his handlers had taken up temporary residence. He used the time to anticipate what would come next. Were they here to retrieve him, or was something else at play? Stan’s tone on the phone suggested the latter to him. They were upset about more than his unscheduled, unannounced trip to Los Angeles. Something bigger had happened. That
could play in his favor, or it might aim more red arrows in his direction.

  His mind went back to Sasha. Had she cranked up the hack? Flexed her muscles again? To out him some more? To get back at him for not seeing things her way? Nah, that didn’t quite compute. Sasha may have been a woman scorned, but she wouldn’t do something stupid. Like raise the heat and get herself burned in it.

  He worked her motivations in his mind, and he could still not snap it all into place by the time the elevator reached the second floor. Two of the four guys shepherded him toward the vault door. There, they stood behind him until the door clicked.

  Martin grinned. “Hey, still letting me in. I guess that means I’m not persona non grata yet.”

  The guys stood there. They gave him nothing but blank stares.

  Martin shrugged and shook his head before pressing his shoulder against the cool metal door. He got it to break seal with a hiss and a pop on the first try, and he stepped in. It slammed shut behind him. He repeated the procedure with a second door, which, as usual, gave way with less resistance.

  Stan Beloski stood waiting on the other side.

  “What gives?” Martin said.

  “This way.” Stan turned and Martin followed.

  They sped-stepped through a corridor. A glass-walled conference room stood at the end of it. It didn’t take Martin long to decide the team had turned it into a makeshift war room. Through the glass he could see computers and wires arranged in haphazard patterns that suggested a rushed, less than neat setup. At the front of the room, a wide projector screen displayed a map of East Asia, lit up with an array of multi-colored, flickering dots whose pattern he could not quite make out.

  “China?” Martin said.

  Stan didn’t reply. Instead, before Martin could step into the room, Stan grabbed him by the arm and took him around the corner into a small office. Martin went in first. Stan shut the door.

  “Is it her?”

  Martin raised his hands. “What? Who are you talking about?”

  “Come on, Martin. It’s been long enough, and I’ve covered enough for you.”

  “You’re confusing me, Stan. Care to get a little more—”

  “We’ve known all along.” He tapped his chest, lowered his voice. “I’ve known all along, OK?”

  “I’m sure you have. Wanna clue me in on what all you have in mind?”

  “Her. Sasha Javan. Is that specific enough for you?”

  Martin shrugged. “She was a classmate at MIT.”

  “Who you happened to meet this evening.”

  Martin shrugged. “Yeah, in a dark computer lab. We didn’t go all the way, if that’s your concern. But if we had, I can assure you we would have had protected—”

  “Take this seriously.” Stan stepped up. In his eyes Martin saw something Stan hadn’t shown him before. Anger. Fury, even.

  Martin stepped back. The vein in his neck swelled and thumped. “Hey, man. I don’t know what—”

  “We know you covered for her.”

  His breath got shorter, shallower. “Covered for what?”

  “You had an accomplice. You’re good, but not good enough to bypass the laws of Physics, like you can’t be at two places at the same time, no matter what hackerly cleverness you unleash.”

  Martin swallowed. He decided at that instant. No use in keeping up the lies. They knew. For whatever reason they’d kept it under wraps. Maybe they’d bought that she wasn’t the big fish. He was. He had the goods, and she’d just pressed some keys and buttons. Or maybe they had a better idea than that, and maybe they’d decided for whatever reasons of theirs not to grab her, too. Or maybe she was working for them all along, and had now resurfaced to trap him. To see whether he wanted to keep on the straight and narrow.

  Whatever the case, he didn’t have time to sort that out now, and they surely wouldn’t level with him. Acting on the level was a one-way operation for them. He had to act on the level. They could do whatever the heck they wanted.

  All the same, Martin dropped his shoulders and felt it. Relief. No more hiding. He sighed. Almost at once the thumping in his chest settled down.

  “So what are you saying, Stan? She’s making China blink with all those tiny dots?”

  Stan twisted his lips to one side then the other, like a man trying to maintain control over his emotions. “Someone’s hacked the Asian markets, much as they did here. Same code.” He pointed at Martin. “Your code.”

  “It might look like my code. But I had nothing to do with it. Been over that, remember?”

  “We have reason to believe it’s her.”

  “Sasha?” Martin tried to inflect as much skepticism as he could muster into his voice. But to his ear, it rang hollow.

  Stan leaned his head to the left. “Come on, Martin.”

  Martin considered his response. Once again, he had no reason to protect her any longer. Neither could he see a benefit to stalling and obfuscating.

  “Stan, it wasn’t me.”

  “I want to believe you.”

  “Why would I do it?”

  “For a girl.”

  “Not this girl, Stan. Not this one. I’m clean.”

  Stan regarded him for what felt like a full minute. Then, he turned to the door and opened it. Martin started to follow Stan. But Stan didn’t so much step out of the room as he slinked sideways to get past a woman. She stepped aside to let Stan get by her before she came into the room.

  “Hi, my name is Cynthia,” she said. “I’ve heard a lot about you. Too much, if I may be honest. Far too much.”

  Martin hated this about himself: in most social situations, he would invariably forget a person’s name two seconds after initial introductions. It happened now. She’d asked him to sit at the table. She’d taken the chair across from him. She’d shown him her ID and told him her name and title. He had only registered her title. But that didn’t make any sense. Something or other about collections.

  “I’m sorry, can I see your ID again?”

  She obliged him, sliding a leather wallet toward him. He felt stupid for asking. She certainly didn’t need to prove her identity to him—not in a fully secured facility. Still, she smiled at him, as if to say, yeah, I know you didn’t catch my name.

  He looked over the ID, looked up to compare the picture to the real thing. Her short brown hair hung lower than in the picture. She looked a little thinner in person, but he attributed that to a wide lens, the sort cheap badge photo cameras usually employed. Her sharp blue eyes sparked with a smile of their own.

  His gaze darted back to the wallet. “So… Cynthia... Agent Odehl—”

  “Cynthia’s fine.”

  “You don’t look like him. Your father? Uncle?”

  She smiled. “The association is entirely paternal. Well, and a little professional, of course.”

  He slid the ID back toward her. “How can I help you?”

  “How do you think you can help us?”

  It took him a second to decipher her question. “Oh, I don’t know. I’ve always wanted to save China.”

  She chuckled. “That would be quite the feat.”

  “It probably would be advisable. Seeing as to how they own, oh, I don’t know—half of the federal debt?”

  What little smile curled her lips and danced in her eyes dissipated. She retrieved her wallet, stowed it in the inner pocket of her suit jacket, and she leaned back in her chair.

  “Tell me more, Martin.”

  “About what?”

  She drummed her fingers on the table. “The US debt. Who finances it. How critical it all is.”

  “Are you kidding?”

  “Do I look it?”

  “I deal with code and computers. All I know about the US debt and the Chinese I’ve heard in the news or the latest political speech.”

  “I see.”

  “Glad we got that cleared up.”

  “Do you know what’s going on in there, Martin?”

  “In the war room?”

  “T
he very one.”

  He shrugged. “I bet you’re dying to tell me.”

  “You’re a smart guy. We bring you here in the middle of the night. You’re not a financial expert—though your code or a version thereof has been detected fondling the tenderest recesses of the US stock market. And I become unusually interested when you mention the US debt and its Chinese benefactors.”

  Martin breathed in deep. “You think the hack has found its way to Asian markets.”

  “We don’t think, Martin. We know.”

  “My code.”

  “Yes. That’s quite the thing, to have your creation threatening to cause an international incident.”

  She waited for Martin’s reaction. He forced himself to sit still, even if he had to allow himself a dry swallow.

  Leaning forward to rest her elbows on the table, she said, “Smart guy like you, it’s all clicked into place, right? Your dear Sasha and whoever she Cyber-impersonates while nibbling at the Chinese, making it look like US nationals, heck, maybe even the US government, are pilfering the very accounts that hold Chinese-owned US Treasury bills. It can all get rather messy in a hurry, as I’m sure you can envision.”

  13» War Room

  It didn’t take Martin long to size up the situation. In truth he didn’t have to figure out anything. His Cyber teammates already had a bead on the hack by the time he and Agent Cynthia Odehl walked into the room. If the trim-and-skim hack on the US stock market had run under the radar, trickling fractions of cents at a time, the Chinese version shouted its presence from the mountain tops. Loud enough, the Chinese had detected it and lodged a formal complaint with the State Department, as Martin overheard from one of the rumpled suits in the room.

  “See that,” the acne face kid—what was his name again?—noted, dragging his finger across the computer screen and leaving a smear.

  Martin shuddered at the oily mark. “Yeah. They’re sure pulling down big time cash.”