“Agent Aiken. Good to hear from you, too. Give me a second.”
She heard a click and a series of beeps. Petrino started to talk but she cut him off.
“What do we know about ICANN?”
“Uhm, okay. I’m fine, you? And so on, is how it goes.”
She waited for him.
“That’s the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers.”
“I know what it is. I need a list of names of the people headhunted to be ICANN members.”
“Where are you?”
“Safe.”
He was silent for a moment. “Aiken, you’re in a lot of trouble.”
“Petrino,” she urged. “Tell me what you know.”
“Okay, Jesus. ICANN. Each of the fourteen civilian members holds a metal key to a safety-deposit box. Each of these boxes contains a smartcard. When these are all activated in unison, it creates a master key which reboots the internet.”
“Based on what IP?”
“Well, come on, Aiken. That would be ICANN protocol.”
“How do they do it? Can it all be done remotely?”
“No. They have to fly to a single location.”
“In the US, right? Petrino, I’ve gotten all the same briefs you have. I’ve read all the memos. Those are the lines they’ve been feeding us for three years.”
“Listen, You need to come in. You’re in danger.”
“That’s just the limited hangout — members flown to a top-secret US location, blah blah blah. Come on. You know how this works. The master key won’t be created by civilians. It’s Wick, right?”
Petrino was unresponsive. “Petrino!” she shouted.
“Aiken. Don’t do this.”
They need me now more than ever. That’s why I’m still alive. All they have to go on is my testimony, my case files, my story. They made the arrests based on me. Not on wiretaps, not on forensic evidence. Nonsystem will have encrypted everything. Maybe they’ll get nothing from their hardware after all — or, it will take months. They’ll lean on those kids for confessions, but maybe the kids won’t budge. They’ll have to let them go.
Or, they’ll keep them right where they are under the NDAA. Maybe they’ll send them to Gitmo. They can do anything they want — this is a matter of national security.
“Aiken, Nonsystem attacked a New York City data center this morning, while you were in with Wick.”
She felt her throat close up. “What?” She thought of the streetlights dark on route 6. The ghost town Cotuit had become. She pictured Wick, sitting across from her, perfectly poised and equable as the city burned. “What’s going on, Gary?”
Petrino was old school, gray and indifferent as a tomcat, not much riled him. But suddenly he sounded like a spooked rookie agent. “It’s the end of the fucking world, Jennifer, that’s what’s going on. It’s been fucking chaos. Are you somewhere secure? You say you’re safe?”
“I am. I’m good.”
“Has anyone tried to contact you?”
“I have no cell service. Internet is out. Calling you from an old landline.”
“You’re in Massachusetts?”
She felt a pang of fear. “I might be.”
“Makes sense. Yeah, Massachusetts is down.” He seemed to be calming down some, but there was still an edge to his voice.
“What does that mean?”
“Internet is down in seven states. There are some areas where it’s still sluggish, some dial-up, but it’s pretty much dead. Cell-phone towers have wigged out, too. It’s a major crash; the whole northeast has basically imploded. Bridges, roads, schools, subways, all affected. The President declared a national emergency at three this afternoon.” Petrino paused, breathing loudly into the phone. “So, they did it. Your little gang of hackers are pretty beefed up after all.”
“Petrino, I spent the night before last cramming internet shutdown information. There’s no way Nonsystem is doing this. For one thing, you can’t destroy a signal while using it. You’ve got to cut cables, pillage data centers, demolish root servers — you need analog violence, not just some amped up DDoS strike.”
“Are you speaking English?”
“What I’m saying is, this type of destruction is not about hackers. The internet is full of backups, redundancies. Nonsystem knows you can’t kill the internet from within; repairs would override damage. This is not coming from them. They warned me about this.”
Petrino was silent. She could sense him evaluating her. Wondering if she’d gone native, if she might be a traitor. She knew it was a risk calling the FBI if they were in fact under the thumb of Central Security Service, but Petrino worked mostly on his own as a profiler.
“There have been targeted attacks on data centers all over the country,” Petrino said. “So, I hear you. I understand the physical components here. Turn the TV on, regular TV, they’re still a couple of stations broadcasting. SWAT teams pushing back demonstrators already surging all over the country; half of them want to fry Nonsystem, the other half of them are calling for freedom of the internet. Liberation of digital currency, net neutrality, all that sort of thing. God, protests used to be simple. You wanted to end a war, you showed some tit. Sorry. Anyway, if it isn’t Nonsystem, or the fucking Islamic State behind them, beg pardon, who is doing this?”
“I don’t know.” It was a lie. Baldest she’d ever told. She could see Wick’s empty eyes, the false charm carefully etched into his features. She could hear Gentian say we’re ready. He’d wanted this? Were they martyrs?
“Okay . . .” Petrino drawled. “If you don’t know, or can’t guess, you got any idea for motivation? I can get you those ICANN names, but it’s going to take a while. Things are totally jacked here. Got a number I can call you back at?”
Jennifer closed her eyes. She’d grown to like Petrino. He was about her only friend in this thing for the past couple years. But she was about to lose him, too.
“No,” she said.
He exhaled with frustration. “Alright. Listen. You need to be careful. Stay somewhere safe. There’s been looting and rioting in Boston, and it’s a total nightmare in New York City. Too many traffic collisions to count, people jumping from buildings, shootings right out in the open.”
She felt cold.
“Okay.” She looked out the window at the azure blue of Cotuit Bay in the distance. She realized there was no one left she could trust. “Thanks, Gary. I gotta go.”
“Okay. Stay safe.”
She hung up and stood motionless in her family kitchen for a moment, her mind just spinning wheels. She then dialed a number from memory. She heard a series of chimes and a prerecorded voice saying that “all circuits are busy now.” Her parents weren’t reachable. Her mother had upgraded everything in their Ramapo home to digital a couple years before. A bundle of internet and phone. This house was the only place her family had with old technologies.
She remembered the TV they used to have. A picture-tube with rabbit ears on top. Jennifer went into the hallway. She pulled the string and the compartment swung down in the ceiling. She reached up and unfolded the stairs down, waving away the dust. She climbed up and looked around in the attic. It had to be a hundred degrees. There it was, the old Zenith television. Grunting and gritting her teeth against the pain flaring in her back and her neck, she wrestled the TV out of the small space and down the rickety stairs, nearly slipping and dropping the whole thing.
She found an outlet in the fake wood paneling in the living room and plugged it in. She fumbled with the rabbit ears for a moment, making sure they were still connected. She pressed the power button and stood back as the screen slowly came to life.
CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT / SATURDAY 6:08 AM
The rain came hard and fast, turning the world the color of cinder. A tethered dinghy bounced in the waves and thumped against the dock. The lake turned choppy, the water gray and frothy in the downpour. The trees shook, their branches silver, beads of rain slicing through the thick boughs. The trees surrounded the large Adiro
ndack Great Camp, it too colorless in the storm.
The bad man's past already conforms to his badness and is filled only with dreariness.
Brendan stood in the driveway, his jeans and sweatshirt soaked through, looking at the Land Cruiser parked at the end of the driveway in front of the single-bay garage. The garage was built into the ground, part of the basement of the large structure. Alongside the garage door was an entrance, the door white with chipped paint. The iron knob squeaked in his grip; it was open. Brendan slipped inside.
The basement was dark, musty, and smelled of earth. As his eyes adjusted to the weak light coming in through the ground-level windows, he saw bags of potting soil stacked up and other landscaping and gardening equipment. Near the back was a workbench and a wall of tools. An old rotary-dial phone was fastened to the wall. Deeper in, a large object sat covered in a tarpaulin. He lifted the canvas covering and peered underneath. A restored boat; a guide boat, Alexander Heilshorn’s prized possession.
Along the far wall were stairs going up, with boxes stuffed beneath. The place was littered with old chairs, bicycles, shelves with canned food, camping supplies.
Pounding from above. Thuds against the floor that moved quickly from one end of the house to another, like running. It sounded like a child. Brendan looked at the ceiling. The footfalls shook the dust from the underfloor.
He started up the stairs.
The wood groaned softly beneath his weight; one stair creaked louder than others, and he froze halfway up. He waited. He heard the pounding again, reverberations of a child running, back in the other direction. He quickly went up the rest of the steps, while the child was in motion, using the sound to conceal his movement.
He faced the narrow door at the top of the stairs. It was locked.
Made sense, he thought. Keep a small child from wandering downstairs. He paused, listening to the noise of the rain outside, the distant banging of the dinghy against the dock. As he considered his course of action, he heard a different sound.
The latch of the door at the garage entrance. Someone was coming in behind him from the outside.
He stood still, his soaked clothes dripping, wetting the strip of worn carpet that ran down the flight of stairs. He felt the rain in his hair trickle down the sides of his face. He kept his breathing shallow, straining to hear more.
He thought he detected the scrape of a foot. As he hesitated and listened, the pounding suddenly resumed as the child in the house ran back across the floor again, covering the whole breadth of it. Thump thump thump thump thump. The sound sinking down towards the other end of the building.
The stairs rose into an alcove where various bags and jackets hung from pegs in the wall. Where he stood, on the second step from the top, he was hidden from below. If he took just one step down, his feet would be visible.
He was trapped in between. Door locked to the house, someone in the basement.
Another rumble of thunder. The deep bass of it, like a stone rolling across a hard floor in heaven. There was no turning back.
Brendan launched himself at the door, throwing his shoulder into it, giving it every ounce of strength he had. But there was no leverage. He heard a splintery crack of wood and the door seemed to give way some but it didn’t open. His stomach went oily. His heart seemed to stop beating for a moment. A flare of heat around his ears, in his armpits, his groin. His whole body pulsed with the beating of his heart, his skin tingled with nerves and blood.
From below him came the distinct sounds of shoes on concrete, a figure running across the space towards the stairs.
He threw himself at the door again; his shoulder, the palm of his hand, even the side of his skull thwacked into the wood. There was a crunching sound, and a groaning of metal as the latch bent slightly and sheared away from the wood casing and the door exploded open and Brendan tumbled through.
He was on his hands and knees. A linoleum floor. A huge kitchen connected to a huge dining room with cathedral windows.
A woman standing by the sink turned to look at him, her eyes wide, her mouth a grim, determined line.
Greta Heilshorn.
On the far side of the enormous open-plan room, hidden beneath the curved legs of an antique dining table, a little girl peered out at him, like a fawn through the trees.
Her eyes, the shape of the nose and mouth, he’d seen those before. He’d seen them in the reflection of a bedroom mirror. The little girl, Leah, looked at lot like her mother, Rebecca Heilshorn.
Brendan got to his feet, watching Greta. The women held a spatula in her hand. The air smelled of onions and garlic — she was cooking an omelet on the stove. Her wrinkled lips parted for a moment, and Brendan heard a hiss, but it could’ve just been the rain, and then he turned as Staryles bounded up the stairs after him.
The little girl, Leah, cried out, “Ma’am!”
Ma’am, Greta Heilshorn, didn’t move. She stood still, eyes locked on Brendan as he lunged further away from the mouth of the basement stairway, clattering into pots and pans hung on the wall. She kept her eyes on him amid the chaos. He distantly realized that the water was running in the sink behind her.
Staryles exploded through the doorway, and immediately swung around to Brendan, who hurled one of the pots at him. Staryles ducked, but didn’t get clear entirely, and the handle of the pot clipped him across the ear. He yelped and put his hand to the side of his head, raising the semi-automatic handgun with the suppressor. He pointed it at Brendan.
“Enough,” shouted Great Heilshorn. Her voice was commanding.
Staryles’ head snapped to the left to look at her, his expression reading, You for real? I got this guy dead to rights.
Brendan remembered the face. Movie-star looks. Lifeless eyes. The last time he’d seen Jeremy Staryles, he’d been sitting across from Brendan in a New York City jail, giving Brendan one hour to either join him or rot in hell.
“Not here,” Greta responded. “You’ll make a huge mess.”
From where he was, sitting on his butt, surrounded by cutlery, Brendan could only partly see the little girl on the other side of the room. Just her hand and part of her foot from where she was on all fours beneath the table.
“Come on out, Leah,” Greta said. She turned away for a moment and calmly removed the pan from the burner on the stove before the eggs burned.
Leah looked right at Brendan as she went to her grandmother. In that stolen moment, he no longer saw Rebecca’s face, but an expression carved from the experience of living with Greta Heilshorn. He only hoped there was still some innocence left in her, some part of her unspoiled by the wretchedness of this life. He felt a pang of guilt for being a part of it, for bringing the violence of the day.
“Come here, child.”
Leah came out from beneath the table and once again disappeared from his view, blocked by the kitchen island.
Leah crossed the room to Greta, who put her arm around the girl’s shoulders.
“Get him up,” Greta said to Staryles, her eyes locked on Brendan.
“Do it,” Staryles barked, and Brendan rose to his feet, and then Staryles laughed.
Brendan stood shaking, his breath coming in jerky gasps. Greta wriggled her lips for a moment, as if tasting something. To Staryles, she said, “Take him out back and kill him there.”
“Move,” Staryles, and pointed behind him.
Brendan started that way, slowly, keeping his hands out in front of him, palms out. He swiveled his head to look at Greta across the wood block as he walked.
“When you’re finished,” Greta said to Staryles, “you may quarter him, pull him apart, and send his pieces to Jennifer Aiken at the Justice Department.”
Staryles shoved Brendan forward. He entered another massive room, with couches arranged around in squares, with a grand piano, and a large river-stone fireplace. An entire wall of rear-facing windows, floor-to-ceiling. These provided a view of the back lawn sloping up and away to a border of evergreens. There was a long, rectangul
ar garden there. Even from here Brendan could see corn stalks.
Greta’s voice floated in from the kitchen.
“Do it in the garden,” she said. “Just like he killed our Kevin.”
CHAPTER FORTY-NINE / SATURDAY, 6:13 AM
NBC was on the television. A reporter stood in front of a scene of mayhem in Manhattan. The message scrolled beneath the reporter on the screen: Emergency Broadcast System urges you to stay in your home. Do not attempt to drive or to enter populated areas.
The TV had been on all night.
Jennifer watched from the couch. She rubbed her arms for comfort while she listened to what the reporter was saying.
“. . . A hospital that is unable to get fuel oil this morning, forced to relocate nearly two hundred patients. Police and fire departments are having difficulty communicating as internet services are still down, or have slowed to a crawl. All commercial flights at JFK and LaGuardia are still grounded. The Department of Transportation has reported multiple motor vehicle accidents due to GPS failures. Rioting continues in the Bronx and in Harlem, and spread overnight into Midtown and Downtown Manhattan. The Metro Transit Authority has suspended all subway travel.”
The shot cut from the reporter to hand-held footage that was shaky and blurred. It was like watching video from Benghazi. People were breaking windows and pillaging businesses. Armored vehicles prowled the streets, whole garrisons of National Guardsmen formed phalanxes. The battle scenarios at Camp Edwards had come to life.
The reporter was looking more and more uncomfortable in her position along the West Side Highway. A caravan of police vehicles raced past behind her, lights blazing. She was about to speak when the camera filming her jostled and went dark.
After a few seconds of blank silence, the news anchor came on screen. “We seem to have lost the feed from Shelly. We have an expert on domestic terrorism standing by, Max Kamber from the Department of Defense. We’re unable to get a satellite feed from Washington, but we have Max on our landline phone connection.”
There was a headshot of a gray-haired man in his fifties, suspended in the corner of the screen.
DAYBREAK: a gripping thriller full of suspense (Titan Trilogy Book 3) Page 26