Today is turning out to be a very different day, indeed.
“We need to work together,” she continued. “Tell me what you know, and you’re a free man. Offline, but free. You say that time is hanging over my head—you’re right. But it’s hanging over yours as well. In twenty-four hours, this whole thing will be over. After that, they won’t need you anymore. And trust me, this wasn’t easy for me to arrange, so it’s not going to happen again in your lifetime. Do the smart thing here, Endling.”
“Anthony,” he said with a hushed tone. “My name is Anthony.”
“That’s good. Tell me what you know, Anthony.”
“Not until I have a deal right here.” Anthony pointed at the desk with two taps of his finger. “That’s how this works.”
“You hear that, Agent Wilcox?” Haylie asked as she typed a few keystrokes. Anthony saw a second window pop on the screen. The new view showed Agent Wilcox, staring into a camera, fighting back her shock.
“That’s affirmative, Ms. Black,” she said, composing herself. “I’ll take care of things from this side. I’ll need you and your friend Vector on the next plane to New York, we’ve set up a command center there.”
The door cracked open as two agents walked in, paperwork in hand, and placed it on the table in front of Anthony. In a slight state of disbelief, he peeled back the cover to inspect its contents.
“One of the first data dumps I sent back,” he said as he read, “the one from the casino—I included a Trojan horse with the data. One that I wrote myself.”
“And it worked?” Haylie asked.
“Of course it worked. He’s been switching phones every other day, but not laptops. He’s still using the same computer that he started with. You should be able to access most of his systems if he’s online—but just read access, not write.”
He finished reading the document and slid his hands over to the pen that sat pointed at his chest. He clutched it, twisting it through his fingers.
“Don’t underestimate him, Crash,” Anthony said as scrawled his name. “With the access he has, he’s capable of anything.” Gazing up at the screen, he saw her eyes grow wide. “Anything.”
The agents grabbed the paperwork and took Anthony by each arm, escorting him from the room. On his way through the door—on his way to freedom—he could make out a voice coming through over the TV screen.
“Try to get some sleep on the plane, Ms. Black,” he heard Agent Wilcox say. “Tomorrow’s going to be a busy day.”
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
JFK Airport
New York
November 5th, 1:06AM
The dull weight of fatigue pulled Haylie’s shoulders down with each step as she made her way up the jetway incline. She had managed a few short hours of fitful shuteye on the flight, but not enough to really count as sleep. It was going to have to do, for now.
Sleep tomorrow night. Sleep when this is done.
She pushed her glasses up her nose and rested both hands on her backpack’s shoulder straps, feeling the hollow floor echo below her feet. She caught a reassuring nod from Vector as he placed a hand on her shoulder.
“You’re doing the right thing,” he said in a low, calming voice. “It will all be over soon.”
As they approached the end of the jetway, two rows of men came into sight, all clad in navy blue jackets with blocky, bright-yellow “FBI” lettering on the top left. Behind them, Haylie could make out Agent Hernandez, phone to his ear, his eyes locked on the fugitives fresh off the plane from Germany.
The closest agent grabbed Haylie by the arm, twisting it slowly but forcefully towards her other. She felt the cold, slick metal click around her wrists as she looked to Hernandez for an explanation. To her side, she saw Vector getting the same treatment as his smile morphed into a scowl.
“What is this?” Haylie yelled over to Hernandez. “This wasn’t what we talked about.”
“Keep your mouth shut and come with me,” Hernandez said.
“Unbelievable,” Vector muttered as the agent walked them towards the exit.
They were escorted through the terminal and deep into the underground parking lot, past a swarm of agents. After being ushered into the backseat of an SUV, Haylie and Vector waited in silence for what seemed like hours, watching the agents in a flurry of activity all around them. Vector looked over to Haylie, who was staring out the window, past the agents, down the long, gray rows of the garage.
“I can always tell when you’re working on something,” Vector said. “You putting together the plan?”
“No,” Haylie said. “It’s … It’s dumb.”
“What is it?”
“The aisles of the garage, they’re what I always pictured when I played a game. An underground world—dark and musty and endless. Something from when I was a kid,” Haylie whispered. “You heard of Zork?”
“I think so,” Vector said. “Maybe you’ve talked about it before.”
“It was a game from the 80s—hell, maybe even the 70s. It was text based, so it just told you what you were seeing and you had to type in the right command to keep going. ‘You are at the bottom of a seemingly endless staircase,’ ‘There is a brass lantern at your feet,’ that sort of thing. I played an online emulator version of it. I loved it—I loved everything about it. Once I discovered it, it’s all I thought about for weeks and months. Played every chance I got. Exploring this giant underground world hidden under a trap door in a kitchen.”
“When this is all over,” Vector said, “we’ll play a round. For old times’ sake.”
“No—that’s the thing,” she said, fighting off tears. “I tried playing again one night last year. Someone posted a new emulator on a forum and I was so excited to jump in again, to see that world again. To go back to what I remembered, you know? But when I logged on, it wasn’t the same. Or, I mean, it was the same, but not like I remembered. The puzzles were boring, the monsters—the troll and the grues—scared me, jarred me when they snuck up on me from nowhere. It wasn’t fun anymore. It was the same, but different.”
Vector looked on for a few moments and nudged her shoulder with his. “We can do this, you know,” he said. “We’re going to make this happen.”
“I know we can,” Haylie whispered back. “I just don’t want to have to do it.”
The door cracked open, and Agent Hernandez ducked in. He slapped a folder down on the seat across from him with one hand, straightening his tie with the other. He looked back and forth between Haylie and Vector for a few seconds, doing his best intimidating, authoritative stare.
Haylie sat back, letting the mood in the car sink in. After a few seconds of awkward silence, she tilted her head slightly and looked Agent Hernandez in the eyes. “Let’s just get on with it, okay, Hernandez? I don’t need the angry-dad routine right now.”
“Yeah, mate,” Vector added. “We’re here to help you. I can’t type with cuffs on.”
“If I could remind you,” Hernandez said. “You two almost got me fired—probably will get me fired, actually, once this is all said and done. Sorry if I’m not giving you the red carpet treatment. And now this Mason Mince guy is all over the TV, and it’s not helping one bit.”
“Like I said,” Vector whispered over to Haylie. “Unbelievable.”
“You know why we had to run,” Haylie said. “I’m sorry if I got you in trouble, but now, we need to work together. We have to stop Caesar before it’s too late.”
“Just give me a location,” Hernandez said. “We’ll send in a team—”
“Just like you sent in a team to find Sean Collins?” Haylie shot back. “He ended up dead. That’s not happening this time. Just like I told Agent Wilcox—I come in, I get the information from the Endling, but it stays on this machine.” She padded Vector’s laptop, safe deep inside her bag. “It’s my way or nothing.”
“What if I say no?” Hernandez said. “What if I just grab that laptop and hand it over to my experts?”
“It’s encrypted,”
Vector said. “You won’t get anything. Even if you did, it would take months. The election starts in just a few hours, isn’t that right?”
Agent Hernandez thought about it for a few moments, staring out the window and whispering in a frustrated burst under his breath.
“What do you need?” he asked.
“We need to get to the command center,” Haylie said. “I’m going to need every piece of tech you have.”
“Access to all of your systems,” Vector said. “Like, the good stuff.”
“We have to assume that Caesar still has access to the NSA network,” Hernandez said. “And the FBI as well. It’s going to be hard to work around that—to not let him know what we’re up to.”
“If we keep our communication on analog channels,” Haylie said, “we can stay off his radar. Get the local election teams for every swing state on the line by the time we get to the office. We’ll need to coordinate our efforts across the entire country to pull this off.”
“What are you thinking?” Agent Hernandez asked. “How can we even begin to stop someone who has your brother’s level of access?”
“We’re going to let him do exactly what he wants,” Haylie said, staring out through the window as the SUV began to roll. “We’re going to let him throw the election.”
>>>>>
Grand Palace Hotel, Rome
Rubbing his face with his both palms, Caesar wiped the tears from under his eyes and traced his fingers down his face. He hadn’t eaten. He hadn’t slept.
The morning was beginning to break, and the glow of sunlight through the window felt like the first light he had seen in years. All he knew now was this room—this room and the black cloud growing over him. Covering him. Still no news on who had been on that plane. But he didn’t need names. He knew what he had done.
He paced the floor as voices filled his head, scrambling to find a corner of the room where they weren’t screaming in his ears.
I take it all back. I just want to go back.
But the thoughts wouldn’t stop. His steps grew heavy as he felt himself fall to the floor, his knees grinding against the thin carpet, his cheek scraping across the fabric. His heart pounded against the floor as he fought to swallow down air.
It’s just not worth doing any more—any of it.
You’re a monster.
He glanced over to the window, taking a few steps forward to look across its sill. The morning sunlight glistened off the pavement five stories below. He pulled the window open with a violent jerk, knowing how easy it would be to just fall.
It’s all over.
He took a breath and pushed a foot up onto the windowsill, closing his eyes and leaning forward.
Just fall. Just fall.
He fell back onto the bed, tears burning his eyes, as his head pounded. He twisted and turned into the sheets, curling into a fetal position, sweating from every pore. All he could hear was Haylie’s voice. Just wanting to talk.
Her voice fell away, replaced by the sounds of a news report on the TV across the room. No—I need to hear her. I need to hear her voice. He shot up, scattering to find the remote to mute the sounds, and stopped when he saw the live feed of CNN International.
The broadcast showed overnight scenes of reporters huddled in winter jackets at darkened polling places still waiting to be opened. Lines were already forming—voters holding their places by sitting in camping chairs with thermoses full of coffee. He squinted to make out the hand-written signs staked behind them. The largest one read: “HACKERS ARE TERRORISTS. IN AMERICA, WE KILL TERRORISTS.”
Caesar studied the sign, not even hearing the broadcast any more. He traced each line drawn with marker, in red, white and blue.
Hancock started this. If I’m a monster, what does that make him?
Caesar rose from the bed, his eyes staying on the screen and narrowing as his brain came back online. He looked back to the window, the curtains swaying into the room with a fresh breeze from outside, and then down to his laptop. The election scripts were still running their tests, just as they had been through the length of the night.
See this through. Then do what you have to do.
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE
FBI Command Center
New York City
November 5th, 4:45AM
As the SUVs carved their way through the early morning traffic of New York City, Haylie stared into the darkness, knowing the sun would soon be rising. Before this madness had started, back at home, she had grown obsessed with waking up early each morning. She loved being the first person awake—enjoying the sense of a new beginning, with no one else around to spoil the silence. There was an undeniable tranquility to the world when it hadn’t started turning yet, when everyone’s thoughts and agendas still slept warm in their beds.
But in this city, the hours before dawn were greeted with taxis and buses already hard at work, the sidewalks swollen with hurried masses trying to beat the rush. It appeared that in New York City, there was no such thing as “the first one up.”
The motorcade made its way into the basement of the FBI command center, and after working their way through security, Hernandez, Vector, and Haylie entered the elevator, getting off on an unmarked floor. Hernandez led them through a series of hallways, snaking left and right and left again, to a pair of double doors at the end of a hall. He turned the knob, letting Haylie and Vector walk in first. What Haylie saw inside was disappointing, to say the least.
“This is it?” she asked, looking back at Hernandez with a scowl. “This is where we make our last stand? This place is a dump.”
The room looked as if it had been thrown together only hours earlier—piles of cheap-looking wooden desktops piled over in one corner on a stack of rust-colored filing cabinets that were buckling under the weight. Water stains on the ceiling tiles pointed her eyes to the middle of the room where a collection of desk phones—with seventeen different sets of blinking lights—had been arranged on a table, hobbled together with a patchwork assembly of cords all duct-taped tightly down across the dull gray carpet.
“We’re trying to keep this operation under wraps, even inside the Bureau,” Hernandez said with a defensive tone. “Don’t worry, this room will be full of our best people, and a bunch from the NSA, within the next fifteen minutes. It’ll get the job done.”
“And what’s that all about?” Vector asked, pointing to the collection of phones. “It’s all bits and bobs of decades-old technology. You understand that we’re trying to stop one of the most sophisticated—”
“I understand that we need to stay analog,” Hernandez shot back. “This is our answer to Caesar’s access to our network. The FBI’s conference call system is run through our central servers—it’s all digital these days. If we were to get everyone on the line that we need, all seventeen election offices, then it would light up our digital switchboard like the Fourth of July. Caesar could listen in to the whole thing. But this—I’ve brought in every old landline on this floor, punched a few holes through some walls. It’s ugly, but Caesar won’t have any idea that we’re even here.”
Haylie smiled and nudged Hernandez on the shoulder. “This is actually pretty decent work.”
“I have my moments,” Hernandez said. “When I’m not letting notorious hackers cut off their ankle bracelets.”
“Right,” Vector said. “Let’s get on with it. Where is everyone?”
“They’re down the hall. Agent Wilcox is holding a briefing to get everyone up to speed,” Hernandez said. “How are the timing algorithms coming? Are you ready?”
“Almost,” Haylie said, pulling Vector’s laptop from her bag and placing it on the table. “We’ll need to get the phone lines open. I have a couple of questions for a few local offices—Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Virginia—on their system crossover.”
Vector brought his machine out as well. “I’ve got Florida, New York, and Michigan done. The algorithms match the historical stuff we’ve been able to pull.”
“
Sounds good,” Hernandez said. “When do we switch over?”
Typing away and firmly hitting the “return” key, Haylie turned to face Hernandez. “Just did.”
A look of panic ran over his face. “What do you mean, just did? You just put the plan into place without even testing it?”
Haylie shrugged her shoulders. “Votes start hitting the systems in just over an hour. No time to test. We can tweak it after we talk to—”
“You can’t just…” Hernandez muttered, backing away from the table. “This is the presidential election we’re talking about.”
“We tested it a little bit last night, right, Vector?” Haylie said.
“What’s that?” Vector said, looking up. “Oh right, tested the code. Sure. On the plane. All tested. All good.”
Hernandez shook his head. “I hate this job.”
>>>>>
Grand Palace Hotel, Rome
Double-checking the Florida script, looking for any critical logic breaks, Caesar made a few tweaks and hit save.
This is your only chance to make this all worth something.
He ran a quick query on the database. Millions of active records, all ready to do their civic duty. He checked the network of thousands of zombie machines, all online and ready for instructions. Soon, data would be hitting servers across the U.S. from all over the world, but it would start right here with his laptop.
Running the simulation script one more time, he watched the nodes pinging back and forth, the data flying across landlines and satellites to finally find a home in the voting records of key precincts across the country. It was beautiful.
It’s time to vote.
He hit the “return” key and sat back, watching the white machine text report its status with each step—flowing, flying, dancing. It was like Sean was alive once again, breathing through the tech that he had left behind.
Crash Into Pieces (The Haylie Black Series Book 2) Page 27