27.1
Team Indra crowded around Kenny as he struggled to get the massive DESTROYER to perform the intricate task of picking up the USB and reinserting it.
At the same time, Rex quietly slipped out of the room.
Everyone’s attention was so focused on the Game that no one noticed when Rex reappeared above us and made his way to the quantum computer.
“Is Rex going to be back soon?” Ambrose asked.
“Just had to run to the bathroom,” I said. “Don’t worry, he’ll be back soon.”
Ambrose tore his eyes away from the screens.
“Are you kidding me?” he asked.
I shrugged. “Nature calls.”
I watched Team Mitra. Tunde stood behind Norbert and cheered him on like a boxing coach. Compared with the chaos erupting in Team Indra’s corner, Team Mitra worked in perfect harmony.
Minutes quickly became seconds.
“We’re winning,” Ambrose said nervously. “But not by much.”
“Where is Rex?” Rosa was flustered.
“We’re okay,” I said. “We’re still winning.”
I clenched my jaw and ground my teeth in frustration as Rex’s program moved slightly ahead of Norbert’s. This wasn’t good. We couldn’t win. But the streams of code scrolled across the screens at such a fast pace that I couldn’t make out characters; it had become a blur of digital movement, impossible for me to control. Kiran, reading it all, eyes darting, called out the progress.
“This is it,” he said, walking closer to the screens. “This is it.”
The room grew intensely quiet. The only sounds were the clicking of fingers on controls and the rush of frenzied breathing as Kenny kept DESTROYER kicking the USB around the floor in his desperate attempts to get it back.
Kenny hissed. “No. No. No. No. NO. It’s not over yet.”
I was so concentrated myself that I didn’t notice when Rex reappeared alongside me. “Looks like you’re actually too good with this,” he said, noticing how we’d pulled ahead. “I’ll take it from here.” Seconds after he took the cell phone, Team Mitra slipped back into first place. But we still appeared to be neck and neck.
Rex leaned in close to me, so close that I could feel the warmth of his breath on the back of my neck. It sent a tingle of nervous energy down my sides. He held his cell in front of me. The WALKABOUT program screen was open and displayed a single line: an address in New York City.
“It worked?” I asked, a lump in my throat.
“WALKABOUT found Teo.”
My mouth dropped open and I spun around and hugged Rex. His eyes danced with excitement, but we didn’t speak, because at that very moment, a siren sounded. On one of the screens a plain blue desktop flickered into existence. On it was a single digital file folder. The folder opened and inside was a note with one sentence typed at its center.
Tunde read it out loud. “It says, ‘Welcome to the team.’”
The Game was over, and Kiran raised his hands in triumph.
“The winner of the first-ever OndScan Game is … Team Mitra!”
Tunde fell to his knees and we ran over to lift him high. He landed on Norbert’s shoulders and Norbert paraded him around the room.
Kiran and Edith clapped wildly.
When Tunde finally hit the floor again, he made his way to Rex and me.
He hugged us both, at the same time.
“See, guys,” I said. “Together we can do anything.”
“Yes.” Tunde beamed. “But our adventure has only just begun!”
28. REX
The Game was over.
Teo was as good as found.
Tunde had won.
Most everyone broke into a frenzy of dancing and jumping and singing and shouting. Well, everyone that is but Team Indra. I didn’t hear the commotion, though. I didn’t feel shoulders crashing into mine. I was just so, so stunned.
It actually worked.
Painted Wolf grabbed my hands. “Are you okay?”
“Yeah,” I said. “I—I think so.”
“We did it.”
“We really did, didn’t we?”
Painted Wolf leaned in and kissed my cheek. “Yes.”
Three seconds later, Norbert’s confetti bomb went off.
Lightning-fast, the room went from high-end, glass-floored office space to a confetti wonderland. It fell as thick as a blizzard in the Arctic.
Still I didn’t move.
Kenny and Leleti were slumped in a corner, despondent. Kenny was actually crying. Ezra angrily packed up his stuff. Fiona just stood there looking confused and watching Norbert leap around the room, yelling with his mouth open wide enough that it quickly filled with confetti. Halil and Anj jumped together and fell to the floor, laughing and making “confetti angels” on the glass floor. Rosa and Ambrose carefully guarded Charlie 2 as they carried him over to his shoe box.
This was what victory looked like.
I took it all in for a few seconds before a hand landed on my shoulder and squeezed it hard. I turned around to see Kiran standing beside me.
“Congratulations,” he said. “You’re a force to be reckoned with.”
“Was it everything you wanted it to be?” I asked.
“A thousand times better.”
There was a commotion in the hallway just outside the room. The party atmosphere seemed to transform instantly from glee to concern as three uniformed police officers walked through the door.
Was someone hurt? What happened?
“Have you heard the news, Rex?” Kiran asked, suddenly.
“The news?”
“Yes,” he said, very calmly. “There was just a major security intrusion at the FSB, the Russian Federal Security Service. Someone hacked in and stole billions of top-secret, high-level data points. Countless covert files. It’s a global mess. The NSA, Interpol, MI6, they’re all scrambling to shut it down, but it’s still happening. Just a few minutes in, actually, and it’s already the biggest cyber leak in history. The stuff they’ve stolen, if sent to the wrong people, could start wars. Could change the course of history. Tech security experts think it’s the first time a quantum computer has been used to commit a cybercrime.”
I was stunned.
“Are you kidding?” I asked. It was the only thing I could think to say.
My eyes were locked on Kiran’s, trying to make sense of what he was saying and why he was telling me at that moment.
Weren’t we supposed to be celebrating?
Kiran continued, “The word we’re getting is that it’s the work of Terminal. Apparently, and this hasn’t been verified but I’m guessing it’s true, the hackers used the quantum computer in the room just above this one.”
“What? I don’t—”
My head was spinning.
This wasn’t making any sense.
Kiran waved to someone over my shoulder, like he was signaling them to approach, as he said, “Someone broke into the machine, Rex.”
The police were walking directly toward me. Eyes locked on mine.
“I—I don’t understand…,” I stammered.
I backed up, away from the cops, panicked. The lead officer, a big guy with a thick mustache, yelled, “Hands on your head! Hands on your head now!”
I dropped my cell and kicked it across the room just as the cops pulled me to the ground. Kiran scoffed. “Not even putting up a fight, Rex?”
28.1
They led me out of the room with my hands handcuffed behind my back.
Painted Wolf was in shock.
Tunde was pale with disbelief.
The last thing I saw before the door swung closed was Painted Wolf retrieving my cell phone from the floor. At least Teo’s address was safe.
Outside, I was pushed into the back of a squad car.
The door was slammed shut.
And off we went.
The following three hours were pretty much a blur. We arrived at the intake center and I was pulled left and right, jostled ever
y which way until my hips and shoulders were sore and my stomach ached. They took fingerprints. They emptied my pockets, even of lint. They took photos. They got my vitals. I sat alone in a holding cell and then an empty room and then another holding cell. The rooms were cold, but I was so numb from everything that I hardly noticed. They finished by reading me my Miranda rights. I had nothing to hide, and being sixteen, I was old enough to waive them.
“You have the right to have an earnest consultation with an interested adult,” the intake officer told me.
“An interested adult?”
“Your parents. A family member. Friend. Someone with a relationship to you who is genuinely interested in your welfare and can give you advice. Anyone like that you want us to get ahold of?”
“Do I have to?”
“No,” the intake officer said. “But we’ll be calling your parents.”
“Listen…,” I started, but wasn’t sure what to say.
I had to protect my parents. This was me, all me, and I would never be able to live with myself if they were deported because I’d screwed up somehow. “I just want to talk to someone here,” I said. “I want to explain it all myself. You don’t have to get my parents involved in this. They don’t know. They don’t need to know.”
The officer didn’t answer. Just said, “Sit tight.”
The last room I went to was the interrogation room.
It was the warmest.
I was in there fifteen minutes before a woman in a pink suit and a chubby guy with a red tie walked in. The woman sat across from me. The chubby guy stood. The woman pulled a folder from her briefcase and read through its contents briefly. As she read, she cleared her throat and wiped her nose. It was silly, but I honestly was more worried at that moment about catching a cold than anything else.
Finally, she closed the folder and said, “Rex, I’m Special Agent Lindell. This is Special Agent Rowe. We’re with the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Your parents will be in town later tonight, but I understand you’ve chosen to speak to us without them or another adult. Is that correct?”
“Yes.”
“You seem awfully protective of your folks. Why is that?”
She locked eyes with me, her gaze as cold as liquid helium.
“This is about me, right? Not them.”
“Are your parents in the country illegally, Rex?”
I didn’t answer.
Special Agent Lindell nodded, then took a digital tape recorder from her briefcase, turned it on, and placed it on the table in front of me.
Before she said anything, I leaned forward. “I had nothing to do with it.”
Agent Lindell said, “Okay.”
“This must be a mistake,” I said. “I wouldn’t have done anything like this. You can look. I don’t have any record. I was just in the competition; I was just a participant. You can ask anyone who was there, I—”
“Says here”—Agent Lindell flipped through some paperwork and coughed—“you were not invited. We have a statement by a Kiran Biswas, who says you cheated your way into the competition.”
I choked a bit on that.
“Listen, I invited myself. I assumed it was a mistake, okay? They just forgot to invite me so … I invited myself. Kiran and I already discussed this. Did he tell you that? We came to an agreement. It’s all been settled.”
Agent Lindell made a few notes. Agent Rowe just stared at me.
“You’re in very, very serious trouble, Rex,” Agent Lindell said. “You’ve got a stack of felony charges here. You get lucky, say the right things, answer honestly, and plead guilty, you’ll probably get off with probation until you’re twenty-one. No computers, no phones. That’s my guess on the most lenient sentence. But if you’re going to fight us—”
“I’m not going to fight you.”
“—if, being the crucial word, if you fight us, then you’re looking at time in a juvenile detention facility. You ever been in one, Rex?”
“No.”
Agent Rowe cleared his throat. “They’d eat you alive.”
Agent Lindell said, “How long have you been a part of Terminal?”
I swallowed hard and sat up straight.
“What?”
“How long?”
“I’m not a part of Terminal. I have nothing to do with Terminal.”
Agent Rowe dragged a chair over to the table and sat.
“The more you lie to us, the worse this thing gets.”
“I swear to you, I am not part of Terminal.”
Agent Rowe’s eyes bored into mine.
I did not blink. Did not turn away.
“Let’s start with this,” he said as he pulled an eight-by-ten glossy photo from his stack of paperwork and slid it carefully across the table to me. It was a shot of Tunde’s and my dorm room at the Boston Collective. Frozen in the bright, antiseptic light of a camera flash were the notes and calculations I’d written on the walls, the guts of the program for the jammer.
“I don’t understand,” I replied.
“Had one of our techs take a look at this stuff; he tells us it’s for a GPS jammer. Very sophisticated. Large scale, incredibly dangerous, and it looks like it’s in your handwriting.”
“I was helping a friend.”
Agent Rowe glanced over at Agent Lindell. “What sort of friend needs something like this?”
“It’s complicated. But he was asked to make it for a corrupt general in Nigeria. You can look him up. He is holding my friend’s family captive in—”
“Of course he is.”
I was getting nowhere. Frustration was rattling my insides.
“I’m not joking here. I’d be happy to show you—”
“There’ll be plenty of time,” Agent Lindell said, cutting me off. “Talk to me about the quantum computer. We have surveillance video from OndScan of two individuals breaking into the Boston Collective research lab on the day the computer was illegally accessed. A pretty clean B & E, but these individuals missed a couple of cameras.”
I winced internally but kept a straight face.
Could I still talk my way out of this?
“I don’t know what—”
“Mr. Biswas has confirmed,” Agent Lindell continued as though I hadn’t even spoken, “that there was an anomalous program detected on the quantum computer after the Game. The program was linked directly to you. We’re still in the preliminary stages of analysis, but our security people tell me that the program installed on that quantum computer was used to commit the hacking attacks against Russian, Chinese, and U.S. government interests.”
“That’s impossible!”
Agent Rowe delivered the coup de grâce. “‘Walkabout’ mean anything to you?”
“Yes. But it only finds things, tracks people,” I said.
“Not anymore,” Agent Rowe replied.
“That’s impossible.”
“You calling us liars?” Agent Lindell asked.
I rubbed my eyes and tried to drive back the headache that was threatening to explode my brain. “Listen,” I said. “I wrote the program. I put it on the quantum computer. But I didn’t break into any government anything. That’s not what WALKABOUT is for, it’s not what it does. I don’t do that. I’m not like that. I swear to you, it’s the truth.”
“Why would you load it on to the computer then?” Agent Rowe asked.
“To find my missing brother,” I said. “To do what you guys couldn’t.”
I realized I was pushing things after I said it. The agents weren’t pleased.
Agent Lindell said, “I find it hard to believe that the same person who wrote a program like this one and illegally loaded it on to the highest-end of all computers would have any qualms about infiltrating other countries’ government. Call me crazy but…”
“I swear to you, I didn’t do it.”
The conversation went round and round from there.
They said the same thing over and over.
I said the same thing in respons
e every time.
After three hours of this, I went back to the holding cell.
Papa and Ma arrived just after midnight.
The look on Ma’s face nearly crushed me.
28.2
We were shown a meeting room at the back of the intake center.
It was small, the furniture was plastic, and the lights hummed.
I sat at the table and ran my hands through my hair in frustration. Papa sat across from me, and Ma pulled up a chair beside me. She held my hand as we spoke.
“Papa—” I started.
He cut me off with a stern glance that was less angry than disappointed.
“Is it true?” he asked.
“No.”
“You didn’t hack into any government sites or—”
“I said no. I didn’t do any of that.”
Papa sat back in his chair and sighed. “What about the competition?”
“I cheated to get in.”
Ma squeezed my hand and I glanced over to see she was crying again. “Ma,” I said, “I’m really sorry. I let everyone down. I was just … I needed to be here.”
“But you lied to our faces, Rex,” Papa said.
“I know. It was the worst thing that I have ever done and it’s been eating me up inside. I don’t have an excuse, but I do have a reason.”
“And what is that?” Papa asked.
“For Teo,” I said. “The program they found on the quantum computer, the one they said I used to hack into those government websites, it’s called WALKABOUT and I created it to find him.”
Papa asked, “Why didn’t you just run it at home?”
“I needed a quantum computer. I needed to be here.”
Papa nodded as though he understood, but … “Why couldn’t you just have told us, Rex? We would have figured something out. We would have found a way for you to run the program somewhere. You should have just asked us.”
“I know,” I said. But that was another lie.
Thing was, even if I had told them, there was no way anyone would let a punk kid like me install a DIY program on one of the most advanced pieces of technology in the world. It was a nice thought, though, an idealistic one, and I decided not to argue with my father.
“And you told all of this to the police?” Papa asked.
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