Brain Jack

by Brian Falkner

  Sam took another step backward, a couple of feet closer to the gates. His eye caught the security camera above Brewer’s head, and a plan started to form in his mind.

  “Don’t you move,” Brewer said, raising the gun, but Sam did move. He raised his hands high in the air and slowly turned around.

  “Better,” Brewer said. “Now you’re getting the idea.”

  In front of Sam the gates began to close.

  He took a step toward them.

  “Next step is your last, boy,” Brewer said.

  “I don’t think so.” Sam found his voice. “You won’t do it.”

  “I don’t think you wanna find out,” Brewer said.

  “See the camera?” Sam said, nodding toward the camera to the left above the gates. “CNN. Live feed. I wired it right into their network.” It wasn’t true, but how would Brewer know? He gestured toward the one on the right. “Fox News, and the two at the back are BBC. You want to be seen all over the world shooting an unarmed teenager in the back?”

  He took another step and there was no shot. He took one more. The gates were a quarter closed now. The gap was narrowing rapidly.

  He sensed rather than saw Brewer holster the pistol, but he heard the heavy, hasty footsteps behind him.

  Sam dropped his head and sprinted toward the gates.

  Brewer was older, fatter, and slower than Sam. Sam would have easily beaten him if he hadn’t caught his left shoe behind his right ankle and gone sprawling across the tarmac four or five yards from the gates.

  He was up quickly, though, and actually through the gates when a meaty hand latched on to the collar of his jacket. Sam was stopped dead in his tracks. He turned around to see the sweating, scowling face of Brewer just an arm’s length away.

  “Gotcha!” Brewer said triumphantly.

  “Not unless you want to lose that arm,” Sam noted.

  It was true. Sam had slipped through the slenderest of gaps, and Brewer was too large to get through behind him. The gap had already narrowed even more, and there was no way Brewer would be able to pull Sam back inside.

  Only his arm was through the gates now, and the heavy metal edges were closing in fast.

  Brewer swore violently and snatched his arm back inside, just as the gates slammed shut.

  Sam didn’t wait around for any clever repartee. He just ran. He had allowed himself ten minutes to get to the intersection of MacArthur Boulevard and Little Falls Road. He had already used three.

  Sam ran. A strong, gusty breeze buffeted him, alternately pushing him backward and helping him along. He stayed off the boulevard with its inconstant stream of headlights and ran on the grass of the reservoir park alongside, staying in the darkness by the high safety fence.

  Sweat streamed from his face. His chest ached, his knee also. He must have hurt it when he had tripped inside the cage. He ignored it and ran.

  Kiwi would have sent the “false alarm” message by now. The one thing Sam had needed him to do. It would take only a minute for the fire controller to relay that to the fire trucks, and they would turn around at the first place they could—the MacArthur Boulevard and Little Falls Road intersection.

  He had to get there first.

  Sam ran.

  He wondered what kind of confusion he had left behind him at Recton. The codes no longer worked. The phones and radios were inoperable. The cell-phone jammer was still operating, though; he had made sure of that.

  The guards were captives in their own prison and unable to tell anyone about it.

  He would have laughed out loud if he had had the breath. But he didn’t.

  He ran.

  The flashing red lights of a fire truck appeared along the boulevard in front of him, partly obscured by the trees in the narrow strip of parkland. Even as he watched, the truck slowed and the lights ceased.

  It was only a few hundred yards away now, but the truck slowed further, signaled, and turned left, not right as he had thought, heading down the other side of MacArthur Boulevard rather than taking the shortcut back through Little Falls. No matter. As long as he got there in time.

  Eighty yards to go, that was all, and the second truck, a large pumper unit, clearly visible in the glare of the intersection streetlights, turned and moved away in the stream of traffic heading south down the boulevard.

  A third fire truck turned and was gone, and then the fourth and last truck signaled and turned while he was still twenty yards away.

  The last truck stopped in the through road, giving way to an eighteen-wheeler and a succession of sedans before making the turn.

  Sam caught the truck as it was just starting to move, grabbing a chrome bar with one hand and swinging himself up onto the back running board, hanging on, barely, as it accelerated away.

  Wind whipped at his hair and threatened to knock him off his perch, but he clung tightly to the round metal bar and pulled himself as close as possible to the body of the truck.

  There was no traffic behind him, for which he was grateful, as it might be a bit hard to explain what he was doing there if an alert motorist noticed him.

  The traffic was light heading back along Dalecarlia Parkway to Friendship Village, and the trip passed without incident.

  He stepped off the back of the truck at the first intersection they came to in the town center, seeing the lights of a taxi stand at the end of the street.

  He heard sirens now, not fire but police sirens, only a few blocks away, without doubt sounding for him. Brewer must have found a way to raise the alarm.

  Sam strolled casually along to the taxi stand, opening the door and sliding into the backseat of the first cab at the stand.

  “Where to, guv’nor?” the driver asked, sounding just like a London cabbie, or at least what Sam’s impression of a London cabbie was like from TV shows and movies. He had a passing feeling that he had seen this driver before, but that was surely impossible.

  “The train station,” Sam said calmly. He didn’t want to sound like a prisoner on the run, even if he was one.

  “Bethesda or Silver Spring?” the driver asked. “Bethesda is closer, but the express goes through Silver Spring.”

  “Bethesda,” Sam answered. He’d checked that out too. The express didn’t run this late at night, but Bethesda was on the red line, and he could catch a train to Union Station. From there he could disappear anywhere he wanted.

  “Rightio, Bethesda it is, then, guv,” the driver said, turning around to face him.

  He was surprisingly young for a cabdriver, Sam thought. No more than eighteen and completely bald under a peaked cap. His face was long and thin, but there was a glint of a chuckle in his eyes. Sam had never seen him before in his life, and yet …

  Then he got it. It was the voice. The accent, it was unmistakable.

  The driver grinned, a slightly macabre, almost demonic, smile, even without the face paint. He tilted back his cap, revealing the tattoo of a biohazard symbol on his forehead.

  “Skullface!” Sam cried out, and the driver laughed.

  “Took your bleedin’ time gettin’ out, ya muppet,” he said. “Another day an’ we’d have had to send you home.”

  REVELATIONS

  12 | SILICON VALLEY

  “You’re Sam Wilson?”

  The man in front of Sam was tall, his back straight, his head erect. Ex-military, Sam thought. A scar ran sideways across his face, crossing just below the bridge of his nose.

  “Yes. Yes, sir,” Sam managed, trying not to stare at the scar.

  “Come with me, son.”

  Sam stood up from the chair in the waiting area and tried to keep up with the man as he made quick yards down a long, featureless corridor.

  A woman was waiting for the man at the end of the corridor, by the open door to an office. She was short and plump and less than five feet tall, but with a huge frizz of orange hair that added another six inches. She glanced briefly at Sam before handing the man a folder.

  It was only for a half second, but in
that time he felt as though he had been x-rayed. That her small, black eyes had burned their way through to his soul.

  The tall man opened the folder, reviewing its contents.

  “How good is the intel?” he asked the woman.

  “As good as it gets,” she said. “We just don’t know when. It could be this afternoon, or it might not be for months.”

  The man nodded and returned the folder. “Okay. We’ll raise the threat level. Go to lockdown.”

  “I’ll tell the team,” the woman said, glancing again at Sam.

  “Thanks. I’ll be along shortly.”

  The woman disappeared back along the corridor with the folder as Sam followed the man into the office.

  “Sit down, Mr. Wilson,” he said, taking a seat behind a large desk.

  Sam sat on a chair on the other side. A photo of the man in a marine uniform sat on a bookshelf to his right, confirming the military background. The man in the photo had no scar, though.

  “My name is John Jaggard. Welcome to Homeland Security,” the man said.

  “CDD?” Sam ventured, and Jaggard nodded.

  Cyber Defense Division.

  “I don’t quite understand why I’m here,” Sam said carefully. “Am I in trouble?”

  “You should be,” Jaggard said, punching something on his keyboard that brought up Sam’s file on a screen they could both see. He handed Sam a thick sheaf of papers. “But as it happens, we need people with your skills. We want you to work for us.”

  “Work for you?”

  “That’s what I said.” Jaggard smiled. The scar echoed the smile. Sam thought back to the whirlwind of the last few weeks and shook his head, confused.

  “But the White House? Neoh@ck Con?”

  “There is no Neoh@ck Con,” Jaggard said. “Think of it as a job application.”

  “And Recton Hall?”

  “The job interview.”

  Sam was still having trouble comprehending it all. “What’s this?” he asked, holding up the sheaf of papers.

  “It’s a job offer,” Jaggard said, although he clearly thought that was obvious. “You can take it or leave it.”

  “I’m only seventeen,” Sam said, thinking they must already know that.

  “Sam”—Jaggard looked at him appraisingly—“everybody at that meeting in the old warehouse was given the same information. Hack into the White House for the Neoh@ck Convention. You want to know how many of them got through?”

  Sam shrugged.

  “Just you, Sam.”

  Sam looked again at the figure on the bottom line of the contract. It seemed extraordinarily generous for an annual salary. Almost too high, in fact.

  “What does that work out to be per month?” he wondered out loud, trying to do the math. His brain seemed to be running in slow motion.

  “That is per month,” Jaggard said.

  Sam gasped.

  “You can take it or leave it,” the man said again.

  He didn’t expand on that, but Sam had the strong sense that if he left it, that would mean a return to Recton.

  “If you take it,” Jaggard continued, “you’re on probation for three months. If you survive the probation”—he’d said “survive,” Sam noted, not “pass” or “succeed”—“then that figure doubles.”

  “Doubles?” Sam blurted.

  “Think we’re being overgenerous?” Jaggard said, and his scar smiled again.

  Overgenerous? The amount was obscene! Sam thought, but said nothing.

  “We pay well,” Jaggard said. “We have to, or at least we choose to. We select only the best of the best, so we pay them accordingly. But it goes a little deeper than that. You’ll have almost unlimited access inside every government department and financial institution in the country. We want to remove the temptation to help yourself and to avoid the possibility of bribery by outside agencies. We feel that if you have more money than you know what to do with, it makes you a little more resistant to corruption.”

  Sam leaned back in his chair and looked around the office, trying to get his thoughts in order.

  Dodge—Skullface—had driven him straight to the same small private airfield just out of Bethesda that he had flown into a few weeks earlier.

  The drive hadn’t been without incident. A police cruiser had passed them on the main street through Friendship Village and shone a light into the rear of the cab before pulling in behind them. The red-and-blues had come on.

  Dodge reached for his cell phone the moment the cruiser had shown interest, talking quietly into it even as he signaled and pulled over to stop.

  Two Bethesda cops stepped out of the cruiser and approached cautiously, weapons drawn, silhouetted in their own headlights. They made it only halfway to the car when they halted, and one put a radio to his ear.

  That was it. The two officers retraced their steps to the cruiser, switched off the flashing lights, and just sat there.

  Dodge slipped his cell phone back in his pocket as he accelerated away from the curb.

  These guys have some powerful mojo, Sam thought.

  The flight, in the same black Learjet (or at least an identical one), was longer this time, and he had slept on the plane. He woke at the jolt of landing. His watch said six-thirty, and he would have expected to see the early dawn lightening of the sky, but it was still as dark as tar. That meant they had flown west, into a new time zone. The flight time (they had taken off around midnight) meant California.

  Signs on the freeway on the drive in from the airfield confirmed it. San Jose.

  Right in the heart of Silicon Valley.

  “Welcome aboard,” Jaggard said as Sam finished signing the last of the paperwork. Jaggard stood. “I’ll take you through to meet the rest of the team.”

  “What about my mom?”

  Jaggard considered that for a moment and sat back down. “It’s all in your contract, but the gist of it is this: For the next three months, as far as your mother is concerned, you’re still at Recton. Any e-mails to your Recton account will be intercepted and relayed here. Any efforts to visit you will be rebuffed. Any legal challenges or official channels she might complain to will turn a deaf ear.”

  Sam nodded his understanding.

  “At the end of the three months, if you survive, then your mother will be fed some cock-and-bull story about you working out a deal with the FBI and working for them.” He looked Sam in the eye. “At no time is your mother, or anyone else you talk to, allowed to know about your involvement with the CDD. A network is only as safe as the people who protect it. If the bad guys know who you are, they can compromise you, and if they do that, they can compromise our entire operation—and with it the data infrastructure of this entire country. Is that clear enough for you?”

  “Yes, s-sir,” Sam stammered.

  “I’m not trying to frighten you,” Jaggard said.

  Sam wondered what he’d be saying if he was trying to frighten him.

  Jaggard continued, “But secrecy is our first line of defense. Let’s go.”

  Jaggard stood and led Sam through a series of doors that he unlocked with a keycard, then into some kind of control center. The room was circular with workstations arranged in pairs around the outer circumference. Dark tinted windows gave a dimly shaded view of the outside world. A few blocks away, he could see the Adobe logo on top of a group of high-rise towers, and across the superhighway was a large sports stadium that he thought was the Hewlett-Packard Pavilion.

  This was Silicon Valley, all right.

  In the center of the room, giant plasma screens faced in every direction. Some of the screens were security monitors, showing switching views of both the inside and the outside of the building. They surrounded a small, raised octagonal office. Sam couldn’t see in, but he had a strong feeling that someone was in there, looking out.

  There were at least seventy people in the control center when he arrived, and only a few empty desks. The people sat in pairs, three computer screens to each person.
>
  He saw Dodge sitting at one of the workstations. Dodge looked up briefly as Sam walked in behind Jaggard. The rest of the workers ignored them, intent on their screens. There was a sense of urgency in the room.

  It could be this afternoon, or it might not be for months. Sam recalled the words that the strange woman had said earlier.

  Jaggard put two fingers in his mouth and made a piercing whistle. Work stopped.

  “Team, I’d like you to meet our new probationer,” Jaggard said in a voice that filled the whole of the large room. “This is Sam.”

  He heard a voice somewhere behind him mutter, “Fresh meat.”

  Another voice, from across the room, called out, “Two weeks.”

  “Ten days.”

  “I give him a month.”

  Jaggard rolled his eyes. “Sam is the one who pulled off the Telecomerica hack a few weeks ago.”

  There was a sudden, emphatic silence in the room.

  Dodge jumped up from his console and bounded over. He shook Sam’s hand. “Welcome aboard,” he said, and smiled, creasing the biohazard tattoo on his forehead.

  He wore denim shorts, raggedly ripped off at the knees from a pair of jeans; steel chains crisscrossing a tight tartan T-shirt; and a skull on a leather strap around his neck.

  Jaggard said, “You’ll be working closely with Dodge. You’ve also met Vienna.”

  Vienna was a short-haired girl with a fierce gleam in her eye. She wore a leather miniskirt and a black T-shirt that read WHO ARE YOU AND WHY ARE YOU READING MY T-SHIRT? But it was the intertwined dragons tattooed on her arm that gave it away. Rock Chick Bride!

  A succession of others came over to meet him.

  “This is Socks, Zombie, Bashful, Gummi Bear.” Jaggard introduced each of them in turn.

  Sam didn’t hear the door open behind him, but he noticed Jaggard’s glance.

  “You’re late,” Jaggard said.

  “A few problems with the paperwork,” said a voice Sam well recognized.

  Sam half turned, his mouth gaping.

  “G’day, mate,” Kiwi said.