by Chuck Wendig
“And we’re baaaaack,” Reagan says in a game-show host voice, then kicks her wheeled chair back against the wall.
Aleena gets to her feet, claps her hands. “Okay. We’ve got an hour.”
“The hell’s going on?” Chance asks.
“While you were down the rabbit hole,” DeAndre says, “we made plans.”
They gather around him in a semicircle—a fact that seems to make him uncomfortable, like they’re pressing in on him too much—and Aleena gives him the story. “Reagan used you to get close to Graves. Then she set Graves up to fail, and while he was in with Copper, she and I took his laptops, plus a bunch of cryptophones and USB keys. We think he was trying to escape, but we’re going to be the ones to do it instead. But we need leverage.”
DeAndre picks up the story: “We know that if we bail, Big Government’s gonna stomp down on everybody and everything we hold near and dear. So we gotta get something to hold over their heads. You know what I’m saying? You stab my back, I stab your back. That sorta thing.”
“We’re starting to see a picture form,” Aleena says. She watches Chance loosen up—his arms drop, he leans forward, then back. His eyes searching their margins—not really looking at them, but thinking. It’s then she guesses: he’s smarter than he or anyone else gives him credit for.
“It’s like you were saying at the boulders,” Chance says. “All these connections. They’re forming a ring. Circling the wagons. That means we need to find out what’s in the middle. We need to find out what they’re protecting.”
“We need to find out what they’re hiding,” Wade corrects.
“Whatever it is,” Aleena says. “I bet it’s Typhon.”
They get to work.
DeAndre sits back down, starts figuring out a fresh take on what he calls his “Master Hacker, Mother-Cracker, Death Star Laser Program.”
Wade dives into the Deep Web, looking for so-called dark-news sites—places that compile all the hidden and hush-hush government secrets.
Reagan works on the Iran problem. Nobody knows what the hell she’s doing, only that she’s “got a plan,” and it makes her giggle uncontrollably.
They put Chance on Google duty. They hack a path through the search engine to clear the way for unblocked, unmitigated searching and tell him to start putting together the companies they pen-tested in various search strings. See if he can drum up any more connections between them. Anything that points to whatever the hell Typhon is.
Aleena has one job: contact the Widow. If anybody knows anything, it’s her.
The Widow of Zheng.
Historically, that title falls to one Ching Shih, a Chinese prostitute taken off her floating brothel home to be the wife of the pirate Zheng Yi. Zheng Yi died not long after, in a tsunami—a whole fleet of his boats taken out.
That should’ve been that, but Ching Shih had other ideas. She took over the so-called Red Flag Fleet. Her rules were iron-clad: no raping, no sex, no stealing from the common man, no fighting on any of the boats. Any violation of her rules resulted in a variety of wretched punishments: tied to a cannonball and fired into the sea, beheaded, stomped to death on deck, fed to gathered sharks or orcas. Deserters suffered, too: they were hunted down and disfigured.
Under her care, the fleet didn’t wither. Its power multiplied. Its ranks swelled. She took the fleet from six hundred boats to eighteen hundred.
She set up a pirate government, controlled every aspect of piracy, and ran a criminal empire spanning the entire South China Sea. When other pirates attacked her, she stole their ships and used their own crews against them. The military couldn’t stop her, either: She outran them. Outgunned them. Outthought them at every turn.
The military’s only weapon against her was amnesty. They offered her a chance to walk away from it all with all her loot and total freedom. She took the deal. She was thirty-five years old at the time and lived another thirty-four years managing the same floating brothel from which she had been taken.
Ching Shih was one of the most successful pirates of all time. And now, a hacker has taken her name and title.
Aleena’s known about the Red Flag Fleet—the hackers, not the actual fleet of boats—for years now. They’ve been at the edges of hacker society for a decade, as much a myth as a confirmed presence. Their deeds are legendary: hacking the United States infrastructure, shutting down various satellite launches via NASA, even uploading a worm to the International Space Station that threatened its air supply and docking mechanisms. Some folks think they’re part of—or at least backed by—the Chinese military, but Aleena never thought so. Their footprints were all over the hacking of China’s own aerospace program. They have routinely made North Korea a target, sometimes forcing missile launches into nowhere (which the DPRK always claims is intentional, some kind of threat and test of their might).
The RFF are wildly effective. And, like the actual pirate fleet before it, they have a code.
So when Aleena received that message—Who is Typhon?—signed by “The Widow,” she almost couldn’t believe it.
It was only days later that the Widow appeared again. This time, in a much bigger way. The lights in Aleena’s pod shut down. Then the cameras. Everything but the screen. The Widow appeared streaming on-screen—a terrible feed, unclean and distorted by pixilation and blocky artifacts. The sound was warped, too. But what Aleena saw behind the shifting, chameleon-skin distortions of the video feed was a girl almost as young as she was. Long hair, straight as a rain of arrows. Face white like chalk.
She said: “Aleena Kattan. You are a pawn. A piece moved about by invisible enemies. Find—” Voice distortion. Aleena tried speaking back, but her words went unheard, and then the Widow’s voice emerged anew: “Find Typhon. Reveal it to the world. The monsters in the dark wither when exposed to the liiiiight—” That last word, prey once more to distortion, drawn out as if in slow motion, stuttering—
And then she was gone. Lights back on. Cameras, too.
When Aleena told the story to the others, Wade asked: How do you know it was really her? The answer, at least to Aleena, was clear: Who else could hack into the Hunting Lodge so boldly?
Now, Aleena needs to find the Widow of Zheng again. Thing is, how do you find a hacker mastermind? What does that search even begin to look like? This isn’t just an act of finding a needle in a haystack. It’s conjuring a ghost—summoning a demon. She sits at the computer for a while and just stares.
When a hand falls on her shoulder, she actually jumps. Wade says, “You look like you saw a ghost.”
“More like, I’m trying to summon one, and I’m failing.”
“Speak English.”
“I was born in America, racist.”
“No, I mean—” He sighs, defeated. “Sorry, I just mean, I don’t know what the devil you’re talking about. Just . . . tell me what you’re doing.”
“Oh.” He seems genuine? Hm. “I’m trying to find a way to contact the Widow.”
“Huh. Sure she’s not watching us right now?”
“If she is, she’s not jumping in to say so.”
“Here’s something. Before your time and a bit after mine, the hacker-cracker pool was much smaller than it is today. Back in the eighties and nineties, you didn’t have these giant carder markets or whole hacker fleets so much as you had lone wolves and little cabals trying to break into banks, mess with IBM, phreak the phone company, what have you. Groups like the Warelords, the Masters of Deception. Along with the Kevin Mitnicks and Phiber Optiks and whoever, early on there was this Bay Area hacker, called himself Emperor Norton. To track him down you used old hobo code—you’d scratch a sign into the sidewalk or on a BART seat or whatever with a bit of chalk, maybe a stone. You didn’t find him. He found you.”
Aleena says, “So I should let her come to me.”
“But not before leaving a trail of bread crumbs.”
“Good idea.” She never thought she’d be saying this, but: “Thanks, Wade. Whatever happened to
the Emperor?”
“Turns out, he was a homeless guy. Fucked up like so many of us are. He eventually jumped in front of the trolley after it reopened in 1984.”
“Oh.”
“Uh-huh.” He shrugs. “Good luck with your hunt. Leave good bait.”
And then Wade goes back to work.
Good bait. Aleena knows what to do. Reagan spoke about an image she saw: IMAGO TYPHONVS. On some old woodcut or something. Didn’t take Aleena long to figure out that it was from a seventeenth-century book called Oedipus Aegyptiacus, by Athanasius Kircher. She grabs that image file, starts popping into every Deep Web forum she can find with a question: Who is Typhon? The Widow knows.
Time to go fishing.
He has a task at hand, but Chance isn’t doing it.
He knows he should be, but Google. Oh man, sweet Google. It’s a window to the outside world, and he hasn’t looked out that window in all too long now. The Hunting Lodge is like a bigger version of the Dep. It’s not like Chance was particularly connected to the world outside, but suddenly what few connections he had feel all the more precious, and here’s a chance to find them. You deserve this, he tells himself.
He searches for himself on Google. He’s been outed. He knew it was coming. Soon as he got his ass kicked in his own driveway, he had to figure his name would leak. Copper said as much. But here—oh man. News stories. Blog posts. Postings across endless forums. Digging up his life, his address, his everything. Talking about how his mother died from cancer—and they keep calling her a “failed actress,” which only makes him grit his teeth so hard they could snap (even though a smaller voice inside him acknowledges the truth of the statement). Talking about how his father killed himself—and then he sees that’s what a lot of people think Chance did, too. They think he killed himself. Like they’ll find his body bobbing in Lake Norman one day, or some dog will drag his half-eaten body out from underneath some overpass somewhere.
Worse, a lot of folks hope that’s what happened. Turns out, pissing off the fans of a football team is a good way to get yourself threatened with death. Never mind the fact that he outed a goddamn rape posse—a crew of jock monsters who had zero problem stalking girls like they were zebras on the veldt, getting them drunk or roofied, raping them, then ditching them on their lawns like an empty, half-crushed beer can. (One comment on Reddit: “You ask me Chase Dalton should get raped then killed then raped again but only after he has to watch a video of his own mother taking it in all her holes.”)
It’s not everybody. He sees posts in support of him. Some blogs calling him a hero. But none of that outweighs the tide of toxic shit slung his way. Doubly awful are all the people who support Bogardian and the others: petitions to get them released, to get their sentences cut, goddamn love letters to a handful of rapist shits.
Chance feels overwhelmed by it all. He tells himself to stop looking. He knows he did the right thing, and that should be enough. He didn’t do it to be a rock star. It’s not like he wants Marvel to turn him into a superhero comic book. He did it because it was the right thing to do. (And because you had a debt to pay. That voice from You-Know-Who.)
Then he goes and does it. He Googles the name: Angela Slattery. He knows what he’ll find, and he does: There’s her obituary. Young girl, sixteen, dead from self-inflicted gunshot wound—
“Whatcha lookin’ at?”
Chance about pisses himself. He quickly closes the browser. He looks behind, sees Wade damn near sitting on his shoulder like a hawk. “Nothing. Don’t you have things to . . . things to do? Jeez, man, warn a guy before you come up on him like that.”
“You all right?” Wade asks. “You seem off.”
“Fine. Yeah. Just great.”
“That Dep is pretty bad, huh.”
Chance hesitates. He doesn’t want to talk about it. “Yeah.”
Wade puts a hand on his shoulder. It’s warm, reassuring, unexpected. Chance is about to say thank you, but then DeAndre says: “I did it. Holy shit, I did it!”
DeAndre feels everyone gather around him like he’s a campfire giving them warmth. He sees the clock on his system: hour’s almost up. It’s gonna be close.
They’re all watching the progress bar, 50 percent to 60 percent to 75 percent, up and up and up. “C’mon, man,” DeAndre says, biting his knuckles. “C’mon, baby, open up for DeAndre Deleon Mitchell, give it to Darth Dizzy, open that flower, gimme that sweet, sweet, sweet nectar—”
Chance leans in, mutters in his ear: “Dude. You’re being kinda creepy.”
And then: the progress bar goes from red to green. The folder unlocks.
DeAndre opens it. There’s one file inside. A text file—.txt extension. That’s it? DeAndre thinks. This is the damn prize?
“You’re giving me blue balls,” Reagan grouches. “Open the file, jerk.”
DeAndre scrambles to open it. Double-click and—
“It’s just a list of names,” Aleena says.
Thirteen of them, as a matter of fact.
Leslie Cilicia-Ceto.
Park Soo-Kang.
Hiram Willingham.
Arthur McGovern.
Alan Sarno.
Hamid Abilshair.
Gordon Berry.
Ernestina Pereira.
Siobhan Kearsy.
Ian Ballard.
James Francis Peak.
Honor Street.
Devon Fulbright.
“Man, who the hell are these people?” DeAndre asks.
“I know some of those names,” Wade says. His voice is quiet. “Oh shit.”
“Hamid Abilshair,” Aleena says. “He’s a Muslim academic, progressive. A big thinker. My father adores his books. He protested the Taliban’s destroying Afghani history. He protested American soldiers doing the same in Baghdad, then traveled there to help preserve artifacts, books, vital sites.”
“Two minutes,” Chance warns. “And did you guys see, Alan Sarno’s on that list.”
Reagan says: “Honor Street. Hacker, right?”
“Oh snap, yeah,” DeAndre says. “Been in and out of prison, right? Isn’t she dead? I coulda sworn—”
“Yeah,” Reagan says. “I thought so. Prison transport van crashed.”
Another warning from Chance: “One minute.”
DeAndre’s head is a mixed bag: triumph over cracking it, let down over finding nothing more than a damn text file, bewildered at what this list of names even means. Who are these people? Why are they together on one list? What’s the connection?
That’s when Wade drops a bomb. “Siobhan Kearsy,” he says. “Siobhan is the mother of my baby girl.”
“Time,” Chance says. “Ten seconds, back to the desks—go!”
CHAPTER 25
Revenge Is a Dish Best Served at Dinner
THE LODGE, CAFETERIA
Dinnertime. They’re all afraid to talk about what they found, in case someone is listening. Mostly they sit around. Looking at one another. Straining to talk it all through, to unpack it: but they won’t. They can’t. It leaves a palpable tension at the table, like a dinner guest nobody wants to entertain but who barged in anyway.
They note that Dipesh isn’t at his table with the rest of his pod. When Chance passes Miranda near the trash, he asks her where he is. She says he’s back at the cabin. “He needs time,” she says, and then she hurries away.
When Chance gets back to his table, he sees his seat is taken.
By Shane Graves.
“Hey, Dalton. Pull up a chair.”
“Go die in a fire, Graves.”
“Fine. Stand. This won’t take long.” Graves leans forward on his elbows, wearing a goopy smirk like a teen girl staring at a photo of her favorite celebrity crush. “You guys. Masterful work. I am impressed. Particularly with you, Reagan Stolper and Chance Dalton. You two played me good.”
Reagan shrugs. “I like seeing the mighty fall.”
“And fall I did. Clever work. I don’t have much left, but a snake always has his fangs, a
scorpion always has his stinger, and I always have the things I’ve learned.” His smile grows big, so big and so eager it could described as shit-eating. “I know secrets.”
“Good for you,” Chance says. “Now get up or I’ll call the hacks.”
“Angela Slattery,” Shane says, then turns around and stares up at Chance. “Ah. There’s the face I expected. See that face, everyone? Like I just slapped the food right out of his mouth. You want to tell them who that is, Chance?”
Fear and rage run through him like battery acid. “Fuck you.”
“Uh-huh. You know what? I’m not gonna tell them. I’m gonna let them search for it themselves. After all, I’ve given you the keys to the kingdom. You’ve all got peepholes now into the outside world. Google it. Angela Slattery.” He turns to Reagan. “Though you already know. I know you know because we talked about it.”
“Pack it in, Shane,” Reagan says. “Leave it alone.”
Shane turns to her. “Stolper, you tumor. Dalton doesn’t know that not only did you set him up here for his little trip to the Dep, but you were the one who leaked his name in the first damn place. Right? That’s how everyone found out. You.”
And to think, Chance was just starting to not hate her. “You,” he says. “Why?”
She swallows hard. “Like I said, I, uhh, like to see the mighty fall. Thought you needed to be brought down a peg since you were using Faceless like that. But I didn’t know you then. I . . .” She frowns. “Shit. God damn it, Graves.”
Shane grins. “I’m not done yet. One more for you, Reagan.”
“Bring it on, Graves. You got nothing on me because I got nothing. I’m an open book, dick.” But her smug face softens a little.
Not Graves. He keeps on leering. “Your little girl,” he says. “She’s alive. No thanks to you, Reagan. Her name is Ellie Belle Stevens. She’s five. And I’m sure she very much regrets being left in a Target bathroom by her mother, Reagan Stolper.”