Zero Day

by Jan Thompson

  He could only think of one person.

  Ulysses.

  As soon as the men released Danika from her bonds, she pressed her fingers on Vivek’s arm. “I’m not dreaming.”

  “Neither am I.” Vivek looked at Danika a certain way.

  “That can wait, lovebirds,” Kelvin said. “Where’s Jamal?”

  Nobody could answer him.

  Maybe Jamal wasn’t dead either. Cayson would be happy to hear that. In fact, he’d be happy to hear that most of his team wasn’t dead.

  “What do they want from us?” Danika looked at Kelvin, as if he’d know.

  He shrugged. “We’re all waiting to find out.”

  All the screens flickered on at once. A wall-mounted screen came to life.

  Reuel appeared on the screen. “To answer your question, Kelvin, your assignment is to hijack MedusaNet.”

  “MedusaNet? It was destroyed last year,” Kelvin reminded his captor.

  “Nope. On the contrary, Ulysses is trying to rebuild it. You’re going to take it away from him.”

  “For what compensation?” Vivek asked.

  “Your life. You capture MedusaNet, we release you.” Reuel said it as if he meant it.

  That was when Kelvin decided that Reuel couldn’t possibly be telling the truth. If they wanted to live, they had to find a way out themselves. But not without Yona.

  “Where is Yona?” Kelvin asked.

  “Our insurance is right here.” Reuel motioned to someone off-screen.

  Yona was pushed into the camera view. She looked a bit disheveled.

  She gasped. “Whoa. Is anyone else not dead?”

  Chapter 14

  The problem with a team whose members knew they were going to die was that it killed their motivation. Nothing Kelvin said—whether explicitly or implicitly—could make Vivek and Danika do what Reuel wanted: take over the new MedusaNet from Ulysses.

  Kelvin found himself working hard alone, surrounded by Vivek and Danika squabbling with each other in their last days on earth.

  As soon as Reuel appeared on the screen again, Kelvin threw up his hands. “Kill us already!”

  The door clicked open.

  “What did you ask them to do to us?” Danika screamed at Kelvin.

  The men came in, and without a word, they cuffed Vivek and dragged him out.

  Danika pounded the door. “You can’t do this to us! We’re human beings too!”

  Onscreen, Reuel cleared his throat. “From your conversation with each other, I realized that you need an incentive to get this project completed.”

  Kelvin glanced at Danika. What have you done?

  “We’re holding Vivek and Yona until we have control of MedusaNet,” Reuel said.

  Kelvin raised his hand.

  “What, Kelvin?” Reuel frowned.

  “It’s not called MedusaNet anymore. Ulysses renamed it Telemachus.”

  “Son of. Hmm… Not unexpected.”

  Kelvin had no opinion. If Ulysses—real name unknown—wanted to name it after his mythological son, Telemachus, who was he to object? However, to keep it all Greek, Ulysses should have called himself Odysseus, rather than the Latinized version of his name.

  Then again, what did Kelvin care? He was stuck in here without a bargaining chip, imprisoned with a screaming woman gone berserk who might not be able to do the job without her beau.

  However, since he had nothing to lose…

  “Reuel, three meals a day together with our friends, daily showers, and clean clothes. Is that too much to ask?” Kelvin went for it.

  “No sleep? You’re not asking for beds?”

  “Considering you seem to be in a hurry to take over MedusaNet—Telemachus—I wouldn’t think we’d get much sleep.” Kelvin paused, as if thinking, which he really was. He pointed to an empty corner by the wall. “However, since you mentioned it, a couple of cots over there might be a gesture of kindness and good faith.”

  Reuel laughed. “I can see why Aspasia kept you alive. You don’t take sides, do you?”

  Kelvin used to take the side of money, but now that he was older, money had no hold on him as much as people.

  And God.

  He had repented.

  Yet, he was still in this hole in the ground that he had to crawl out of. Galatians 6:7 came to his mind in a flash.

  Be not deceived; God is not mocked: for whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap.

  Kelvin knew he was reaping the sin he had sown. His soul was forgiven, but that didn’t remove the consequences of his sin.

  This could be his death sentence, though he would go to Heaven with a free conscience.

  “Please?” Kelvin asked.

  “You’re asking for a lot. Three meals a day, showers, clothes, and two cots.”

  “Do you want Telemachus or not?” Kelvin kept his voice even, although his heart was beating fast.

  Reuel paused. And then he nodded.

  An hour later, one cot appeared in the corner. Kelvin and Danika had to hot bunk when they took turns to nap.

  Kelvin checked on Danika from time to time. “You okay?”

  Danika was still crying. Her mascara ran down her cheeks, making her look like some punk rock star. Her purple hair—with her blond roots showing—didn’t help. She looked a mess.

  Several hours later, Kelvin and Danika were taken separately to a shower. The water was slow and cold, but Kelvin didn’t care. They had given him a bar of soap, and he almost used it up, scrubbing gunk off his scalp and skin.

  Feeling clean, Kelvin waited for Danika. She also looked better after her shower. In fact, her face looked brighter.

  Kelvin prayed for Danika. He wasn’t sure if she was saved, but the main thing right now was for God to keep her calm. If she could stop screaming, they might make better progress in their work for Reuel.

  Armed guards came to usher them to a room with no chairs or tables. On the floor was a large plastic sheet. And paper plates of food.

  “Where do we wash our hands?” Kelvin asked.

  Danika laughed so hard it echoed in the room. Then she slapped him on his arm. “You’re always the optimist among us.”

  Kelvin had never looked at himself as an optimist. In fact, he still felt that he was the prodigal son.

  I want to come home, Lord. Please take me back.

  He knew God had forgiven him, but he didn’t feel it. His situation currently didn’t help.

  When the door opened again, and Yona walked in, Kelvin nearly cried.

  Stale bread, old apples, questionable water.

  That was their lunch, but Yona was simply happy to have some food and be with Kelvin—

  Wait. What?

  She knew that whatever they said would be recorded for Reuel and Issachar.

  Yes, Issachar.

  Her once-mentor, now an enemy of the state of Israel.

  God will judge him.

  How could she speak in cryptic messages to Kelvin? How could she tell him that Issachar was part of the setup? That the entire situation was bigger than them?

  Then again, was that important?

  It was all in the past. All done. All over.

  If she only had five minutes to spare with Kelvin, she had to make every minute count. There was no guarantee Reuel would let them eat lunch together tomorrow.

  She felt uncomfortable when Vivek and Danika kissed in front of her. It wasn’t like she hadn’t seen anyone kiss before, but they were in prison!

  When she looked back at the apple core in her hand, she felt someone touch her arm.

  “How’s your ankle?” Kelvin asked quietly.

  “Better. I get to rest a lot, so no pressure on it.”

  “Good. Are they treating you well?”

  “For a prisoner, I guess. Reuel told me you asked for a picnic.” Reuel also told her more, but Yona didn’t need to get into all that right now.

  Kelvin seemed genuinely happy to see her, and she didn’t want to spoil his joy by telling him th
at she knew he had been interested in her for a while now.

  To be fair, she hadn’t given Kelvin much thought until Reuel fed her erroneous intel about Issachar’s non-murderer.

  “Not exactly a picnic. I asked for three meals a day. I guess he didn’t want Danika and Vivek to hurt each other if we had tables and chairs.”

  “Yeah?” Yona chuckled. “They don’t look like they’re fighting at this moment.”

  Vivek and Danika weren’t shy about their public display of affection.

  Kelvin drew a deep breath. “I’m sorry, Yona.”

  “We all are.”

  “I’ll make up for it,” he whispered in her ear.

  Yona didn’t push him back because she realized this was how they could communicate. She leaned in toward his ear. “Homing beacon.”

  It was all she said.

  Kelvin ran a thumb across her chin and smiled. He planted a kiss on her cheek.

  “Brilliant,” he whispered.

  Chapter 15

  A call to action. A directive. A suggestion.

  Call it whatever, but Kelvin had his marching orders now.

  For the next several days and nights, as he and Danika hacked into Telemachus to gain control of the VPN for Reuel, he looked for ways to plant a homing beacon that would call for Leland Yang-Joule, the only person Kelvin knew who might be able to read it as a call for help.

  Might.

  Nothing was a sure thing.

  Kelvin wished he could have more hands on deck. He voiced the concern to Reuel the next time he appeared on screen.

  “You realize that Vivek is part of my team,” Kelvin reminded him. “Yona is neither a hacker nor a systems specialist.”

  The elderly man made a face, and the screen cleared.

  Some time later, Vivek returned to the computer room, accompanied by a guard, who didn’t leave.

  Kelvin wondered why the guard didn’t leave.

  Whenever Danika scooted her chair over to Vivek’s workstation, the guard made some sort of low level grunting noise. It sounded like grrr or something.

  Kelvin couldn’t help chuckling.

  Reuel had sent a watchdog.

  “How far along are we?” Vivek asked.

  Kelvin spun around in his chair. “DMZ. Glad you’re here. We should be able to get in soon.”

  “Nice to be needed.” Vivek nodded. “Hey, thanks for asking for the meals. I think I’m gaining all the weight I lost in the last few months.”

  Kelvin didn’t want to ask more, but he figured they ran too. Perhaps they had it better than he did because they ran together.

  Kelvin had been alone in that abandoned building.

  Well, not entirely alone.

  He had Mordecai the stray cat.

  And God.

  Most of all, he had God.

  God never left him nor forsook him.

  Thank You, Jesus. Help me succeed, please.

  They spent the next few days chipping away at the security system around Telemachus. It was military grade, but nothing Binary Systems hackers couldn’t handle.

  Ulysses must not have had proper help because at the core of Telemachus was the network structure that Binary Systems had put in place several years prior. Kelvin and Cayson had designed it.

  If he planted the homing beacon at the right places, whenever the VPN was activated, it would send signals to several sites around the world that Kelvin knew Leland and Cayson would check. If their tools could triangulate where the signals originated, they could send someone—Dario, maybe—to rescue them.

  Endless hours later, they were inside Telemachus, wandering around, checking on fail-safe measures that Ulysses had hacked together. It was messy, but it wasn’t his system.

  “Are you ready for root?” Kelvin asked Vivek.

  At the corner, Danika was asleep. She hadn’t slept in about three days. Her mouth hung open and she had been out for hours.

  Vivek nodded. “Too bad there’s nothing in this for us.”

  “Maybe the satisfaction that we hacked into the system in five days?”

  “No glory in that, dude. We’re all going to die.”

  Kelvin actually smiled. “I don’t fear death. I’m going to Heaven.”

  “How can you even know that to be a fact?”

  “The Bible says so.”

  Vivek shook his head. “And you believe it. No questions asked? Blind faith and all that?”

  “It’s not blind faith. I know whom I believe.” Kelvin wasn’t sure how else to explain his faith. He knew in his heart that he was a believer in Jesus. That was all he knew.

  “Whatever floats your boat, man.”

  Kelvin said no more.

  They worked in tandem to hack into the root account. If Kelvin didn’t know any better, he would say that Ulysses had left a backdoor for him. Left the lights on.

  One could say that it could be as easy as walking in through the front door.

  However, because of that, Kelvin wondered if this was a trap.

  Who was Ulysses trying to catch?

  Chapter 16

  One benefit of knowing more than his employer—or in this case, captors—was the freedom to add or subtract functionality to the computer system at will without their knowledge.

  To Kelvin’s delight, the kill switch he had implanted into the old MedusaNet had carried over to Telemachus in a fractured sense—part of the code was still functional.

  He could see the pieces that he had debugged and fixed—the last thing he had done before Aspasia lost him to the FSB, just moments before he activated it.

  From what Leland had told him in the van the week before—had it been a week?—the kill switch was in Cayson’s head, but who had put it there? Was it Neon before he died? Or was it someone else?

  “Kel, I’m done debugging,” Vivek called out from his corner of the room. “You can test run it, if you want, but I think it’s green for go.”

  Vivek lumbered toward the cot and dropped on it. Within seconds, he began to snore.

  Danika was asleep at her keyboard, head in her folded arms on the table.

  The wall-mounted screen came to life.

  “You done?” Reuel asked.

  Sitting next to him was someone Kelvin had not seen before.

  “Do you have the admin account?” he asked.

  He had heard that voice before. Sometime ago. And that accent. Was he Israeli, by any chance?

  Could he be…

  Could he be Neon’s handler?

  It was a shot in the dark. Kelvin decided the probability for that to happen was very low.

  “Yes, we just reached root.” Actually it was almost two hours before, but he needed that much time to activate what he had left unfinished the last time he was inside MedusaNet.

  Kelvin couldn’t recall why he didn’t have enough time to finish the second malware he added to the system the year before. He wondered sometimes if he was slowing down.

  At thirty-three years old?

  He wasn’t sure if age had anything to do with it.

  He yawned.

  Or a lack of sleep.

  After this, he decided he would sleep for days. Maybe weeks.

  Well, he might get his wish. There would be plenty of time to sleep in jail.

  “Do we have control of Telemachus?” Reuel asked.

  Kelvin nodded. “If you heard Vivek, he just finished debugging some procedures. I need to run some final tests, and then it’s all yours.”

  “Very good. No more lunches with your sweethearts until this process is complete,” Reuel said.

  “To be sure, Ulysses is going to know as soon as we cut off control to the VPN,” Kelvin warned him. “Are you prepared for that?”

  “We have his location surrounded,” the other man said. “Don’t worry about Ulysses.”

  “I’m sorry, I didn’t catch your name.” Kelvin felt braver now that he had the upper hand in the transaction.

  “It’s not your concern. Get us Telemachus.
”

  “And we go free? All four of us?”

  “That’s the agreement.”

  But it might not be the plan. Kelvin was sure now that he had to find a way out. The homing beacon had to work.

  As soon as he made the switch and kicked Ulysses’s system administrators off the VPN, the homing beacon would transmit the location of their new machine room.

  If it worked.

  Please, Lord, let it work.

  Danika stirred from her table. “Are we ready to test?”

  “Yes.” Kelvin looked up at the camera mounted on top of the wall screen. “If you’d excuse us, we have work to do. I will let you know as soon as we’re done.”

  Danika typed furiously on the keyboard.

  Vivek snored on the cot.

  Kelvin prayed his old software pieces he had completed tonight—or was it day?—would not fail him now. He ran the malware in the background. If it worked, it would completely obliterate Telemachus once and for all.

  “What’s that…” Danika sounded perplexed.

  “Diagnostics. Ulysses has a habit of adding background processes that might prevent us from doing a complete takeover. We need to eliminate all those before we proceed, obviously.”

  “Okay.” She still looked a bit confused.

  “Why don’t you wake up, Vivek? We need all hands on deck.” Kelvin hoped his voice was not nervous.

  As soon as Danika stepped away from her workstation, Kelvin activated the homing beacon.

  One shot.

  That was all he had.

  If it failed, all of their lives would be in the hands of Reuel and his co-conspirator.

  If it succeeded, Leland would get someone to come over here to rescue them. Perhaps Dario and the CIA. Perhaps INTERPOL. He didn’t care who, as long as they were rescuers.

  Kelvin knew that he would be arrested, tried for treason, and incarcerated.

  He prayed that the sentence would be swift.

  He wasn’t sure how long it was going to be. Perhaps the judge and jury would see that he had tried his best to correct the errors of his ways.

  When he found out what Aspasia wanted him to do, he installed a kill switch that brought down the old MedusaNet.

  Now he was activating not only a homing beacon so the calvary could find them, but also installing a malware that would destroy any failsafe measures in the new Telemachus VPN.