Genius--The Revolution
Page 16
“Your army is finished. You’re finished. This…” I turned and motioned back to the laser light tree on the wall behind me. “These are all pipe dreams now. The brain trust is all but disbanded, we have the Rama code, and we’ll block any move you make to launch Shiva. So there really isn’t anything to join, Kiran.”
He didn’t seem very concerned.
“That all might be true, in some form or another,” Kiran replied cryptically. “But I still have Shiva, and I still have the will to use it. But I didn’t lead you, Rex, Tunde, and the kids from ULTRA all the way across the globe to confirm what you already know. I wanted you to see this and understand.”
“Understand what?”
Kiran walked over to the bookshelf and removed one of the binders. He placed it on a low coffee table and removed a single sheet of paper from it. Kiran handed the paper to me. On the sheet was a typed list of dates—day, month, and year. I only recognized one of them: It was the date of the Tiananmen Square protests in Beijing.
“This has all happened before,” Kiran said, walking across the room toward the laser-projected tree. It spun lazily around him, the colors playing over his face and his hands. “It happened before, and it will happen again. Unless you let me do something about it.”
Just then we heard Rex and Tunde at the top of the stairs. Kiran moved his hand, and the room was plunged into darkness. I didn’t move, lost in the instant night, until the lights flickered on a second later.
Kiran was gone but the tree remained, endlessly spinning in place.
20. Rex
30 HOURS UNTIL SHIVA
We were SO close!
I can’t tell you how frustrating it was walking into that basement room and hearing that I missed Kiran by less than a minute.
Teo and I searched the house and the grounds but couldn’t find any trace of him. Unless he had some sort of Phantom of the Opera lair hidden under the place, he was likely miles away.
It was hot outside and dry enough to make my throat feel like the back of a furnace. I had no idea how people comfortably lived out in the middle of a desert.
Winded from running around, I found Cai in the living room.
She was holding a piece of paper she said Kiran gave her.
It was a list of random-looking dates.
“What’s the list?” I asked, sitting beside her on a couch.
“Revolutions,” Cai said. “I ran the dates. There are forty of them here, all dates of failed revolutions: times when people or groups rose up against broken or controlling systems. The only thing that really links them all is that they were crushed. Maybe things changed for a little while after these events, but, in the long run, the world went back to normal or got worse.”
“That’s grim.”
“He wants me to know he thinks we’re going to fail,” Cai said. “That even if we stop him, it won’t change a thing; Kiran’s making fun of our revolution. He seems to think that he’s the only one capable of real and effective change.”
“Well, we know that’s wrong.”
“Do we?”
I wasn’t sure where Cai was going with that, but Tunde and Stella interrupted us. They emerged from the stairs holding big duffel bags packed full with all sorts of tech, wires and cables dangling out like they’d massacred some robots.
“So what did he want?” Tunde said, setting his bag down.
“His usual,” Cai said. “Wanted me to join his army.”
“That what he called it?” Stella asked.
Cai nodded. “And of course, he painted the whole thing as though he’d plotted it out from the very beginning. He told me that he led us here on purpose. He didn’t seem too concerned about us breaking in and finding everything.”
“Well,” I said, “there’s a lot here.”
“Yeah? What did you discover?”
“Ton of files, tons of data,” Teo said, joining us from downstairs. “Place is a treasure trove of all his personal notes. They show how he developed his company, created the Game, the viruses, all of it. Only two things we don’t have are access to Shiva itself and Kiran.”
“Well,” Cai said, winking cockily, “that’s not quite true.…”
She showed us her cell phone and an open app. It displayed a digital recording screen, with an audio wave making peaks and valleys, and a map. There was a green dot moving toward a private airfield just a few miles away.
“Is that?!” Tunde gasped.
Cai said, “Not only can we follow him, but it has a microphone so I can hear everything he’s saying.”
Just to rub it in, Cai pulled a tiny earbud from her left ear.
“Have you been listening to him this whole time?” I asked.
Cai nodded.
“And I thought we were having such a nice conversation.”
“Stop being silly, Rex!” Tunde shouted. “What has Kiran said?”
Cai said, “He’s going to a bunker in Patagonia, Argentina.”
20.1
A bunker.
I’m not much of a history buff. I don’t really know the first thing about battlefield strategy or offensive preparations, but I do know that people don’t just throw around the word bunker. That’s a place you go to get away from something really bad—a tornado, a fire, or a war.
Maybe Cai read it differently, but to me it meant Kiran was going to ground.
He’s readying for the final battle, amigo.
“What about Shiva?” Ivan asked. “Has he said anything?”
“Nothing yet.”
“We should leave,” Teo said as he headed outside to the waiting van.
Seconds later we heard tires screech and Teo barreled back inside.
“Police are here!” Teo shouted. And I could see the lights flickering through the front window as a veritable caravan of police rolled toward Kiran’s modernist abode.
“Go out the back door,” Teo said, pointing toward the kitchen. “There’s a path to a detached garage—go around there and down the alleyway. Head to the right; the cops are coming from the north.”
ULTRA ran first, Tunde and Cai following.
I paused, noticing that Teo was striding toward the front door.
“What are you doing?!” I asked him, panic rising in my throat.
“The cops are too close; you’ll never get away without a distraction,” he said.
“Are you kidding me?”
I grabbed my brother by the arm and spun him around to face me. Teo was calm, despite the fact that two-dozen police were seconds away from knocking down the front door.
“I just found you a few days ago, brother. I’m not going to let you do this.”
“Rex.” Teo pulled my hand away. “I’ve had this coming for a long time anyway. But you need to go. I’m really proud of you. Go stop Kiran. I’ll see you soon, okay?”
As if to punctuate the moment, fists were banging on the front door.
“Go on,” Teo said. “Save the world.”
I hesitated, wanting to just have that one last moment with my brother. I never thought that once I’d found him I’d lose him again so quickly. But he was right: I had to stop Kiran. So I turned and ran after the others, through the kitchen, and out into the backyard toward the garage.
As I ran, I pictured the scene.
The front door to Kiran’s mansion being broken down by the police, nearly off its hinges, as Teo stood stoically in the entranceway, ready to distract them with whatever story he could come up with before they slapped the cuffs on him and led him out to one of the idling police cruisers.
I was sure his story would be something great.
20.2
I ran until my lungs nearly burst.
I sped around the garage and into the alleyway. Though I couldn’t see the rest of the crew, I just kept running and assumed I’d find them. The alleyway ended at an intersection. It was quiet but also empty.
I stepped out near a streetlight and caught my breath.
Okay, okay, now wha
t?
To my left, I could see the flashing lights of the police cars. Most were piled up around Kiran’s mansion, but there were several spreading out through the neighborhood. They were looking for me, and it would only be a matter of time before they found me. Sadly, I didn’t have any tricks up my sleeve. No funky Tunde-tech and certainly no Cai-styled social engineering that would get me out of a run-in with the cops. Especially not while carrying a duffel full of stolen information. Nope, I was going to just have to run.
My first step was coming up with a direction.
Obviously, we’d need to get as far from the mansion as possible. Myself, I’d have just run in the opposite direction. But Cai might have chosen a different route. She might even have run toward the cops in some sort of crazy game theory ridiculousness. I’m sure she would have had a brilliant argument for it, too, but right now, I didn’t feel capable of predicting her strategy.
So I decided to just run and reconnect with everyone once I got a little farther from all the chaos. I wondered what Teo was going through as I raced around a corner to my right and jumped over a series of low hedges. Was he being interrogated in the back of a squad car? What would he say to our parents when he was allowed to make a call? If he was allowed …
“Rex!”
It was Tunde. He was standing at the edge of a park next to the van. The sliding side-door was open, and ULTRA and Cai were inside. I dashed over to them.
“What happened? Where is Teo?” Tunde asked.
“He turned himself in to protect us,” I said.
“I am sorry, omo. That was a very brave thing.”
“Come on,” I said. “Let’s get in that van.”
I jumped in and settled into a seat beside Cai as the driver hit the gas.
Cai reached over, took my hand, and squeezed it.
She understood.
21. TUNDE
28 HOURS UNTIL SHIVA
The sacrifice that Teo made for us was truly astounding!
I have always been a sucker for tales of extreme courage. There is a story in Akika Village of a woman who bravely stood between her family and a rampaging hyena. She did not blink when the fearsome beast swiped at her face with its clawed paws. Her stoicism scared the animal off, and though she lost an eye in the attack, my people always saw the loss as a badge of honor.
While I had made many assumptions about Teo, I knew that he was truly an honorable person for what he did to secure our escape. The Teo who fell in with Terminal and considered their approach to be preferable was long gone. In Mexico City, as in Arizona, we saw the true face of Teo, and it was startlingly similar to that of my very best friend, Rex.
We reached the Phoenix airport twenty-five minutes later.
As we unloaded, Cai showed us her cell phone and the tracking app on Kiran. He was airborne, his flight headed south toward Mexican airspace.
“We have tickets?” I asked, leaning back to look at Javiera.
She nodded. “First class again.”
“You are a superstar,” I said. “How long is the flight?”
Cai said, “Twelve hours to Buenos Aires. Then another, shorter flight to Bariloche, a city in the Patagonia region. It’ll be twenty hours give or take a few minutes. We’re going to be cutting it very, very close. We’ll get in just a couple hours before Shiva’s launch.”
“All right,” Rex said. “We can go over all the stuff we’ve managed to gather from Kiran’s and formulate a plan of attack.”
I fist-bumped Rex.
“We have so much to discuss, omo,” I said, “though I have spent only a few minutes looking at the stuff we recovered and it is all very exciting. I cannot wait to go over some of the details with you. You are going to love this.”
“Tunde, your optimism is…”
“Is what?” I asked.
Rex laughed. “I wouldn’t trade it for the world.”
With that, we ran into the airport and readied for our flight. My friends, I had been traveling so much since I first left my beloved village to attend the Game that I felt as though I was now an old hand and the thrill of being on an airplane had quickly been replaced by a sort of warm familiarity.
We checked in for our flight and then passed through security.
One of the women examining IDs was Nigerian, and she and I made small talk about seeing the States and missing Naija cuisine before Rex pulled me away. We ran to our gate and boarded the plane a few minutes before takeoff.
I settled into my first-class seat alongside Stella.
She was looking through several reams of blueprints she had smuggled out of the mansion. I glanced at them with her as a steward handed us cups of black tea and water. The first of the blueprints was of the mansion itself. But a few pages in was another building, one I did not recognize. It was built into the side of a mountain.
“Do you think this might be the bunker Cai spoke of?” I asked.
Stella shrugged. “Whatever it is,” she said, “it’s pretty hard-core.”
“How do you mean?”
Stella traced the exterior walls with her right index finger. “Do you see how thick these are? They’re the kind of thing someone builds to buttress against earthquakes or maybe explosions. There’s also the fact that it’s three stories deep.”
“Deep into the mountain?”
“Yes.”
That was interesting. It meant that getting inside was going to be quite involved. I started to picture machines I could build to drill through the walls or maybe excavating equipment that could dig under them, when Stella interrupted my thoughts.
“Can I tell you something, Tunde?”
I shook myself from my planning and nodded. “Of course.”
“This is new for us,” Stella said. “I mean, ULTRA has been to many countries before, but our travels have always been after the fact, so to speak. We’ve spent our time in the shadows, gathering clues, building surveillance stuff, not actually going directly after anyone.…”
“So you are nervous?”
Stella nodded.
“This is understandable,” I said. “When I went to the Game, I was quite anxious about every step I took. I was leaving my small village and traveling across the globe! There is simply no true way to prepare for these sorts of things. When a massive change comes, you only need to focus on yourself and ensure that you are personally ready to handle all that it may throw at you, and if you cannot handle it, then that is okay. You need to accept that.”
I felt as though I was being reassuring to Stella. She had certainly proven herself many times over in Beijing, Mexico City, and Arizona. It was somewhat funny to me that she considered herself anxious now, considering all we had been through. But I supposed the thought of facing off against Kiran, the boogeyman that she had been tracking for so long, was intimidating.
Kiran he dey guy-man.
Rex tapped my shoulder.
“Tunde,” he said, “come look at this.”
21.1
Rex was sitting a few rows back from me with Cai and Javiera.
They all had laptops open, and were going through the materials we had acquired from the mansion in Arizona. I knelt down in the aisle beside Rex, and he spun his laptop around to show me what he had discovered.
“I think the Shiva program has a weakness,” Rex said.
All I could see were long lines of code on the screen. While I may have recognized a few bits, I could not honestly say what I was looking at. Rex knew well enough that I was not a coder, but, clearly, he still wanted to show me firsthand. I have always appreciated that about Rex; he has never spoken down to me or assumed that I would not understand what he wanted to show me.
However, I did not understand it.
“We only have bits and pieces of the earliest drafts of Shiva,” Rex said. “But lining them up and scanning through them to compare differences, I was able to find a tiny poorly designed element that Kiran, or whoever was designing this for him, overlooked through every iteration. I
can’t say with any certainty that it’s still in the final program but…”
“But if it is we can take advantage of it,” I said, grinning.
“Yes and no,” Rex said.
“It’s not really an exploitable flaw,” Javiera said. “Think of it more like a seam where the two pieces that have been brought together aren’t fully in line. There’s a gap. It doesn’t mean we can get in like a back door, but it means we can follow it just the same way we’re following Kiran.”
“I am not sure I understand,” I said.
Rex broke it down quite simply. “Think of it like this,” he said. “We can’t exploit this thing and get inside the program, but when he activates it, we’ll know where it’s going and we can put up digital roadblocks. We can slow it.”
“And this will give us time to confront Kiran,” I said, comprehending the plan. “I think this is excellent. Can we block it now?”
Cai shook her head. “Not until he runs the program.”
That made me a bit uncomfortable. What if Kiran were to launch Shiva and the program was immediately devastating? How could we possibly slow something that was spread out across the globe, with so many different moving pieces, in a matter of seconds? Though I was greatly appreciative of the work Rex, Javiera, and Cai did, I was not entirely convinced it would be as beneficial as they assumed. However, my friends, I would of course give them the benefit of the doubt.
“Well then,” I said, “let us hope we can find him first.”
I went back to my seat to find Stella and Ivan deep in a conversation. I hated to intrude, seeing that the discussion seemed rather heated, and so I walked to the front of the plane to the bathroom. Locking myself inside, I splashed water on my face, which was quite refreshing, and then had a good look at myself. My goodness! The days of running had certainly taken a toll. While I would never argue that I am a particularly handsome young man, I do believe I have several attractive attributes. A strong jawline and gentle-looking eyes. However, I had clearly lost some weight and appeared to be quite gaunt. The heavy, dark bags under my eyes attested to some significant lack of proper sleep.
I promised myself that when we had Kiran locked up and the Shiva program decimated, I would enjoy a healthy meal and a decent amount of sleep.