Vertigo

by Wesley Cross

  “You gotta be shitting me,” he heard Smith say under his breath.

  As Connelly watched two dozen heavily armed men spill out of the truck, his adrenaline surged. Their rescue mission just got a whole lot more difficult.

  7

  July 2007

  New York

  Helen Chen cringed as “Umbrella” by Rihanna started playing for the fifth time in a row. She liked the song when it first came out, but by now, she must have heard it a thousand times, and this café seemed to have it on a loop. She took a sip of her iced coffee and watched the traffic going down Seventh Avenue, first past the Chase bank on the corner and then the esteemed Carnegie Hall across the street.

  Her phone rang with a blocked caller ID, and she declined the call without bothering to see who it was and returned her attention to the laptop sitting on top of the scratched wooden table. The page it was opened on had an official communique issued by the Department of Defense on June 22.

  “The Pentagon is exposed to perhaps hundreds of attacks a day, and the department has backup systems in place. A variety of precautionary measures are being taken. No classified information was compromised, and we expect the non-vital computer equipment that was temporarily taken offline to be operational again soon.”

  Two weeks ago, the same person who wrote that statement told her, and a few other contractors gathered in a dimly lit windowless room who were brought in to investigate the breach, that it was “the biggest fuck-up I’ve seen in a long time.”

  On June 21, a successful spear phishing attempt cracked open fifteen hundred computers storing some of the most sensitive information from a project code-named Nyctalope. After the theft, the machines were wiped clean.

  None of the contractors were told about the contents of the compromised files, and soon Chen had learned that even the name of the project was removed from further communications with people who joined the task force a day later. With a limited number of people involved and disappearing evidence, the whole thing smelled like a cover-up.

  She’d never heard of the word Nyctalope before, but after a quick Google search, Chen found a Wikipedia page dedicated to a pulp fiction hero with the same name. It was created at the beginning of the twentieth century by French writer Jean de La Hire. The hero may have been the first cyborg in literature and was seen by some as a significant precursor to the superhero genre. The character possessed an artificial heart and special powers, such as excellent night vision, which explained the source of inspiration for his name. The idea that the US Army was working on a project related to cyborgs made Chen’s skin crawl.

  “C’mon, come with us. It’ll be fun.”

  “Um, I’d love to, but I need to work.” She looked up at the man as if seeing him for the first time and then nodded at her laptop. “I can’t. Please go.”

  “There’ll be booze and good music.” The man leaned in and lowered his voice to a whisper, “God forbid, you might actually enjoy yourself.”

  He had approached her at the café when she was having lunch and persisted in trying to convince her to go out despite her polite, but firm objections. He left her for a few minutes to reconvene with a few of his buddies at the bar, but now he was back again and she was starting to lose patience.

  “Listen, Brian.”

  “It’s Dylan.”

  “Whatever. I told you I have a boyfriend, right?” She feigned a sigh. “I can’t. You seem charming and all, and if I were single, I’d consider it. Now, please leave me alone before I start breaking your shit.”

  The man backed off, a startled expression on his face, then got up and walked away from her table, mumbling something under his breath. Chen watched him leave and switched windows on her laptop. She’d been swimming in the muddy waters of the internet’s chat rooms for the past two weeks looking for a person going by the handle Delgado, who had claimed to have some information on the attack. So far, she was only convinced of two things—one, that Delgado was a man, and two, that he was probably telling the truth. When she logged in to one of the IRC chat rooms where she went by the Witch, there was a new message waiting for her from Delgado.

  Supermen are real. Look for them in Keeper’s Workshop.

  She read the note again and looked at the gray dot next to the user’s name. He was offline. Chen pondered the message for some time. Delgado wrote Supermen as in plural, so that was the reference to the cyborg project; that much was obvious. But the rest of it wasn’t clear. The message was a riddle designed only for her, which meant she was supposed to be able to decipher it. It was customary when dealing with people who operated in the gray area of the law to speak in code and use it as a security blanket of plausible deniability. But it didn’t make it any less frustrating.

  Keeper’s Workshop? Who’s the Keeper and was there any significance to the words being capitalized? And what about the workshop? Was it something that she was supposed to be familiar with? Something obvious? Or was it a hint to something more obscure that Chen needed to make a connection with?

  Her phone buzzed again with a blocked caller ID. Annoyed, she put it on mute.

  Chen pulled up an Excel spreadsheet with the list of people and organizations one way or another connected to the project. Individuals were listed by initials while organizations were listed by acronyms only. What made things worse—the list was a mix that contained people with top-secret security clearances and those who didn’t have any clearance whatsoever. A mix of those who might have been in the know and those who delivered supplies, mopped the floors, and copied papers. Over fourteen hundred people and almost a hundred companies.

  When she requested the actual names, first someone told her that it was on a need-to-know basis only and then five minutes later, she got an email directing her to delete the file altogether and prohibiting her from making copies under penalty of law. Chen didn’t risk copying the files from the server, fearing that it might create a log of such action on the system and instead took pictures of her monitor to recreate it on her laptop later.

  She sighed in frustration. This was like fighting a professional boxer with one hand tied behind your back.

  Keeper’s Workshop. What could it be? She ran a Google search, but nothing she could see was making any sense.

  Gorilla keepers. Zoo workshops. Wisdom Keepers. Animal Keepers: Ten million results that she couldn’t parse. Chen closed the tab and considered her options. Checking out companies was the first logical step. There were a few of them, and she could figure out most of them by using the list of acronyms. Could Keeper’s Workshop be a company? She scanned the list, but there were no companies with an acronym KW. That wasn’t particularly surprising, though—Delgado didn’t use the word cyborgs either; he used a code—Supermen.

  Maybe, she thought, she could look up some synonyms for those words. She opened a new tab and typed www.thesaurus.com and then searched for synonyms for the word Keeper. She was grasping for straws, Chen realized, but she was running out of ideas.

  The page turned up a few columns of highlighted words.

  Attendant, caretaker, curator, custodian…

  She wrinkled her nose—none of the words were jumping out of the page. Archivist, conservator, guard, jailer. Her eyes wandered around the page and then she saw another highlighted word she hadn’t noticed first, right under the word Keeper:

  noun guardian

  Guardian, she mused. That was a strong word, and somehow it fit. Guardian’s Workshop? Perhaps watching the Robocop movies when she was younger was to blame, but now she couldn’t shake off the image of the government building a cyborg police force and calling them Guardians.

  Her phone silently flashed a Blocked ID sign again.

  “Wow,” she said out loud, looking at it in disbelief. “What a persistent asshole.

  “Yes,” she said angrily, answering the call. “Who the hell is this?”

  “Is this Ms. Helen Chen?” said a man’s voice.

  Something in the tone of it made her sit
straighter and forget her annoyance with the caller.

  “This is. Who am I talking to?”

  “This is Detective Sanchez with the Midtown North Precinct. Do you have a minute?”

  “Yes.” She felt goose bumps forming on her neck and running down her spine. “What can I do for you, Detective?”

  “Do you mind me asking where you are right now?”

  “I’m in Midtown Manhattan,” she replied, the sense of dread covering her like a cold, wet blanket. “Why?”

  “I’d like you to come down to the precinct as soon as possible.” He gave her the directions. “I’m afraid I have some bad news concerning your sister.”

  8

  July 2007

  New York

  Chen left the precinct as if in a haze. She took the stairs from the detective’s office, walked through the hallway covered in WANTED signs, and went outside. She pushed her way past a group of uniformed officers, lost her footing going down the three concrete steps on the side of the building, and would have fallen head first if one of the cops didn’t catch her by the arm.

  “Are you okay, miss?” he asked. There was a genuine concern creasing his cleanly shaven, weather-beaten face, which, for a moment, made her feel better.

  “I’m fine, thank you.” She wiggled herself free, walked around a cruiser parked on the curb, and crossed the street. Her feet continued to carry her past the dry cleaners and then by the group of young men smoking in front of Uncle Vanya Café.

  “You’re pretty. Come drink with us,” one of them shouted, rolling his Rs.

  Chen flipped him the bird without stopping and carried on.

  “C’mon,” the man persisted. “We don’t bite.”

  She ignored him and picked up the pace. She grabbed a taxi at the corner of Ninth Avenue and gave the driver her sister’s address. Normally she would have walked the few blocks, but right now she didn’t trust her legs to continue to move. Now, alone in the darkness of the backseat, she closed her eyes and tried to process what she’d learned from the detective.

  She and Mary had always been close. Not as close in the past few years as they used to be, as Mary’s success came with an ever-increasing responsibility and ever-decreasing free time.

  The last time she spoke to her sister was a month ago at their mutual friend’s bridal shower. It wasn’t really a place and time to catch up on each other’s lives, but they did have a brief conversation, and Helen could not remember her sister looking depressed. Stressed and overworked, yes. Suicidal? She didn’t think so.

  The police seemed to be treating this as an open-and-shut case. Too much wine and suicide. The fact that Mary saw a psychologist also weighed on their decision, but Helen knew it was something wealthy folks like her sis did to unwind and refocus. It wasn’t her cup of tea but to each their own. When she told that to the detective, he was sympathetic, but he didn’t seem to share her suspicions.

  “Look,” he said, giving her his card, “there’s nothing that indicates foul play as far as we can tell. We’re finished with the scene so you can go in and look around if you’d like. You’ve said that you’ve stayed there on a few occasions. Do you still have a key?”

  “Yes, I do,” she said, pulling her keychain from the purse. “I have a copy.”

  “Great,” he said, standing up. “Once again, my condolences. And please, if you see something unusual or suspicious, feel free to give me a call.”

  The taxi pulled up to the building, and Chen climbed out, squinting against the bright light. She nodded to the doorman and took the elevator to the top floor, steeling herself as it stopped at the penthouse.

  It was hot inside, the split system whining above her head, going on full blast, unable to keep up with the scorching draft coming from the boarded-up window. Chen stepped over the threshold and stood in the hallway, taking it all in. The place that Helen once called a “neat freak’s paradise” was a mess. The wind was strong up here, and before the broken window was covered with sturdy four-by-fours, it managed to wreak some havoc inside the apartment.

  The glass bookcase that used to stand next to the window was shattered to pieces, and the floor was now peppered with loose papers, books, and shards of glass. An ugly yellow stain defaced the expensive white rug in the middle of the room.

  Chen stepped into the living room, noting the pair of stylish shoes with bright-red soles under the coffee table and a pile of her sister’s clothes next to the couch. An empty wine bottle was standing at the edge of the table next to the pieces of the broken wine glass.

  This doesn’t make any sense, she thought, looking around in bewilderment. The last time she saw her sister drunk was when Chen’d turned eighteen, and they snuck out to the roof of their parents’ house in Queens. They brought two sleeping bags with them and stayed there all night—drinking, watching the city lights, and making plans of conquering the world until they both passed out. Luckily for them, it was their father who discovered them the next morning. They were mortified, but he only shook his head and quietly sent them to clean up. Thus, they were spared being grounded for the rest of their lives, which would undoubtedly have happened if their mother had found them first.

  Chen put her bag on the floor in the hallway and set out to clean. First, she put away the glass shards and other debris and vacuumed the place and then methodically combed through the papers and books. By the time she was done, she was drenched in sweat, but the papers were stacked in a neat pile on Mary’s desk, the books were lined up against the wall in alphabetical order, and the apartment no longer resembled a war zone.

  She rummaged through the fridge and settled at her sister’s desk with a bottle of cold water to look through the documents. After a few minutes, she caught herself spacing out—the documents weren’t the most exciting read. Accounting statements, corporate bylaws, minutes from board meetings. Chen rubbed her face, trying to stay focused.

  One paper caught her attention—an engagement letter of Peter Shultz and Associates, a mergers and acquisitions firm. She skipped the legalese at the beginning of the letter and traced the relevant part with her index finger.

  To provide financial advisory and investment banking services in connection with a financial restructuring or reorganization of and/or one or more merger and/or acquisition.

  This was new. Chen didn’t know that her sister was considering a merger, but then again, she didn’t know most of what her sister did at her job. She tried to stay in the loop when Mary had first started, but as the company continued to grow, she’d lost interest. But this could be something, she decided, and put the engagement letter aside.

  It seemed that Rapid Science was pretty far along in negotiations with Lightning Labs, a company out of the West Coast, operating in the same space.

  Was she not happy with her business? Chen thought. Her sister was one of the most driven people she knew and fiercely proud of her company. Chen decided that she’d have to look into why Rapid Science was pursuing a merger in the first place. If her sister’s company was falling apart, Chen had to concede, it could be a real reason for Mary’s alleged depression. But a suicide still sounded like a stretch—her sister wasn’t a stranger to failure and to take an easy way out would have been out of her character.

  She finished going through the rest of the papers, separating documents related to the merger and putting them aside. It was getting late now, and she decided to take the docs home and continue from a place that had working air conditioning. Chen packed her bag, finished the water from her bottle and threw it in the wastebasket next to the desk. Then she turned off the lights and headed for the elevator when something stopped her in her tracks.

  She returned to the desk and picked up a crumpled piece of paper from the wastebasket she hadn’t noticed before. It was a printout of an email.

  The body of the message had only one line of text—tomorrow at noon—and the address line was empty, but as Chen looked at the subject line, printed in all caps, her pulse quickened.r />
  RE: GUARDIAN MANUFACTURING

  “I’ll be damned,” she heard herself say.

  9

  July 2007

  Kenya

  Up close, it was obvious that the AM General was no longer in the care of the US States Army. The dark-green camouflage paint was peeling along the side of the truck and the exposed metal was showing signs of rust. The front grille bore deep scrapes, as if the truck had plowed through some gates, and the front bumper was gone.

  With growing alarm, Connelly watched as a group of young bearded men started to disembark the vehicle, most carrying AK-47s, but some with American-made M16s slung across their shoulders. Despite their youth, the fighters didn’t look like greenhorns—they went about their business with a purpose and efficiency of experienced soldiers.

  “We gotta hit them now before they spread out through the building,” Connelly furiously whispered into the microphone.

  He peeked out of the ditch. The solution couldn’t be any more obvious to him—if they allowed the reinforcements into the school, the mission was royally screwed. They’d be outnumbered five to one and still would have to go room by room.

  Connelly didn’t like those odds one bit. Here, in the open, with two snipers crisscrossing the yard with bullets and the element of surprise on their side, they still had an excellent chance. As long as the assholes didn’t get their hands on the Ma Deuce. The 50-caliber machine gun was the wild card in the deadly game they were about to play. It was like a flag in an RPG match, the penalty shot during extra time of the scoreless soccer game. Sudden death.