Besieged

by A. J Tata

  When she’d thought of hacking into Cefiro from inside Cefiro, she’d thought about the good equipment her father had bought just for her. In their basement in Wilmington they had four state-of-the-art MacBook Pros and a mini server farm, which her father had used to monitor his employees at Cefiro. Misha knew that it had been important to her father that he be able to stay home some and help her. And when her father had been home, they’d almost always been in the basement, on the computers.

  Johnny Rittenbach, one of her few friends at the elementary school, had a dad who was a high school football coach. Johnny had told Misha that he would sit on the floor with his dad in their basement television room every week, watching game videos as his dad prepared for the next game. She guessed she had done the same thing with her father. She had been in their basement every day, after her mother would homeschool her or after she would get back from Miss Promise’s tutoring sessions. Her father would be writing code or running test hacks on systems, and she would watch, just like she assumed Johnny watched his dad. Computer language had made sense to her very quickly once she saw the patterns of the code and the methods her father used to penetrate firewalls he had created. So she’d started practicing writing code and running test hacks by herself.

  When her father hadn’t been there, every few days she would sit at the computer desk with all four monitors in front of her. Misha’s fingers would click on the keyboard like they had when she played online multiplayer games. She would follow her father’s path into the database, but then she would explore. Sometimes the databases had been boring and stupid, but other times they had made her heart beat faster as she found things that were hidden from everyone else.

  But one time she’d found something interesting in the Cefiro database that was different than anything she’d ever seen in any of her searches. She’d known she shouldn’t tell anyone about it, not even her father, because he would know she had been keeping a secret and using his computer for things she shouldn’t. It had made her think about the mathematical possibilities of how birds and bees communicated when in flocks or colonies. That afternoon, when her father got home, she’d asked him to order her a book by Wayne Potts about the chorus-line hypothesis. It described how flocks of birds or swarms of bees anticipated changes in direction as they were traveling. She wanted to map that out in a mathematical equation.

  One day after he ordered her the book, Misha had read about the math while her father talked about his day at Cefiro. She remembered the minute she had thought about the cars and the bees and the birds together. She had wanted to know everything about how the autonomous cars worked and had wanted one for herself when she was old enough to drive, or in the case of an autonomous car, ride. Until then she would study everything she could about the engineering, but every time she’d thought about the cars, she’d also thought about the bees and the birds and the math they used to communicate.

  She’d asked Miss Promise if she could map out how birds and bees communicated directional changes, and they’d started to put it all on the Smart Board. Misha knew that Miss Promise liked practical application, as opposed to just teaching theory. It was one thing to observe birds in giant flocks all change direction at once—or bees or fish in schools. It was another thing altogether to understand fully the math behind it.

  Misha couldn’t explain why the movement of flocks of birds fascinated her. What she did know was that she could see a flock of birds and easily know how many birds were in the flock. It was that four hundred to one ratio at which her mind operated over a normal person’s mind. Doctors had performed high-definition fiber tracking of her mind and had seen where her ocular brain fibers were four hundred times the length of those in someone without autism. It was like an upgraded computer processor in that one specific part of her brain. On the other hand, the HDFT had shown the breakdown in Misha’s own auditory fibers that prevented her from speaking clearly. Like someone who stuttered, she just couldn’t get it out sometimes, even though her mind knew exactly what she wanted to say. Often, Misha became frustrated by her inability to communicate clearly what she was seeing.

  But still, her mind snapped multiple pictures in a fraction of a second, and she just knew there would be 1,227 birds in the flock, for example. Wearing her glasses, though, prevented her from being able to do this, so she began taking off her glasses when she wanted to study this problem by watching flocks or swarms on YouTube or some other computer channel.

  Miss Promise was good at math, too. She had a master’s degree in applied mathematics, which helped her keep up. Misha didn’t have any degree, but those brain-fiber differences allowed her to see things and know things that, she realized, other kids her age couldn’t see or know.

  Misha found it interesting to explore swarming. She had actually thought it would help her father with his job. And it had at first. The really sad part, though, was that the code she wrote was part of why she had to kill her father.

  When the attack on the school happened, she knew they were coming after her. Misha had seen text messages between people who used the servers at Cefiro about shutting down the cell phone tower around her school and sending in a bomber to distract people so that the men in black jumpsuits and ski masks could take her. She had been trying to figure out a way to get into Cefiro, and when she saw those messages, she’d designed a plan. Her father would have been proud.

  Why did Cefiro want her? She had developed the code to launch and control swarming autonomous systems. She had visualized the relationship, aspect, movement, and unity of a group and had deduced mathematical formulas that could then predict behavior. She had been able to model the behaviors and had developed an application to control self-driving cars, airplanes, or boats. But she had left a trapdoor that prevented all three systems from communicating simultaneously. Cefiro wanted that fixed.

  That day a few months ago, Misha and her father had just been “jamming,” as he used to say. That was when they would each pick a problem and try to solve it mathematically.

  “Two trains are coming at each other at different speeds. What’s the algorithm?” her father would ask. Then they would write the code and develop an app that would solve the problem immediately.

  “Mom and I are buying you a new two-hundred-thousand-dollar house at five percent interest twenty years from now, after you’re married. What’s the monthly payment?”

  Then they did far more complicated things, like airplanes flying at one thousand feet and dropping one hundred paratroopers.

  “When do the first and the last paratroopers hit the ground? Wind speed is ten knots.”

  Their fingers would click faster and faster, sounding like beetle’s feet on concrete. Her eyes would be staring into the monitor, as if she were in a three- dimensional world physically moving the ones and zeros.

  One night over a month ago her father had said, “I have a new kind of problem for you. Ten Cefiro cars are driving on a football field. How do you make them all turn at the fifty-yard line at the same time?”

  That had led to larger formations of cars and then to aerial flight. Things had got so complicated that her father quit typing and just stood behind Misha as she wrote the program.

  “Oh, my God,” he said late one night. “You’ve done it.”

  She had made the user interface easy, so all someone had to do was push a button. Most people didn’t realize the work that went behind developing an application, because it looked easy by the time they were just pushing a button on a phone. But it was complicated behind that one symbol.

  “Can you develop the application to make them stop swarming, Misha?” her father asked her one night, about a week after she had developed the swarming code. She did her best and developed that code in a day. That was the day she went to tutoring with Miss Promise and showed her all the progress she was making. Miss Promise said that much of what Misha was doing was even beyond her understanding, but Misha continued writing on that Smart Board, which was connected to the Wi-
Fi.

  A few weeks later, on the day of the attack, when she knew from their communications that they were coming to kidnap her, she made sure she was in the principal’s office at the time the bomber walked in. She watched through the Plexiglas as a big man came in behind the bomber and made sure everyone got out of the school. Then she heard a gunshot. Wanting to make sure the kidnappers saw her, she ran into the hallway, forgetting all about the Cefiro texts about backup autonomous cars with bombs, in case things went wrong.

  When the car bomb hit the front doors, she felt stinging on her back. The big man carried her and put some medicine on that really stung. She could still feel the pain. Then the big man, whom Miss Promise called Jake, picked her up, and they started running. That was when the second bomb went off.

  She looked at Miss Promise and started crying. Then she looked at the big man, and he looked like he was sleeping. Then the two men in the ski masks came and took her.

  The night before, she had seen where the attack was going to happen. It was right there in the Cefiro communications database.

  So she knew they were coming for her.

  As she said, she wanted them to capture her because she wanted to see Cefiro from the inside. It would help her reconcile for killing her father before her Day of Judgment came.

  When the big man was holding her, she was screaming and shouting, “Ants,” but what her mind was trying to tell her to say was that this attack was about the autonomous swarming.

  Staring at the keyboard on the eco-pod computer now, she decided she would sneak out and explore.

  CHAPTER 7

  JAKE MAHEGAN

  HE SLEPT FOR ABOUT FOUR HOURS, WHICH USUALLY FELT LIKE plenty for him. Casey was gone when he awoke. He remembered her leaving in the middle of the night, sliding off of him gently, retrieving her clothes, and retreating upstairs.

  He took a quick shower, then reached into the go bag he had snagged from his place above South End Surf Shop and changed into blue dungarees, Doc Martens boots, and a tight-fitting black Under Armour T-shirt.

  Before he left for his meeting with Ximena De La Cruz, he listened for sounds upstairs. Hearing nothing, he found a pen and paper by the refrigerator and started to write a note. On Casey’s refrigerator were pictures of her and an older couple, who he presumed were her parents. Her mother, a beautiful and thin woman, was leaning against a balcony rail, with sand dunes and the ocean in the background. Her father looked like a relaxed politician, with his groomed salt-and-pepper hair and Hawaiian shirt over shorts. There was a lone picture of a young man with a high and tight haircut. It had to be Carver, her Marine.

  “Those are my parents. And yes, that’s Carver,” Casey said, validating his guess from across the room. She was barefoot, in a pair of scrub bottoms, braless, and in a gray tank that read ROXY PRO across the front. Her hair was slightly mussed, and her lips seemed more full and pouty than they had last night. Even that little bit of sleep seemed to have restored her some, or maybe it was something else. He figured since she was a nurse, she was accustomed to odd hours.

  “He looks good in that picture,” he said. “Happy.”

  “We were,” she said. After a pause, “What’s that song from Les Misérables? ‘I dreamed that love would never die. . . . And still I dream he’ll come to me.’ Something like that.”

  “Victor Hugo,” he said. “Always had a way of touching the soul.”

  She cocked her head. “Isn’t the big, strong man full of surprises?” She moved closer and pulled his head down to inspect his stitches.

  “It’s the haircut. Makes me smarter,” he said.

  “Damn good haircut, too,” she said with a smile.

  “What’s this?” he asked, pointing at a magnetic sticker with a picture of a set of red lips superimposed on a surfboard, with the word Bisous! stamped across the image.

  “That was my nickname. Bisous. French slang for ‘kisses.’ The girls on the tour used to say that the way my surfboard smacked the lip of a wave was like kisses on the lips.”

  A moment passed between them. He recalled last night. Her kiss. The softness of her lips. Her aggression. Then he decided to get back to what was important.

  “Any word on Promise?”

  “I called before coming downstairs. Promise is still with us. No change in her coma. Vitals are okay otherwise.”

  He nodded. His hope was that the coma was a reaction to a slightly swollen brain from the concussive force of the bomb and that she would ease out of that condition once the swelling lessened.

  “I’ve got to get going,” Mahegan said. “Let’s sync up later tonight?”

  “Sure. I get off shift at six.”

  She stepped forward again and kissed him on the lips. Bisous. It fit her. He felt his heart race for just a second. Her lips were soft and firm. Her hands were on either shoulder, and Mahegan knew that if they didn’t need to be somewhere else, something entirely different might have happened.

  “Be careful, Jake Mahegan. It’s a big, bad world out there.”

  “Likewise, Casey Livingstone. I’m trusting Promise to you. Meanwhile, I’m going to check out a few things.”

  She stared at him and said, “You’ll learn to trust me. My marine did. So my soldier will, too.”

  “I’m your soldier now?”

  “That’s up to you,” she said. “Now, go figure out what this is all about.” She told him the garage code, and he memorized it. Casey bounced back up the steps. He wadded up his linens and tossed them in the washing machine. He put the pillow in the hall linen closet. He didn’t want to leave any evidence that a stranger was staying in her condo, in case someone decided to inspect Casey’s home illegally, looking for him.

  He drove his government-issued Jeep Cherokee to the downtown Wilmington address that Ximena De La Cruz had given him. After parking in the city garage, he walked a few blocks toward the Cape Fear River, which the new mirrored building fronted. After two security checks, he was escorted to a bank of elevators, and a security guard swiped a card for the executive car. The guard rode up with him to the twenty-second floor, the top, and walked him to the CEO suite.

  There a young man wearing a headset said in a cheery voice, “Hi, Mr. Mahegan. My name is Markeece, and I will show you in.”

  Mahegan looked through the floor-to-ceiling glass-paned walls to an expansive view of the river and neighboring Brunswick County. He estimated the river was only about a mile wide. Totally swimmable. He had been swimming five to ten miles a day a couple of years ago. Now he was swimming or surfing every day, still working on his injured left deltoid, where the piece of his best friend’s vehicle had embedded itself, a piece that a doctor had later removed. He looked at the river the way a skier might look at a new mountain: as a challenge, something he hadn’t done before and might like to do.

  “Beautiful in its own way, isn’t it?”

  De La Cruz’s voice sang across the room. In his periphery he could see Markeece’s eyes switching from him to her, as if he were watching a tennis match. His guess was that he was relatively new and was still trying to impress his boss.

  “Your manufacturing plant is across the river,” Mahegan said. Not a question. He knew this from research last night.

  “Yes. Farther south, though. We’re about twenty-six miles from where the river empties into the ocean here. My facility is about halfway down on the opposite side. Shall we take a look?”

  He turned and faced her. She was wearing designer jeans, low pumps, a white cotton shirt with the company logo on the left breast pocket, and a baseball cap with the same logo. The company symbol was the word Cefiro, written in script shaped like a sports car, the swirl at the bottom of the f a twirling vapor that flattened out, like smoke leaving a billowing trail behind the entire word. He knew that céfiro was a Spanish word that meant “zephyr,” a light wind or west wind. Zephyrus was the god of the west wind in Greek mythology.

  “Sure,” he said.

  They walked back to the ele
vator, and she waved her card across the reader. After exiting at the roof, they approached an executive tilt-rotor aircraft with dual blades spinning. He knew this was the smaller civilian version of the Marine Corps Osprey. This was an AugustaWestland AW609. De La Cruz had it painted white and red, with the company logo on either side. He was getting the impression that she liked everyone to know she was in charge.

  They climbed aboard, where there were two men with two Heckler & Koch MP5 submachine guns. They were strapped into monkey harnesses, vests that had nylon cords snapped into the frame of the aircraft, so that they could lean out the open door when in flight without fear of falling out.

  Ximena De La Cruz had style.

  The aircraft took off with a wobble as they placed headsets on. He observed the pilots from plush leather seats. This was nothing like the military aircraft he had flown in during combat missions. Whereas those aircraft were all sharp edges and hard corners, this one was smooth and luxurious. The autonomous car business must have been doing better than anyone knew.

  “How is your Promise?” she asked.

  “Still hanging in there,” he replied as the pilots tilted the rotors forward so that they flew as an airplane now, not as a helicopter. The look on her face gave him the impression she already knew Promise’s status. “Tell me about Roger Constance,” he said, changing the topic to what he needed to know.

  She looked out the window, giving him a profile view of her face, with its soft edges and high cheekbones.

  “He was my chief of information security, the most important job on my staff. A month ago he was killed. They found some of him in a boat off Southport and his blood and guts in a warehouse just up the street from his headquarters in Wilmington. Southport is where the big studios film all the movies and TV shows.”

  “I know where Southport is. How was he killed?” He lodged in the back of his mind the fact that there were actors and actresses in this area.

  Mahegan wasn’t a trained investigator, but he had led missions to hundreds of combat objectives where they’d had to analyze data and make immediate decisions in the process of killing or capturing targets. The forensic evidence of Misha’s father’s crime scene was long gone, and he had to hope that the county police and the state bureau of investigation had done their jobs properly. The more he thought about what was happening, the more he believed that Roger Constance’s death was what had started whatever they were facing now. In every military operation Mahegan had ever led, there was always that first piece of intelligence that held the key that would unlock the door to operational success.