Ciphers

by Matt Rogers

  ‘They did.’

  ‘Here in Manhattan?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘We tore the family apart. They lost their power, and their money, and their resources. Most of them fled the city, and a few fled the country, but a couple of the stragglers came back to do this.’

  ‘Hmm,’ the boy said. ‘Interesting. Doesn’t change a thing, though.’

  ‘It should.’

  The boy shrugged. ‘Sorry to disappoint.’

  ‘That’s all they ever cared about,’ King said. ‘Their power, and their money, and their resources. Do you four care about that?’

  ‘Of course not. And neither did they.’

  ‘I can see that. You’re doing this with no plan. If you don’t bite down on those pills, you have no escape up your sleeves. You just wanted to watch New York crumble, right?’

  ‘Right,’ the boy said.

  The first confirmation.

  Deep down in King’s core, he felt a spark of hope.

  Get him on board.

  Get him feeling righteous.

  Get him to agree.

  ‘Gavin Whelan had an escape plan. He might have seemed broken, and defeated, and uncaring, but all of this, everything he did… it was because of anger.’

  ‘I doubt that very much.’

  ‘It’s the truth,’ King said. ‘He hated me, and he hated my friend here. Because we took his money and his power away, and he was left with nothing. Look into my eyes. You’re a smart kid. You’re probably one of the smartest people I’ve ever met, if I’m looking at what you’ve managed to do here with a few computers. So look at me. Ask yourself if I’m lying.’

  He didn’t budge.

  He didn’t waver.

  The kid swept a lock of thin hair away from his eyes and stared hard.

  ‘I don’t think you’re lying,’ the kid said.

  ‘I’m not. Now, ask yourself if what he said to you was legitimate. If he was angry about losing it all, and wanted to lash out and hurt the people who did it, does that line up with the anti-Western storyline he fed to you?’

  ‘It wasn’t a storyline.’

  ‘It was. You might have been harbouring resentment — which, believe me, is fucking understandable in this day and age — but he didn’t share them. He told you what you wanted to hear. He used you. Keep looking at my eyes — I’m not looking away, I’m not blinking… I’m not lying.’

  The boy stayed quiet.

  King said, ‘You might hate me, because I’m affiliated with the government. That’s okay. I’m not going to stand here and try and convince you that this country always does the right thing. When I’ve had to, I’ve rebelled against my own employers. Because I always try to do what’s right. I can’t control everything. But when I see pieces of shit leeching off the rest of society like the Whelan family were, I step in and do something about it. The Whelans were partly responsible for the fentanyl epidemic here in New York. I’m sure you have friends, or friends of friends, who’ve died from overdoses. And you know why they were doing that? For money. They were greedy little pigs, and we stuck them for it, and we’re never going to apologise for that. Maybe that’s what a negotiator would do. They’d suck up to you. I won’t.’

  A pause.

  King said, ‘I just have to hope you understand.’

  ‘I get why you did it,’ the kid said. ‘But that has nothing to do with—’

  ‘It does. Take Gavin out of the equation. Remove him and all his rage. What’s left? Would you have done this if he hadn’t been there to talk you into it?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You don’t sound like you mean it.’

  ‘I…’

  The kid trailed off.

  King said, ‘Do you know what panic looks like? Have you seen it in-person?’

  The boy said nothing.

  King said, ‘Millions of people are going to panic, and thousands of people are going to die, if you don’t reverse this. I know you know that, but have you really thought about it?’

  Silence.

  ‘Not everyone in this country is a monster. There’s bad people in it, but there’s bad people everywhere. You’re going to kill a whole lot of good ones if you go through with this.’

  The boy started breathing faster.

  Harder.

  Deeper.

  King hesitated. Wondered if the kid might start hyperventilating. He eased off, letting the silence drag out, letting them sit there. The other three stayed expressionless, their eyes as dead as the moment he and Slater had stepped into the vault.

  But the boy he’d been speaking to wasn’t so calm.

  King said, ‘Do you understand what you’ve done?’

  The boy looked up.

  There were tears in his eyes.

  He said, ‘Yes.’

  He bit down.

  78

  Slater saw King jerk imperceptibly, a visceral internal reaction to what had happened.

  His own heart rate spiked, and his hands tingled, and his skin turned cold, and his stomach fell to the floor.

  But he didn’t let it show, and neither did King. They couldn’t. Everything depended on keeping the other three alive.

  Which, they both knew, would be no easy feat.

  Before the boy had even reacted to breaking through the cyanide pill, Slater spun to face the other three and said, ‘Stay calm.’

  They stared back at him.

  He said, ‘Please, stay calm.’

  And then it started.

  The boy with the dyed hair spasmed in his chair, throwing his head back, the veins in his neck protruding like purple rivers. He let out an ungodly howl, and his whole body tensed in protest. He clenched his teeth so hard that Slater thought he heard one of them crack, and then the trademark foam appeared at the corners of his lips.

  ‘Shit,’ he grunted. ‘Oh shit, oh my God…’

  Then he trailed off, and died in his chair.

  Slater didn’t look at him directly. He kept his gaze transfixed on the three remaining kids, watching the death play out in his peripheral vision. He remained an island of calm, refusing to react to the violent demise, hoping like hell that it kept the other three subdued.

  So they didn’t follow suit.

  There was nothing Slater could do. There was nothing King could do. If they tried to make a lunge, the other three would bite down on their pills out of reflex. They weren’t really kids — they were twenty-somethings — but they were still at risk of contagious behaviour, just like the rest of the world.

  The two boys saw the first guy die.

  They could have reacted in either direction.

  One way, or the other.

  They split right down the middle.

  One panicked, one didn’t.

  Slater’s stomach fell further.

  The boy on the left — pale, sweaty, wide eyes — closed his eyes and bit down.

  The boy on the right — caramel-skinned, maybe Latino — saw the violent aftermath of his friend’s demise and spat his pill across the room.

  The girl let the pill fall from her mouth, too.

  Slater said, ‘Look at me.’

  The pair looked at him.

  Slater said, ‘Don’t look away.’

  They didn’t.

  The pale guy coughed and spluttered and violently succumbed to the cyanide.

  Slater kept his eyes on the two remaining hackers.

  They kept their eyes on him.

  With a final gurgling throat-rattle, the pale guy slid down in his chair and went still.

  No one spoke for a long time.

  The vault’s atmosphere tightened, constricted. There were now two corpses in here with them all, corpses that had once been people. Corpses that had once had personalities, had talked and bantered and maybe sometimes laughed. Now dead, forever.

  Slater doubted that the two surviving hackers had ever seen a body before.

  With his heart in his throat, he
said, ‘Please, for the love of God, tell me that one of you knows the ciphers.’

  Slowly, one by one, they both nodded.

  Slater said, ‘Are you going to do it?’

  They both stared at him.

  King turned around.

  Gave Slater a look.

  Over to you.

  Slater knew what he had to do.

  Now was the time to cut deep.

  He walked over to the chair containing the kid with the dyed hair and spun it around so the corpse faced the two living, breathing occupants.

  They went pale.

  Slater said, ‘You see this? This is a body. This is a dead man. There’s going to be thousands of them out there if you don’t fix this. Remember when you were kids, and you saw an old lady crossing the street, or a young couple hand in hand? Remember back then, before you grew up and started to hate the world. Those people still exist. They’re the majority. And you’re going to kill them, turn them on each other, make them inhuman. Look at this guy right here and ask yourself if that’s what you really want.’

  Neither of them spoke.

  Neither of them budged.

  They need more.

  Slater took a deep breath and said, ‘You want to know something I probably shouldn’t tell you?’

  The boy stayed mute.

  The girl nodded.

  Slater said, ‘I’m an alcoholic. I drink to forget all the hard shit I’ve had to do. But I did those hard things because they made the world a slightly better place. I made life brutal for myself so I could stop people getting taken advantage of, and then I dulled all my memories with booze. Which isn’t the right response to hard times. Just like this isn’t. There’s better solutions. Sometimes life isn’t fair. But you don’t need to do this. Other people recruited you to do it because they were angry, but you’re not really angry. You’re confused.’

  The guy clammed up, reacting harshly to the criticism, to the suggestion that he was naive.

  The girl didn’t.

  She looked Slater in the eyes and tilted her chin downward.

  It took him longer than it should have to realise that she’d nodded.

  He said, ‘Will you fix this?’

  She said, ‘Yes.’

  The guy wheeled around in his chair, venom in his eyes, and lunged at her, a crude switchblade in his hand.

  79

  But King was there.

  He’d seen the resolve in the boy’s eyes. He’d seen him double down on his beliefs, refusing to come out of his shell, refusing to admit the fact that he might be wrong.

  And then the knife was there, a last-ditch effort to preserve the operation.

  He’d seen all that in milliseconds.

  And he’d lunged, too.

  The boy flew off his chair with his knife hand outstretched and a look of pure terror came over the girl’s face, but King darted in and caught him around the waist and threw him like he weighed twenty pounds. The gangly kid rotated an entire revolution in the air and smashed into the safe deposit box framework, probably breaking a couple of bones in the process, and the switchblade fell from his hands.

  King picked it up and tucked it away.

  The girl watched, horrified.

  ‘You see?’ King said. ‘We’re here to help.’

  She nodded, scared, but ultimately glad she was safe.

  Slater said, ‘Tell us how you did it.’

  ‘I didn’t write the code,’ she said. ‘Dex did.’

  ‘Who’s Dex?’

  ‘Long hair.’

  ‘Got it.’

  ‘Then the four of us implemented it.’

  ‘What came first — Gavin, or the code?’

  ‘Gavin,’ she said. ‘He didn’t know how to do it, but he thought it could be done. He showed us some holes in the system. The power grids rely on systems that need to balance supply and demand. If you screw with that balance, the whole thing collapses in on itself. So once we were in, that’s all we needed to do. And Dex wrote the code that got us in.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘Do you have all day?’

  ‘Summarise it.’

  ‘It’s a worm,’ she said. ‘It was designed to be invisible, but I’m sure you already know that. It showed the engineers that all was fine, but it gave us control of the regional transmission organisations and the independent system operators. RTOs and ISOs, for short. Once we had those, it was like clockwork. We could change passwords as we pleased. We could shut everyone out. But we didn’t do it until we were sure that you’d never be able to get back in unless we wanted you to.’

  A chill ran down King’s spine.

  Then he asked the question both he and Slater desperately needed the answer to.

  ‘How easy was it?’

  She looked up at him. ‘Easier than Dex thought it would be.’

  ‘Is Dex the only person capable of creating a worm like that?’

  ‘No,’ she said.

  ‘Why hasn’t it been done before?’

  ‘If I had to guess,’ she said, ‘it’s that no one thought to try.’

  Quiet.

  The quiet of realisation.

  Slater looked over at King. ‘Things need to change.’

  ‘That’s not our department,’ King said. ‘We’re enforcers. End of story.’

  ‘I know,’ Slater said. ‘But Violetta needs to hear this. The whole damn government needs to hear this.’

  ‘They will.’

  King turned to the girl.

  She said, ‘What’s going to happen to me?’

  ‘If you fix this,’ he said, ‘I’ll do everything in my power to help you.’

  ‘Aren’t you just an enforcer?’ she reminded him.

  ‘Not exactly.’

  Slater said, ‘He’s dating his boss. He has leverage.’

  King half-smiled, and surprisingly so did the girl. Right then and there he understood Slater’s usefulness. King knew he had restraint, and tact, and the ability to talk to anyone. But Slater had the no-nonsense approach to almost every situation, and he used it to cut through to the core of the issue. Sometimes, he went too far. Sometimes, it worked brilliantly.

  Just like that, he’d dissipated the tension between the three of them.

  King said, ‘How long will it take you?’

  She scooted closer to the desk, still in shock, still horrified by what had unfolded, but with something new in her eyes. They were no longer as dead and soulless as when King had stepped into the room.

  He thought, maybe, they might stand a chance.

  She said, ‘An hour, maybe.’

  ‘That’s it?’

  She lifted her gaze to him. ‘It won’t take much to hand back control. The real work came in building the thing. Controlling the worm is simple. Not easy, but simple.’

  ‘If you have the ciphers, you have the key?’

  A nod.

  He said, ‘So you really didn’t keep them anywhere physical?’

  She shook her head. ‘That was our trick. We memorised them and then erased them. If we all died, the system would be impenetrable.’

  He was about to say, Why did you do this? but he stopped himself short.

  Now was not the time to be provocative.

  He went quiet, waiting patiently, and the girl hunched closer to her triple-monitor setup and brought up a series of windows. She sunk into the flow state, her eyes wide and unblinking, and her hands started to fly over the keyboard.

  King turned to Slater and muttered, ‘I’ll be back in a moment.’

  He stepped out into the antechamber.

  It wasn’t done yet.

  But it might as well have been.

  He crossed to the broken window Slater had launched Gavin Whelan out of and rested against the sill. He took a deep breath, ran a hand through his hair, and winced as his ribs lit up with the familiar dull throbbing. His nose had doubled in size since the fight with Walker. He couldn’t breathe through it. The septum was mangled.

 
But in the end pain was nothing.

  Victory was everything.

  He pulled out his smartphone, touched a familiar contact name, and lifted the device to his ear.

  Violetta said, ‘For the love of God, give me good news.’

  ‘It’s done,’ he said. ‘Everything will be back to normal within the hour.’

  He thought he heard her ordinarily stoic exterior shatter.

  She audibly sighed.

  She said, ‘I don’t know how you did it. I don’t know what to say.’

  ‘There’s nothing to say,’ he said. ‘I’m just glad it’s over.’

  ‘I’ll pass the word down the pipeline. The engineers will be ready to get the grid functioning as soon as control is returned.’

  ‘You know what this means, right?’ he said.

  ‘What what means?’

  ‘It was four kids,’ he said. ‘Four kids, Violetta. That’s who did this. Gavin Whelan found them on the deep web and filled them with hate. They wrote the code. They unleashed the worm. They did it all. Because they could.’

  ‘We’re going to need an overhaul of the system,’ she said. ‘Trust me, I know.’

  ‘Literally an overhaul. This can’t happen again.’

  ‘That’s not for you to worry about,’ she said. ‘We have entire departments for that. The flaws have been highlighted. Improvements will be made. That’s all you need to know.’

  ‘Good,’ King said. ‘As long as you understand.’

  ‘I understand.’

  ‘Then I’m off the clock?’

  ‘You’re done.’

  The words released something in him. A permanent tension fell away, and the tendrils of civility crept back in. He came out of “kill mode,” and the bank building transformed into an empty dark obelisk instead of a live hostile environment.

  She said, ‘You did phenomenal. As always.’

  ‘I think my ribs are cracked. My nose is definitely broken. Slater’s concussed. He’s operating on autopilot.’

  ‘You’ll get the best treatment. As always.’

  He sighed. ‘One more thing.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Keep the ground troops back. This is going to take an hour or so. I don’t want her to get spooked.’

  ‘“Her?”’