Brain Jack (16 page)

31 | VIENNA

The door slid open, and Vienna was there, her keycard in her hand, a look of surprise and concern growing on her face as she saw Dodge.

“What’s wrong with him?” she asked.

Vienna stared. Sam stared back, unsure what to say.

The air-lock door began to slide closed between them. Sam stepped forward, blocking the door with his foot. The inner door behind him would not open until the outer door was shut.

“We’ve been attacked again,” he said.

“What? When?”

“Just now. Someone hacked into the building and attacked Swamp Witch, wiped her brain like the terrorists in Chicago, then tried to do the same to Dodge.”

There was a hammering from the door behind them.

“What the hell is going on?” Vienna asked. She took a few steps backward, retreating into the parking area.

“Have you been on a neuro-connection today?” Sam asked.

“No,” she said. “Why?”

“Dodge is in trouble,” Sam said. “He’s hurt and we need to get him to a hospital.”

“No,” Vienna said, regaining a little composure. “I don’t know what you’ve done, but let’s talk to Jaggard and sort it—”

“Listen to me, Vienna,” Sam hissed. “The hackers have got inside the firewalls, and they’ve got through the neuro-firewalls. They’ve done … something; I don’t know what. They’re manipulating Kiwi and Socks and Tactical and God knows who else. Help me get Dodge out of here, and I’ll tell you everything I know.”

“Sam—”

“Vienna, Dodge is going to die unless you help me get him out of here now.”

She started to say something to that but stopped and stared at him intently for a moment.

Finally, she grabbed one of Dodge’s arms. “Let’s get him into one of the vans.”

“You take him,” Sam said.

The hammering from the inner door was getting louder, but it was supposed to be bulletproof, and he knew it wouldn’t open until the outer door shut. He ripped off his jacket and rolled it into a ball, wedging it into the doorway as the outer door began to shut. Unable to close properly, it slid open again.

Vienna was already pushing Dodge into the van. He was compliant, malleable, but said nothing. Sam ran to the van.

“I’ll drive,” Vienna shouted. “You get in the back with Dodge.”

Vienna raced to the driver’s side. “Put his seat belt on,” she added. “Yours too. Where are we going?”

“Right now, anywhere out of here.”

Vienna hit the gas as Sam was still buckling Dodge’s seat belt. The van lurched forward with a squeal, and through the back windows, he could see a cloud of black rubber smoke.

The sharp acceleration slammed him into the seat next to Dodge, and he grasped wildly for his own seat belt, nearly falling out of his seat as the van careered around a concrete column toward the exit ramp.

Sam cried out, “They’ve shut the blast gates!”

Heavy metal, bombproof gates were trundling across the top of the ramp, shutting off the late-afternoon sunshine.

“Not yet they haven’t,” Vienna said, and floored the gas pedal. The black and yellow barrier arm at the exit crumpled like paper, and Vienna veered to the right, toward the rapidly closing gap. The edge of the gate scraped paint from the side of the van as they burst through into the sweet daylight outside.

“Where are we going?” she shouted. “We don’t have long before they shut us down.”

All government vehicles were fitted with the LoJack system that allowed them to be tracked by satellite and remotely shut down if they were stolen.

Vienna spun out onto San Carlos Street, just about collecting a trio of middle-aged women in a BMW sedan. There were thuds and crashes from underneath as she bounced the vehicle over the light-rail tracks in the center of the road, and the van leaned—surely on two wheels, Sam thought—as they twisted left onto the roadway heading east.

“Take the freeway,” Sam said, getting an idea. “Head for the Great Mall. Maybe we can lose ourselves in the crowds.”

• • •

In the CDD lobby, Tyler raged at the closed interior door of the air lock.

“Tyler, it’s Control.”

“Go ahead, Control,” he neuroed the response.

“Van four just left the car park at speed.”

“Copy that. I need you to open the inner air-lock doors and override the security system.”

“Can’t be done, sir. It’s a mechanical system, not electronic. When one door is open, it breaks the circuit.”

Tyler grabbed the radio off his belt and keyed the mike.

“McTurck, it’s Tyler, come in.”

A voice responded almost immediately. “McTurck.”

“Are you still on duty in the hotel lobby?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Come over to the CDD underground car park right now; we have a situation.”

“On my way.”

Tyler neuroed back to the command center. “Get the blast doors back open so McTurck can get in. And locate van four on the LoJack, but don’t shut it down yet. Wait till we get to it; otherwise they’ll abscond on foot. And get an alert out to the police. Tell them we have two fugitives, one who appears to be semiconscious. Give them a description of Dodge and Sam. Tell them not to apprehend them if spotted. I’d rather keep this in-house.”

“Copy that,” the confirmation came back from control.

“Where do you think they are headed?” one of his men asked.

“I don’t know,” Tyler replied. “And probably neither do they.” A thought struck him, and he mentally hit the Neuro-communication button again. “Stay off the radio; use only neuro or cell phones. They’ll be monitoring the radio in the van.”

“There’s a neuro-headset in the van too,” Control pointed out. “They could be monitoring our neuro too.”

“They won’t be,” Tyler said firmly, not even really sure how he knew that.

A sudden image intruded on his vision. A security cam feed from the parking garage. It was Vienna, helping Dodge into the van. Who had fed him the image, he could not tell.

“We are looking for three fugitives,” he neuroed. “Vienna Smith is assisting them.”

But where had that image come from?

Dodge’s head had lolled forward, but when Sam lifted it, it stayed up.

“How long has it been?” Vienna shouted back without looking around.

“What?”

“Since we left CDD, you egg!”

Sam checked his watch. What time had they left? “At least five, maybe ten minutes,” he guessed.

“Then why haven’t they shut us down?” Vienna wondered. “It takes five minutes max to locate a vehicle on the LoJack and kill the engine. We’ve got to get off the freeway! Hang on!”

She shot across a couple lanes without signaling, cutting in front of a delivery truck, which delivered its annoyance with a blast on its air horn.

As they spun around the long looping off-ramp, she said, “We have to lose this van now and leg it to the mall. They know our exact location.”

“It’s not going to work,” Sam said. “If they know where we are, it won’t take them long to find us after we leave the van.”

“I know,” Vienna agreed.

In front of them, a tow truck with a large orange towing arm and a mangy-looking dog standing upright on the bed turned on its hazard lights and drifted to the side of the road.

“What time is it?” Vienna asked urgently. “I may have an idea.”

“Four-fifteen,” Sam said.

To their right, a small Mitsubishi car was parked on the side of the road, the only car on the roadway. A few yards before it, a large sign proclaimed
NO PARKING, 4 PM TO 6 PM MON–FRI
.

The tow truck, its lights flashing, pulled over to the curb in front of the car and began to back toward it.

Vienna signaled and cut over to the right as well, sliding to the curb with a squeal of brakes, just in front of the Mitsubishi.

“Get Dodge out now,” she said. “And leave your cell phone and his in the van.”

Sam slid the door open and guided Dodge out of the van. A blast of cold air hit him. He wrapped his arms around himself and wished he had kept his jacket.

The tow truck driver was halfway out of his cab by now. A big hairy biker of a man. “Hey!” he yelled at them.

“Government plates,” Vienna called back, and flipped him the bird. She grabbed Dodge’s hand and began to walk briskly toward the huge shopping mall at the end of the avenue.

• • •

“Special Agent Tyler, this is Cuthbertson in Control.”

“Go ahead, Control.”

“The van has stopped. I repeat, the van has stopped on the Montague Expressway.”

Tyler cursed. They must have already escaped on foot. That would make things harder.

“Hold on a second,” the voice sounded again in his head. “They’re on the move again.”

Sam and Vienna walked swiftly along Falcon Drive to the huge outdoor parking lot of the mall, Dodge trotting between them. Security cameras on tall poles were scattered around the area.

“Don’t look up,” Vienna said. “Just keep moving. The facial-recognition software can’t ping you if you don’t look up.”

That was easy, Sam thought. The wind was bitter, scything around the sides of the building, and it was natural to hunker down and shove your hands in your pockets.

Vienna led them away from the entrance to the mall and around the side to a service lane.

She stopped at the entrance to the lane and scanned the walls of the surrounding buildings. “Two security cameras,” she said.

“Where?” Sam asked.

She pointed them out. “They rotate to cover the whole lane. When this near one is pointed away from us, run to the wall right below the camera, before it swings back and catches us. Do you think Dodge can do that?”

“Let’s find out,” Sam said.

The service lane was a long road, with concrete walls lining both sides. Nestled into the walls were large roll-up doors and smaller access doors. One or two of them were open, revealing loading docks inside. Signs next to each door gave the names of the retailers. Walmart, Borders, Sears.

“Okay,” Vienna said, watching the camera. “Now!”

They each grabbed Dodge by an arm and hauled him along as they ran into the lane. They slammed into the wall beneath the camera just as it turned back the way they had come.

“See the Walmart door?” Vienna asked.

“Uh-huh.”

Walmart was on the opposite side of the lane. The roll-up door was shut, but the access door next to it was open a couple of inches, propped open with a block of wood.

“Wait for the camera to swing back again,” Vienna said, looking straight up at the camera. “Move!”

They tore across the alleyway to the door, pulling it shut behind them.

Inside it seemed dark. Long overhead fluorescents filled the area with a flickering alien glow, but after the sunlight outside, it took their eyes a moment to adjust. The dock looked deserted.

They moved through into the warehouse of the big department store. Floor-to-ceiling shelving systems held every imaginable kind of product on flat, utilitarian racks. There were people walking around in here, but by carefully picking rows, they were able to pass through the warehouse without being spotted. A doorway on one side, near the entrance to the store itself, led into a dusty disused storeroom.

“Stay here. I’ll be back shortly,” Vienna said, and turned to leave.

“Vienna?” Dodge asked faintly.

32 | THE GREAT MALL

Tyler slammed the dashboard with the flat of his hand. “Come on!” he said to the driver for the third time in the last sixty seconds.

The van veered around the corner onto South Abel Street, tires smoking. The siren screamed at other traffic to stay out of their way.

“Tyler, it’s Control. The van has turned onto the Nimitz Freeway.”

Tyler thought about that for a moment. “Stupid kids. Okay, shut the van down. We’re just about there, and the next exit is not until California Circle. They’ll be trapped on the freeway. Shut it down now.”

“Confirming that—shutting down van four now.”

“Okay, all units, listen up,” Tyler said, finally feeling that he was recovering control of the situation. “We’re stopping the van on the freeway. Red Two, I want your team to keep moving over to California Circle and come in through the exit. Block them from getting out that way. We’ll come up behind them.”

“Tyler, it’s Control again; we may have a problem.”

“Go ahead.”

“I’ve engaged the remote shutdown, but the van is still moving, sir.”

Damn!
Those hacker kids must have found a way to disable the LoJack mechanism. He thought that was supposed to be impossible.

Vienna was back in a few moments with a couple of Walmart plastic shopping bags, packed with items.

“We won’t have long,” she said. “They’ll backtrack from where we parked the van and find us on the parking lot cameras. We have to keep moving before they can close in on our trail.”

“I hope you paid cash,” Sam said, looking at the shopping bags.

She shook her head and rolled her eyes. “No, I used my credit card. Egg.”

She pulled out some jackets and caps from the shopping bags. “We need to change our appearance. Just enough to fool the security cameras in the store.”

She handed Sam a long black Halloween witch’s wig.

“You’re kidding,” Sam said.

“Don’t worry about it,” she said. “Up close it’s obvious, but on the security cams they won’t be able to tell. Here, stick this on too.” She passed him a fake goatee.

She also put on a long black wig and pulled a short, curly blond one down over Dodge’s head, topping it off with an outsized baseball cap. She covered his black T-shirt with a padded nylon zippered jacket that Dodge wouldn’t have been seen dead wearing under any normal circumstances.

“He looks like a cross between a clown and a rap artist,” Sam muttered.

He pulled his wig on and attached the fake beard around his mouth. Vienna passed him a knitted hat and a nondescript Windbreaker, both of which he put on.

“You’re not exactly the bachelor of the year yourself,” Vienna said with a quick grin.

“I think you’re enjoying this,” Sam said.

“Having the time of my life,” Vienna said, but the grin was gone. “Where do we go once we get into the mall? You got any ideas?”

Sam shook his head. “Not yet.”

“Well, you’d better figure out something soon,” Vienna said. “It won’t take Tactical long to work out where we went.”

“Maybe we can get down to the parking levels and borrow a car,” Sam said.

“Maybe.” Vienna didn’t seem convinced.

Sam looked at Dodge. His eyes still seemed soft and vacant, and since that one word, “Vienna,” he had not spoken.

“There will be cameras everywhere,” Vienna said. “We’ll try to stay in a crowd as much as possible. Make sure you never look directly at a camera. If you can’t help it, put your hands in front of your face and pretend you’re sneezing.”

“Okay.”

“Ready?”

“Ready.”

From fifty yards away, through the growing crush of peak-hour traffic, Tyler could see the problem. They might have shut down the van, but the van was attached to the back of an A & A Towing truck.

The siren and lights made a path for them through the lanes, and he pulled up alongside the truck, ordering the driver to pull over with the van’s loudspeaker.

He was out of the van and up on the running board of the tow truck before it had even come to a halt.

“Where did you pick this up?” he shouted at the driver, although he was pretty sure he already knew.

The mall was bustling with shoppers, and it was easy to lose themselves in the thick of the crowd. To his left, Sam noticed a store with a huge three-dimensional model of a neuro-headset displayed in the window. The name of the store was
NEURO-TICK
, emblazoned on the wall above the store windows. The store’s slogan underneath proclaimed
YOUR STORE FOR EVERYTHING NEURO
.

A few yards in front, Vienna was walking with her arm around Dodge and his around hers. Her head was on his shoulder, and his head rested on hers. To a casual viewer, they looked like any boyfriend and girlfriend, with no indication that one of the couple was just a few notches above brain-dead.

A girl in a white T-shirt walked toward him, wearing a neuro-cap—a baseball cap with a built-in neuro-headset—chatting animatedly to a friend walking next to her. Sam quickly pretended to sneeze, covering his face with his hands until she was gone.

He increased his pace, moving past Vienna and Dodge and muttering out of the corner of his mouth as he did so, “It’s not just cameras we need to worry about. Keep away from anyone wearing neuro.”

Vienna said nothing, but he knew she had heard. He stopped and looked in a store window for a moment to let them get back in front.

A young couple walked past wearing matching neuro-caps. They were smiling at each other, sharing secret thoughts. They did not glance at him; they were too besotted with each other. Sam felt that he had blinked and the whole world had turned neuro. Three months ago, neuro-headsets were a rare sight, but now everybody had them.

A security guard on a raised walkway was staring straight at him. Was that uniform cap a neuro-headset too? Sam wondered.

The man looked away. It was not.

Vienna stopped in her tracks and turned toward Dodge, as if having a conversation with him, although Sam knew that was not possible. Not yet. He moved closer and glanced idly around the mall, paying no attention to them.

“ATM ahead,” Vienna said. “Wait till someone goes to use it—that’ll block the security camera.”

“Okay,” Sam said.

“Where are we heading?” Vienna asked. “Any ideas yet?”

“I’m not sure,” Sam said. “But I know we have to keep moving.”

Vienna nodded slightly, to let him know that she had heard. After a moment, a large woman with a child in a stroller and two more in tow walked up to the ATM and inserted a card. Vienna started walking at once with Dodge. Sam counted to three, then followed her. They repeated the procedure at two more ATMs as they made their way toward the large center court of the mall.

A sign caught his eye in a corridor that led off to the left.

Sam quickened his step and passed Vienna, whispering as he did so, “Follow me.”