Dead Run (33 page)

"Moob, of course. Boom sets the bomb, boom backwards unsets it. I mean, how obvious can you get?"

Harley smacked him across the back of the head. "You dumbshit. What if the guy had set it the other way around so itwouldn't be obvious?"

Roadrunner rubbed his head. "Shit. I never thought of that."

Harley smacked him again, lightly. "That's the trouble with you linear thinkers. You have no imagination, no understanding of human psychology, and psychology rules the world, man. Magozzi, you want to get out there and call the others-tell 'em it's safe to come back?"

Magozzi looked down at his shoes. Sure, he could do that. Just as soon as he could get one of his legs to move. "So the bomb's disabled?"

Annie gave him one of her slow, signature smiles. "Of course it's disabled, sugar. That's why it says 'Bomb Disabled' on that screen."

AGENT KNUDSEN'S car was still outside when Magozzi walked out of the shed. Knudsen was standing next to it with his phone pressed to his head; everybody else was inside the sedan.

Magozzi was furious. He stormed up to the passenger side and jerked open the door where Gino sat. "What the hell are you still doing here?"

Gino glanced at his watch. "We've still got three, four minutes."

"The hell you do. And what the/"c^ is he doing on the phone?"

"Calling off all the people coming in, keeping them away from this place."

"He couldn't do that when the goddamned car was moving?" Magozzi was nearly spitting.

"Well, it's a bumpy road. Makes it hard to dial."

"Goddamnit,Gino . .."

"Take it easy, buddy. You're going to stroke out. Glad you changed your mind about leaving, though. Hang on. I'll move over and make room."

"I didn't change my mind about leaving, goddamnit, I came out to call you and tell you it was safe to come back!"

"No fooling?" Bonar said from the backseat. "They deactivated the bomb?"

"Yeah."

Halloran and Sharon both closed their eyes at the same time. They looked like a couple of Kewpie dolls going to sleep.

Gino looked down at his knees for a minute and just breathed. When he looked up again, he was grinning. "Knudsen's going to be pissed. Now he'll have to call back all those people he just told to stay away and tell them to come back, and I wouldn't blame one of them for not believing him. What about the trucks in there? Any chance they'll blow when the two on the road go?"

Magozzi dropped to a crouch in the grass by the car, arms across his thighs. "Grace says no. There are only the two trucks online. The computers in the trucks in there aren't even linked up, which probably explains why they aren't on the road with the others."

"So we don't have to worry about dying in the next couple hours."

"No. Just about a lot of other people out there somewhere dying. Roadrunner thinks there has to be a fail-safe in the program-some kind of an abort command. They're trying to find it now."

Gino stared out the windshield and shook his head. "Godspeed.'

They waited outside as the minutes ticked by. Their guns, badges, and law-enforcement expertise-even the hotline to D.C.-were utterly useless. Everything depended on one skinny guy inside that machine shed finding one single circuit in a dizzying maze of computer language.

Halloran, Sharon, Magozzi, and Gino paced in mindless patterns close to the shed door while Halloran smoked one cigarette after another. Knudsen continued to walk his own private circles around his car, phone pressed to his ear, putting on the miles.

"You sure they don't want us in there?" Sharon asked Magozzi for the tenth time.

"They were pretty specific aboutnot wanting us in there. This is their thing. There's no way we could help them. We'd just get in the way."

"This is driving me crazy, not doing something. Anything."

Magozzi saw the hollows under her haunted eyes and thought it was all getting lost. Everything the women had been through in the last eighteen hours-things the rest of them would never be able toimagine, no matter how many times they heard the story-was getting lost in what was happening right now, and what was going to happen if they couldn't find a way to stop it. And yet there were Grace and Annie in that building, right in the thick of it, and here was Sharon, pacing around like a caged animal because she wasn't in there with them. She reminded Magozzi of a combat vet who signed up for another tour through hell because he couldn't stand the thought of his comrades fighting without him.

"You did good, Sharon Mueller," he told her on her next pass.

She stopped where she stood and looked at him, and what he saw in her face almost made him wish she hadn't. "Thank you, Magozzi," she said, and then started to pace again.

Knudsen finally signed off the phone and walked over to where Halloran was sitting. He scowled down at the burning cigarette, and Halloran glared back at him. "What," Halloran growled. He was spoiling for a fight, any kind of a fight. They all were.

"You got another one of those?" Knudsen pointed to the cigarette.

Halloran handed him the pack. "Never in a million years would I have pegged you for a smoker."

Knudsen lit up, took a drag, and coughed for a long time. "There are no nonsmokers in this business. Just people trying to quit, and people who haven't started yet. They've got the fire under control. My people are starting to move into what's left of Four Corners. The bomb squad and the computer expert should be here in thirty minutes." He took another drag and looked back toward the RV. "Monkeewrench," he recited the name painted on the side. "Those are the people traveling all over the place, donating their programs to law enforcement, right?"

"That's right."

"Huh. And you've got two of them on your force."

Halloran looked him straight in the eye. "They're kind of subcontract."

Knudsen almost smiled. "How good are they?"

"From what I hear, the best in the world."

"They'd better be. We're running out of time."

Within a few minutes, the field started to fill up with the people Knudsen had called in: a couple HAZMAT vans, sedans with more suits, and an ominous-looking black helicopter that had emptied out some ominous-looking men in black suits in the last five minutes. That contingent was standing in a tight, motionless group near the building. As far as Magozzi knew, they'd said a few words to Knudsen and hadn't talked to anyone since.

"Those guys give me the creeps," Gino said. "They all look like the bad guy inMatrix. Who are they, Knudsen?"

"Friends."

"Gee, could you be a little more specific?"

"No."

In the next minute, the sky filled with noise and a big, dirt-brown sky pig came in fast, beating all the grass in the far corner of the field down into a crop circle. It had barely touched down before men started tumbling out, then lumbering toward them. They were already in full gear-bulky, padded suits, sealed helmets, ninety pounds of protection weighing down each man.

"Don't they know the bomb's been deactivated?" Magozzi asked.

"They know," Knudsen said. "But there's still a brick of plastique in there. They'd come in like that if it were floating in the middle of a swimming pool. As far as they're concerned, no bomb is deactivated until they say it is."

"Goddamnit, that plastique is not going to blow, whether they believe it or not. You cannot let them go in there and start messing around while the Monkeewrench people are trying to . . ."

"For God's sake, Magozzi, I'm not a complete idiot," Knudsen interrupted, then trotted over to meet the bomb squad and the other men who had disembarked.

Magozzi sighed and looked at the trio from Kingsford County. Halloran and Bonar were standing close on either side of Sharon, who looked wired enough to start snapping apart. Magozzi figured they all looked a little bit like that.

There was a flurry of activity and voices for a few minutes while Knudsen made the rounds of the arrivals, barking out instructions like a drill sergeant. By the time he was finished, the field was remarkably silent. Magozzi looked around and felt the hairs on the back of his neck stand up. There had to be at least fifty people standing in a ragged semicircle around a building that looked as benign and harmless as a thousand other old farm buildings dotting the mid-western countryside. Nobody was doing anything; nobody was saying anything. They were all just staring at the door, waiting for it to open.

INSIDE the machine shed, Grace, Annie, and Harley hunched around Roadrunner at the computer, every unblinking eye fixed on the screen as pages of command codes scrolled by. A sheen of sweat washed Roadrunner's face as his twisted fingers talked to the keys, and then suddenly, his fingers froze and the scrolling stopped."What?" Harley demanded. "Did you find it? Is that the abort?" Roadrunner closed his eyes for a moment, then swiveled his chair to face them all. "There is no abort," he said quietly.

OUTSIDE the machine shed, the semicircle of silently waiting people let out a collective gasp as Harley came barreling out the door. He was moving at a perfectly amazing speed for a man that size, a blur of beard and tattoos and black leather as he raced past all of them into the RV. He came out five seconds later waving a disk and hollering, "There's no abort-we've gotta try something else!" He was back in the building so fast that it was hard to believe he'dever been out. Everyone was standing up, hearts pounding, legs ready to run somewhere if they only had a little direction.

"What do you suppose was on that disk?" Knudsen asked.

"God knows," Gino said.

"I'm going back in there," Magozzi said abruptly, heading for the door. He had license, he reasoned. He'd been in there before when things were really tense and hadn't messed anything up. Besides, this was driving him crazy. He had to know what was going on. He had to feel like he was part of it. He'd be very quiet. They'd never know he was there.

Sharon stared after him for a moment, muttered, "Well this is just bullshit," and followed him.

It was as if she had taken a cork out of a bottle. One by one, everyone in the field started to move toward the building and slip silently through the door.

ROADRUNNER'S LYCRA SUIT was soaked with sweat, and his leg jiggled furiously under the desk while he pushed the disk Harley had retrieved from the RV into the computer drive.

Grace eyed him worriedly. "Anything you want to run by us before you try this thing, Roadrunner?"

He shook his head hard and fast, keeping his fingers over the keyboard and his eyes fixed on the screen. "No time."

"Is this what you wouldn't let me get a look at in the office yesterday?"

"Yeah. It's just something Harley and I have been working on."

Annie forced herself to take a breath and blew the exhale up toward her bangs. "Are you saying you don't even know if itworks?"

"Are you kidding me?" Harley rumbled. "Of course it's going to work." He clapped Roadrunner on the back. "Go for it, my little chickadee."

Roadrunner pushed a few keys and started the disk loading, but Grace's eyes were on Harley. His voice had sounded strong and full of confidence, but there were bloodless white lines tracing around his moustache and down into his beard, and his eyes looked sad, almost hopeless.

"How much time does it take to load?" she asked quietly when Roadrunner had finished typing.

He punched a single key and brought up a time bar that started filling with blue color, millimeter by millimeter. "Five minutes, maybe. I don't know. We only did one test run."

"And then how long to execute?"

"I don't know." Roadrunner pulled his hands away from the keyboard and stared at the time bar. Everyone else was staring at the red countdown clock in the upper-right-hand corner of the screen.

37:22:19... 18... 17...

Jesus,Magozzi thought, moving a little closer to Grace, sensing her rather than seeing her because his eyes were fixed at the damn clock as it ticked down.It had to be wrong. It was going too damn fast.

"Well, what the hell is this thing?" Annie demanded harshly, but her hands were on Roadrunner's shoulders, kneading through bunched muscles that felt like tangled tree roots.

"Uh . . , sort of a virus . . ."

"What?You wrote avirus? You went to the dark side?"

"No, no, no, it's not like that." Roadrunner's mangled fingers were twisting together. "It's not really a virus. Well, it is, but it's not a bad virus. It's a good virus."

Annie dropped her hands from his shoulders. "There are no good viruses. That's why we call them viruses, for God's sake."

"It's not contagious," Harley broke in. "We only direct it to specific sites, and it can't go any farther. All it does is just eat away the guts of the computer we send it to, while the computer doesn't know it's getting eaten. It doesn't replicate, the recipient computer can't send it to anyone else-it's perfect."

"But it destroys computers."

"Boy, does it ever."

Magozzi's eyebrows shot up. Behind him, in the back of the vast room, a lot of other eyebrows were doing the same thing.

"Oh, for God's sake, you guys," Annie chastised them. "Who were you sending this to?"

Roadrunner muttered something unintelligible down at his lap.

"What?"

Harley was staring at the countdown clock, and then at the time bar, shifting back and forth on his worn-down boots. "Oh, for Chris-sake, it's no big deal. We send it to the kiddie-porn sites. Shut down a big one last night."

Annie thought about it for a minute, and then said, "Oh. Cool."

Grace was looking down at the floor, saving up a smile for later. When she looked up again, the time bar was almost entirely filled with blue, and the countdown clock was at twenty-nine minutes.

IN A SUBURB of Detroit, Michigan, a Good Health Dairies truck sat outside the entrance of a vast, sprawling building. Hundreds of people were skirting the truck as they went inside, eyeing it curiously, irritated by the group of playful neighborhood children who were gathered around the truck. They were climbing the running boards, pressing their noses against the window glass, chattering, and squealing in a most inappropriate manner.