The Cause (16 page)

He pauses, breathing heavily.

I glide toward him. Rake my sword against the ground. My legs awaken. The Earth breathes beneath me, its shake blowing through my body. Dust clouds push up into the air in tiny puffs as I step forward. A primeval call, an ancient scream with a gnarled voice. Fear is in Conroy’s frantic face, a grin that doubles
over into a frown. He throws an overanxious swing. Inexperienced body movement. He has not trained as hard as me. Nothing more than a raging man lashing out with a prayer. My eyes gleam at him as he uncovers the battle secret.

He recognizes my look, and a new brand of fear leaps out of him. He backs up in a new, more dogged retreat. The blade is an extension of myself. My veins wrap around it. Nerves, skin, and arteries tighten. I find an opening. Then my steel slashes through his arm as if it were air. It’s over, but not over.

I climb out of The Pit and stomp a path toward Seee. The men part as I pass. Seee has a surreptitious smile on his curvaceous lips, looking at me as if I am the wolf he knew was lurking inside. I wonder what kind of man I have become, solemnly trying to remember Conroy’s first name. I think if I looked down, I might have the answer, as if it might be the last thing on his lips. Then I was there, staring into Seee’s eyes, and from somewhere the name suddenly came.

He stared into my eyes and nodded. My eyes said it all. This was the vanquished and the champion. This was the fed, and the eaten. This was the hair of another curled around my fingers, a weight both burden and relief. This was courage and fear, Nature and evolution. This was not only a command, but a plea, held tightly in his name. This was his blood coursing through me, as my eyes appeared in his. This was death and the first head of a revolution. And unlike so many others, in front of me was a leader who I knew was worth following.

“Edward Conroy, sir,” I said, dropping Conroy’s head at Seee’s feet. And with these words, I became sworn to The Cause.

Seee and I moved into the forest, entering the same trap door I crawled out of the day I was released from The Hole. Seee closed the hatch, smothering the light from above. The familiar gritty concrete scraped underfoot, and the days in darkness rushed back to me. Where was that naive prisoner now?

Moving in the opposite direction of my old cell, we came to a dead end after about twenty yards. A blip of red light flashed from Seee, and the massive concrete wall opened, sliding on squeaky wheels rolling on a track. Seee produced two headlamps and offered one to me.

“Welcome to The Anthill,” he said at the entrance. “There’s a ladder here.” He waved his headlamp at the metal rungs of a ladder at the foot of the opening. “One thing you have to understand is that knowledge is like a bridge. You only allow someone to cross if it’s absolutely necessary. This requires the strictest discipline, as inevitably human desire urges us to share with people we believe we can trust. But what is even more difficult is sometimes it becomes inevitable that one must share secrets with dubious persons out of pure necessity.”

I smiled slightly at his words. “And am I one of those dubious persons?”

“Most certainly.”

“What is down here?” I asked, but he simply told me in Yoncalla I would have to wait and see. Over the ledge, I peered down with my headlamp. No end to the darkness below, and I felt like Lazarus again, heading in the wrong direction. It appeared to be an old, dried-out well. The walls in front of me
were pocked and blackened. “Why are the walls this way?” I asked.

“We have practiced engaging the enemy should they come.”

We climbed down. No end to the rungs in the iron ladder we descended. The air was stagnant, a dank smell of moss and decay.

After a long silence, I finally asked a question still burning throughout the camp. “Tell me, who were those guerillas that stormed the camp? What was their purpose?”

“It was a turf war,” Seee said. “But it had nothing to do with land. When we get below, it should help answer the question.”

The sounds of hands and feet stepping and sliding on the ladder echoed throughout the chamber. As we climbed downward into the mouth of some beast, the air smelled as foul as the imagined breath. Seee seemed content to descend in silence, but my agitation grew. “How do you think you can win?” I asked. “The U.S. government is a giant much bigger than you. What is your plan to fight it?”

“A giant’s size perturbs his flexibility,” Seee said.

“The giant is like an octopus arm. You cut off one tentacle, and it simply grows back.”

“When a giant falls, expect the ground to shake as he gets up to chase you, not yet realizing he is already dead.”

“I can think of nothing that could kill the giant,” I said. “The government is ubiquitous, all powerful.”

“The government holds the illusion of power, but it is the people who truly possess it. Otherwise, why would the State need to plot against us? Their weapon is fear, and with fear they try to cow us into submission. But if the State can be shown as weak, out of control, then the spark is lit, the fire takes birth, and it is then the government must bend the knee to the people instead of the reverse.”

“And is it the purpose of The Minutemen to bend, or break it?”

“Do not misunderstand our intentions. We want to preserve the Union, not destroy it. Are we not all Americans? What is needed is surgical removal of the rot, the detritus of those choking our Homeland and enslaving the people. But we do not want the nation falling into the chaos of factions and street anarchy, yet there lies the path already in front of us.”

Our voices echoed off the stone and funneled to the surface as we dove ever deeper. We had gone perhaps seven stories down, and still I did not see a bottom. Not long afterward, I finally saw a floor, a long slab of rusted iron. I dropped down onto it. A dull thud from my footsteps was not the clanging echo of something hollow I expected underneath. The floor was solid steel, thick enough to take a direct hit from heavy artillery. Another flash of red light, and the sidewall opened. We ducked under the entrance and moved into a little cave, the door of iron closing behind us. A hatch in the iron floor took us down one more level to a lockout trunk. We crawled through another steel hatch and then slid into a darkened hall. At the end of the corridor, a loaded Dillon Aero Gatling gun with a string of ammo attached pointed at us, the ammo looping down to a box on the floor. Seee led me through a door into a plain-looking room stacked with boxes of supplies (I guessed ready-to-eat meals). We paused in the next room, which had a thick steel vault, high enough for a man to easily step through.

Seee turned to face me. “Our control room. Only a limited few have ever seen it, besides those who work here. With trust, comes honor.” He placed his hand to my heart in a Yoncalla sign of respect. “The only wall that can stop you from doing great things is the one you build yourself. Remember to use all three of your eyes, Cerberus.”

It was the first time I had heard my hacker name spoken in many years. My Anonymous name, once upon a time spread throughout the fabric of the Underworld, the three-headed Hellhound raining chaos on the financial elite inside the Internet.
A rebel against Wall Street, a Main Street protector, fucking with HFT algos, juking them at their own games, bankrupting their over-leveraged positions by pushing a snowball off a mountaintop, watching from the summit as it rolled over all of them.

Seee punched digits on a wall keypad and the vault opened. We stepped into a dome-shaped room, a lecture-hall feel to its rounded architecture. Long tables faced toward the front of the room. Workstations spread all over the place, outnumbering the people—enough for fifty, but only fifteen were present—some at holographic touch-screens, others at terminals. Some paused pulling at images floating in the air. A few faces turned to gawk at me, and like
The Time Machine
, they stared at me as if I were an Eloi from above.

A series of wide steps led down to the viewing wall where the largest ten-foot screen displayed a black image. From the top of the stairs, I could see the caption on the lower left—Montgomery 02:30:11 EST—as the seconds ticked along. Ten other screens surrounded the larger, each monitor flashing a different location. Places within The Abattoir—two shots within the jungle, one high on a cliff close to where we were dumped for Nature training, another on the outskirts of another perimeter. Another showed the quarters of the Tree House where we were first delivered. Another the Laddered Pit. Others showed thermal images of tunnels—one of them from the well we had just descended. Still others were nighttime images, city images far away from this one.

Seee weighed the reaction on my face. “We modeled it after Langley, but of course some of the design we’ve given our own personal touch. As you see, we have room to grow.”

“So you want me working down here?” I asked.

He smiled at my incredulous tone, my eyes of disbelief. “Only for a week or so. Then you will have another assignment involving some of your old skills as well as some of your new.”

Seee led me down the stairs, where from a circular desk on the lower floor with large monitors on top, a man stood from behind one of the screens and approached. A frail man, short and lightly bearded, as if someone had peppered it with snow, he smiled slightly when he got near. Hair flowed to shoulder-length, but strands of oily brown bangs flowed clumsily into his eyes. He stood with his hands behind his back, inching toward us in small steps, as tiny as a geisha’s. Seee announced him as Promiscuous, and when he did so, the man raised his pale lips delicately into another fragile smile. Dipping his head so slightly, it was unclear if it had been a bow. The name was known widely in the Underworld, a name that circled around the infamous virus Stuxnet, the cyberattack on Iran’s nuclear centrifuges. His name had been associated with the NSA, the Tailored Access Operations, a group of cyberwarriors, hackers, and programmers. They were the hitmen of the Internet, layered deeper than all others in the skeins of cyberspace.

The frail Promiscuous held out his eggshell of a hand, and I took it lightly in my palm. His wrist was made of bird bone, his palm so delicate I wasn’t sure if I should kiss it. He wore a custom-designed Anonymous T-shirt, the question mark notably larger above the flamboyantly bulbous head of the black-suited man in the logo.

“Promiscuous is an Anonymous name, is it not?” I asked.

“It is. And yet, I’ve been called worse.”

Promiscuous was a network mode activated when a sniffer went online within a segment. I had always found the name quite clever, and for the first time I was meeting a face from the Underworld, one for whom I had deep respect. He was a legendary mind, his knowledge vast and broad, a brainchild of tactical cyberwarfare and one of the cleverest worm writers I had ever known.

I nodded respectfully. “It is a pleasure to meet you, sir.”

“Likewise,” he said. He removed one of his hands from
behind his back and tapped his finger on his lower lip. He glanced at Seee, and as if he were coming to a conclusion, said, “You’ve been out of the game for quite some time, Cerberus—a long, long time.”

“Yes, sir. Three years.”

“Yes. Yes. Yes. Three years, two months, and five days in fact, if your time away from an Anonymous login is any indication.” He paused, fingering the air in a small arc with his pinky, as if there were a clock measuring time in front of him. “Much, much, too much time I would say.”

“I was caught,” I said.

“Only by Datalion.”

“It was enough to get me blacklisted across Silicon Valley, and beyond.”

“You were trying to hack Blake Thompson’s personal computer, weren’t you?”

“I was unlucky. The machine was being fixed by the IT department at the time.”

Others in the room became intrigued by the conversation. In front of me, faces popped up from behind glowing monitors. Some people got up from their seats to stare. Others descended the stairs to introduce themselves.

“What were you after on Mr. Thompson’s machine?” Promiscuous asked.

“Something I didn’t get.”

This statement put another thin smile on the gaunt man’s face. “We believe this is something he still has. But more on that later.” He was waving at others to join. “From what I have seen, your time away from a machine has flared up quite a bit of violence in you. Perhaps your mind is not as sharp as it once was.”

“I have always been a fighter, sir. No matter the capacity. I am sure my mental facilities can still be of some use.”

Promiscuous nodded to Seee, seemingly pleased with the response.

An older, white-haired man leading a troupe of others descended the stairs. He had glassy yellow eyes, and a leathery, dried-out face. He was introduced as Cetus, and he was someone I recognized. Shuffling back in my memories, I remembered the farmer waving to Merrill as we stood on a hill in observation. A man both Morlock and Eloi, he was coming above ground for the life of the ancient world, only to descend into the world I stood in now.

Others were introduced after the old man—Toorcon and Vines—names infamous in the hacking world years ago, but since gone off-grid. The Anthill had gobbled up others I didn’t know and had never heard of. There was Eros, Sputnik, and two women in the crew whose names were Nyx and Lady X.

After the introductions, Promiscuous said, “We are called The Anthill not because we are buried underground, but because we work like the insect Formicidae. We work in groups, each assigned an area of expertise. We require a very special expertise from you, Cerberus. You have intimate knowledge which we do not have concerning Datalion’s security systems.”

“It would be an honor to help,” I said.

But Promiscuous was eager for more information, a sense of hacker impatience in his voice. “We’ve duplicated some of the NSA client programs that have been created internally and used only inside Bluffdale. After decompiling them, we understand how they work.”

“Bluffdale?” I asked.

“The NSA SIGAD site in Utah. Stellar Wind? I do hope you can remember a few things, being out of the game.”

“I know of Stellar Wind,” I retorted. “I just didn’t recognize the town. I am also quite aware of the new quantum computer running there.”

“The QX. Yes. But singular, it will not be. It will be many, and they should help tremendously in their quest to blow away the few grains of privacy still left. There will be no more latency
within the Leviathan.”

“Is that what you’re calling Stellar Wind, the Leviathan?” I asked.

“That’s what is. Is it not? Every bit of your life will be present under their roof. They will sit on top of you, using the information as they please to squeeze you to their will.”

“Yes,” I said.

“How do you think they are getting names for what they are calling the Uplift Programs? You know what they are, don’t you?”

“I’m not very aware—”

“Of course you’re not aware,” Promiscuous interrupted. “We urge you to go see for yourself. They are constructing camps in South Dakota, Idaho, and eastern Oregon.”

“Only Idaho and Oregon are operational at the moment,” Cetus interjected. “Some of our friends have been taken there.”

Promiscuous said, “When you come out—no, no, let me backspace—if they let you out, you will be pacified. As good as lobotomized by their drugs; the drips of which come from a surgically implanted port that can be refilled with a doctor’s visit. It is a mega-dose of valium for the population.”

“They are starting with persons of interest,” Seee said. “But most certainly they will enlarge the beta program as civil disobedience grows.”

Promiscuous tapped his thin lips again. “Internally at the NSA, much has changed since whistleblower Edward Snowden had his day. They have zipped their vagina tight with a chastity belt. They have gone through great pains to make Stellar Wind secure. Like Fort Meade, data can come in, but it can’t get out. But it’s worse than that.”