ZerOes (23 page)

DeAndre feels everyone gather around him like he's a campfire giving them warmth. He sees the clock on his system: hour's almost up. It's gonna be close.

They're all watching the progress bar, 50 percent to 60 percent to 75 percent, up and up and up. “C'mon, man,” DeAndre says, biting his knuckles. “C'mon, baby, open up for DeAndre Deleon Mitchell, give it to Darth Dizzy, open that flower, gimme that sweet, sweet,
sweet
nectar—”

Chance leans in, mutters in his ear: “Dude. You're being kinda creepy.”

And then: the progress bar goes from red to green. The folder unlocks.

DeAndre opens it. There's one file inside. A text file—.txt extension.
That's it?
DeAndre thinks.
This is the damn prize?

“You're giving me blue balls,” Reagan grouches. “
Open the file
, jerk.”

DeAndre scrambles to open it. Double-click and—

“It's just a list of names,” Aleena says.

Thirteen of them, as a matter of fact.

           
Leslie Cilicia-Ceto.

           
Park Soo-Kang.

           
Hiram Willingham.

           
Arthur McGovern.

           
Alan Sarno.

           
Hamid Abilshair.

           
Gordon Berry.

           
Ernestina Pereira.

           
Siobhan Kearsy.

           
Ian Ballard.

           
James Francis Peak.

           
Honor Street.

           
Devon Fulbright.

“Man, who the hell are these people?” DeAndre asks.

“I know some of those names,” Wade says. His voice is quiet. “Oh shit.”

“Hamid Abilshair,” Aleena says. “He's a Muslim academic, progressive. A big thinker. My father adores his books. He protested the
Taliban's destroying Afghani history. He protested American soldiers doing the same in Baghdad, then traveled there to help preserve artifacts, books, vital sites.”

“Two minutes,” Chance warns. “And did you guys see, Alan Sarno's on that list.”

Reagan says: “Honor Street. Hacker, right?”

“Oh snap, yeah,” DeAndre says. “Been in and out of prison, right? Isn't she dead? I coulda sworn—”

“Yeah,” Reagan says. “I thought so. Prison transport van crashed.”

Another warning from Chance: “One minute.”

DeAndre's head is a mixed bag: triumph over cracking it, let down over finding nothing more than a damn text file, bewildered at what this list of names even means. Who are these people? Why are they together on one list? What's the connection?

That's when Wade drops a bomb. “Siobhan Kearsy,” he says. “Siobhan is the mother of my baby girl.”

“Time,” Chance says. “Ten seconds, back to the desks—go!”

THE LODGE, CAFETERIA

D
innertime. They're all afraid to talk about what they found, in case someone is listening. Mostly they sit around. Looking at one another. Straining to talk it all through, to unpack it: but they won't. They can't. It leaves a palpable tension at the table, like a dinner guest nobody wants to entertain but who barged in anyway.

They note that Dipesh isn't at his table with the rest of his pod. When Chance passes Miranda near the trash, he asks her where he is. She says he's back at the cabin. “He needs time,” she says, and then she hurries away.

When Chance gets back to his table, he sees his seat is taken.

By Shane Graves.

“Hey, Dalton. Pull up a chair.”

“Go die in a fire, Graves.”

“Fine. Stand. This won't take long.” Graves leans forward on his elbows, wearing a goopy smirk like a teen girl staring at a photo of her favorite celebrity crush. “You guys. Masterful work. I am
impressed
. Particularly with you, Reagan Stolper and Chance Dalton. You two played me good.”

Reagan shrugs. “I like seeing the mighty fall.”

“And fall I did. Clever work. I don't have much left, but a snake always has his fangs, a scorpion always has his stinger, and I always have the things I've learned.” His smile grows big, so big and so eager it could described as
shit-eating
. “I know secrets.”

“Good for you,” Chance says. “Now get up or I'll call the hacks.”

“Angela Slattery,” Shane says, then turns around and stares up at Chance. “Ah. There's the face I expected. See that face, everyone? Like I just slapped the food right out of his mouth. You want to tell them who that is, Chance?”

Fear and rage run through him like battery acid. “Fuck you.”

“Uh-huh. You know what? I'm not gonna tell them. I'm gonna let them search for it themselves. After all, I've given you the keys to the kingdom. You've all got peepholes now into the outside world. Google it.
Angela Slattery
.” He turns to Reagan. “Though you already know. I know you know because we talked about it.”

“Pack it in, Shane,” Reagan says. “Leave it alone.”

Shane turns to her. “Stolper, you tumor. Dalton doesn't know that not only did you set him up here for his little trip to the Dep, but you were the one who leaked his name in the first damn place. Right? That's how everyone found out. You.”

And to think, Chance was just starting to not hate her. “You,” he says. “Why?”

She swallows hard. “Like I said, I, uhh, like to see the mighty fall. Thought you needed to be brought down a peg since you were using Faceless like that. But I didn't know you then. I . . .” She frowns. “Shit. God damn it, Graves.”

Shane grins. “I'm not done yet. One more for you, Reagan.”

“Bring it on, Graves. You got nothing on me because I got nothing. I'm an open book, dick.” But her smug face softens a little.

Not Graves. He keeps on leering. “Your little girl,” he says. “She's alive. No thanks to you, Reagan. Her name is Ellie Belle Stevens. She's five. And I'm sure she very much regrets being left in a Target bathroom by her mother, Reagan Stolper.”

Chance expects a fight to break out. Everyone's leaning forward like they're on the edge of a cliff, about to jump. But nobody knows what to do. Feels like they just got caught in a nuclear blast. At the
start of dinner, the unspoken message between them was,
We can't talk about the things that we know
. Now that telepathic narrative has changed to:
We don't know each other at all
.

Shane chuckles. “I think that, Zeroes, is what you call a
mic drop
.” Then he slides his chair back, stands up, and strides away.

THE LODGE, THE CABIN

G
raves put a cannonball through their sails. They mill around until lights-out and lockdown, then lie quietly in the dark for a while. Until finally someone, Wade, speaks up. “Siobhan Kearsy was this . . . you know, this radical type. Protester of the Vietnam conflict. Kind who liked to call the returning soldiers ‘baby killer' and all that. When I went to war, that would've upset me, because I was a shorn-clean, cherub-cheeked Boy Scout type. Then I went to the jungle, saw what the heat and the chemicals and the fear did to good men, and I came back scruffy, empty of something, lost as a little kid in a Kmart. Siobhan . . . we met at some D.C. protest and we were like the terminals on a goddamn car battery. Positive, negative, red, black. A hard charge going through us. We loved each other. We hated each other. We couldn't stay together, but we kept finding each other's orbit over the next ten years, and then one day . . .”

“She got pregnant,” DeAndre says.

“No,” Reagan says, “she turned into a giant rabbit.”

DeAndre makes a frustrated sound.

“Yes,” Wade continues. “She got pregnant. With our daughter,
Rebecca. See, thing is, by then we had already long passed each other on the axis. She was softening—working inside politics as much as against them. I was hip-deep in running my anarchist bullshit BBS and I had my FFL, my federal firearms license, to buy and sell and repair guns. By the time Rebecca was a year old, I'd hacked into Los Alamos labs and ended up stirring the shit so bad that SWAT came knocking on our door—which is to say, they knocked it right off its hinges. It was determined at that point—er, by way of a mutual decision—that I was maybe not the best fella to have around the baby. So I left. Siobhan went on to become a philosophy professor and then a journalist—never married.”

Chance is listening to all this, and with every word Wade says he feels sicker and sicker to his stomach and he knows he's going to throw up—but what he's gonna regurgitate isn't dinner but rather the story of Angela Slattery. Because it's better they find it out from him then find their own info and start making guesses.

Wade's story winds down, and Wade finishes with: “So I know a little something about giving up a baby girl.”

“You don't know shit, old man,” Reagan calls from the loft.

Everyone's quiet for a little while.

Chance says: “Angela Slattery.” Then he has to stop because he actually thinks he might throw up. He breathes in. Breathes out.

Okay. “Uhh. So. I was in, I was in high school? And I wasn't real popular but I wasn't
not
popular, either, just one of those kids in the middle. I didn't get picked on but didn't pick on anybody. Had friends from all over. But I still wanted to be popular and there was this girl, her name was Caitlin Tremayne, and it was like in all those dumb movies where she was the hot popular girl and I was just some dink and in my head I'd one day get to show her how badass I was and then we'd fall in love or have sex or something.

“So, there was this party. At Matt Moody's house. And Moody was a football guy and his parents were rich and somehow I scored an invite to this party and me and my buddy Pete went. Pete and I had known each other for a good long time, buds since preschool, and I knew Caitlin was gonna be there, so we both went.”

He clears his throat, sits up in the darkness. The bed creaks and squeaks. “Well, I heard that Caitlin was upstairs somewhere, so I thought I would go up there and, I dunno, make some overture to her, spill my
heart. I'd practiced this speech about how beautiful she was and everything. But while I was standing at the bottom of the stairs, getting up my confidence, Matt Moody and a couple other guys—Hill Prager and Joshie Winslaw—pushed past me. They had a girl with them. I knew her a little from school. Angela Slattery. She didn't seem all there. Like she was drunk, really drunk,
worse
than drunk, and, uhh . . .”

From the loft, Reagan's voice: “Spoiler alert: they rape her, and Chance Dalton the hero boy doesn't do shit about it. He sees it, lets it go, and his friend Pete convinces him not to tell anyone because blah-blah popular kids, blah-blah Caitlin Fucking Tremayne. I've seen the e-mails he and Petey exchanged. I've seen how two white boys circled the drain and found a way to find peace with someone's rape.”

Chance wants to be mad at Reagan, and her renewed anger at him seems sudden—but she's right. His voice starts to crack like lake ice under a testing foot as he finishes the story: “They dumped Angela on her front lawn. Naked. They'd written words all over her in lipstick. ‘Slut,' ‘dog,' words like that. Next day she told the police. They wanted proof, made it seem like it was all in her head, that she'd gotten drunk and whatever. And everyone said the same thing: ‘Oh, if you didn't wanna get raped you shouldn't show up at some party and get wasted.' Even though they probably
got
her wasted on roofies. Cops dismissed rape kit testing. Wouldn't interview eyewitnesses. Moody's parents had money, were important. I could've spoken up. I didn't. A week later, after their house had been vandalized for the third time, after someone threw a brick through her mother's SUV, after people said all kinds of things about her online . . . she shot herself. Took her father's handgun out of his nightstand drawer and . . .”

“Dang, man, that sucks,” DeAndre says.

From the loft, though, Aleena calls down, “No. Don't. Don't act all sympathetic toward him. He made a mistake—a choice!—that saved his ass while letting some poor girl hang for it.”

Wade calls up: “Hey, now, we're all in the spirit of sharing. Reagan—you wanna spill your guts? Sounds like it hurts but it actually feels kinda good.”

“It's like Graves said. Had a baby. Left it at Target. I'm a monster. Fuck off.”

THE LODGE, THE POD

T
he days go by the same way. Most of the time they work on cracking open the bones of the Iranian nuclear program to get at the marrow—but they take two hours of each day to get closer to Typhon.

First up: the thirteen names. Wade says, “I wanna know why Siobhan is on that list.” And so they get to poking through the names, first doing shallow searches, then digging deeper through news blotters, public records, Deep Web fishing.

Some of them, they know. Sarno: famous pop psychologist, now missing. Hamid Abilshair: historian, Muslim, went to try to stop Isis from destroying precious Silk Road artifacts in Iraq, has been missing for four months. Honor Street: hacker, killed in a prison transfer.

In fact, most of the names seem to fit into that category: missing or dead.

Gordon Berry: Renowned neurologist, had a practice in Virginia. Known for revolutionizing how the brain reacts to neural implants to help regain sight, hearing, cognitive function. Had a heart attack a year back, then went missing a month ago.

Park Soo-Kang: South Korean futurist. Disappeared in the Aokigahara suicide forest—thought to have taken her own life.

Hiram Willingham: One of the wolves of Wall Street. Financial genius. Scammer extraordinaire. Became subject of an investigation, went out on his yacht off Curaçao. He and his yacht disappeared.

Ian Ballard: Prominent science fiction author. Author of comics. Youngest of this bunch—late thirties. Went missing on Kauai while hiking the Na Pali coast. As many do.

Arthur McGovern: Political pundit. Hard right wing. Radio show. Had problems with drug addiction—pills. Said to have committed suicide in his bathroom.

Devon Fulbright: Gender-fluid classical musician. Said to be a genius since a very early age, but prejudice forced zir into a first-violinist chair at a lower-tier orchestra. Went missing three months ago—didn't turn up for practice.

Two of the names are total unknowns: no sign of an Ernestina Pereira or James Francis Peak. The former has no hits of note, the latter has way too many.

It's Wade who discovers that Siobhan Kearsy is also missing.

She'd recently been crusading against antiabortionists—fighting for the rights of both patients and doctors. She failed to show up at a clinic in Albuquerque, New Mexico, about four months ago. Foul play is assumed. The article Wade finds doesn't say anything about Rebecca.

Wade makes these angry, exasperated chuffs, like a territorial ape. He starts hacking something and stops responding to anyone else.

Meanwhile, Chance digs up the last name on the list: Leslie Cilicia-Ceto. She, as it turns out, is the only one not dead or missing. “She's the founder of some defense contractor company,” Chance says. “APSI.”

Wade's head jerks up from the computer. Wild eyes stare out from behind the curtain of gray curls. “APSI. Argus Panoptes Systems, Inc. They make targeting systems for missiles, tanks, planes, choppers. Antimissile tech, too.”

Chance says: “She might be in danger.”

“There's something else,” Aleena says, typing furiously.

“You don't need an invite,” Reagan growls. “Spill it, Kardashian.”

“Argus Panoptes is also the name of a figure from Greek mythology. He's a hundred-eyed giant. Hera's pet. For her, he killed the so-called Mother of Monsters, Echidna. Echidna's husband was the
Father
of Monsters. Typhon.”

“This shit is crazy,” DeAndre says. “I do not like it, and I would like to get off this ride now.”

“Fuck that,” Reagan says—those two words spat as much as they are spoken. “Don't be a soft little vagina. This means we're getting close.”

That night, the night before they're ready to pull the trigger on their hack of the Iranian nuclear program, Wade shuts off all the surveillance to the cabin with one of the cryptophones, then tells the rest of the pod what he's been up to. He hacked Siobhan's e-mails. Said it was a bit tricky because she had two-factor authentication active—but he said that was easy enough to get around, because once you tell the provider you lost your data, the recovery process defaults to one step.

In her e-mails, he found something. She'd been trading e-mails with someone who called himself Mr. Lee Cothip, said he was on the inside of a domestic terror organization planning a coordinated bombing of several abortion clinics in the Southwest. Said if she met him, he'd give her proof that she could take to the police, newspapers, whoever.

They arranged a place to meet. Little historic area of Santa Fe. Near something called the Crispin House. That's the last anybody saw of her. Wade says the area has no cameras, no surveillance—except for one. A little Wi-Fi camera someone set up at a nearby bed-and-breakfast. Pointed out toward the garden for some reason—to film hummingbirds or look for whoever's been picking flowers or whatever. Thing is, the camera points to the entrance of the empty lot where Siobhan met this Lee Cothip.

The video caught her pulling in. Five minutes later, caught another car: a little commercial Nissan van. Wade pulls out the Floydphone once more, passes it around. The Zeroes look at a blurry photo of a man driving. He's tall, bent over the wheel like a tree heavy with ice and snow. Bald, too. Though his face is pixilated, it's still easy to see that something isn't right with it. Some scar, some deformation.

“That's it,” Wade says. “Last sign of her.”

Aleena lies there in the dark. She's nervous about tomorrow. Tomorrow they sneak into the Iranian servers, mess with their nuclear program,
steal whatever data they can steal, and head for the hills. If everything goes off without a hitch. Which, of course, it won't. How could it? This is big. They've had no time.

And they're distracted. At least, she is. Hacking Iran should bother her. Messing around with an autonomous state like that. Iran's backward in a lot of ways but progressive, too. More progressive than anybody here gives them credit for. She knows it's a nation primed for revolution. Revolution away from the religious autocracy, away from the oppressive regime. A revolution led by youth. Like her.

She keeps thinking about that because she feels like she should, because whenever her mind drifts to Chance, she feels like it's a waste of her time and talent. A waste of all that she is. So she keeps trying to focus on what matters. It's not easy there in the dark.

These people she's stuck with—she's grown to actually like them. And yet, with all these revelations—she's learning that she doesn't really know them. Probably can't trust them, either.

Reagan, leaving her baby in a Target bathroom.

And Chance.
Chance
. Aleena wants to be forgiving. She wants to understand. Academically, she does—high school is hell. Sticking out your neck for someone is a good way to get it broken.

But what he did . . . emotionally she just can't parse it. It makes her mad. It discolors what he did later, exposing the rape posse. It makes it about him, not about the victim. It makes it a wrong he had to right, not a thing he had to do just because it was good. And yet it
was
good, wasn't it?

Gah! All parts of her are tense. Her arms stock straight. Her elbows and knees locked, her jaw so tight she can feel the pressure in her temples.

It's not just her. She hears others tossing and turning. Even Wade, who seems like he could sleep through mortar fire, isn't snoring as usual.

DeAndre clinches it. He says in a loud whisper: “Hey. Everybody else awake?”

Murmurs of anxious, sleepy assent.

“Typhon,” DeAndre says. “The hell is it? We know the government controls it, but what do you think it
is
?”

“It's probably NSA,” Aleena says. She tells them that her guess is it's an upgrade to their algorithms. NSA has long been interested in
creating a truly uncrackable encryption system. DeAndre says, nah, it's their new surveillance program. From Echelon to PRISM and now to this.

Wade snorts, says, it's all those things and more. “My best is: supercomputer. Quantum computing. They always got weirdo names for their supercomputers: HARVEST, FROSTBURG.” Chance doesn't know much about this stuff, and Wade explains that a quantum computer moves past the standard computing process of binary: in the old way, everything is either a one or a zero, a yes or a no, a stop or go. Quantum computing changes that: superposition says one thing can be many things and in many places at once and so bits can be ones
and
zeroes at the same time. Smarter, faster computing via so-called qubits.

Wade goes on to say, though: “It's never been much to write home about. Not yet. Nobody thinks the NSA has been ahead of the curve. No more than Google or any of the other big labs. But still, look at the systems we've been pen-testing. Tech. Cloud solutions. Shit, even that geothermal company might suggest how the thing is gonna get its power source.”

Aleena points out that it doesn't explain everything.

That's when Chance says something off the cuff, like he's just making it up: “What if it's an artificial intelligence?”

Aleena thinks, once again:
Maybe he deserves more credit than he gets
.

DeAndre whistles. “That's some sci-fi shit.”

“Not really,” Wade says. “NSA's been looking to model predictive cryptanalysis for years. Figure out how people would behave. Figure out the kinds of passwords they might use. Besides, sci-fi isn't sci-fi anymore. Alien autopsies and Russian psychics and all that shit is real. Nothing is the realm of fiction, you ask me. Not anymore.”

They laugh at him for that. It's the first laugh they've had in days.

Though Aleena wonders if it breaks the tension . . . or only ratchets it tighter.