ZerOes (4 page)

DeAndre thinks,
I can do this
. He can jump. Like they do in the video games. Free running. Parkour. Whatever they call it.

He climbs up, crouches in the bathroom window like a gargoyle. He's tall but lean, and can close himself up like a folding chair if need
be. He looks down at the stone wall separating his moms's new house from the neighbor's place. The wall is as wide as DeAndre's foot is long, and just ten feet away. Beyond it is the neighbor's house, with a sloped roof. If he can make it to the wall, he's free.

The trick is, he's got to run—but they've got to
follow his ass
, too. He runs and they go kicking down the door to this house, what will Moms think? If she doesn't have a heart attack, she'll know his job is a lie, the house is a lie.

She'll know
he's
a lie.

He swallows hard. Catches movement down below, up past the little shed along the side of the house, near the birdbath.

He jumps. His feet plant hard on the flat top of the wall—the shock goes up through his knees, into his hips, a javelin of straight pain, and he knows he should have crouched more as he hit to absorb the shock, but no time to worry about that now.

Now he's landing on the neighbor's roof, cracking a terracotta tile and sending it spinning to the ground. He hears another radio squelch and mumbled police chatter. Just to make sure, he calls out, “Up here, homies.”

Someone calls out in alarm from below. The cops. Good. He scrambles to stand, spits blood, jumps to another roof. He slams his shoulder hard against a window—it's just a screen, and it pops out as he tumbles inside, pitching forward against what is mercifully plush carpet. He hears a high-pitched shriek and realizes it's his own.

He hurries through the house. Carpet on his feet, air in his teeth, no time to think. He runs through the hall, sees a woman in frumpy pink panties throwing clothes into an over-under laundry machine. DeAndre gives her a panicked look—
sorry, lady—
and a little wave. She screams. He runs into a master bedroom the color of Caribbean waters. He flings open the window and—

Long jump. Ignoring the pain now. Adoring the freedom. His hands catch the ledge of another house's roof—and here he has it all played out in his head. He'll plant his feet. Kick off like a swimmer. Wrap his arms around a palm tree like a stripper at her pole and then he'll be up on another roof with some kickin' Assassin's Creed moves—

The gutter he's holding onto shifts downward. It makes a
gonk
sound, then rips out of its moorings and breaks away from the roof.

DeAndre lands hard on his ass bone and feels firecrackers of pain popping up his spine, into his neck, to the base of his skull.

He hears the crackle of shrubs and hedge.
Incoming
.

He wants to lie down and whimper, but that ain't an option. So he's up. Running toward the sounds of traffic, past a little swing set, past a hibachi grill, to a breach between two tall bougainvillea hedges. That breach means freedom. He sees the road beyond it. Cars and trucks whipping past. Once he hits the street, that's it. He can go anywhere—lose himself in the park, disappear into traffic, grab a golf cart.

He charges hard for the breach in the hedge.

Someone steps in his path.

He cries out, “No, no, no, no!”

A shotgun goes up, then off.

DeAndre drops. Gasping. He can't breathe. He can barely see. Everything is a strobing white light of pain, up and down, left and right, wheeze, cough, whine. He feels around his midsection for the hole. Looking for the blood. But nothing. His shirt's not even torn.

A man steps into view. Tall, like he is, but not so lanky. Broad shoulders, bit of a gut straining against the white shirt and black jacket. African American, like him. Darker skinned. Midnight skin.

The man lets the nickel-plated pump-action hang by his side. “Hey, DeAndre,” he says. “My name's Hollis. You busy right now?”

NEW YORK CITY

R
eminder,” Melanie the vampire says, standing at the front of the room by the whiteboard. “Next Thursday is the Fourth of July, and the Wednesday before we're doing Cruiseapalooza, where every floor is a different”—she makes bunny-ear quotes in midair—“‘cruise destination,' and here on the accounts floor we're going to be Hawaii, so, aloha, mahalo, dress Hawaiian.”

Aleena sits at the back of the room, listening to Melanie—whose skin is the alabaster hue of a river-logged corpse—drone on and on. Mel's the wrong person to lead the department and these monthly staff meetings. Everyone hates her. She's got a voice like a mosquito humming in your ear. But that's middle management for you: smart enough to get promoted, stupid enough to have to stay.

Aleena thinks a lot of these people are stupid.

She feels bad about that. It's very judgmental. But she also feels these people are due a bit of judgment. This batch of half-done cookies is an ignorant, corn-fed lot happy to watch sitcoms on their too-big TVs while the rest of the world struggles and cries and burns. They have their own problems, but Aleena knows they're not real problems. Like the hashtag says: #firstworldproblems.

Her phone vibrates in her pocket. A text. She pulls out the phone, gives it a quick look. Her heart lodges in her throat.

The text reads, in Arabic:
We are advancing—the timetable has moved up

The message is from Qasim.

She texts back:
I'm not ready. Nobody told me!

Khalid has been shot—sniper fire

Her pulse goes from stopped to stampeding horses.
No, no, no
. She tries to think. It's 10
A
.
M
. here, which means in Damascus it's 5
P
.
M
. Where are they? What are they doing right now? Not the protest.

The station. They're attacking one of the state's TV stations. Trying to take it over in the name of Suriya al-shaab, the people's station, to broadcast truth in the name of those who oppose the regime. That's today. That's
now
.

Her phone buzzes:
Get to a computer

Not now. She can't.
She can't
. She needs this job if she's going to do her . . . other work. Firesign is one of the country's biggest ISPs. She has nearly infinite bandwidth here, and as smart as they think they are about network security, she can dip in and out with ease.

Leaving a meeting, she'll draw attention. She looks up, makes sure nobody sees her texting. Sends the message:
Can't right now find someone else
. It has to be someone else. They have others like her. She knows they do, even if she doesn't know who they are.

Qasim texts back:
Nobody else—only you—get to a computer!

Then a second text:
Please Aleena

Before she knows what she's doing, she's standing. The chair stutters and groans against the floor as she pushes it back. Everybody in the room—and the entire department is here—turns to look at her. Melanie stops speaking. She has a look on her face like she smells something dead.

“Is there something wrong, Aleena?”

“No,” Aleena blurts. “Yes. I . . . have to use the bathroom.” Stupid, stupid, stupid. What is she, in fourth grade?

Melanie echoes the sentiment. “We're not in kindergarten, Aleena. You're supposed to go before you get here. Uh, hello.”

A quiet murmur of uncomfortable laughs from those gathered.

“I don't feel well.” Aleena holds her hand over her stomach. Her brother Nas always said,
You want to get out of a day's work, just tell
them you have diarrhea. Nobody will ask you to come in if you've got the shits
.

“Go,” Melanie says, her look of disgust deepening.

Aleena hurries toward the door, ignoring all the looks that follow her out.

She texts as she walks, all of it in Arabic.

What do you need from me?

Qasim returns:
We can't get into the station without Khalid you need to shut down their broadcast

She texts back:
How am I supposed to do that?

Qasim sends four texts in rapid succession.

You're the one with the bag of tricks Aleena

They're broadcasting lies and we can stop them we can show the truth

Please Aleena

Others have been shot—we are pinned down

Aleena responds:
I'm working on it

She jogs down the hallway.

This would have been her plan all along. To hack the broadcast. That's the power of what she does. Nobody needs to die. Nobody needs to step in the way of a sniper's bullet. But some of her people over there, they want to make a show of it. Qasim and Khalid said they needed the people to see them doing it—masks and homemade flash-bangs and AKs chattering. So that when they took over the state media,
other
media around the world would show images of them storming the stations.

They don't understand what she does. Not really. Not yet. But her fingerprints and those of her fellow “hacktivists” were all over the Arab Spring. Helping protesters kick through firewalls, setting up wireless hot spots or dial-up access, running direct denial-of-service attacks on government websites, hacking the sites to deface them, spreading restricted images and videos across social media, leaking secret documents.

She threads her way through the cubicle farm. There's been some talk about moving to an open floor plan, which would be terrible for what she does. These fuzzy gray cubicle walls give her all the privacy she needs.

She navigates the grid, turns right at the copier, left at the paper cutter—

Someone is sitting in her cubicle. Right in front of her computer.

He's government. She can see that by the way he sits, the dark suit, the earpiece nesting in his ear. Though she wonders about those muttonchops: an unusual style. He's opening her drawers. Rifling through files. Humming.

She has to go. She's busted. Aleena knows the stakes—if they catch her, she'll end up in a dark hole in some desert. Her and every Muslim goatherd suspected of terrorism, lorded over by soldiers with high-powered weapons.

But she also knows the stakes in what's happening right now. She needs to help Qasim. She can't keep anyone from dying today. But maybe by ending the government broadcast, she can get the rebels—
her
rebels—international attention. She can save people going forward.

The truth can save people.

And that means she has to work.

Aleena pivots before the government man can see her. She hates leaving her computer behind, but everything there was done through a proxy—she has no evidence on that system. And while she has items in the desk she would otherwise want to keep (lip balm, snacks, an appointment book), none of it is meaningful, nor does it point to her
activities
in any actionable way.

She stops in the break room. Kay Weldon is there—one of the executive secretaries. Red hair like a helmet, shellacked with so much hair spray it reminds Aleena of her brother's Lego figurines, like you could pop the hair on and off with ease.

“Aren't you in Melanie's meeting right now?” Kay asks. Kay knows everyone's schedule. Kay called Aleena “Lana” for two months straight, then “Leena” for two more.

“Over early,” Aleena says. She tries to make it chirpy but knows it comes out bitchy. Fine. Whatever.

“Where is everyone, then? The cubes are still empty.”

Aleena looks at the snack machine. She needs Kay out of here. Now. “They're still talking about Cruiseapalooza.”

“Shouldn't you be talking about it, too, Aleena?”

Aleena tenses up, hears the words come out of her mouth before she can yank them back in. “Shouldn't you be keeping your piggy nose out of everyone's ass, Kay?” The acid in her words is regrettable, but it does the trick. Kay's face puckers like a stress ball squeezed in a heavy hand.

“Well, then.” She bustles past Aleena and out of the break room.

Time to hurry. Aleena goes to the snack machine. Reaches under it. Finds the cell phone taped there along with the USB key containing her suite of hacker tools: port scanners, portalware, worms, Trojans, keyloggers. She's no script kiddie. She designed these all herself. They have her signature.

She heads to the elevators. Outside, in the cubicle farm, are two men in suits. One woman, too. Just as the woman looks in Aleena's direction, Aleena drops down behind the fax machine table.

When the woman looks away, Aleena hurries to the elevator.

White floors. White ceilings. Bold humming fluorescents.

And beneath them, row after row of black boxes and blue lights winking. It's quiet down here. Calm. Just the vibrations in the floor, the hum of the cooling fans, the little chirp and whir of hard drives running.

One of Firesign's many server farms. For hosting. For directing traffic. For the company intranet. Aleena's not supposed to be down here. But a hacked key card made it easy.

She grabs the cell she plucked from under the snack machine, unspools a cable, plugs the USB right into a random server—doesn't matter which one, she just needs the connection to the Firesign pipe. Down here it's
pure bandwidth
—useful for the encrypted video she's about to send and receive, but not strictly necessary. No, why it's important to be in this building is because most connections in America are loaded with speed bumps meant to slow the connection down. It's all monitored, as if every line has a little virtual bug clamped to it. But here, at the source, it's all open. A screaming, streaming river of unburdened data.

She fires up the phone. Opens a telnet port. Some privileged hackers
think cracking computers in the Arab world is easy, like Arabs are all a bunch of dirt merchants with wireless signals coming in through a Pringles can to shitty old ten-pound laptops with security as sophisticated as a password that's someone's birthday. It was that way once, and still is in some places, but that world caught up fast. With the combination of DIY, get-it-done attitude, and a sudden flood of high-tech gear coming in from the UAR or Qatar, everything has changed. That's true across the whole Middle East—maybe more so in Iran.

Translation: they've gotten good at protecting themselves.

But she's better.

She opens up her port scanner, uses her own breach-map software to find the vulnerabilities. It doesn't take long before she's digitally kicked open a backdoor into the Syrian state television station. This is bare-bones stuff: a command prompt. She starts sniffing for the ports of the consoles filming, mixing, and broadcasting the feeds.

There
—

And then her phone's screen goes dark.