Out of the Dark

26 Celebrating Individual Strengths

Evan and Joey sat in the rear of the dark auditorium as the PowerPoint continued, urged glacially onward by a matronly headmistress who seemed intent on reading every last bullet point.

“—our philosophy of fostering community while celebrating individual strengths.”

Evan leaned over. “Is this really what school is like?”

Joey rolled her eyes over to him. “She’s gonna say ‘climate.’ Wait for it.”

A mother in flaking maroon lipstick and a mink stole turned around to hush them. Her kid shrugged apologetically at Joey.

Onstage the headmistress raised her remote control and another slide appeared: Diverse Kids Playing Frisbee in Quad.

“We seek to provide a climate that focuses on the individual student’s interests, abilities, and educational goals.”

Joey muttered, “Nailed it.”

Evan had once sat a sniper post in a tree in Sierra Leone for fifteen hours without moving. He’d lain in wait beneath a bridge in Kirkuk, sipping from a CamelBak, eating protein bars, and pissing on the same spot on the wall for three days.

But this? This was actually going to kill him.

Not that the preceding twenty-three minutes and change had been any easier. On the way over, they’d run a gauntlet of teachers and administrators, each one stopping Evan to tell him what a wonderfully well-behaved student Vera was.

Now the headmistress was talking about mission statements and institutional values, pacing the stage like a charisma-challenged stand-up.

“How much longer?” Evan whispered, keeping his voice even lower so as not to draw the wrath of übermom in the row ahead.

Joey slid out of her seat and crooked a finger for him to follow. They moved in stealth mode out of the auditorium and into the corridor.

He hustled to keep up with her. He was still adjusting to seeing her wearing the school uniform — white polo, navy blue slacks, navy blue sweater, saddle shoes — rather than torn jeans and a loose flannel.

They turned the corner, running smack into an austere gentleman in a no-shit three-piece suit. He was lanky and tall enough to regard them down the length of his nose. “Vera, what are you doing out here? The itinerary’s very specific about—”

“I’m really sorry, Dean Anders.” Joey bent her knees slightly inward. “It’s just — I need to get to the bathroom. Girl problems, you know.”

The dean and Evan stiffened in uncomfortable tandem.

“Okay,” the dean said. “And this is your—?”

“Cousin-uncle,” Evan said, recovering and shaking the dean’s bony hand. “It’s nice to meet you, sir. Vera was in some pain from, you know … cramps, so I thought I’d see her to the bathroom.”

“Very well,” the dean said. “Hurry back.”

Evan wondered what kind of upbringing a person had to have to say “very well.”

The dean coasted past them on an effluvium of aftershave. As the sound of his loafers clicked away, Joey’s posture transformed and she grabbed Evan’s arm. “Move it.”

They cut up another corridor and paused before a locked door, Joey fishing a thin tension wrench and a hook pick from somewhere in her hair. She was through the dead bolt in seconds, and they were inside. She closed the door behind them and relocked it.

The windowless computer lab hummed with electricity from the monitors, a few dozen screen savers projecting patterns onto the walls. The room held the hot-metal scent of outlets working overtime.

“You’re looking at my own personal robot army,” she said. “After hours I reconfigured the network and code for all these stations to make it a compute cluster and harness all the computing power in the lab. Of course no one’s figured it out yet ’cuz, you know, I’m me.”

She sat down at a station, slid a keyboard into her lap, and then her hands did that thing that made her look like a piano maestro playing Rachmaninoff in double time.

“I’ve been working on a chipset designed just for deep learning,” she said. “I wrote a program that uses machine learning to, like, self-teach, self-improve, and ferret out data I don’t even know is relevant. It’s not rule-based — it’s all analytics of Big Data now, ya know, scrutinizing massive sets of unstructured data to discover previously unknown connections. Like if someone searches for mouthwash effectiveness, it doesn’t mean their next move is ordering Scope from Amazon, it means they make an OpenTable reservation for a date. Get it?”

“Not really.”

“Basically, I’m a warlock.”

“Copy that.”

Various windows proliferated on-screen — internal school documents, transcripts, confidential bank records, the search history and other documents pertaining to a male student named Matteo. Evan pointed to the raft of data about the handsome senior. “What’s that?”

“That is a fucking rapist. No — to call him a fucking rapist is too flattering. He’s an aspiring necrophiliac molester of unconscious underage girls. But that takes too long to say. So: ‘fucking rapist.’ I’m gonna scorched-earth his ass. And destroy his family, too, while I’m at it. Seems his old man’s tangled up in some insider trading, and let’s just say CONSOB’s gonna get an anonymous e-mail with attachments—”

“Joey.”

“Sorry. It’s just … cyberworld’s so much more interesting than meatworld.”

“Meatworld?”

Ignoring him, she plugged the Boeing Black smartphone into an ATX tower. “Okay, what’s your plan?”

“My plan?” Evan said. “My plan is to ask you what to do.”

She grimaced at him. Then scanned the screen. Did some clicky things. Grimaced again. “As I suspected, the Secret Service network isn’t totally air-gapped.”

“How can you tell that?”

“Because your girl”—a squint at the screen—“Agent Naomi Templeton, she logged in to her e-mail once through an encrypted program from a work computer.”

“So—”

“Don’t talk.” Joey pinched the bridge of her nose, squeezed her eyes shut for a moment. “Okay. Here’s what we’re gonna do. We’re gonna infect the Secret Service’s private secure network with a corrupt Windows update and let their secure update server pass it around their net. We make them infect themselves.”

“And you’ll do that how?”

She tore off her sweater impatiently and hiked her sleeves over her deltoids. “We’re gonna get a sploit payload in through this broad’s e-mail. We log in as her, put the bad payload in a PDF doc attachment, send it to herself, then modify it so it’s, like, hidden inside the icon for a JPEG file. The next time she logs in on the secure network, my tiny little sploit execution engine uses that hidden code and actively modifies the private Windows update server with a series of corrupted patches. At the next update push — and they usually push at least biweekly on setups like this — it’ll automatically install our modified patches to all the computers inside the private secure network. Once that goes down, my recon code’ll probe around for a way through the outbound firewalls to find the Internet. It just takes one touch to the outside. Then we use, like, a hidden reverse SSH backdoor for you to get in at will and see whatever data you need. After that, all you have to do is sit on your ass, drink vodka, and watch the monitors. Got it?”

“I understood the sit-on-my-ass-and-drink-vodka part.”

“You should pay attention. This is some wicked shit. Crumbling-kingdoms kinda shit.”

Her hands moved in a blur, and more stuff happened on-screen. He watched with wonderment, feeling something akin to pride. For a time the only sound was the hammering of the keyboard.

Then Joey said, “These rich kids suck. When can I come back to L.A.?”

She kept her eyes on the monitor, her fingers never slowing.

He hesitated.

“Not to live with you,” she added, still typing. “I mean, that’d be a nightmare. But when?”

“If this mission goes well, it’ll be safer for you. We can talk about it then.”

The scrolling code reflected in her striking emerald eyes. “Is it gonna go well?”

He thought about it. “I don’t know. I’ve never tried anything like this.”

“Just don’t die,” she said. “I mean, that’d suck. Promise?”

He considered the odds, knew better than to answer. Instead he removed a burner satphone from his pocket and set it down on the mouse pad. “If we need to be in touch about the code.”

Her eyes flicked over for a split second to take in the device. “Wow. This is great. Did you get it from 1985? Lemme guess — the Beverly Hills Cop lent it to you?”

Evan sighed. “You’d prefer we communicate through a draft file of an unsent e-mail?”

“Uh, yeah.”

“I’ll get you my account and password.”

“Thanks, Kojak. And if we need to talk, I’ll figure out an actual secure line.” She logged out and stood abruptly, the chair flying out from under her like something scared. “Let’s go.”

Again he hustled to keep up with her. In the corridor she used her lock-picking tools to reseat the dead bolt. Then she hurried up the hall, tugging down her sleeves and slinging her sweater back on an instant before a young teacher backed out of a classroom in front of them, cradling an armload of files against her chest.

“Vera!”

“Hi, Ms. Bosch. We’re just — This is my uncle-cousin. We’re hurrying to make the end of the reception.”

The teacher brightened. “Nice to meet you. Your cousin is a wonderfully—”

“Well-behaved student,” Evan said, pumping her hand. “Yes, thank you.”

Minutes later Joey and Evan slipped back into their seats in the rear of the auditorium. The headmistress remained onstage facing the massive projection screen, arms crossed, wearing a beatific expression as she regarded a video showcasing the students’ academic and athletic accomplishments.

Students jumped show horses, flung lacrosse balls, slide-tackled on lush pitches. A saccharine lily scent of perfume wafted off the woman with the mink stole. Evan was considering dozing off when the presentation suddenly fizzled out, the screen turned to static.

A blip of pure black.

A gritty sketch of the see-no-, hear-no-, speak-no-evil monkeys appeared briefly, a hacker’s signature.

And then footage came up, low light, angled across a desk. A hijacked recording from a student’s laptop webcam? A student — Matteo — sat facing the lens, staring at the invisible screen of his laptop intently.

A parent gasped.

It took a moment for Evan to assemble the imagery in his head: Matteo’s contorted face, the grunts and groans emanating from his laptop, his hand pumping hard just below the sight line of the camera.

Suddenly there was pandemonium. People shouting, administrators rushing the stage, a swarm-of-bees hum of student voices. Someone tripped over a power cord, and the projection slid off kilter, mercifully before Matteo concluded. A mother — presumably Matteo’s — was sobbing, and then the lights went out altogether. The sounds of a mini-stampede to the aisles filled the dark auditorium.

The headmistress’s voice, sharper than before, cut through the darkness. “Please stay calm. We’re going to … um, perhaps … Can I get … can I get campus security up here? Going to cancel the scheduled … the father-daughter dance until we can get a handle on just exactly … So inappropriate.… We’re very sorry. Security, please?… Maybe just—”

Evan and Joey remained in their chairs, watching the swirling chaos before them, shadows in the darkness.

He looked across at her. “Next semester?”

Joey smirked. “Sure thing, Pops.”

She held out her fist, and he bumped it.

He was gone before the lights came back up.