Red Right Hand

25.

AS HENDRICKS SCALED the Lincoln Boulevard on-ramp toward the Golden Gate Bridge tollbooths, the Homeland Security agent stationed at its top looked him up and down. The man’s expression was inscrutable, thanks to a pair of sport sunglasses, and his gloved palms rested on the butt of his MP5 assault rifle, which hung from a tactical sling across his chest.

Hendricks was flushed and short of breath. Because of the hike across the Presidio, he told himself, although he worried it was more than that. Sweat beaded on his brow. His skin crawled. His wound itched like crazy. He worried he’d look like he was going for a weapon if he scratched at it. He worried he’d look shifty if he didn’t.

The stolen.45 rested heavily in the pocket of his cargo pants. After a brief internal debate, he’d elected not to move it to his waistband once he made it onto Presidio grounds. Now he regretted that decision. He had no intention of using it against law enforcement, but damn if having it within easy reach wouldn’t offer him some comfort now.

The route to the bridge had taken him down Pilots’ Row, a neighborhood of Colonial Revivals originally built for army aviators. He caught glimpses of the bridge through the trees to his left as he walked, but he couldn’t see it in any detail. When he climbed the on-ramp, the trees dropped away. The view that greeted him was heartbreaking and confounding. Even as tense as he was, marching into the densest concentration of law enforcement agents this side of the Hoover Building, he couldn’t help but stare.

The bridge’s roadway was chunked and gapped as it drew near the southern tower. Cars were piled atop one another on either side. Charred bodies lay just outside open doors and protruded from shattered windshields. There were survivors up there too, some trapped inside their ruined cars, others wandering nervously while they waited for rescue. There’d been reports that a few of them had plunged to their deaths during the night. Whether they’d jumped or fell, no one was sure, but the result was the same either way. Two hundred and seventy feet is a long way to fall-four full seconds from bridge to bay. When they hit the water, they were moving so fast that they might as well have landed on a city street.

The tower itself was blackened but stood true, although a few of the steel support ropes that ran parallel to the tower dangled freely, frayed at the ends and curled like broken guitar strings. Smoke still drifted on occasion from below as leftover accelerant caught fire, only to be quickly doused. The undamaged northern tower seemed impossibly small from where Hendricks stood, which made sense, given that it was almost two miles distant.

The bay was littered with government boats: police, Coast Guard, fire-and-rescue. Most were small, ugly, and utilitarian-scuffed hulls and faded paint, pilothouses crowded with antennas and equipment-but a few were quite large. Several hundred yards to the west of the bridge was a fog bank as pale and solid as the cliffs of Dover, and a Coast Guard cutter hovered like a ghost ship at its edge. A massive crane barge with a ruined pickup truck in its grasp sat to the bridge’s immediate right, the twisted wreck swinging like a pendulum as the crane pivoted to deposit it on a flattop barge beside it.

As Hendricks approached the top of the on-ramp, he forced himself to give the Homeland Security agent guarding it a friendly nod. It felt awkward, insincere, and in that instant, Hendricks was painfully aware that this plan hinged on a disguise made out of duct tape.

The man eyed him a long moment. Shifted his weight and adjusted his hand on his gunstock. Hendricks tensed. He was too far away to engage hand to hand but not nearly far enough for the man to miss him if he opened fire.

Then the man said, “Fucking awful, isn’t it?”

“You ain’t kidding,” Hendricks replied. “It makes me hope there’s such a thing as hell-death’s too easy for anybody who could do a thing like this.”

“I hear you,” the man said, and then a quadcopter camera drone zipping toward the bridge from the command tent drew his gaze. Hendricks slipped past him without another word, into the teeming nerve center of the rescue effort.

From Hendricks’s perspective, the place was an operational nightmare. There were cop cars, fire trucks, and military vehicles everywhere. At least half of them were occupied, their doors open, radios crackling. People seemed to dart around at random. SFPD and Park Police uniforms abounded, but FBI and ATF agents were sprinkled here and there as well, their nylon raid jackets fluttering in the breeze. Men and women in military fatigues trotted back and forth between the command tent to the south of the tollbooths and the sawhorses that marked the point at which the roadway was deemed structurally unsound. Homeland Security agents in riot gear stood guard at all the access points.

It looked to Hendricks like it had been a while since a survivor was extracted from the wreckage. Ambulances lined the FasTrak lane that bypassed the tollbooths, their drivers antsy and wide-eyed. Two Life Flight helicopters sat in the bridge pavilion’s parking lot, their crews milling just outside. Some paced. Others smoked. All of them looked tired, strung out, on edge.

Hendricks took in most of this through the screen of his smartphone. He walked with it in front of him, scowling and occasionally tapping at it with his thumbs as if he were texting. Smartphones made for excellent camouflage. People were less likely to question your presence if you seemed like you belonged, and these days, belonging meant wandering obliviously around with your eyes glued to your phone’s screen.

But the phone was no mere prop for Hendricks; it was also a useful piece of tech. He kept the camera app open as he walked, and, pretending that he was looking for a decent signal or trying to see the screen in full sunlight, he alternated between live shots of whatever was in front of him and glimpses over his shoulder, via the forward-facing camera, to see if he was being followed.

The cell on wheels was set apart a ways from all the chaos, which made approaching it tricky. It was a good fifty yards south of the command tent, to which it was connected by a cord the width of Hendricks’s wrist, and twenty yards from the nearest cluster of vehicles. No one was guarding it, which was good, but no one passed near it either, which would make any attempt to do so painfully obvious.

He snapped a pic. Sent it off to Cameron via text. “You still with me?” he asked.

“Sure am,” she replied in his Bluetooth earpiece. Hendricks could hear the clink of dishes and quiet conversation all around her. A coffee shop, she’d said. Then she’d hit him with some mumbo-jumbo about how she planned to use its unencrypted Wi-Fi network to gain access to the other computers on it, which would decrease the processing time for all the data they were about to steal. He’d barely understood a word.

“Good. I sent you something. Any updates on our bomb scare?”

“CNN and local news are on the scene. The bomb squad’s cordoned off the area. They’re waiting for a robot to arrive as we speak so they can safely detonate it.”

Her tone was sharp. Brittle. “You sound annoyed,” he said.

“More like disgusted. Two more witnesses came forward claiming they saw, and I quote, ‘an Arab-looking guy’ drop the bag and flee the scene. One of ’em swore up and down this nonexistent perp was wearing some kind of explosive vest.”

“People are scared. Nervous. Bracing for the next attack. They see what they expect to see. That’s why eyewitnesses are so untrustworthy. You’d be surprised how easy it is to plant the seeds of false memory. They probably don’t even realize they’re lying.”

“Somehow,” she said, “that doesn’t make me feel any better.”

“Did the pic come through yet?”

“Yeah. Pulling it up now.”

“Is that what I’m looking for?”

“Yup. That’s our Bessie, all right.”

Hendricks smiled despite himself. “You really want to make that happen, don’t you?” She’d called the damn thing Bessie the whole drive north while they were hashing out their plan.

“What else are you supposed to name a COW?” she asked. “Have you reached it yet?”

“I’m headed toward it now,” he said, head down, snaking through the crowd. “What next?”

“There should be some kind of control panel.”

Up close, the cell on wheels looked to be part cargo trailer, part TV-news van, and part moon lander. It was a wheeled box of road-grimy white maybe four feet high with a ladder at one end and a trailer hitch at the other. From its center, a telescoping antenna pointed twenty feet into the air, and a triangular brace extended from each of its four corners, like landing gear, to hold it steady.

“The whole thing’s panels,” he said.

“The one we want would be waist height or higher. We’re looking for electronics, not anything mechanical, and no designer in her right mind would put an access terminal at ground height.”

Hendricks raised his phone into the air toward the tower as if he had just lost the signal and started to circle it slowly, taking pics and texting them to her. In the distance, an equipment tech in his midtwenties eyed Hendricks with confusion and then began walking toward him.

“There!” Cameron said. “Stop. Go back. Not the last pic you sent, the one before. Top left.”

The panel Cameron directed him to looked like the door of a breaker box, except that it was white, not gray. There was a keyhole beside the recessed handle. Hendricks tried the handle anyway, hoping for a bit of luck. It was locked, because of course it was.

“Hey,” the man headed toward him called, not angry yet, but agitated. He was taller than Hendricks by a few inches and well muscled beneath a layer of baby fat. He wore a tool belt low around his waist and soon was close enough-thirty yards or so-that Hendricks could make out its contents. Screwdrivers. Wire cutters. Voltmeter. Electrical tape. An assortment of pliers. They clanked and rattled as he walked.

Hendricks set his phone down atop the cell on wheels, reached into the right thigh pocket of his cargo pants, and took out Cameron’s electric toothbrush. He’d come across it when they were taking inventory of their belongings on the plane and couldn’t help but laugh. “What’s so funny?” Cameron had asked, reddening.

“Most outlaws aren’t so diligent about their oral hygiene,” he’d replied.

Hendricks had removed its brush head and filed down the metal spindle on the curb while Cameron doctored up his windbreaker. Now he carefully inserted it into the lock.

The man was twenty yards away, the cell on wheels between them, so Hendricks was partially obscured from his view. “Hey!” he shouted. This time, several people glanced up at them.

Hendricks thought, Please work, over and over, a silent mantra.

Hendricks was not a seasoned lock picker. Give him a set of rakes and torsion wrenches, and he’d get through a door eventually, but not with any speed or grace. Lock-bumping-in which a specially made key is inserted partway into a lock and then rapped with a mallet so that the vibration causes the pin stacks inside the lock to line up momentarily-was far more reliable for an amateur like him. But each make of lock required its own bump key, and the process was far from stealthy.

Thanks to recreational lock picking’s rise in popularity, Hendricks was able to learn a trick or two online. For instance, he’d found out that you could insert the spindle of an electric toothbrush into a lock and use its high-speed vibration like a computer hacker uses a brute-force attack. Instead of one rap of the mallet, one chance to turn the lock, the constant shaking knocks the pin stacks around until they line up just right.

At least, that was the theory. Until today, Hendricks had seen it only on YouTube. The guy who’d posted the video warned that the average electric toothbrush spindle was too short to work on a door lock and too thick to fit inside most keyholes. He’d also warned that if you filed the spindle down too far, it’d snap off and the lock would never open. But done right, he said, anyone could pick a lock this way, and to demonstrate, he’d popped open half a dozen padlocks, lockboxes, and storage lockers in seconds flat.

At the time, it had seemed impressive to Hendricks. Now he hoped he didn’t wind up getting caught because he’d been dumb enough to believe something he saw on the Internet.

The tech was fifteen yards away and agitated enough that he’d attracted the attention of some nearby personnel. Hendricks pressed the button on the handle of the toothbrush and winced as the motor hummed to life. The spindle rattled in the lock like pennies in a cup holder.

He held his breath.

Twisted the handle.

To his surprise, the lock opened.

Inside the panel was a keyboard. A bunch of lights, toggles, buttons, and ports. A small display screen, green writing on black background, lines of data scrolling by.

“I’m in,” he said quietly. He glanced up. Ten yards and closing fast.

“You see a USB port?”

“No,” he said. Her tense silence spoke volumes. “Wait-yes. What now?”

“Pop in the thumb drive that I gave you.”

“Done. Now what?”

“Is the screen giving you a prompt of any kind?”

“Uh…”

Cameron sighed. “Just show me.”

“How?”

“Jesus, you’re hopeless. Hang on.”

Hendricks’s burner began to vibrate atop the cell on wheels, spinning a minute or two clockwise with every pulse. He picked it up and clicked the notice. One of the apps Cameron had installed on it launched, and her face popped up on his screen. “Hold me up so I can see it,” she said. He complied. “Okay, listen carefully.”

She told him what to type. He set the phone back down and punched the characters into the keyboard, hunt-and-peck-style, with his index fingers. “Uh, the screen just went blank. Nothing but a blinking cursor in the top left corner.”

“That’s expected,” she said.

“What do I do now?”

“Nothing,” she said. “Once the exploit’s done uploading, remove the thumb drive, close the door, and get the eff outta Dodge.”

“How will I know the exploit’s done uploading?”

“Just watch the screen.”

“For what?”

“You’ll know it when you see it.”

“Uh, buddy?” The tech had reached the other side of the cell on wheels. “You want to tell me what the hell you think you’re doing?”

Hendricks eyed the screen. Then the tech. Then the screen again. Nothing on it had changed that he could see. “I don’t know what you mean.”

“I mean, why are you fucking around with my machine?” He began to circle around to Hendricks.

“Oh, that,” Hendricks said nonchalantly. “My signal keeps cutting out. I thought it’d get better the closer I got to the tower, but no such luck. So then I figured there’s gotta be some kind of knob on this thing somewhere that’ll turn it up. But the goddamn thing is locked.”

The corner braces forced the tech to swing a little wide. Otherwise, he would’ve seen the open panel door and called to the guards-who were already a little too interested in this exchange for Hendricks’s liking.

Hendricks glanced down. Saw the screen flicker. The code vanished, replaced by a message in block letters made of zeros:

HELLO MY NAME IS BESSIE

Then the message disappeared, and code began to scroll by once more.

Hendricks removed the thumb drive. Pocketed it, along with the electric toothbrush. Eased the panel door closed as the man rounded the corner. It locked automatically with a click.

The man had an ID badge on a lanyard around his neck declaring him to be Aaron Stanton of the NCSC-Homeland Security’s National Cybersecurity Center. “This thing’s locked for a reason.”

“Which is?”

“So morons who can’t stop the clock on their microwave from blinking twelve don’t fuck with it and knock out our whole damn communications network,” he said.

“Listen, asshole,” Hendricks said, affecting umbrage, “I’m not some dipshit off the street-I’m a special agent with the FBI.” He was always amazed at how well a little bit of swagger sold a flimsy grift.

“Oh. Sorry,” Stanton said, his words dripping sarcasm. “I didn’t realize you were a Feeb. I’ll try to talk slower.”

Hendricks leaned in close and grabbed Stanton’s ID badge. He made a show of scrutinizing it closely. “Hey!” Stanton exclaimed, snatching at it. “What the hell?”

“I want to make sure I spell your name right when I report you,” Hendricks replied.

“For what? Doing my job? You’re lucky I don’t report you. If you’d so much as pressed a button on this baby, I would’ve. So how about you get the fuck away from her before I change my mind?”

“Fine. Have it your way. I don’t have time for this bullshit.” Hendricks turned and walked off. Once it became clear the argument was over, the attention of the crowd began to wander. Stanton, though, was still suspicious. He looked the cell on wheels over carefully, even opening the panel door and checking inside.

When Hendricks was twenty paces away, Stanton shouted, “Hey, dipshit-not so fast.”

Hendricks tensed. Reddened. Turned. Those near enough to hear Stanton turned too, their gazes focused on Hendricks once more. A few placed their hands on their guns. Hendricks broke out in a nervous sweat.

“What now?” he asked, as casually as possible.

Stanton smiled like a grand master declaring checkmate and waved something at Hendricks. “You forgot your phone.”

Hendricks didn’t have to feign embarrassment; his rattled nerves made his performance as convincing as it was effortless. He jogged over to Stanton and took his phone. Once he had it, he set off walking west-toward the nearest off-ramp, toward anywhere but here.