The Anonymous Signal

21

“Why do we have to call you Fawkes, anyway?”

Three teenagers crouched in a dark hallway, whispering sharply to each other. Mark and Violetta slunk behind the third, a lanky boy with unkempt hair. He turned back to them with his finger on his lips.

“Because I said so,” he whispered. “Now, be quiet. Boot camp library is around the corner.”

“But it’s locked,” said Violetta. Fawkes reached into the back pocket of his jeans and removed several small, metal rods. “You’re gonna pick it?” Her eyes widened.

“Come on.”

The three moved quickly down the hallway. The building was still and silent, only the emergency exit signs providing light in the corridor. At the end of the hallway a set of double doors framed by windows on each side awaited, a soft glow from computer monitors in screen-saver mode spilling through.

Fawkes knelt down beside the lock and quickly worked the tools as the other two watched in awe. Less than a minute, and the mechanism clicked. He reached up and pulled the handle down and the door opened.

“Inside.”

The three rushed in, Fawkes closing the door quietly behind them. He motioned with his hand for them to follow, and he led them away from the windows toward the recessed counter where the librarian worked. He went behind a computer monitor at the book checkout and wiggled the mouse. A login screen appeared.

“What are you going to do?” asked Violetta.

“I told you. Get us all out of here,” he said with a smirk.

“With the computer? Come on.”

He used one of his tools to open the chassis of the machine as he spoke. “These old junkyard machines have BIOS holes you can drive a truck through.” He toggled from working on the circuit board to typing at the login prompt and back again.

“I hate this place,” said Mark, looking around the dark room. “All I did was one joint. I didn’t even want it. Then it’s undercover cops and detention and mom sending me to this stupid place to save me, or whatever. It’s all my brother’s fault.”

“It seriously sucks,” Violetta agreed. “Caught me with a boy in the attic. Shamed the family, you know. I’m fifteen! They think I’m a baby.”

Mark swept his eyes over her body. “You’re not a baby.”

She ignored him. “So, Fawkes, why are you here? You never said.”

The computer beeped and he typed furiously at a prompt on a black background. “Stepdad. Got tired of beating on me. Decided the ex-marine who runs this place would get my ass straightened out.” He clacked the enter key and the screen went dark. A second later it lit up with a bright image of a field of green grass. “We’re in.”

His companions crowded around the screen. Fawkes worked quickly, searching through file systems and applications.

Violetta continued questioning. “How can you do anything from the library computer?”

“It connects to the others. See, look. I’m using this terminal window to remote login on the other system. They’re so stupid. All the passwords are related. So I’m in there, too. Admin office computer. And these,” he said smiling as text scrolled through the window, “are files on all of us. What’s your last name, Violetta?”

“Rayon,” she said.

“There you are. Born in Mexico City? What, you illegal?”

“Shut up.”

“Maybe you were born in LA.”

The girl gasped as the text changed at his keystrokes.

“You can do that?”

“And, looks like you’re here for the month program. That’s a long time.”

“Yeah.” Her face fell.

“But since the last day is tomorrow, you’ll be going home.”

She squinted at the screen. “You changed the dates!”

Fawkes opened another window and keyed in lines of code.

“Take too long to do this by hand,” he said. “This little script — wait, gotta save it — it will do them all.” He typed the name of the new file into the other command window.

“What’s it doing?” asked the boy.

“Reading all the files in this directory, looking for the dates, and changing them. There, all done. Everyone goes home tomorrow.”

“Fucking awesome!” The boy shouted.

“They’ll figure it out, dumbshit,” said Fawkes. “Don’t get too excited. But we’ll have a few days of chaos. I wonder how many parents will get calls and show up?” They laughed.

“What else can you do? Can you like put naked pictures on the screens or something?”

“Yeah, sure. We’ll need to download some. And — wait, what’s this?” Fawkes stared at the screen and the file he just opened. “Oh, this is good. See the dollar signs? This is budget stuff! Financials! Same format my stepdad uses for his accounts. Okay. We can do some serious damage here.”

The girl’s eyes darted. “Fawkes, maybe we should leave. We could really get in big trouble for this.”

“Hold on, hold on.” He tuned her out, opening other files, scanning the numbers and accounts at light speed. “What the hell? Ah, no, no, no, no, no. Ah, man. Tonight’s fucking lotto. Oh, Mr. Harrison, you’ve been a very bad man!”

Mark backed away slightly. “Mr. Harrison? Don’t mess with him, Fawkes. Scares the shit out of me.”

Fawkes laughed. “Boot camp marine man? Yeah, but right now, I got his balls in a vice. Oh, man. My stepdad's gonna love seeing where his money went! The tuition? All the fees? It’s all transferred. It goes from the school account to this one. And look whose it is!”

“Wait,” said Violetta. “Mr. Harrison is stealing?”

“What’s stealing? Dumbass parents send them the money. Fix us and all that. He already stole it. But that’s not how the world works. I’ve seen my stepdad with his money. Taxes and shit. You have to do it right or the FEDs come down on you. You can go to jail, even. Mr. Harrison’s gonna be in a world of hurt if this gets out — which it’s going to!”

“Don’t!” said Violetta. “Fawkes, don’t. He’ll do something. The man is messed up or something.”

“Yeah,” said Mark. “Look man, this was fun, but I don’t want to end up somewhere worse than this. You get him in trouble, then what’s he gonna to do?”

Fawkes froze a moment in thought, a half-smirk on his face.

“Excellent points, friends. But it’s a crime to let this go. So, there’s only one option left. And I think it’s a much, much better option.”

“Get the hell out of here?” said Mark.

“No. Blackmail.”

SACKER Deposition 1

22

Miller blasted through the left-most toll lane with lights flashing as he and Savas raced down Interstate 95 on their way to Bridgeport, Connecticut. The NSA finally seemed to be playing nice with the other agencies and had come through in a big way. With their eyes nearly everywhere in the digital world, they had been able to trace the feed for the streaming video of the assassinations to a boardwalk section of the port town.

“Near Captain's Cove,” said Savas, mapping the location on his phone. “Seems to be some minor touristy location by a marina. Move a bit out from it and things deteriorate quickly. A lot of abandoned buildings.”

“Buildings with serious bandwidth, it seems,” said Miller. He cast a sharp look toward Savas. “Rebecca’s where again? We could use her today.”

Savas sighed. “Tell me about it. Look, I know I’ve been keeping this in a black box, Frank, but there are some very good reasons. Things will be clearer soon. Current events have complicated things, but she’s tending to something important.”

“Your call, John. But I can’t say there hasn’t been a lot of interest and speculation.”

“Answers are coming. Meanwhile, we focus on today.”

Miller stared a moment more at Savas, then turned his eyes back to the road. “Sure.”

Savas continued. “We’re going to have local and state police on scene, and some agents from the New Haven Division. But they’ve saved the crime scene for us, and I’ve got a forensics unit en route. This is our first real physical connection to Anonymous.”

“Well, let’s hope these digital ghosts leave real-world footprints.”

They stepped out of the car in front of a faded orange building. Sandwiched between several dilapidated and shuttered structures, it hardly seemed the location for the broadcast of the most devastating video in the history of the internet. They were met by representatives of the local FBI division and surrounded by police. Bystanders stood behind police tape, gawking at the uniformed presence, cell phones raised like torches, beaming images around the world.

“Assistant Special Agents in Charge Jimmy Onda and Maggie Linven,” said a tall woman wrapped in a coat and indicating a pencil thin man with thinning hair. Both of the New Haven agents appeared anxious and fearful.

Savas shook their hands. “John Savas and Frank Miller, Intel 1. I take it you’ve been inside?”

Their wide-eyed expressions gave Savas his answer.

“Yes, agent Savas. The bodies are still there. They haven’t been disturbed. I was told your New York crime units are coming.”

He nodded. “Yes. They should be here any minute. Mind if we have a look ourselves?”

“No. But it’s pretty grim.”

The four of them entered the building, a narrow hallway leading back to what might have been a storage room for a small business decades ago. Photographers continued to take pictures, and the strobing of the flashes in the dark space created a strange, discontinuous visual effect as he and Miller snapped on nitrile gloves.

Even walking in the space was hazardous. Clotted pools of blood had seeped from the center of the room outward, coating the floor in an expanse of red goo. The staging was as it had been in the video: two rows of ten chairs, corpses tied to them, stage lights affixed to stands around the massacred, and a dark cloth framing the nightmare in a semicircle of black.

“There seems to be some rigor mortis remaining in the bodies,” said agent Liven. “That’s consistent with the timing of the broadcast last night.”

“So it was live,” mumbled Miller, a scowl on his face. “Like to tie down the bastard that did this and see how he likes the treatment.”

The accompanying agents eyed Miller cautiously. Savas turned the conversation back to Anonymous.

“That speech on TV sounded like talking points from a manifesto. They truly hated the people here, saw them as criminals and murderers that deserved their punishment.”

“Sounds like you’re empathizing with them,” growled agent Onda.

“Not at all,” said Savas. “But we can’t sit here getting off on righteous indignation. We need to understand them, get in their heads. We need to anticipate them. And we can’t do that if we can’t think like they do. Basic criminal psychology 101.”

A glint of light caught his attention. Moving in a wide arc around the crime scene to avoid the blood, he approached the left side of the chairs and crouched beside a white object on the ground. One side of it was dyed red from blood that had run alongside the plastic.

“The Guy Fawkes mask,” said Savas.

The head of the New Haven division stared between Savas and the mask. “I wondered what that was all about in the video. Who’s Guy Fawkes?”

Savas shook his head. “Too much FBI training is still in the analog years.” He stood up and continued to move parallel to the chair rows, examining the layout. “Historically, he’s a figure from British religious wars in the sixteenth century. Led a failed Catholic rebellion against the English. Fast forward. Now, amazingly, he’s become a general symbol of resistance to oppressive systems. Started with a graphic novel. The hacker community in particular has adopted him as a symbol. Anonymous often uses iconography of him — the mask in particular — when putting a public face on their activities. It literally keeps them anonymous and gives them some kind of mythic power.”

The New Haven agent shook her head. “That doesn’t make any sense.”

“Yeah, well, since when do sociopathic revolutionaries have to make sense?” asked Miller. “But the idiot left the mask here.”

“Exactly,” said Savas, a glint in his eye. “And look, behind the chairs,” he pointed with a blue finger. “Some masks from the shooters. They wore them for the entire video.” He smiled. "Maybe Anonymous is made up of geniuses, but their intelligence is limited to the digital realm. They’re rookies here.”

At that moment, several additional agents entered the room carrying equipment and evidence bags. One waved to Savas as he approached.

“Just in time,” said Savas. “Our NYC crime unit. And it looks like Anonymous has left some interesting Easter eggs for us to open.”

23

An unremarkable blue sedan pulled up to a tollbooth on the George Washington Bridge on the Jersey side. The booth officer watched as a man with blond hair and a youngish face shoved a fist out the window, offering a ten and a five from inside. The officer could see her face reflected in his mirrored glasses. She glanced inside at his companion as she took the bills, glimpsing a woman with short black hair and dark sunglasses. The man looked away as the gate swung upward, and the car dashed off, lost in the traffic swarming onto the bridge.

Lopez rubbed his hand across his face as he steered the vehicle toward the right lanes, glancing upward to a sign for the Harlem River Drive.

Houston smiled. “Miss the beard?”

“Not sure. Just getting used to it. Nervous habits and all.” He took the offramp from the bridge and forced his way into the gaggle of vehicles queuing up for the East Side Highway. “I’m sure we got our photos taken back there.”

Houston stared outside the window at the merging traffic. “The image-recognition solutions still struggle with facial hair, so I’m the bigger danger. We are number one on the most-wanted list. Anyone would want to make their career bringing us in.” She looked behind them and studied the vehicles. “These giant sunglasses should mask my forehead and cheekbones some. I kept the visor down as well as we approached the toll booth. Which reminds me: fifteen bucks for a car?”

“Getting a bit ridiculous. Cheaper with EZ-Pass, but we have to stay off the grid.” Lopez grunted. “So how do we fight a digital terrorist group when we stay off the grid?”

“First, they stopped being digital. Rebecca’s encrypted data was informative: Bombings, shootings — nothing virtual there. Second, there are ways to get online without alerting the world to your presence. We’ve done it.”

“You’ve done it. But these guys put the Feds to shame. It’s different.”

“They aren’t omniscient. They don’t know what to look for. We don’t exist for them. Not yet, anyway. We’ll be targeted later.”

“They seem pretty good at that.”

Houston turned her body toward Lopez, swinging a leg onto the seat to stabilize herself. “I’ve been thinking about that, Francisco. How the hell did these guys remotely pilot these things so skillfully? They aren’t drone operators.”

“Maybe they recruited some. Besides, it’s not like people don’t know where the Capitol is. Just punch in the GPS coordinates and off you go.”

“And how do you explain hitting a moving vehicle like the CEO’s car?”

Lopez nodded. “Got me there. They’d have to steer it. In real time.”

“Pretty tough with an evasive target. I doubt the best drone pilots in the CIA could do that.”

“Then how?”

“Same thing you said. GPS coordinates.”

Lopez furrowed his brows. “I see. Mobile devices.”

“Right. Even CEOs have their damn smart phones these days. If they could hack into one or more of the Big Brother databases out there, they might be able to get the target’s phone GPS feed. It’s like shining a laser beam for a missile. Even a moving target. Individualized. It’s perfect. They were using this in Pakistan and other locations for al-Qaeda honchos. But it should work even better in Western nations.”

“You’re right. It’s perfect for assassinations: auto-piloted drones coupled to the real-time coordinates of the target.”

Houston spun back around as Lopez exited the Harlem River Drive and entered the streets of Harlem itself. “For now. If this is what is happening, you can bet every figure of importance will ditch their GPS-enabled tech.”

“By then, it might be too late.”

Rebecca Cohen was standing outside the rundown brownstone as they pulled up. Lopez and Houston exited the car quickly and scaled the steps to meet her at the doorway.

Houston glanced around them. "You're on a burner cell? No GPS?"

Cohen nodded. "As you asked. It's a cheap model, but it makes calls. You might be right about how the hits were made. It's so simple it's frightening." She motioned them to the entrance. "Let's get in and I'll let John know you're here." Cohen unlocked the door and the three entered rapidly.

"What a dump," said Houston. Cohen shut the door behind them.

The wreckage of the former living room was strewn with broken furniture, blankets, and litter. Grime coated the walls and floor. It stank.

"Former crack house that was shut down and left to die," said Cohen as she handed Lopez the keys. “Gentrification hasn’t made it this far north yet.”

He nodded. "It's perfect. I'll be right back."

The ex-priest returned quickly with a heavy suitcase in each hand and a backpack strapped over his shoulders. Cohen glanced briefly at the bags as she dialed. She didn't need any guesses as to what they held within. She punched a key on her phone.

"John? It's Rebecca. They're here. Yes, okay. Go ahead."

She was silent for a few moments as muffled sounds came from the speaker. Meanwhile, Lopez and Houston opened one of the suitcases, removing body armor and firearms. They stripped to their underwear, Houston with a tight sports bra, Lopez’s rippling musculature distracting the FBI woman. They donned tight black tanks and black pants, strapping on shoulder harnesses with holsters for handguns and knives. Cohen thought she saw stun grenades as well in the suitcase, but it was closed before she could be sure.

She hung up the phone and approached the pair. "Some interesting news."

Houston slipped a loose black shirt on, the rough fabric concealing all evidence of the weaponry within. "The crime scene?" Lopez seemed to be tying together a long robe or coat of some kind.

"Yes," said Cohen. "The executions. Looks like our hackers left considerable physical evidence behind in their getaway. The crime unit just went through things and it's preliminary, but there are prints and hair."

Houston's face was set. "Well, it's a start. How soon until we have something?"

“This is priority one. John and Frank are on their way back with them. They'll do this right. Best people, best labs. Everything is nearby. Bottlenecks should be travel time to the labs and lab work. We’ll get the fingerprints first. DNA tests in some hours plus time to search databases."

"If things go well," said Lopez. He stepped beside her.

His demeanor had changed completely. Outwardly, he was covered in black vestments, modified and tightened so as not to restrict his movements. Along with the monastic garb came a stern expression on his face, one Cohen had never seen before. For the first time, she noticed clearly the scar on his forehead, branded there by the hot barrel of a weapon held by a vengeful madman, a circle of white tissue with a cross from the site at the top. It almost seemed to glow.

Cohen cleared her throat "Yes, if things go well. Listen, I want to thank you both for coming. I know you didn't have to."

Lopez slammed a magazine into the butt of a gun and holstered the weapon within the folds of the vestments. Even his gloves and boots were black. As Houston unconsciously moved to his side, Cohen noted how similar they seemed, how coordinated their motions, like two black cats stalking prey.

"Let's get to work," Houston said. "When do we get to meet the gang?"

24

The location was ideal. The overpass was large, the tunnel and space underneath deep and shadowed. They were concealed from nearby residential windows by the thundering highway above and from other eyes by the East River at their backs. The dark evening created numerous pockets of gloom away from any direct lighting. There had been a contingent of homeless, but at the sight of the figures entering the dark underpass, they seemed to sense danger, and one by one they filed out and seemed to dissolve into the flow of the city.

Savas had used Intel 1's access to city camera systems and determined that the area was poorly covered, a patchwork of lenses crossing nearby but leaving considerable holes, including the space underneath. It was not difficult to arrange for separate approaches that would avoid nearly all surveillance.

Miller, Lightfoote, and Rideout stood like statues in the cool air and watched three shadows approach from the opposite side of the tunnel. The distance was only fifty yards, and it was easy to identify one of the shapes. Cohen walked at a brisk pace several paces in front of the two other figures, her eyes locked on Savas. Behind her glided a lithe woman with a confident, feline gait, her body remaining shrouded in black even as she approached close enough for light to spill over her form. Her face was covered completely by a veil or mask. A slit in the black fabric revealed a pair of intense, blue eyes. Beside her strode a powerfully built man, also black clad but with his face uncovered, dark eyes and raven hair blending into the night. He seemed to possess an underlying tension that caught on the air like static.

Miller spoke quietly to Savas as the three neared. "Is that a cassock?"

"Maybe," Savas growled.

Rideout cut in. "If you mean the one next to the hot burqa-ninja, I would say yes. Definitely a cassock."

Miller shook his head. “John’s mystery project. Who are these ghosts?"

Lightfoote laughed, tipping her head to Miller's. "Avenging spirits, Frank."

The pair behind her stopped several feet in front of the others. Cohen stepped up to Savas and placed her hand gently on his shoulder. She glanced backward.

"They weren't happy to come, John. But they're here. They're ready." She slipped alongside him and turned to face the ciphers.

Savas spoke to his team. "I'm sorry for this secrecy, but it was necessary for reasons I can't go into. But they're here to help." He gestured toward the pair. "Gabriel and Mary. You're to know them by these names. They're professionals. They are off the radar. They have no ties or allegiances to anyone. But they're allies."

Savas saw Miller and Rideout appraising the pair. Lightfoote only smiled.

Cohen continued the introductions. "Mary is an experienced field operative. She's smart and can handle herself in just about any situation. Gabriel has a unique history, but he is unparalleled in combat and crisis."

Rideout cut in. "Gabriel and Mary? What's next, the Holy Spirit? Christ child?”

Lopez walked up to Rideout, who could not suppress an instinct to step backward. As Gabriel, he offered his hand. "We'll need all the help from God we can get, if what Rebecca has told us is true. You can trust us."

Rideout extended his hand cautiously. The two men shook. There followed a repeat of the ritual with the other members of the team. Houston paused a moment looking Lightfoote up and down.

"This the one? Your white hat hacker?”

Savas nodded. "I don't know what color she is. Red, by the color of her butchered hair." He gestured toward Houston. "Angel, meet Mary. You and JP will be paired with her and Gabriel to form a team to look into the drones and computer end of this case. The rest of us will pursue the human angle and try to dig out the members of Anonymous."

The two women shook hands.

Houston stared quietly a moment longer. The fabric around her mouth pulled tightly from a smirk. "I like this one. She's hardcore."

Lightfoote looked deeply into Houston's eyes. "We all have to be. Now the nightmare really begins."

Lopez moved between Savas and Lightfoote. "You said she was special."

Savas shook his head. "You have no idea."

"Now that we're one big, happy family," said Lightfoote, "Let's get the hell out of here. Meeting together is a bad idea. For all of us, because of Anonymous. For you," she said, indicating Lopez and Houston, "because of, well, everyone else. Right, Fearless Leader?"

Miller and Rideout looked over sharply, but Savas ignored them. "As usual, Angel is correct. But I felt to get us through this email wouldn’t cut it. Sometimes face-to-face is required. So, the drone data?"

Lightfoote pulled out a black binder filled with paper and handed it to Houston. "Mary, your homework for tonight."

"What is it?" Houston asked.

Savas answered. "Angel's been digging into the drones. Records of the sales and trades of the major manufactures in the country. Hardcopy in case we’d transfer the worm to your computers. You said yours are scrubbed?”

Houston nodded. “Re-virginized.”

"I think you'll find this interesting," said Angel, a sly look on her face, indicating the binder.

"Once you've had a chance to digest it, we can plan the next steps," said Savas. "Meanwhile, we split up again, contact only through burner cells without GPS. Anonymous may have compromised telecommunications, and we can't afford to tip our hands."

Miller grunted. "Or you may find a drone up your ass with an unfriendly payload."

"Who’s our contact point?" Lopez asked.

“You’ll have all our numbers, and should we need to dump a phone we'll update as we go. But you’ll funnel all communications through Angel. The rest of you, outside of an emergency, straight to me. We believe Anonymous is using the NSA-developed snooping tools, piggy-backing on US surveillance. That means anything and everything is possibly an eye or ear for them. Angel is monitoring those tools for any hint that we’ve been compromised. Unlikely given our precautions, but we need to be careful, so let’s keep communication minimal.”

"See, you aren't the only ones hiding from Big Brother," said Lightfoote, smiling toward Lopez and Houston.

Lopez arched an eyebrow and Savas cut in. “Frighteningly intuitive, as I mentioned. I’m still calling it a feature, not a bug.”

Houston half turned to leave. “Okay then. Let's break and communicate when we’re ready to move.”

Savas nodded, and with a last look across the members of Intel 1, Lopez and Houston walked back through the tunnel and disappeared into the darkness.

Rideout let out a long breath that condensed in the air. “Well, that was intense!"

"Trusting your judgment on this, John," Miller said. "But I know death when I see it. And it was just standing in front of me."

"They've been through hell and back," said Savas. “Believe me, you wouldn’t want to walk in their shoes.”

They turned to exit the tunnel in different directions, each to take a different path and avoid detection. Before leaving, Lightfoote dropped alongside Savas and pecked his cheek with a kiss.

“Explanation?” Savas had known her for too long to hope to guess.

“The Priest and the Whore." She nodded approvingly. "Good catch, Aging Overlord.”

Savas sighed. "Damn, Angel, sometimes I don't know whether you're our only hope or our doom. How the hell did—"

"And it's really something that you did for them." Her expression turned serious. “But don't forget — I’m the only Angel.”

25

It was three in the morning, and a bleary-eyed Sara Houston lay back against the filthy wall of the abandoned brownstone. Small lamps were placed on the floor around a crouched figure in front of her. Cords ran to outlets in the wall at her left. Lopez sat cross-legged in the middle of the circle of light, his dark features giving him the appearance of some ancient priest petitioning the gods. Instead he bowed over reams of paper, and rubbed his eyes.

"It's so obvious if anyone had been looking." His voice was deeper than usual, rough from lack of sleep.

Houston spoke over the wailing of an ambulance siren as the flashing lights played across the windows. "So, we’ve got records for six major drone manufacturers in the US. Every single one of them has seen a marked increase in sales over the last six months. No wonder Angel thought we’d find it ‘interesting.’”

Lopez nodded, stood up, and stretched. “But we could be jumping to conclusions. Maybe the market has picked up for drones? More and more police and news stations want to get their hands on these things. Doesn't mean it's Anonymous related. Would they even shop local? Leave that kind of trail?”

"I don't know, but they haven’t shown the same talents in real world crime as they have online. Anyway, we can’t visit all these places across the country. Not in time to hope to contribute meaningfully to this case. But from what I can see, four of the six plants only ship smaller scale drones. I think we can forget those. The drones carrying explosives — they'd have to be much larger."

"Agreed."

"There are only two providing models of that size in any number in the US. And guess what? One of them happens to be across the Hudson in New Jersey."

Lopez stared down at her. "I suppose you’re interested in paying that place a visit?"

Houston smiled. "And there’s no time like the present. What do you say we make a little excursion to Jersey?"

Lopez began to pace. "We're not ready. We need to do recon. Find out what this place is, try to determine the security, what we'll be up against. And what’s our target? We won't have access to the guided tour."

"We'll need to be in and out in under half an hour to be sure the police don't arrive. We need their records. What they've been selling and to whom. Hopefully, we can use that to trace the drones to Anonymous. In the real world, you always leave footprints.”

"So we need to identify their offices, determine how to penetrate their perimeter and security, how to get into the records, all from outside with no computer access."

"We can't do it without online access."

Lopez raised his hands. "But that opens our computers to the worm. Right now they're wiped. Pristine. Who knows how long before we're infected online."

"From what Angel said, not long."

"Then we might as well be televising what we're doing. At some point we risk opening ourselves to discovery by that thing. Best case they blow our data. Worst case they send assassins."

"So we don't use our computers."

"Then what?"

Houston stood up, stretching slowly in different yoga positions as she spoke. "Public library. We'll disable some of their safe-browsing settings, install TOR for anonymity, and get what we need and hope for the best."

“All those computers are infected.”

“Yes, but the worm isn’t omniscient. It’s also latent until activated. Is there a trigger keyword in every strain on every computer about everything that might be a threat to them? Anonymous can’t anticipate all the threats.”

“And if they have anticipated that one?”

“We’ll lose the computer and connection as the worm is activated. Then we go back to the drawing board, or head into the plant blind.”

“With somebody alerted to our interest.”

She sighed. “A risk we have to take.”

Lopez nodded. “We need building specs. Satellite info. How do we get that from the library computer connections?”

Houston laughed. "More than you think is publicly available. But for the details, we need governmental access." She picked up her phone. "Angel must not be getting much sleep these days." She dialed.

Lopez walked to the window and stared out into the night. The streetlights took on a hazy blur from the soiled glass. The occasional passing car was enveloped in a glowing fog that seemed to give it a phantasmal quality. Sleep deprived and anxious, the images stirred his primitive emotions. To add to the suspense, a whistle rose and fell from a wind picking up and blowing through the alleyways.

"Hi Angel. Mary here." Houston made her way to their weapons cache. “We have a lead on a manufacturing plant in Jersey. No, not far. South of Newark. Yes. Look, we need to do some serious recon before we hit that place. We need access to FBI databases, satellite scans, building schematics. Anything on the site.” She paused, listening. “We don’t have time to wait until John’s back. Yeah, I know you’d like his approval, but he’s not my daddy. You’re point for us, remember? And don’t tell me permission from the boss ever got in your way!” Houston picked up a large handgun, a Browning 1911, and sighed. “Look, can you do this, give us access or not? Okay, then just do it.” She nodded and checked the magazine on the weapon. “Thanks. And tell John we’ll be careful.”

She closed and pocketed the phone as Lopez approached. He glanced down at the weapon in her hand.

“Tell your dad to watch over us.”

She smiled at the .45 caliber, semiautomatic. “He always does. Believe that.”

Lopez checked his watch. “So, what time does the library open?”

COHEN Deposition 2

26

The guard sat the prisoner down across from them on the other side of the plexiglass. There was a voice activated speaker that did away with the antiquated two-phone system of the past. Cameras were perched on the ceiling in multiple locations. The armed guards did not leave.

Savas and Cohen had driven north from the city into the heart of Upstate New York, the scenic Adirondack mountains. Miller remained at Intel 1, serving to coordinate the division’s activities in their absence as they waited for the results of the forensics. On the way up, Lightfoote had informed them of the progress on the drones and Lopez and Houston’s plans to infiltrate the New Jersey plant. It was reckless, but Savas had to concede that it was necessary. The finer points of legality and admissibility seemed to matter little when the city was locked down by the National Guard. It had taken them an hour simply to get permission to leave Manhattan.

The prisoner stared across the composite glass with apparent bemusement. He was lanky and his posture slovenly, body nearly vanishing in the folds of his overlarge gray and tan uniform. A baby face aged by a short growth of beard grinned at them as his fingers drummed incessantly.

“Laurens Hanert?” began Savas as the pair of FBI agents settled into chairs. Cohen swiped across her tablet and opened several files.

Hanert smiled. “Who wants to know?”

“FBI Special agents Savas and Cohen. New York.”

Hanert leaned forward with a smile. “Federal special agents. Well, well, well. What brings you two all the way up here? Don’t you have a national crisis to solve?”

Cohen scowled. “I’m sure you can imagine why.”

“An-on-y-mous.” He broke out each syllable in slow motion, seeming to relish every moment. “Remind me why I’m locked up in here?”

Cohen set her lips in a line. “Hanert, the judge slammed you, no doubt. But you weren’t a nihilist. You were an activist. You can’t tell me you approve of what has happened.”

“FBI girl with a heart. I like that. You must be good cop. In fact, you remind me of the lady that cuffed me when they flash-bombed my bong-session at home. America is lucky to have you folks on the job.”

Savas cut in. “Why do you have any loyalty to Anonymous? They ratted you out.”

“Please, at least pretend you’re not as stupid as you sound. It’s a distributed group, Einstein. Anarchist. There isn’t an Anonymous. There are as many as there are people and groups within it. I was sold out by one motherfucker who decided to protect his own ass when he fucked up. He set me up to cut time served. You folks gave him that deal. I don’t blame Anonymous for this,” he said, rapping on the glass and gesturing around him. “And you shouldn’t blame them for what’s happening now.”

Cohen tilted her head to one side. “What do you mean?”

“I mean, pretty agent girl, that you need to take that bloodbath broadcast seriously. One very disturbed dude with an I’m-the-real-Anonymous delusion of grandeur. The rest of us are as Oh Shit! as you FEDs are.”

“Do you know who he is?” asked Savas.

“We all know who he is. Those of us who were in deep. There is only one nut job with the chops to pull this off.”

Savas leaned forward. “And who is that?”

Hanert smiled. “What’s Batman say? ‘If you make yourself more than just a man’?”

“That was Ducard,” said Cohen. “And it’s a legend.”

“No fake geek girl here!” Hanert paused and looked between them. “Interesting. There’s some chemistry between you two! Tell me, gramps, you banging this one? You getting some? ’Cause she’s hot.”

“What legend?” asked Savas, his voice strained.

The prisoner’s smile fell. “Right now I should be asking for early parole or something. But honestly, I think this damn place might be safer than being on the outside from here on out.” He leaned forward, his expression serious for the first time. “You know why communism never worked?”

Savas blinked. “I don’t see what—”

“Because it’s based on perching society at the top of an unstable equilibrium. I mean, forget all that ‘give to those in need from what you have’ Marxist ivory tower bullshit. Sounds nice. Would be a good Sunday school lesson if people understood a fucking thing in the Bible. But it’s a god-damned local maxima!”

“I’m not following,” said Savas, who looked to Cohen. She was staring intently at Hanert.

“Jesus, don’t they teach even basic math to you special agents? How are you going to understand the economy or cybercrime? Look, for an economic system you want stability. Communism ain’t it, because all it takes is one person — a single fucking non-saint — to start being a selfish asshole and the whole thing collapses. Of course, usually you get groups of selfish assholes that form parties and blocks and structures to protect their power. But I digress. It’s inherently unstable! Like a car perched at the top of a hill. Release the brakes and zoom! That’s Anonymous.”

“How’s that?” asked Cohen.

“It’s a leaderless, structureless anarchy. That’s nice for flexibility and isolating different cells when you Feds come knocking. But its weakness is in the Selfish Asshole. One person can assume control of it before it can be stopped. This new real Anonymous of live televised massacre notoriety. And that person is Fawkes.”

“Fawkes?” asked Savas. “As in Guy Fawkes?”

Hanert slumped back in his chair. “Yeah. I mean who takes that handle? Mt. Everest ego. But this wacko was like Mozart. He could play the hell out of the code.”

Savas shook his head. “You’re telling me that there is a single individual — this Fawkes — who is responsible for what is happening? I don’t believe you.”

“Look man, I don’t care what you believe.”

Savas continued. “Who is he, then?”

“Hell if I know. It’s not like we all got around and passed the hash pipe. It’s called Anonymous for a reason, you know.”

Cohen pressed. “Doesn’t this Fawkes need other members of Anonymous to help? An infrastructure? You can’t orchestrate multiple bombings, kidnappings, and hackings without money and people. A small army.”

“No doubt.”

“And so?”

“So, it isn’t Anonymous. None of the main players anyway.”

“And how would you know that?” asked Savas.

Hanert smirked. “I have my ways of knowing. Even in here. Believe me when I tell you that the main hacker groups aren’t involved. It’s a ridiculous idea, anyway. They aren’t terrorists. Most wouldn’t know which way to point a fucking gun.”

“I want contact information on all of these groups. How can we find them?”

“Fuck you, man.”

Cohen spoke. “Hanert, one of them might know something that can lead us to this Fawkes. We’re not interested in them right now. They may have broken one hundred federal statutes, but in the larger context that’s background noise. You can see how serious this is. You know about the worm, I assume?”

He nodded. “Yeah. We all do now.”

“Then you know what’s at stake. Please. You have to trust us. And we need to trust you to tell us what we need to know. Anonymous was about changing a corrupt system. But right now the entire system is about to be blown up.”

“That’s Fawkes. His conclusion. Some agreed with him.”

“Do you?” Cohen locked eyes with him.

“No. Far more damage than gain. We could go back to the Stone Age.”

“Then you’ll give us names?” asked Savas.

Hanert looked at him and back to Cohen. “Yeah, but only because she’s so damn pretty. I wouldn’t give grandfather here jack.”

“Go to hell, Hanert,” said Savas.

The hacker smiled and tapped his index finger repeatedly, nail to vinyl on the short shelf between him and the glass. “I said we didn’t know each other. That was mostly true. But there’s online and there’s the real world. Some of us did pass the hash pipe. Maybe more.”

Cohen tapped on her tablet and looked up. “Well, I’m ready when you are.”

27

Cohen sped down I-87 toward New York City, the black Dodge Charger clearing one hundred without seeming to break a sweat. She glanced from the speedometer over to the impressive LCD screen flashing information on the cellular signal as Savas continued to speak through the hands-free system. The hidden flashing lights had been activated, but she had left the siren off — she'd have a migraine by the time they entered the City otherwise.

"Several of the prints returned with hits." It was Miller's voice. "They're all over the place — security firms, prison guards. One was ex-military, then worked for a contractor that provided muscle in Iraq and Syria for VIPs."

"I'm smelling mercenary," said Savas, his expression grim.

"Possible. But it's not very helpful. No recent addresses. We’ll fish with relatives and last known residences, but—"

"But we don't have the time for that. What else?"

"The mask was better."

"How so?"

"Hair. They got DNA sequence — likely the mask ripped out some strands with roots."

"A match?"

"No, and that’s the interesting part. Doesn't match the prints. The DNA sequence is an unknown. But some genotyping gives us a first sketch of the leader: Caucasian male, brown eyes, black hair that matched the hair color found, so a good control."

"Fawkes," whispered Cohen, staring ahead at the blurred road. The dash display flickered oddly. She hoped that she wasn’t pushing the car too hard.

"Sorry?" asked Miller.

Savas answered. "We'll fill you in soon, Frank. Thanks. I'm getting an alert of an incoming call from Angel. We'll get more details in an hour when we arrive."

"Right. Out for now."

The connection was severed and Savas punched the touch screen on the dash to take the call from Lightfoote.

"Shoot, Angel."

"John, pull the damn car over!"

"Sorry — repeat that, Angel?"

The dash screen pixelated and froze. Cohen spoke coldly.

“John, the steering wheel is locked.”

Lightfoote’s voice still came in over the speakers. “The worm! You’re on a system with an online connection. Your car cell is tracked. Worm activity lit up on my monitors and it’s you two!”

Savas felt his stomach clench. “The car?”

Cohen gasped. “Oh God.”

Savas didn’t have to see the needle on the speedometer begin to spin clockwise, he could feel the acceleration in his gut. Cohen frantically stomped on the break.

“Nothing’s responding!”

The speed climbed toward one-hundred and twenty. Cohen flipped the switch to engage the sirens. They were not part of the car’s system, installed independently, and they blared out. Cars in front began to swerve to the side as the blue and red lights bore down on them.

“Disconnect the motherboard!” came Lightfoote’s voice. “Under the steering wheel, wires lead to the circuitry. Yank them! You’ll get manual, maybe. Or the car will shut down. I don’t know! But disconnect, now!”

There was a loud pop from the speakers. The control panel went dark.

“Angel?” called Savas. There was no response.

“No time, John. Connection’s severed. Do what she said. Get over here.”

The car shuddered and Cohen gasped. Her hands were white with pressure and her shoulders hunched as she struggled with the wheel.

“John, hurry! It’s trying to turn!”

Turn? At that speed, they’d flip over and roll to their deaths.

There was no time for finesse. He removed his sidearm and fired several shots into the casing of the dash near Cohen’s legs. He saw her flinch as the plastic exploded only inches from her knees. His ears rang. He released his seatbelt and fell onto his back toward the driver’s seat. His feet worked their way up the window and he pushed himself between the steering wheel and the floor board, body crushed into the tight space.

“One forty! It keeps trying to turn! John, hurry!”

Jesus. Grasping the smoking and shattered plastic, he ripped with all his strength. Toxic fumes from melted insulation choked him, but he reached in and grasped elements of the circuitry and wires, praying that he wouldn’t electrocute himself.

Cohen screamed and he felt the car lurch back and forth and barely remain under her control. He felt sick from the motion and stench, but forced himself to focus. He ripped backward from the electronics, snapping wires and yanking pieces of the computer boards out with them, static pops exploding beside his face.

The car stalled.

“John, no control. No brakes, no wheel. Key is locked! I can’t start it!”

“Is the computer control dead?”

“I don’t know!”

Ahead of them construction arrows indicated a merge of traffic. Cohen could see a small bottleneck approaching and a single-file line of cars. The car continued to slow down, but it wouldn’t be enough.

“John, hotwire it. Now. Construction!”

“Shit! Can you hotwire these cars?”

“Try!”

In his wild efforts to disconnect the computers of the dash, he had smashed part of the paneling around the steering column. He reached up and beat on the loosed parts, crushing several elements and the ignition cover. By now his hands were bloody, but he hardly noticed, running on pure adrenaline.

Three wire pairs. “Battery, lights, ignition,” he spoke numbly as his slick fingers worked to strip the wiring, bring the leads to this mouth where his teeth ripped at the insulation.

“John, now!”

He didn’t have time to figure it. He’d have to guess. He grasped two wires which he prayed were the power to the car. He disconnected them from the cylinder, twisting them together.

Cohen cried out. “We’ve got the dash and lights. Start it, John!”

He took the two remaining wires and touched them together. There was a spark and the engine roared. Cohen slammed on the brakes and steered the Charger. The car shuddered and leapt into the air. From his vantage point he could see nothing, only imagining her veering away from the obstacles ahead and likely off road. If the shoulder was not forgiving, they were likely dead.

A machine gun sound beside his ear announced the engagement of the antilock brakes, and the car began to spin. Cohen screamed. They wrenched sideways, glass shattered, and everything went dark.

28

“John, can you hear me?”

A woman’s voice. Probably his mother’s.

He was at the seaside. A strong wind was blowing, waves crashing, muffling sound. No, he was in the water, floating on his back, incoming waves smashing against him, up and down, right and left. Dizzy.

His whole body hurt.

“John?”

“Please, ma’am.” A male. “You shouldn’t even be here.” That would be dad.

Sirens. Why were there sirens at the sea?

Another jolt and his eyes opened. He was staring up at a ceiling, a blurry sphere above him condensing slowly into a fluid-filled bag. A tube ran from it to his right arm. Across from him was a shape on a gurney. A woman with brown hair. Her leg was immobilized with a metal shell of some kind. Blood soaked bandages on her head and shoulder.

“Rebecca.”

He tried to sit up but found himself unable to move.

“Hold still, Captain Overlord,” came the woman’s voice again. “You’re strapped down or you would have bounced all over the place. Highway infrastructure deterioration and all that.”

“Angel?” he turned his head painfully to the side. The motion was restricted and stiff. There was something fitted around his neck.

“Rebecca’s banged up but she’s okay. Well, broken leg, I think. Maybe a concussion. We’re inbound to the hospital and will be there in twenty if the traffic opens some. Frank will meet us there. I was lucky to catch a ride. Not policy you know, but with the world going to shit the plumbers get some perks.”

Savas looked down at his body on the gurney. A few bandages. Ripped clothing. Otherwise, he seemed to have escaped any serious injury. He let himself settle back into the padding of the gurney. He closed his eyes. “What the hell happened?”

“You don’t remember?”

“They hacked the damn car. Nearly killed us. We spun out and crashed.”

“That’s about it,” she said. “You were lucky she steered into a row of construction barriers and attenuators. Course you were going nearly seventy at that point, so it was still a mess.”

“Yeah, that part I don’t remember.”

“Frank and I followed the last known GPS pinging from your car and alerted local emergency responders. We got up here as they were extracting you from the car. A really twisted cage you two were stuck in.”

“Jesus.” He looked toward Lightfoote, her bald and pierced image surreal in the sounds of the siren. “And the worm?”

She smiled. “Well, it was likely not your plan, but that act of crazy on the highway may be a breakthrough.”

“How?”

“The worm in the car’s system — it never got a chance to go into hiding again, to erase itself from memory and go latent. Bang, you cut the power and froze everything in place. We’ve got a crew extracting the computer elements from the Charger. We might get lucky.”

“What does latent mean?” He just wanted to sleep.

“It’s like Herpes.”

“Herpes.”

“Yes. Cold sores come out every now and then. Not from new virus you get exposed to, but from virus hiding out in your cells. The genetic material is dormant, latent. Waiting to be activated. Usually for herpes it’s stress of some kind. For the worm — well, we don’t know all the things that might wake it. But the programmers have established some flags. Apparently investigating Anonymous members like Hanert was one of them.”

“Wake it up?”

“Well, not really wake. It’s not sleeping. That’s just scientific vernacular. For viruses, there are proteins that react to signals or stresses and then go and start making the virus again from the genetic code hiding out in the cells. That’s waking up.”

“Uh-huh.”

“For the worm, the signals are detected by smaller pieces of code floating about, placed there by the initial infection, and they wake up the worm, which then assembles, like the parts of a mature virus particle, from various pieces of code across the net.”

This would have given him a headache on a good day. Now it was torture.

She continued. “Usually, after that, the worm disintegrates, so the active, fully functional copy is lost, and the encrypted genome hides out latent. That’s the problem getting at it. I couldn’t get my hands on anything functional. Until now. Just maybe your automotive catastrophe trapped our little monster in a cage.”

“So you can study it.” His voice was hoarse.

“It’s going to be tricky. As soon as I try to connect a live computer with functioning operating system to the thing, the worm is going to try and go active. Like melting the ice off The Thing. Look out. I’ve got to prevent that, prevent it from taking over whatever system I’m using to study it. And prevent it from erasing itself before I can look inside.”

“Can you?”

Lightfoote stared into space. “I don’t know.” She turned her intense eyes on Savas. “But I’m going to try.”

He was beginning to drift off. He fought the currents dragging him under.

“Lopez, I mean Gabriel and Mary. Have you heard anything?”

Lightfoote shook her head. “They’ve gone dark since we gave them the keys to the databases. My guess is they’re prepping.”

He nodded. “How’s the world doing?”

“A few days of martial law sure has an effect on a town. It’s like some apocalyptic thriller. But no zombies, sadly. The worm’s been quiet since the massacre. Well, quiet is a relative word. It’s still spreading, penetrating more and more systems. No one has a solution to that yet. But so far no direct attacks. No other mischief.”

Her voice seemed to fade. He was staring up a deep well, trying to communicate. “That’s good. That’s good.”

“But I think everyone knows it’s a calm before the next storm. Someone has a grand scheme. Phase one is done. Phase two will be worse, I bet.”

She looked down at Savas, but he was already back under. Her hand found his. “Goodnight, John. Rest up. We’re going to need it.”

29

A lanky adolescent male slouched in a baroque chair, the office around him out of a seventeenth century painting. He sported shoulder length black hair and rumbled denim attire, square prescription sunglasses masking his eyes. Across from him a young woman with a shawl over her bare shoulders scribbled notes and nodded her head. The boy hardly looked at her.

“I will have to submit my evaluation next week, Tony,” she said.

“That’s not my name.”

The woman nodded. “And I will continue to use it as per the juvenile privacy laws. Tony. I will not know your real identity. We protect those under custody.”

“Jesus Christ. How long do we play this game?”

The therapist sighed. “You do want me to write you a good report, I assume? You want to go home?”

“Home? You’ve got to be kidding. Don’t you read the files they send you?”

“Foster home. You ran away from home and your mother is a recovering alcoholic. Yes, I know. I meant, don’t you want out of here?”

The boy completely repositioned his frame in the chair, whipping a leg across the other and folding his arms across his chest.

“It doesn’t matter. I’ll be out very soon no matter what you write. I’ve made sure of it.”

“Hacking the city council’s computers is a serious offense. Hasn’t this experience humbled you at all?”

The boy laughed. “It was an experiment. Not for the hack. That was all too easy. For the effects. Learned a lot about cybercrime investigations and protocol. I’ll follow up on the outside. But I’ve gotten all the data I can from this, so there isn’t much of point in continuing here. And, you know, what I found on their servers was a thousand times worse than anything I’ve done. And they know it. I squirreled it all away where they can’t touch it. They’re not going to fuck with me.”

The woman stopped writing. “I’m worried about you, Tony. You manifest a collection of antisocial behaviors and extreme, nearly delusional idealizations.”

“Don’t forget boundary issues. I think you still show too much cleavage for a doc. Go with the more discrete pushups from Victoria’s. I like small and well-made. You don’t have to look like you have implants, you know.”

The woman buttoned the top of her blouse and angled her body to the boy. “Yes, that is what I mean. You are alienating. Hostile. Even to those you know mean you well. Psych profiles place you in the top percentiles for intelligence. If you would have cooperated on the examinations we could have placed you more accurately. But you don’t use that intelligence wisely. You purposefully lash out and degrade those around you.”

“Or, you could just be more honest and say that people want to maintain the facade of comfortable lies and masks they use. Jesus, don’t you all get tired of it? Or is it that you’re all just so fucking scared all the time? Fuck all your boxes. Fuck all your strata and rules and cages. Look at you! Borderline anorexic, overly made-up, over-slutted, and probably thinking to get a boob job. Honestly, did you sign up for this shit when God handed out the double X’s?”

The woman looked away from him. “Is that why the girl left you? Did you treat her like this?”

The boy turned to face her for the first time. “Seriously? You know my fuck-buddies? Is that why they picked you?”

“We receive detailed dossiers on our patients. Personal relationships are often part of that. All anonymous. We try to understand and we need backgrounds to see the big picture.”

He laughed, throwing his head back. “You lying motherfuckers. You’re a goddamned Fed! I should have known it. All this therapy for juvenile offenders! You’re profiling me!”

The woman froze slack-jawed, but said nothing.

“I can’t believe I didn’t see through it sooner. I guess they picked you for that. I kinda trusted you. It was like instinct. All those pheromones and those boobs and the neural pathways — zap! They fuck you up. You really want to know? Zap! That’s what the girl was. Lots of research you can read online. It’s like heroin, you know? Same brain pathways. Same high. Same addiction and withdrawal. Except it also plugs into all these emotional pathways. So it’s a hundred times worse than heroin. Hormones and receptors and neural pathways designed over ten million years to get chunks of meat to fuck and make more chunks of meat.”

The woman paled and pulled back slightly in her chair.

“These thoughts, Tony, I am concerned—”

“You are concerned,” he barked, chuckling. “You don’t give a fuck except for what kind of checklist of personality traits you can enter into a database for your puppet masters. Fingerprints, blood type, you likely got my DNA. Now it’s gonna be some kind of brain-print. You need a pattern, profiles, data for the algorithms to train on. Not really there yet, are you, though? But let me help. I can tell you all about our relationship.” He leaned forward toward the woman. “I think you like talking about sex. I think it arouses you.” He held his face steady in front of hers. “Maybe that’s why you do this.”

The woman licked her lips.

The teen pivoted his body again and looked away from her. “Anyway, that fucking girl. I can tell you, heaven and hell, love and loss. All that. Damn, that panic. Lost, lost, lost.” He replaced his glasses. “But that’s the withdrawal. You’re sick, all the hormones fucked to hell. Then, you finally come out of it. Then you see. You finally know the truth.”

“Which is?” Her voice was hoarse and dry

“That there is no love. No destiny. No meaning to these stupid feelings. That’s the delusional thinking, doc. Then you understand that emotion is the problem.”

She shook her head vigorously. “Don't you see, Tony? This is just another form of extreme idealization. You went from an extreme belief in transcendent love to an extreme disbelief in all love, a rejection of all meaning in human emotion.”

His voice turned cold. “Look, dogs love us. Cats nurture their young. Birds have emotions. The only thing that distinguishes us from the rest of the animals is a small first step in abstract thought. That’s it. With emotion, we’re puppets to our dicks, our ovaries, some asshole with a shiny car or a promise that you’ll live forever. Cut the emotion! Engage the fucking homunculus.”

He stood up and pressed his jacket flat, buttoning it closed.

“We’re done here,” he said. “You go write your report. Like I said, they’re not going to do anything with me. They wouldn’t dare. File it. It won’t matter. In ten years, it won’t even exist.”

The woman’s eyebrows arched upward, but he didn’t pause to consider her confusion. With confident steps, he walked to the door of the office and left.

30

It was one of the largest water filtration plants in the United States. Twelve acres, drilled through bedrock to a depth of over four stories in the Bronx’s Van Cortlandt Park, it sat over one of the main supply lines feeding water from the Croton Reservoir into New York City. Water flowed from the force of gravity upstate through two eight-thousand-foot-long tunnels into the plant, where particulates were removed, solids dewatered by centrifuges, and the filtered water disinfected with ultraviolet light and chlorine. Chemical alterations were then made to control corrosion and add fluoride.

The entire process utilized several networked controllers, twelve workstations, five separate operator interfaces and numerous ‘intelligent’ devices, including flow-meters, pressure and temperature sensors, transmitters, and automated chlorination analyzers. Everything was networked, highly modernized, automatic, and requiring far less human oversight than anything else like it ever produced.

On the evening of October 27^th, the first sign of problems was detected by a skeleton crew manning the equipment to analyze the quality of the final water to leave the facility. A young woman with Indian features and lush black hair gazed at the readings from a dilapidated sensor, a relic from the early testing of the computer systems. Her body was tense, the white of her lab coat contrasting with the deep caramel of her skin. The readings from the other sensors were normal. She felt that she shouldn’t care about this artifact of older tech, one that management had never given the order to remove. While it had never acted up before, common sense told you that someday it would fail. It shouldn’t bother her when all else appeared normal.

But it did. She spoke into a mobile phone.

“No, Larry. Everything reports nominal. It’s only the older ovation monitor. It’s screaming on the chlorine and fluorine levels. Look, I didn’t want to get you out of bed for this. Probably just the old unit has finally gone senile on us.”

There was a pause in her speech as she listened intently. “No, really, no need to come in. Look, I know your close, it’s just I…Okay. All right. Fine. I’m happy just to log it, but if you want…Okay. Yeah, I’ll call the chemists on three.”

She walked up to the bank of computer monitors to check once more the readings from the chemical sensors. Satisfied that all was within normal parameters, she sat down to open a video call with the staff upstairs.

“What the hell?”

The computer was unresponsive. She moved to a nearby terminal, but it too had completely locked up. The unease that had buzzed in the background of her mind at the anomalous readings came much more strongly to the fore. Is there a computer problem? In all the years she had worked here, there had never been a glitch affecting more than one unit. Multiple computers down alongside the dangerous readings coming from the other unit — she whipped out her cell phone and called the upstairs number directly.

“This is Deepta from Analysis. Look, are you guys having any computer problems?” Her brow furrowed and she listened. “Yeah, me too. Look, I need to ask you a favor. I’m getting some ridiculous readings on an older sensor. It’s not networked with the others; it’s probably just failing. But all this has me nervous. Is there a way you can monitor your additive levels? Yeah? Sure, I’ll wait. I’ll put you on speaker while I recheck that damn unit.”

She pressed a button on the mobile phone as she walked to the far wall and crouched in front of the older equipment again.

A voice erupted with distortion from the small speaker of the phone. “Okay, Deepta. Give us a few minutes here. There is a panel of sensors directly on the additive pipes. They should be read by the main software — and all that looks good — but they also display the values on the sensor units themselves. We can read them off directly. Hang on.”

“I’ll be right here.”

She shook her head. The anomalous readings had not normalized. In fact, they were shooting up. It was like they were unloading their entire store of toxic chemicals into the New York City drinking water!

The door to the operations center burst open. A middle-aged man with a crop of silver hair dashed into the room. He was roughly dressed, clothes obviously thrown on in a hurry, hair uncombed. He rushed straight to the computer monitors as he put on his glasses.

“Mike, wait that’s no good. There—”

“Deepta! What the hell’s wrong with the interface?”

“It’s down! I’m trying to tell you. All the machines! And not only here, but on other floors.”

“But the software’s still running. I just can’t access anything. God, we’ll have to reboot everything!”

“Mike, come look at these readings.” Her superior shuffled over and bent down to examine the older unit. “Please tell me this is malfunctioning.”

His face paled. “I grew up on these things, Deepta. When they fail, they don’t give readings like this. The checks are too thorough in the logic. This is not failure behavior. We need to find out what’s going on with the treatment chemicals.”

“Right. I’m on the line with—”

The phone popped. “Deepta? Mike? This is Herman Richards upstairs. We have several people double-checking, but you aberrant sensor is not, I repeat not malfunctioning. Our pipe sensors are screaming. The valves are completely open. We’re dumping everything into the supply!”

“Can you shut things down from there?”

“So far no! All computer control is locked. We can’t get into the system. We’re force rebooting a few to see if that clears the problem. Meanwhile we’re poisoning the water supply for millions in the city! We’ve got to get a public health message out. Get this on the news. Something!”

“Calm down! We follow protocol. Deepta, get the manual open and let’s go by the book on this.”

“We went paperless three months ago, Mike. The hardcopies were recycled.”

“Jesus!” He shook his head. “Then go from memory! Meanwhile, we’ve got to shut it down before too much gets out there.”

The voice on the phone sounded panicked. “I know! What if we can’t?”

“Then we’re going to have a hell of a lot of sick people come tomorrow.”

SAVAS Deposition 2

31

A heavy cold front had rolled in a thick layer of clouds, and the evening was without moon or starlight. Lopez and Houston lay prone at the top of a small hill overlooking a factory. Inside, thousands of drone unmanned aerial vehicles were assembled for governmental and civilian buyers, loaded at a wide dock, to be shipped across the country. The factory was isolated in a relatively undeveloped region in New Jersey east of Newark, nestled in a minor valley. The small facility was surrounded by tall fences and wire, imaged by numerous cameras, and protected by a small crew of five security guards at several stations scattered around the compound.

The two fugitives wore dark clothing and gazed down through night vision scopes mounted on rifles. Houston pulled her head back from the lens and whispered.

“I think we’ve got shots at three guards from here.”

“Should be four,” grumbled Lopez. “The info is outdated, so our guard count is wrong. Other things could be off.”

“You didn’t expect a briefing from them, did you?” she smirked. “Three down is a big win. I doubt they’ll have added many more guards. Maybe one is out to piss.”

“Things could get messy. These guys are naive hires. They don’t deserve a grave for this gig.”

Houston sighed. “So we’ll do our best, Francisco. Right now the big game is threatening many more lives. Even theirs.”

“I know. So, let’s bring them down. One should do it. Two for sure with plenty of margin for safety on the overdose.”

They bent to the rifles, aiming down the hillside. The sounds were soft, muffled expulsions of pressured gas. Each of the guards jerked when hit, twitching again from a second impact. Within seconds, each fell to the ground, unmoving.

Houston pressed a button on her wristwatch. “Clocks running.”

Lopez donned a ski-mask and they sprinted down the hill, arriving at a central transformer near the fence line. Houston removed a small pack, placed it on the metal casing with a clang as the magnet took. They dashed away from the location as a red light blinked on and off behind them, putting several hundred feet between themselves and the pack when it blew. A small explosion lit the dark night orange with a shower of sparks. The facility lost power, and they quickly cut through the fence and raced toward the central office building.

The structure was the size of a residential home, lined with corporate dark glass, dwarfed by the manufacturing buildings and warehouses around it. They passed two guards on their way in. Large darts in their thighs left them unconscious, drugged. As they neared the entrance, the door opened and two figures stepped out.

The two guards were disoriented, the blast and light drawing their attention. The blurred motion of their assailants was glimpsed too late, part of a distraction of violence and prone figures, two shadows blending into the night.

The intruders engaged without weapons. In a flurry of hands and feet, the guards were disarmed, their weapons sent flying, sudden blows to the abdomen and head stunning them. Before they could even cry out, both were down, unconscious in front of the doors of the office. Lopez emptied the guards’ weapons, slinging the ammunition into the night. Removing wires from their belts, the two shadows secured the guards, tying their arms and roping their ankles together. Duct tape sealed their mouths. Houston grabbed a keycard from one of the men and tried it on the front door. It opened.

“Emergency power’s up,” Lopez noted.

They headed inside. Weak illumination spilled from corners in the room and green lights from some of the older cameras.

“Smile pretty. Just keep your mask on,” said Houston.

Passing the reception desk and moving down a hallway, they stopped in front of a door labeled ‘Records.’ An alphanumeric keypad was embedded in the door beside the handle.

“I don’t recall any of the files mentioning a code for this, do you?” she asked. Lopez shook his head. “Didn’t think so. Hinges?”

Lopez reached behind his back and unslung a short-barreled pump-action shotgun. Houston stepped backward as he aimed. He fired blasts near the top, middle, and bottom of the door across from the handle. Wood splintered and metallic fragments rained around them. He spun and kicked the door inward, the wood hanging to the frame weakly from the keypad and lock mechanism, then ripping free and thudding to the floor.

Inside were a set of computers and floor to ceiling filing cabinets. They moved quickly.

“Grab all the hard drives,” said Houston, pulling out what looked like a large pocketbook. She unzipped the leather and removed several tools. “We’ll deal with them later. I’m going to go for paper.”

Lopez knelt down and pulled the chassis off one of the computers. “That wasn’t part of the plan.”

Houston went to work with several microtools on the locks of the cabinets. “Neither was the fact that they still had paper records.”

“The disks will be fast! It will take you forever to get the records.”

“We’ve got twenty minutes. A little more if they’re out for donuts.”

The shell popped off one of the units as Lopez reached inside to disconnect the wires to the hard drive. “Cutting it close, Sara!”

There was a click, and the large cabinet door was slung open. Houston shone a small flashlight on the folders and began scanning their content. “Paper, Francisco. No bytes. No worms. No worries. I’ll be done before you.”

Grunting, he dropped one drive into a bag and moved to the next computer. Within ten minutes, Lopez had removed all the drives and placed them in the bag. Houston called him over, showing him regions in three cabinets where purchase orders over the last six months were filed.

“That’s three full boxes!”

“So, a transport!” she said, pointing to the far end of the narrow room.

Lopez rushed over and wheeled a wobbly cart to her side. Together they hefted three large boxes full of files onto the slight metal surface.

“This is definitely not my idea of stealth. I hope this doesn’t collapse.”

They sped out of the building as fast as possible, Houston with one hand stabilizing the boxes, Lopez pushing the cart from behind as they navigated prone bodies, ramps, and the sharp rise of the hill. They were forced to remove the boxes and fit them through the hole in the fence one by one, bringing the cart awkwardly through at the end.

“It’s no good. We can’t get that thing up the hill,” said Lopez.

“Okay, bring the car around. Tape the plate, but we’ll have to lose it tonight.”

He nodded and sprinted up the hill. Houston waited in the cold night air, her fogged breaths coming quickly. She heard the engine cough.

Lopez rounded the corner of the hill and braked hard beside her, popping the trunk. They worked quickly, flinging the boxes in, the car bouncing with each impact. Houston slammed the trunk and ran to the passenger side, Lopez already seated. He gunned the engine.

Red and blue lights flickered in the distance, reflecting off the low lying clouds.

“Wait, Francisco! We’ll need a back road. Listen!”

Sirens. The police were converging on their position from the main route. Lopez spun the car in a one-eighty and tore down the road in the opposite direction.

He laughed ruefully. “Well, this sure feels familiar."

SAVAS Deposition 3

32

A misting rain partially solubilized the grime on the gray Ford Taurus that pulled alongside a nondescript brick warehouse in Long Island City. Lopez and Houston exited, both dressed in dark trench coats and shades. Passing underneath the “Your Storage!” sign and the security cameras, they entered the small business.

The office was more a glorified hallway outfitted with a narrow countertop and secretarial equipment on the right side. Behind the counter was a receptionist, a slight African American woman, with thick glasses and makeup obscuring much of her face. She spoke into a microphone on a headpiece as she motioned for them to sit. Houston turned to look behind her at a small and uncomfortable looking bench. She shook her head at Lopez.

Reaching over the counter, Lopez removed the headset in one quick motion, tossing it to the side. The receptionist looked stunned.

“Hey! Just what do you think you’re doing?”

Houston placed a hundred dollar bill on the counter. “We’d like to purchase the expedited service.”

“The expedited…?”

“Just get your manager out here now and you’ll get another one.”

Grabbing the bill in her hand, she stood up slowly, her eyes ludicrously exaggerated in the strong lenses, her bright purple eyeshadow giving her features a slightly alien quality. “Just a second.” She stepped out from behind the counter and clicked to the end of the room in impossible heels. She opened a flimsy door. “Hey, Ryan. A man and a woman need to speak with you.”

“What do I pay you for, bitch? You deal with it!”

The receptionist startled as Houston handed her another hundred. “Go on back to the call. We’ve got it from here.” The woman took the bill and scampered away.

Lopez opened the door and stepped into a crowded room. Likely an addition to the hallway, the walls were a temporary attachment, the flooring added over part of the cement below it. He canvassed the ceiling and corners, the desk surface and walls. There were no cameras.

A bald man sat over a terminal and flashed them a puzzled expression.

“Who the hell are you?”

He gasped as Houston pointed her Browning at him. Lopez closed the door.

“We’re the ones with the guns. Don’t scream. Keep your hands over the desk.”

“Oh God, oh God, oh God. Please. Take what you want. I have a safe, there!”

“Shut up,” said Houston, ignoring his gesture. “I’m going to ask you a few questions. You are going to answer them truthfully and quickly. Or I’ll let my partner deal with you.” Lopez held a hunting knife in his hand.

The man swallowed, struggling to speak. “Yes.”

“So, Ryan,” she began. “What do you do here?”

“We, ah, store things.”

“What things?”

“We don’t ask. It’s like a remailing service. People ship here, we get another address for the item, and ship it there. Keeps buyers and sellers separate. Anonymous.”

“Anonymous?” said Lopez.

The man stared at the knife, terrified. “Yeah. Private. That’s why we don’t ask what’s in the boxes. It’s all perfectly legal.”

“So you don’t know where the boxes come from. How do you know where to send them?”

“Paired codes. The sender has a code that has to match the buyer’s code before we ship to the buyer’s address. They get those from whatever exchanges they make their deals on. That way nothing can be traced.”

“But you put the items in the mail. In their original boxes?”

“Oh, yes. We never open a box.”

“Then you must know the weight of the items. For postage.”

He nodded. “Yes.”

“And you have records of that?” Houston asked.

“Of course. That’s our main expense. Why are you asking this?”

“The people with guns ask the questions, Ryan.”

The man shrank into his chair. Houston removed a set of folded papers from inside her coat and looked them over. As the seconds ticked by the manager began to sweat. Beads of perspiration dripped down his forehead, and his underarms stained.

Houston grabbed a pen and circled several regions on the paper. “Ryan, I need you to find shipments that match these weight specifications.”

“Now?”

“Yes, now.”

The manager typed furiously on his computer keyboard. Within seconds, his face relaxed. “Yes, I have a bunch of them. Lots of orders match those specs exactly.”

“Where are they shipped to?”

“Um. That’s interesting. All shipped to the same place. Some address in Jersey.”

“We would like you to print out one of those records, Ryan, with the address.”

“Yeah, okay.” He clicked several times with his mouse. A small printer behind Houston whirred to life.

She grabbed the printout and stared at it. Nodding to Lopez, she grabbed the paper she had given the manager and then pocketed all of them. A wad of cash thudded on his desktop.

“You wouldn’t lie to us, would you, Ryan?”

He looked at the knife again. “No way.”

“We were never here, and you can enjoy the fee for this priority service.” The man nodded dumbly, taking the money. “But this is a discrete service, right?” She glanced at Lopez, who twirled the knife slowly, staring at the serrated edges. “There isn’t going to be any need for us to come back and register a complaint that our privacy has been violated, is there?”

Again the man swallowed. “No. I never saw you.”

“That’s good,” she said smiling, opening the door.

Lopez sheathed the knife. “It was a pleasure doing business with you.”

33

“You sure you’re up to this, John?”

Savas shifted his position in the car once again. It didn’t help. He was bruised all over his body, several lacerations still quite painful to the touch. He stared at Miller and ground his teeth. Of course he was up to it.

“Frank, I’d have to lose a leg or worse to have an excuse not to be on the ground in this crisis. Are you going to tell me otherwise?”

“You are literally the boss, so okay.” The ex-Marine continued to focus ahead as he drove. “And Rebecca?”

“Tibia was snapped. Soft tissue damage from the bone as well. It’s set, she’s stitched up. But it’s going to be a serious cast and crutches for a couple months. She’ll heal. She’s tough.”

Miller nodded. “It always seems to get personal with us, doesn’t it?”

Images of a gray-haired man swept through Savas’ mind. They came with explosions and collapsing buildings, a sniper round buried in the shoulder of the man driving next to him. A massacre of an FBI division. A threat to Rebecca’s life.

“Yeah, and I’m getting kinda tired of it.”

“We sure know how to make friends.” Miller’s smiled faded as they pulled alongside a black van in an abandoned parking lot. “Don’t think this club is going to be very taken with us today. I hope this intel is worth it.”

“Highest level contact in Anonymous we have. Rebecca seems to trust him. Let’s see if she’s right.”

A commuter train rumbled overhead along the Queens subway line. Nestled underneath, a rusted warehouse waited before them. Heavily armed FBI agents in body armor stepped out of the dark van and grouped around them.

Savas limped toward the group. “I’m sorry to pull you from every which division, but you know what we’re up against. FBI — now the damn Federal Bodyguard Institute.” The men laughed. “Thank you for coming on such short notice. We might already be too late, but we have to try. Police are inbound, but we’ll be without their backup for the dangerous parts. I’ll let our vet from Kabul fill you in.”

Miller stepped forward. “There was no time and no data to recon this right. I don’t know what we’ll find in there. Might well be empty. Might be an armed engagement with as many as ten hostiles. But if our intelligence is right, it’s going to be a bunch of hackers scared shitless about what’s going down. We don’t need them dead — understood? We need information. They need to be able to talk, and dead men don’t. Defend yourselves but keep a level head. We’ll go in through the main door with a volley of flash bangs and tear gas. Unless they’re trained militia, that ought to have most of them rolling on the ground crying for mommy. Bag them and into the van. Make sure you canvas the interior and clear it. We don’t want any surprises. Questions?”

“Yes, sir,” came a voice of a young blond to the right. “Is this Anonymous? Are these the guys?”

“We don’t know, but not likely. But we think they can get us to the real criminals. So remember—alive. Understood?”

The men nodded. Along with Savas and Miller, they donned gas masks. Savas drew his weapon. “Okay, boys, your show.”

The SWAT team filed off in a quick jog, splitting into two groups on either side of the door, weapons at the ready, quickly reaching the wall of the warehouse and using it as cover from the building windows. They slid along the sides, Miller and Savas at the far end of the lines. An officer nearest the door pulled slightly on the handle near the ground. The rollup door moved slightly, and he gave the thumbs up. Miller nodded, the other officers set, and the door was raised.

The men dashed inside and out of sight. Savas ran forward and could just discern the arc of canisters being lobbed in to the air and over a set of dark obstacles inside the building. The flash bangs flashed and banged. It was nearly stunning even from their position. Several canisters of tear gas filled the space inside with a cloud of burning vapor.

For a moment, there was no other sound. Then the screams began.

The SWAT team pulled out the last member of Anonymous just as their police backup finally arrived. They had never been in any danger. The disoriented and snot dripping youth that were dragged out of the warehouse were never going to put up any kind of a fight. Some of the SWAT team administered first aid to those who had suffered most from the chemicals and shock. It looked to Savas that the agents felt sorry for them.

The blond leader of the SWAT team came out of the warehouse, mask in hand.

“Secured?” asked Miller.

“Yeah,” he said, and coughed. “Most of the gas is gone. And you need to come and see this.”

Savas arched an eyebrow. “Right behind you.”

He led the special agents into the warehouse. The dark obstacles Savas had seen were revealed to be rows of computer hardware stacked six feet high in places. The SWAT officer zig-zagged through it like a maze and brought them to the center, a space occupied with several large monitors. And two decomposing bodies.

“Jesus, that ruins your lunch,” said Miller, scowling.

Savas stepped forward and stared at the bodies. Flies danced around the forms and maggots were slithering over the decayed faces. “They’ve been here a while. Likely rules out a killing by our friends.”

“Today, anyway,” said the SWAT officer.

“I doubt they’d have come back here,” said Miller. “Division in the ranks?”

Savas nodded. “Looks like a hacking bunker. I’d say these poor jerks pissed somebody off.”

“Fawkes,” said Miller. “He’s turning out to be one ruthless bastard.”

“Okay, let’s get a forensics team in here and see what we can find. My guess is the computers are all wiped. But we need to check them all. Meanwhile,” he said, turning toward the door, “I’ve got a few questions for our hogtied friends outside.”

He strode back out the door, Miller close behind. The members of Anonymous were placed in a circle in front of the FBI van facing outwards. Their eyes were red, faces flushed, one with bandages over his head. Groups of NYPD and SWAT officers mingled in haphazard groups around them. He stopped in front of the circle.

“I think you know that all of you are fucking screwed,” he began. “Basically anyone connected to Anonymous right now likely goes straight to jail without their $200. Not to mention, as you surely saw inside, the real problem is still out there on the loose turning you folks into corpses.”

He could tell the last remark struck a raw nerve as several bodies jerked and heads turned toward him. He hoped to God he could reach the sane part of someone in the group.

“Now, we have a global catastrophe looming. We know about the worm.” More heads turned. “We know about Fawkes. But we don’t know where he is or what the endgame is. But I think it’s clear it’s going to be ugly. As in civilization-ending ugly. We’re going to get you all back to lockup to question you there, but time is not our friend. So I’m going to give you the opportunity to talk right here, right now. Right now there’s no Miranda. There’s just me and you and getting us all out of this mess.”

“Fuck you, pigs!” yelled one of the group, a longhaired man across the circle. He spat at Savas.

“Anyone else? Anyone else with parents? Friends? Kids? Anyone who wants to help us stop this before it’s too late? Right now I couldn’t give a rat’s ass about you, your amateur cybercrimes, or the Anonymous Manifesto, or whatever you have. I need answers now! I need to stop this. Help me.”

There was only silence. Police red and blue flickered over them like washed out club lights, the setting sun beginning to dip below the taller buildings in midtown across the river. Officers in heavy gear shifted weight, the friction of thick Kevlar on rubber popping around them. Savas looked up into the sky with his hands on his hips. A crimson scab ran down the left side of his face.

“No one?” He shook his head and turned to the SWAT team. “Okay. Load them up. We’ll try again back home.”

“Wait!” A female voice. Savas turned to his right. A black-haired woman with deep black eyeliner stared back at him, the goth makeup running down her face as her eyes watered.

“Yes?”

“Shut up, Poison! Don’t make this personal!” said the longhaired man.

“Up yours, Protos. Fawkes is into some fucked up shit. Pig’s right. Somebody has to end this.”

Savas crouched down beside her, several agents stepping forward with weapons at the ready.

“You know Fawkes?”

She laughed. “Yeah, you might say. Better than all these losers here, anyway. Better than you Protos and your group of ass-wipes.”

“Fuck you, Poison. We’ll remember this.”

She laughed. “Remember this? You gonna remember Dave and Chen? Yeah? You don’t get it. He’s burning everything to the ground. Us, too! There ain’t gonna be nothing to remember, you dumb fuck!”

Savas tried to control his voice. “How do you know Fawkes? What can you tell me about him?”

She looked Savas in the eye and smiled. “What do you need to know? His favorite food? Fetishes? Size of his dick?”

Several members of Anonymous laughed. Some of the police officers smirked as well.

“Look, if you want to help, I need you to be serious. What can you tell me about his whereabouts? How do you know him?”

“Whereabouts? I don’t know jack. He’s too careful. But how do I know him? That I can tell you. I was his lover.”

“His lover?”

“Yeah, you know, Anonymous cock. Hackers do it through the back door. Fawkes’ fuck buddy. On top, underneath, sideways.” She angled her head to the side and ran her tongue over her teeth, leering at him. “Fucking yoga position. I was his right hand girl, you know what I mean? That answer your question?”

Savas stood up. “Yeah.”

“Then let them go, and I’ll tell you more than you want to know.”

34

Lightfoote and Poison were hitting it off charmingly.

Savas had agreed to release the other prisoners if and when she responded to their questions back in Manhattan. They had carted the entire crew back into the city, once again subjected to the delays and authority conflicts from the declaration of martial law. However, having claimed to have bagged key members of Anonymous opened the gates more quickly, and they soon had Poison isolated in an interrogation room. The rest were being held in lockup.

Poison was actually Tabitha Ivy, ‘Poison’ her own hacker handle used from the time she was fourteen. A quick database search revealed that she was now nineteen, a repeat offender having been busted for several hacks of corporate websites, having served nine months behind bars for one job on Pepsi. There was an additional list of minor infractions from possession to vandalizing a parking meter.

It was no wonder she hit it off so well with Angel.

“From what I can tell,” said Lightfoote, “about half the code is just to execute this biological like replication and camouflage system.” She sat next to Poison at the table, Savas and Miller across in a more standard adversarial position. “Another quarter is still just a black box. Finally about another quarter for ending the world as we know it.”

Poison sounded impressed. “How the hell did you get all that? We couldn’t even get near the thing.”

Lightfoote looked at the battered visage of Savas and smiled. “Mr. I-tried-to- shave-during-an-earthquake over there trapped a live worm for me.”

Poison’s eyes grew wide. “How the fuck did he do that? I’m surprised he can log into his own computer.”

“An unusual technique, but it worked. I have an activated worm trapped on a hard drive. The hardest part was dissecting it without it sending everything to hell and back. That’s when I thought, oh, VMS.”

“VMS? Like your great-grandfather’s OS?” The hacker looked confused.

“It’s 1970s stuff, for sure, but it kicks serious ass. It’s a hacker’s worst nightmare. Amazon uses it for shipping. Some stock exchanges. Pretty rare and pretty secure.”

“And the worm wasn’t designed to hack those machines?”

“Bingo!” Lightfoote beamed.

The two men stared at each other in confusion.

“I don’t get it,” said Miller.

Poison scowled at him as Lightfoote elaborated. “Fawkes found hacks into a bunch of the world’s computer operating systems: Microsoft, all the flavors of UNIX including Apple. The worm bundles all the tools to hit each of them. But he didn’t waste his time finding security holes in something so rare and hard to hack as VMS.”

Miller shrugged his shoulders. “And?”

“So it’s fucking immune, you thug,” spat Poison.

“Wait," said Savas. "So you could use it to look at the worm? The worm can't operate in this VMS machine?”

Lightfoote clapped her hands together. “Correct! But interfacing with the hard drive was a nightmare. We only had a few 1990s era VMS machines left around here. They weren’t designed to handle modern hard drives. I practically had to solder half the spare parts we owned, and cannibalize several perfectly functional computers, to rig something to read the data. Piece by piece. The older machine doesn’t have a lot of memory. But we’re doing it. JP is down there now with some of the rest of the unit. Active worm, but frozen on my lab table!”

“What else have you learned from it?”

Lightfoote’s face fell. “Nothing good. Names. Important names. Politicians. More CEOs. I think they’re targets.”

“Jesus, here we go,” said Miller.

“We need those names now, Angel,” said Savas.

“JP’s getting the list. But just wait. This is only one active worm, and every worm is different, remember? These were the names we were lucky to get. And we don’t have dates or other information. Just names.”

“There could be other targets?” asked Miller.

“Almost certainly. But there’s more. I don’t think the main course has even been served.”

“And that means?” asked Savas.

“That last 25 %. The really bad part? It does a lot of things. It infiltrates, copies, and reports out to address that are relays to relays: I can’t track them, but it’s pooling information somewhere, likely ending at his terminal. But the weird part is that this region always has empty space. In the code, nonsense. It’s filler. But no way this guy would write junk code. That code is something else. I think it’s a marker for new code. The virus is waiting for new command modules, something that is going to come down the road.”

“Why?” asked Savas. “Why not just hide it all around like the rest of the code?”

Lightfoote shook her head. “I don’t know.”

Poison rested her head on the table and spoke through a mumble. “Fawkes. It’s Fawkes. He’s paranoid. A total douche about it, too. Never get involved with a paranoid. Fucking misery.”

“What do you mean?” Savas asked her.

“It must be the kill shot,” she said, her eyes closed. “He’s too paranoid to ever trust his code. He thinks he can hack anything — that anything can be hacked. So he’s worried he’ll get hacked.”

Miller looked at Lightfoote and chuckled. “He was right.”

Poison’s eyes flashed open. “So, he’s saving the best for last, just in case.”

Lightfoote nodded. “Now I see. The relay system to the worm. He’s going to use it to upload a final code sequence.”

Poison slammed her hand on the table, causing the others to jump. “And then we're fucked. Once he sends that signal, it’s over. You can’t let him send that signal. You’ve got to stop him or the worm will carry out his final instructions.”

“And what might those be?” asked Savas.

“Who the hell knows?” said Poison, her arms out to her sides. “But seriously, Einstein, after all this shit, how do you think his kill shot is going to go down?”

Savas looked toward Lightfoote. “I hope you have some good news about stopping it.”

“Sorry, John — no. That’s a whole other story. But, I’ve sent out my little spies to find out as much as they can.”

“Little spies?” asked Miller.

Lightfoote beamed at Savas. “The virus I used to discover we’d been hacked? Well, I’m a few generations down the road with it and it’s spreading across the net. The worm gave me a few ideas of using NSA backdoors and we’re using them. They’re looking for worm activations and taking what snapshots they can, sending them back to me. Real time. You should come down and see the data. Like some war going on out there.”

Poison stared at her. “Beautiful.”

Miller held his hands up. “You’re infecting computers now? That makes us hackers, too?”

“You’re amateurs compared to the NSA,” said Poison. "As American as apple pie."

“Too true,” said Lightfoote. “But we’re not looking for stealth or long term stability. We’re going in full bore. But don’t worry, Frank. It’s a good virus. A pet virus. It’s on God’s side.” She smiled.

Miller stared incredulously at her. “Jesus. John? What do you say to this?”

Savas appeared not to have heard him. He stared intently at Poison, his eyes focused, seemingly both near and far away.

“John?”

He glanced toward Miller. “Yeah. I’ve green-lighted Angel’s shenanigans. Paying off, I’d say.” Then he turned back to the hacker. “You stopped seeing him?”

Poison frowned. “Fawkes? Yeah. Look, I told you, I don’t know his real identity. He only trusted me with his dick.”

“But you said he pursued you.”

“Jeez, yeah. And you know, when you have the world’s best hacker stalking you online, it’s a fucking nightmare. I spent months shaking him off. I mean, he said it was over, so get the fuck out of my life, right? I think he finally gave up.”

Savas held up a small cylinder. “Are you sure?”

She reached over and grabbed it from his hand. “What’s that?”

“GPS tracking device. An agent pulled it off your car at the warehouse. It’s not in our records. Not a model we use.” Savas stared intently at her. “Anyone else you think might be interested in following your every move?”

“Oh, Christ, that fuck!” She stared furiously at it.

“He likely knows you’re here by now.”

“Yeah, well, so what? He won’t be tracking me anymore.”

“He might try to get you out.”

Poison laughed. “You’re kidding right? Why would he do that?”

Miller leaned forward. “Because he’s obsessed with you. Maybe he thinks it’s love. But it’s obsession for sure.”

Savas nodded. “And that makes me wonder just what we’re going to do with you.”

Poison shook her head. “You really think he’ll come after me?”

Savas smiled for the first time. “I’m counting on it.”

35

A deep voice chanted in the darkness beside the candle flames.

“God of power and mercy, maker and lover of peace, to know you is to live, and to serve you is to reign.”

Houston observed the flickering light from a distance, giving Lopez space as he dressed. Body armor under vestments, belts and holsters for guns, magazines, knives, and grenades. All the while he chanted. She would never understand. He reached out to a God who had rejected him. He sang the song of a priest when the Church had cast him out. It was his way.

“Through the intercession of St. Michael, the archangel, be our protection in battle against all evil.”

Michael. The older Lopez brother. The man whose death had brought her together with Francisco. The man whose life had upturned theirs and so many others. The man whose actions had created a monster of terrible vengeance that had burned like acid through the Central Intelligence Agency. The wraith. A killer whose life ended before the barrel of the man before her.

Michael. An archangel. Like his brother, Gabriel.

“May our cause be just. May we have clear vision. May our courage not falter. May our efforts bring lasting peace. Should we perish in the struggle, may God embrace us and find for us a place in His Kingdom. Amen.”

Crossing himself in front of an icon of St. George slaying the dragon, he blew out the votives and turned toward her, his black cassock a flowing shroud over layers of death. She waited as he approached, a shadow herself in dark camouflage, an energy anticipating the coming violence burning within her.

Lopez spoke softly, staring into her eyes, black to blue. “Everything will depend on removing the sentries on the roof. Those snipers will pick us off if we try to enter. We’ll have to be fast and accurate. The diversion will buy us only moments.”

She smiled beneath the covering of the mask. “Amen.”

Lopez frowned. “Let’s hope our recon remains accurate, that they don’t change anything.”

“Lord hear our prayer.”

He watched her silently for a moment and then pulled down the fabric of the mask covering her mouth. He kissed her, lingering until they pulled away for breath.

“In case it’s the last kiss,” he said. “I want to make it count.”

She reached her hand up to his face and cupped his cheek. “Every mission you do that. And every time I want you to. Because one day, we won’t come back, Francisco.”

He nodded, turning with her toward the door. “But let it not be this night, O Lord.”

36

They called him simply Alpha. He was the point man, the de facto leader of this group of men wrapped around and above, guarding the warehouse. The building was a squat little thing, about half a city block. Isolated in the northern New Jersey countryside, it attracted little attention, was not easily accessed, and unregistered in any business directories. It was a ghost.

Like they were. All their real names were scrubbed. They adopted spy thriller handles. Former soldiers and contractors, all of them, hired secretively by a company many in his team began to suspect was involved in some of the attacks occurring around the country. That suspicion led some to leave. But most stayed. The company had done its homework. Like Alpha, most of them would point the gun for whoever paid them the most.

But tensions had escalated dramatically. Five additional guards had been added bringing the total to fifteen. Powers that be were getting rattled about what was inside the metallic walls of the structure. Alpha didn't know what was in there, and he didn't want to know. A few times each month, a small convoy of trucks would show up and pull into what he presumed was an enclosed loading dock, the doors closing and sealing off everything from view. Shortly afterward, the trucks would drive off, whether having unloaded or loaded a mystery that was not part of his job description. A job that paid ridiculous money for guard duty in the states. Iraq had been one thing, but Jersey? Retirement gig.

Until things started blowing up. Until more and more trucks had come. Until more former soldiers had been brought on to fortify a rural building like something in the green zone. Just the presence of that many guns raised the temperature.

"Main gate, clear," came a voice through static on his headset.

"Roger that."

It was Delta. There was only one way by vehicle into the building, through a gate lodged in the electrified fence, then down a broad, truck-friendly road to the loading dock. Three guards patrolled the gate, two at the dock entrance, four moving about the perimeter fence. Six took to the roof, four at the corners and two on the longer sides of the building. Those on the roof were trained snipers. Alpha was one of them, positioned at the front on the right-hand side facing the gate.

"Perimeter report."

Several voices spoke in order of established protocol. The roof snipers followed suit. The space was clear. As it was half an hour ago. As it was at dusk. As it was every night for the last six months that he had worked this job.

That's why when he spotted the headlights at the top of the hill in front of the gate, he didn't quite believe his eyes.

"Delta, check scheduled arrivals."

It looked like a smaller delivery truck, not the massive eighteen wheelers that they tended to get. He zoomed his night-vision goggles. The truck was nondescript, no insignia, the plate damaged and unreadable. The windows seemed opaque or blacked out. Something was wrong.

The vehicle began to accelerate down the hill. Alpha didn't hear the telltale sounds of torque in the engine, the changing pitch as the rpms increased. The steering was odd. His alarm bells were ringing

"Log's empty, Alpha. Nothing due until tomorrow afternoon."

He powered up his scope and set his transmission signal to maximum. "Unidentified vehicle approaching from the road. Treat as hostile. Repeat, treat as hostile!”

Automatic gunfire erupted from the gate. The flashes lit the dark night, strobing the gatehouse, glinting off the chainlinks in the fence, reflecting back from the glass in the truck that was now barrelling down the hill. The windshield of the truck exploded, glass spraying inwards, the metal of the hood pocketed with bullet holes. It only accelerated.

"Perimeter guards move forward to engage. Anyone up top with a view take a shot if you have one. Gamma and Omega, hold the dock!”

The maniacs! Whatever crazed assault this was, it was only going to end one way, and that was with the occupants filled with holes. A foregone conclusion that didn’t give him any comfort — madmen always maimed and killed. How many men would he lose tonight?

He settled into a crouch on the roof's ledge, stabilizing his rifle, knowing that the snipers around him were doing the same. The night-vision scope zoomed in on the rushing vehicle. Alpha focused on the cabin, determined to take out the driver himself.

The cabin was empty.

Shit! "Delta, all crews, break off! Repeat, break off!"

But it was too late. His eyes were seared by a bright light and a blast of air that nearly knocked him backwards. Stunned, he shielded his eyes as an orange fireball climbed into the sky, quickly darkening in a blanket of smoke and falling embers. The screams hit him now. Just like he remembered. Just like in Mosul when the trucks came and the bombs blew and men and pieces of men lay strewn in the street.

The afterimage of the blast partially blinded him, but he strained to see the gate below. It was gone. The metal ripped and melted like cotton candy, flaming chucks of truck and gatehouse scattered radially around the scene of destruction. Only those bodies that were not close to the explosion were visible, but all of the men he had sent to converge on the intruders were now corpses, or as good as. Three at the gate, four wrecked forms from the perimeter guards. It was a slaughter.

“Roof report.” His voice was strained and husked.

Silence.

He spun around the roof top, dropping the goggles over his eyes again. Motionless forms were draped in various positions across the asphalt. They were all dead. Sniped themselves while distracted by the commotion and chaos at the gate.

Alpha stood up fully now, heedless of the danger, removing his goggles. It was just a matter of time now. Light flickered from the burning debris behind him. He stared up into the sky, looking for some heavenly object, the moon, even a single star to glimpse before the final darkness came.

But it came without mercy. His head snapped backward, a bullet tearing through the soft flesh of his face, a clean hit to the brain stem that unplugged his basic physiological functions in an instant. For a second, his eyes empty, he stood staring stupidly forward. Then the electrochemical signals ceased completely, and he dropped straight to the rooftop with a thud.

Then, only silence.

37

Lopez and Houston entered the burning compound. Their forms wrapped in black, packs strapped to their backs, and pistols in their hands as they jogged cautiously among the scrap and human remains scattered before them. They paused over several bodies, checked them, and moved on toward the compound’s entrance.

With weapons raised they approached, stairs on either side leading to a loading platform in front of the enormous roll-up shutter door. Two bodies lay on either side of the stairway, blood pooling underneath them. Houston sprinted up the right-hand steps and examined the large locks barring entrance. Lopez continuously scanned around them with his weapon raised.

“Francisco, it’s no good!” she cried. “We’re going to have to blow it.”

“I counted fifteen. They can’t have had more, could they?”

Houston sprinted down the steps, unstrapping her pack. “I don’t know. Paranoid as all fuck, so I won’t put anything past them. We need the charges from your pack.”

Lopez slung his bag to the ground and removed several gray blocks with detonators. He handed them to Houston who returned to the door as he resumed his scanning. Placing the explosive on the locks, she set the charge and sprinted down the steps. They grabbed their bags and rounded the corner of the building, constantly alert for hostile movements or sounds. Houston raised a controller.

“Three, two, one…”

She pressed the bottom and a blast shook the building. After several seconds, they came back around the wall and ran to the loading platform. Twisted steel and smoke greeted them, as did an enormous hole in the shutter door the width of a small car.

Houston laughed. “Just meant to break the locks. I need a course on explosive yields.”

She removed a flashlight and they stepped into the building through the hole, careful to avoid the sharp and smoking edges. The air inside the place was stale, almost metallic tasting, the acrid smoke from the blast mingling with the stored smells of machines and dust. The echoing of their footsteps made it clear that the space was vast and open, but it was too dark to see much beyond the direct beam of the light, which only revealed the reflective hulls of large shapes.

Lopez led her arm. “Try the wall. Lights.”

Houston scanned the beam across the nearby wall and located a set of switches. Lopez faced away from her with his gun raised in anticipation. She flipped the switches together in one motion.

Ceiling-high bulbs winked to life with a buzz. Dim at first, the bulbs slowly waxed to full brightness, their combined numbers across the length of the warehouse causing the pair to squint as their eyes adjusted.

“Holy shit, Francisco.”

They stared down rows and rows of enormous bladed aircraft. The machines were variable, all devoid of a cockpit or other indication of a pilot’s chair. Some of the smaller units sported large cameras. The larger drones were outfitted with an array of cargo, all of it dangerous.

Lopez walked up to one of the larger ones, bulbous, metallic shapes strapped to its underside. “Bombs.”

“Looks like,” said Houston. “And those are aircraft sized machine guns on that one. Can you imagine the bullets?” She swung her gaze across the interior. “There’s got to be forty or fifty in here. It’s the drone motherlode.”

Lopez got to one knee and crossed himself. “At least it wasn’t for nothing.” Houston placed her hand on his shoulder.

“It had to be done,” she said, staring across the warehouse, seeming to see beyond it.

“It makes us as much murderers as them.”

“And the alternative?” She knelt down beside him. “We knew the moment we canvased this place that the drones were here. Stupid to put the place surrounded by hills, but it was muscled up. We weren’t going to be able to convert them to our cause. It was either more drone attacks or we fight this war.”

“Killing in war only makes it necessary, not moral.” He stood up, his composure returning. “It’s still killing, and we just left the biggest body count we ever have.”

She placed her hand on his face and looked into his eyes. “I know. I know it hurts you. And I know you do this only because you see that we had to. You’ll ask your God for forgiveness. And I know you’ll mean it. But, meanwhile, we need bring in the cavalry.”

“FBI?”

“Yes. This changes everything.” She held up a plastic bag with several phones. “And we got these.”

“You don’t think they’d be stupid enough to leave a trail?”

Houston shook her head. “Not Fawkes, but he’s got an army now. You’re only as secure as your weakest link.” She looked back outside toward the carnage. “Lots of bodies. Lots of hires. Lots of potential weak links.” She pulled out her phone.

“How much time do we have?”

“I don’t think the local police or fire will be out here quickly. It’s the middle of nowhere, and these guys weren’t plugged into their systems with a burglar alarm. No, just the opposite. I bet this place is off the grid completely.” She punched a number. “I think our Intel 1 pals will be the first on the scene.”

A voice crackled on the other end.

“Angel? This is Mary. We hit the jackpot. Tell John and the others to get to the address we sent you. And bring fire and a cleanup crew. And body bags. Lots of body bags.”

Hours later an army of police cars, FBI vehicles, SWAT vans, and emergency response crews were stationed around the smoldering scene. Spotlights were trained around the compound, and forensics teams darted around the bodies like fireflies with their flashlights and cameras.

Cohen slowly exited one of the black Crown Victorias. She hopped beside the door, removing a pair of crutches, and then proceeded to swing herself toward the stairways. Refusing the aid of several agents and police, she forced her way clumsily up the steps and into the warehouse.

Inside, a group of men stood marveling at the building’s inventory. Flashbulbs exploded around them, documenting the scene.

“John. Frank. Sorry I’m late.”

Savas turned around and the lines of his mouth tightened. It was hard to see her like this. The bruises had only begun to leave her face, the hideous black and green fading to a sickening yellow, scabs slowly being absorbed, hair lost from her left side where stitches ran over her scalp like laces on a game ball. Cohen limped toward them, her breath ragged, her eyes fatigued, yet a light burning within them.

“You didn’t miss anything,” said Savas, taking her arm. She relented and let him help her. “Or rather, we all missed the same thing. Hell of a fireworks display. And just look what Pandora’s box has inside it.”

Cohen whistled. “And no one noticed that someone was piling up large drone orders like this?”

Miller shook his head. “It didn’t look that way on paper. Our two shadows tracked it all down, like tributaries piling into a big river. Then they came here and did this,” he said, gesturing outside. “Who did you say those folks were?”

“I didn’t,” said Savas.

“Mmmm.”

“We’ve counted twenty-five of the largest models,” said Savas, “most equipped to bomb or shoot anything to smithereens. The rest are reconnaissance setups, smaller models with different imaging equipment ranging from cameras to infrared, audio — you name it.”

“The bodies outside?”

Savas nodded. “Need to confirm, but facial recognition from snapshots IDed two of them. Former contractors that worked in the Middle East, one ex-army.”

“More mercenaries,” growled Miller. “Fifteen of them, it seems. Your ghosts are better than Jason Bourne.”

“Moving on,” said Savas. “We’ll ID all we can and see what we can find from it.”

“Meanwhile, we’ve put a dent in their attack plans,” said Cohen.

“I hope so.”

“What do you mean?”

Savas sighed. “Fawkes used a bunch of shell companies, crisscrossing aliased orders to stock this place. It was to hide his tracks, hide this place from prying eyes. But I’m starting to think that he’s not the kind of guy to put all his eggs in one basket.”

Miller looked gravely at him. “You think he has more drones.”

“I know he does.”

Savas didn’t want to believe his own words. He needed a win, the kind of win that would let him believe he had declawed this nebulous monster. But the truth was too obvious.

Cohen changed tact. “You said there was a call from Gabriel?”

“Yes. They have a bag of phones. You can guess from where. Angel’s on it now, but it’s beyond her resources. I’m going to go long on this and bring in Simon.”

“Fred Simon of CIA?” she asked. “We haven’t contacted him since—” She caught herself. “Not for a while.”

Miller smiled. “Who’s he?”

“Someone who might can help,” said Savas. “We might also need the NSA to work those phones.”

“More Watchmen?” asked Cohen.

He nodded to her and stared at Miller a moment. “Why don’t you fill in Frank a bit on the group while I get this show wrapped up here. I think the usefulness of certain secrets has diminished greatly given the current circumstances.”

“About damn time,” whispered Miller under his breath.

Savas smiled wanly. “Be careful what you ask for, Frank. Ignorance can be bliss.”

38

Savas and Cohen sat in the back of one of the old Crown Vics as it sped toward Manhattan on I-80. The sun arced over the factories and former swamplands, pouring a bronze coating over the buildings and waterways. Savas found it increasingly difficult to keep track of the days, one rolling into another on minimal sleep and maximal stress. But now, finally, there were some real breaks in the case.

They had insisted that the car be swept for digital technology, and screened their drivers, allowing only those who agreed to leave their smart phones and similar equipment behind. There was no point in spending the time to explain why. The turn to luddites had hampered them severely, however, as the attempt to establish a conference call with Fred Simon had demonstrated. They had tried to have two phones on speaker, Lightfoote on Cohen’s phone, Simon on Savas’ cheap model. But it had proved unworkable, the sound quality rendering much of the dialogue incomprehensible. They had settled on speaking to Simon alone.

The CIA agent’s voice was energized. “Our mutual contact at the NSA has managed to make rapid progress. All the calls and texts from the numbers you gave were grabbed over the last week. There wasn’t much to go on. They were careful, but not careful enough. Two of the phones had sent text messages to the same number. I don’t think it was because they were brothers and contacting mom.”

“What was that number?” asked Savas.

“An unregistered phone. Likely a burner. But we don’t need a name to track it.”

“GPS?”

“No. They weren’t that careless. But with enough activity, we can triangulate from the cell towers. They didn’t check the fine print on this model. It checks with the home company a lot for service performance. Pinging back on an hourly basis. They might as well be flashing a light.”

Savas sat up in the seat. He turned to Cohen. “Do you think it could be Fawkes?”

“I doubt it, John.” She swept the crutches from between them and leaned them against the window. “You never know, but my guess is a mid-level operator. But he could lead us to the boss.”

The speaker crackled. “My thoughts exactly.”

Savas nodded. “So where is this phone?”

“Long Island Sound near Glen Cove.”

“In the water? They ditched it?”

“Unlikely,” said Simon. “It’s moving. Speed and direction consistent with a maritime vessel following the coastline.”

Savas and Cohen exchanged glances as she spoke. “Well, that isn’t likely for some low level grunt. Maybe we have something interesting.”

“Want real time footage?”

“Are you serious?”

“Soon as we had the coordinates, we dispatched a chopper.”

“An agency chopper in the US? Where from?”

“Need-to-know basis, John.”

“I thought the CIA didn’t operate within US borders.”

“Clinton said it best: it all depends on the definitions of words like ‘is’ or ‘operate’.”

“Mmm-hmmm. You bet your ass I want footage, but we’re pre-smartphone era here, Fred. When the AI in our car tried to kill us, we decided to go Amish.”

Simon barked a laugh. “I understand. NSA has found a way to firewall the damn worm. Slowing them the hell down to fence everything off, but they’ve got server farms now with serious prophylactics. I’m watching real time. It’s a nice boat.”

“I bet it is.”

“With a bunch of folks on it. Hard to make out high-res detail — the bird is at a distance and altitude that won’t give it away. But I can tell you they aren’t milling about socially. Positioned strategically.”

“Bodyguards,” said Cohen.

“Who needs a ship full of muscle?” chipped Simon.

Savas felt the adrenaline kick in. “Fawkes.” He turned to Cohen. “We need a rapid response team. They’ll lose that phone or the owner soon.”

She nodded. “That means air. We’re out of choppers. Too busy flying the VIPs out of the city still.”

“Dammit!”

Simon cut in. “Well, remember those contractors that the CIA doesn’t hire under aliases for work inside the country? Well, why have one chopper when you can have three for ten times the price? The fact that they don’t exist creates some budget magic.”

“You’ve got a spare bird?”

“Already routed toward you.”

Savas punched the seat in front of him, startling the driver. “I owe you big, Fred.”

“Don’t think so, John. I’ve got a ways to go on that other debt I owe you. Speaking of which, how are my kids?”

“They’re good. Spooking my team with their ninja-assassin program. Even Frank was impressed. But they’re delivering big time.” He glanced at Cohen. “We’re a bit busted up and we’ve got a full plate of hackers in the City. I think I know who I’d send for a rendezvous with the boat.”

“I agree,” said Simon, “but we’re pushing them. They’re human, whatever they seem to accomplish.”

Savas sat back in the chair and closed his eyes. “I know, Fred. But right now we all need to be a little superhuman. There’s a monster to fight. I don’t have manpower to do this. Maybe Frank, but he’s one. And there are some important people we need to question as of several hours ago.”

“I’m with you. Tell them the chopper’s been loaded with some useful gear. But getting on that boat and surviving isn’t going to be as easy as the warehouse.”

“Easy. Right. I’ll tell them. I’m glad you’re with us, Fred.”

“I’m not the only one, John. The Watchmen still have some kick left. Until soon.”

The connection was closed. Savas dialed and held the phone to his ear.

“Yeah, Mary? This is John. That bag of phones? Well, they might have bagged some big game. The guards called a number. Fred Simon traced it. It’s zipping along the Long Island Sound as we talk. We need you two to intercept a boat.”

A muffled voice sounded through the other end. Savas nodded.

“Not to worry. Give me your current position. We’ve got that covered.”

RIDEOUT Deposition 3

39

A dark-haired man handed Lopez a tablet and swiped through several photos. Although dimmed, the glow of the screen was nearly blinding in the dark interior of the aircraft, the thundering sound of the blades and engine suffocating auditory senses as well. They were flying just over the low cloud cover on a moonless night, shadowing the boat by matching speed and direction, remaining well out of earshot.

The two men were young, barely out of their twenties, and Lopez wondered where Fred Simon had found them. Breaking agency protocol, even in this crisis environment, likely meant they were not mere tools, but a part of the loose network united by Savas and Simon. The Watchmen. Lopez didn’t know whether to respect their efforts or consider them hopeless idealists.

He turned his attention to the tablet. The images showed increasing zooms toward an unusual-looking boat. Lopez strained to hear the CIA man over the sounds of the helicopter and the strong headwind that rocked the craft mercilessly. Even with the headphones, he found himself using hand signals to get Houston’s attention as he handed her the device.

The CIA man repeated what he had said. “It looks like one of the newer anti-pirating vessels. Aluminum hulls and cabins designed to withstand small-arms fire. Dual-engines to bring top speeds of around sixty miles per hour. They can turn on a dime and chase down anything that isn’t a speed boat. Or outrun it.”

“Good thing we’re in a helicopter,” said Houston, smiling.

The CIA man wasn’t amused. “Look, I don’t know who you are and what strings you pulled, but his isn’t a day trip. Look at these.”

He scrolled past several photos that centered on the boat and its hull, pausing over a pair that focused on the deck.

Houston interrupted. “We see them. Guards fore and aft, automatic weapons, even a fairly large machine gun mounted there,” she pointed. “If I were you, I wouldn’t bring this bird in too close. The gun might almost qualify as anti-aircraft depending on the rounds.”

“But if we are going to have you near enough that thing, the approach is going to have to be close,” he scowled. “They’ll make us for sure by sight as well as sound. There’s nothing identifying on the outside, especially at night, but that in itself will likely send up flags.”

Lopez nodded to the side door. “What is this thing? I assume it’s for us?”

“The best we could manage on extremely short notice. We aren’t the Navy Seals, and to be quite honest, this is our first and I hope only sky-to-sea assault mission. Usually we do things with a bit more stealth.”

The man edged over and unzipped one of the bags. Black fiberglass gleamed back at them, reflecting the light of the tablet and cockpit instrument panel.

“But this will get some points for that.”

“It’s a jet ski?” asked Houston.

“Yes,” said the CIA agent. “Electric. Good for the environment.”

Houston nodded. “Silent, in other words.”

“Next to the motors on the boat, most definitely. It’s pitch out there on the open sea and they’re not running all that dark, so you should almost be invisible. We disabled the safety lights. It’s a two-seater, so you’ll both fit with some minimal gear. You stay in their wake and you should be able to grapple on before they know you’re there.”

“Except for the thundering helicopter drop-off, of course,” said Lopez.

“We’ll try to keep as far out as possible, so there will be some distance. You can hit 50 on this thing. Boat tops off at 60 and they aren’t pushing it that hard right now. Nowhere close. You can close the gap.” He looked Houston up-and-down. “It’s not us I’m worried about. Getting on the boat is one thing. Then what? I hope Simon hasn’t lost his mind.”

Houston used the silence to loudly slap a fresh clip into her browning. “Just get us on the water and watch your own ass. We aren’t outfitted for a sea mission. Put us low to avoid a bath and we’ll preserve more function in the gear.”

The CIA man motioned to a rope and pulley. “Thirty feet already laid out. In this blackness, well, that’s pushing it, and the downwash is going to be a problem.”

“We’ll make do,” she answered, wrapping a tactical vest around her.

The pilot spoke through the noise. “Target has decelerated. Down to 30 miles per hour.”

“We do it now,” said Lopez.

The CIA man nodded. “Drop us down, Charlie.”

They felt a tug inside and the helicopter buried itself in the cloud layer, additional turbulence rocking the small craft back and forth violently. The pilot was flying dark except for instrumentation. They plunged below the clouds and the sea swelled into view. Light from the boat ahead bobbed like a beckon.

Houston and Lopez removed the remainder of the tarp on the jet ski. Without a combustion engine, it was surprisingly light, and they positioned it in front of the door. They were dressed in black with protective vests, ski masks and dark gloves, packs on their backs and weapons strapped to utility belts. Night vision googles dangled from their necks.

The helicopter plunged toward the sea, the pilot speaking in their headsets. “Wind’s a bitch! Be quick.”

They lurched to a hover. The pair removed the headphones and fastened the rope to the jet ski. The CIA man opened the side door and they lowered the watercraft quickly. The gears on the pulley hummed as the rope flew through the mechanism, the smell of burnt leaves filling the small space. Far below, they watched the water splash outward from the impact on the surface.

“Go, go, go!” cried the pilot.

Houston leapt onto the rope and wrapped her feet around it. She descended swiftly down it length and vanished below. Lopez paused a split second to give her space to clear, then dropped straight into the wind and night.

It was all completed in less than a minute. The pilot was skilled and held the helicopter in position. Feet firmly planted on the jet ski, they detached the rope as Houston slipped into the driver’s seat and fired it up, the engine purring softly.

The craft leapt forward toward the dancing lights of the yacht. Lopez removed a high-powered assault weapon and focused ahead as the helicopter darted upward, heading back toward the cloud bank and safety.

Only it would not make it. Operators on the boat had seen the craft. Through the washed-out green of the night-vision, Lopez saw a volley of infrared tracers converge on the aircraft. He remembered the large weapon in the recon photos. He removed his googles and stared helplessly.

A bright light erupted above them, painting the ceiling of cloud-cover in orange and white, the water reflecting the growing fireball. The sound shook them as they sped forward, the rending of metal and air pressure from the ignited fuel. In the dimming fireball the wreckage could be seen to careen toward the open sea and slam into the water like the surface was made of concrete, the helicopter crushed and sinking. It vanished below the waves.

Lopez felt all ambivalence evaporate.

“Let’s get these bastards.”

40

Their target accelerated. Houston gunned the jet ski and pushed it to the breaking point. The boat took no evasive action, and even angled toward them to narrow the distance somewhat of their approach.

“They haven’t spotted us,” screamed Lopez behind her. “Running from the crash site!”

Houston nodded vigorously and continued to push the ski full out. The high waves gut-punched them as they sliced through the water, but they gained on the yacht. Lopez began to see just how fortified it was. Anti-pirate, indeed. While it possessed a superficial resemblance to the luxury powerboats decorating many docks, the fiberglass was replaced with thick aluminum, the windows black and refracting light unnaturally, the bullet-resistant composition altering the optical properties. And of course the guards and their weapons, in addition to the churning motors kicking a spray like a comet’s tail behind the craft.

They were within ten yards and still gaining on the starboard side. Now came the true insanity: The boat had accelerated beyond fifty miles per hour and the jet ski was barely holding together. The angle had decreased, reducing their relative velocity, but also affording the only way to try to board. Lopez shouldered the automatic rifle and removed two stun grenades.

“Flash bangs ready!” he called to Houston. They were nearly alongside the yacht.

She nodded and he flung the bombs one at a time toward the bow of the ship. Both landed and rattled across the surface, ricocheting off the gunwale, then exploding. Even from the side of the ship, the sound and light were startling.

Lopez heaved a grappling ladder against the side and it caught, the roped steps unfurling against the hull. Just then the boat lurched starboard slamming into the jet ski. Instinctively, both of them leapt off the doomed craft and grabbed the sides of the ladder, one on each side, their legs half submerged in the sea. The friction of the water threatened to pull the grapple from the boat and deposit them into the propeller blades.

Lopez placed a foot on the roped ladder and violently swung himself toward the gunwale, grasping the side of the boat with his hands. He tucked his legs underneath his torso like a gymnast and planted his boots on the uppermost portion of the hull, a powerful thrust of his legs propelling him over the side to land in the stern on top of the engine box.

Two men were positioned near the cabin looking ahead at the commotion caused by the still smoking flash grenades. At the sound of his awkward landing, they turned too slowly, the shock of the unexpected attack leaving them off guard.

The distance was only a few feet, and Lopez placed his hands on the engine box and swept his leg through the air like a switchblade. His boot connected with the head of the leftmost guard, the neck snapping to the side, teeth raining sideways against the metal. The man fell with a crash and didn’t move.

But it left Lopez open for a strike from the second guard. He prepared for the worst, hoping Houston would be there in time to engage.

And she was. As he spun away from the guard and onto his feet, he crouched and pulled a handgun from his belt. In front of him there was a blur of hands and feet as Houston’s lithe form pummeled the thick hulk of the other guard. The results were devastating. Blows to the neck and groin incapacitated him while she drew a knife. Using the momentum of his failing retreat, she toppled him onto the prone form of the other guard and plunged the blade into his neck, wrenching it several inches, sidestepping a jet of blood that bathed the floor of the boat.

It was over in seconds. In the cacophony surrounding the boat, the melee had barely risen above the chaos.

“I’ll take the cabin,” she said, twitching her head toward the interior. “There are two guards at the bow. I doubt the flash bangs did much more than knock them sideways.”

“Be careful, Sara,” said Lopez. “I don’t want to lose you now.”

“Move, priest,” she said, and darted toward the door.

Their actions played in counterpoint. Lopez sprang forward, his weapon raised, back sliding along the wall of the cabin. The acrid smell of smoke from the lingering grenades burned in his nose as he approached the front of the ship. He turned the corner of the cabin and crouched to one knee, steadying the pistol with his left hand as he scanned the deck.

One of the guards remained positioned on the gun turret, checking the skies as if awaiting another attack. The other had tossed one of the smoking remains of the grenades over the side of the boat, aiming his weapon downward, anticipating an assault from the water.

The assault came from behind. Lopez fired two shots before the man could turn. Both connected. The guard slipped over the railing and disappeared into darkness.

The other guard heard the shots. Lopez walked casually toward the turret, his weapon aimed at the man, the guard releasing the controls of the large machine gun, realizing it couldn’t be used at close range. He desperately tried to draw a pistol.

Lopez blasted his right shoulder, the man’s obvious gun arm. The guard screamed and clutched the wound, terror in his eyes as the masked assailant approached.

Lopez grabbed the wrist of his uninjured arm and twisted. Again the man screamed, his body paralyzed in pain, eyes shut harshly.

“How many guards?” yelled Lopez. “Don’t think! Tell me! How many guards?”

Like a programmed machine the man stuttered his answers: “Two here. Two in the back. Two in the cabin with Fawkes.” Tears streamed down his face.

Fawkes? It wasn’t to be believed. The architect of Anonymous was on the boat. “Sara’s in the cabin with him,” he whispered, the frightened man looking on in distress.

Lopez brought the handle of the pistol down on the man’s temple, the body collapsing into the turret. He sprinted back to the stern of the boat.

At the same time, Houston stood over the bodies of two men.

She had entered the cabin forcefully, kicking in the flimsy door to find three men looking through the front window at the aftermath of the flash bangs. Two were obviously hired protection — broad in the back, towering over the middle figure who could otherwise have been mistaken for a scrawny teen. They turned at the sound of her entrance.

Fawkes. It was the glasses that sealed the identification. The female hacker’s words — her lover—the lanky body, the darting motions, the smart glasses: it was Fawkes. But she had no time to consider the implications.

The men held guns in their hands. They turned to engage, but she held the advantage. She fired twice, each shot aimed quickly at the moving targets across from her. The first shot hit true to rip through the forehead of the bodyguard on her left, his blood splattering the window and ceiling. The second shot drifted right from her momentum. The bullet hit the man in the chest, too high for the heart, but he cried out, dropped his weapon, and careened toward the window.

But he wasn’t down. As Fawkes screamed and darted left, the guard faced her and rushed, the crazed look of a wounded animal on his face.

She pivoted, side-stepping, and grasped his outstretched arm, using his momentum against him. He missed, and she thrust him toward the window in the back of the cabin. His face smashed the glass, a spiderweb of fractures erupting from the bullet-resistant material. Leaving nothing to chance, Houston fired once into the back of his head. She turned quickly to subdue Fawkes.

But he was gone. Wind and a salty mist poured in from an opening in the roof. A short ladder led from the cabin upward. Fawkes had gone up.

She ejected the magazine and pulled another from her belt. Slamming it in place, she darted to the stairway, weapon raised to the ceiling. She could see no one. At the same time, the whirring of an engine could be heard, changing in pitch from low to high.

“No!” she whispered under her breath and sprinted up the ladder.

A loud voice exploded throughout the cabin as Lopez charged inside.

“Sara!”

She was climbing a ladder across the room and didn’t hear him. Her feet lifted from the steps and out of sight. Ignoring the bodies around him, he dashed to the ladder and ascended. Houston was there, firing her gun madly as she aimed out over the open water.

He followed the barrel of her gun. In the distance, a form was suspended over the ocean, legs dangling and kicking, arms grasping desperately above him. Overhead, a shadow hummed, a black object the size of a bed, the pitch dropping as the man accelerated away and faded into the blackness.

“Fuck!” cried Houston as the object disappeared, her mag emptied.

They both stood there in silence, spindrift coating the dead bodies scattered below them, the boat hurled back and forth in the wind.

All for nothing!

Fawkes had escaped by drone into the night.

COHEN Deposition 3

41

He spoke to them on five different encrypted video conferencing calls. They were hired guns and bombers, assassins trained under diverse conditions spanning the military to organized crime. He’d baited them through the underground online marketplaces with money few could refuse. He’d filtered through information searches, background checks, and video chat interviews. He’d tested each of them with small scale operations, sifting the wheat from the chaff, identifying the unreliable, the unstable, the less competent, and those who reported back to others and revealed themselves as informants. Sometimes he was forced to erase those who could pose a threat.

The few who survived the process were moved like chess pieces, directed remotely so that groups were formed, hierarchies established, rules set and punished harshly when broken. And always there was money. Hard to comprehend amounts of money, accounts protected from the worm scattered across the world. Houses and lands were purchased. Protected lives and identities created and promised. All for the taking should a final set of missions be accomplished. And all to be snatched away once the missions completed. He was fighting against the plutocracy and he was sure as hell not going to create another one.

Fawkes adjusted the mask over his face. A mask of a smiling, goateed madman from another age, always in place, his identity revealed only to those bodyguards who worked directly with him. He prepared a final address. Now he would move the strikes forward quickly in time. Now he would give a last set of instructions for the beginning stages of the end. Dangerous people at the FBI and other agencies had forced his hand sooner than he would have liked. He preferred careful probing of systems and weakness, test shots and stress tests that allowed him to screen his people as much as the target systems. He liked to thoroughly debug the code.

But the time for precise experimentation was gone. The time for drastic action had revealed itself. He could not afford another near disaster like that on the boat. How had they found him so quickly? Attacked him so easily? He had taken every precaution! Every trace erased from the digital world. But he was clearly not careful enough. Which meant he had to hurry. There was no telling from what direction they were coming, what flaws in the program were still lurking, waiting to collapse like poorly designed walls under siege.

Chaos was his ally. The more dysfunctional the world became around them, the less the governmental apparatus could use its considerable firepower to find and kill him. The attacks would begin there with the heads of the hydra in Washington. They thought they had been attacked! But they had seen only the weak pieces, a feint to test the strength of their defenses. And those defenses had been found lacking.

But the hydra’s handlers were not in Washington, but Europe and Asia. And so he would begin the dismantling of the European society and destabilization of China and the lesser economies. There could be war. These disturbances might be enough.

Otherwise, he would bring the final direct attack. He would darken America and plunge the nation into complete anarchy. Moments before the lights went off in the centers of power in the United States, the signal would be given for the worm to complete its final function. The digital mind of the planet, on which all the modern societies rested, that calculated trade and commerce, that built buildings and cars, that became nearly a higher order organism of parsing ideas and thoughts in a fiber-optic neural network, a brain beyond anything the solar system had likely ever seen — it would die. Erased. Unmade in a cascade of deletion that would render them beyond salvage. Once the signal was given, the mad mind of Earth would die.

Only then might there be a chance for something more worthy, more pure to rise from the ashes. Fawkes didn’t care if it was Humans 2.0 or the dolphin beta release. It had to be something new. Utterly new. The corrupt, cancerous, and insane thing called modern culture, what the deluded called modern civilization, had to be sterilized. Every cell wiped to prevent reinfection.

The worm would do that. The final cargo to be uploaded was designed and long perfected. It would exploit the enormous security and logical holes in the neuronal system of the world mind and scramble it, then like an acid eat away at the fibers and proteins until even the very DNA was digested.

Fawkes smiled behind the mask as he spoke to his blind tools. The FBI group had nearly ended it, but had only accelerated the date of doom.

He would start with them. He would pay that bitch in the bowels of Manhattan a short visit. Then he would show her who really ran things in cyberspace.

“Knock, knock, Angel.”

42

The names unfurled across the screen like entries in some doomsday book.

It was the new month, November first at three in the morning, and Angel had spent it deep in the basement of the FBI building. She rubbed her eyes. The holes across her left ear were swollen and red from the piercings that had been squashed as she slept during the last worm decryption job. Running one hand over the orange stubble of hair on her scalp, she clicked with the other to silence the alert tone from the computer that had called her out of some murky dream — only to stare at another nightmare.

She read through it again. The list was a who’s who of the power brokers in Congress and business.

“Oh, look — there’s the president herself!”

Of course. If you’re going to bring down the US in one blitzkrieg, you ought to have her on the list. That made sense.

But did any of it really make sense? Angel knew her brain was close to oatmeal at this point, but were these really hit lists? What madman would try to off that many high-profile people? What lunatic could ever think something like that was even possible? And to what end?

Chaos. She shook her head. It all seemed to point in that direction. The banking meltdown. The attacks. This list of powerful names. Fawkes had made no demands. He hadn’t tried to leverage the threats into anything. He seemed to be running by a playbook no one had ever seen before. No one could anticipate his moves.

Until now. Her virus was functioning, reporting on the worm’s activities. And her little digital operating room had revealed more and more of the inner workings of the worm. Like any code, it was a series of instructions, fragile logic and loops calling out to be hacked. All she needed was time. But there was precious little of that left.

Angel sat upright and gulped down a wash of cold coffee. She’d bring this directly to Savas in the morning. Those names had serious protection, especially after events of the last two weeks. But was it enough? Could the secret service, the military, private contractors, could any of them anticipate what attacks might come from a man that was as diabolical as he was creative? Could anyone?

Her screen went dark.

“What the hell?”

She clicked on keys and the mouse but there was no response. Wonderful. It was a very bad time for a device failure. She began to reach around for the power switch to forcibly reboot the machine when a line of green text ran across her screen.

“HELLO, ANGEL.”

It was like some old mainframe terminal, letters appearing left to right revealing words, then phrases. Carriage returns advancing text. A knot formed in the pit of her stomach. Someone else had hijacked her computer, and she had no doubts about who that was.

The GUI was gone, but she found that she could type.

“HI, FAWKES.”

She jumped up and disconnected the VMS machine from the internal network. She hoped to God he didn’t have any inkling of what she was doing with it.

More text appeared.

“LIKE THE MATRIX, RIGHT? IT’S BEEN INTERESTING WATCHING YOU WORK. BUT I’VE GOT THINGS TO DO AND YOU’RE CRAMPING MY STYLE.”

A green light appeared on the upper lip of the screen indicating that the camera was on. She ignored it and the video image that appeared on the screen. She raced toward the bank of computers along the wall.

A mocking voice came over the speakers.

“No use, Angel, baby. I’ve turned all the drives to goo already. You don’t think I’d give you the chance to shut them down first, do you?”

She reached the first machines and scanned for the main power connector.

“Thorough, aren’t you? Look at your pretty little ass wiggle! Here, I’ll just put a stop to all this unnecessary work so we can chat a little bit.”

The cluster of computers switched off. Machine-gun like clicks of the system shutting down, the lowering pitch of hundreds of disk drives spinning to a stop — it was like some sonic rush of wind through the room.

“There. That’s better.”

She turned to face the only active monitor left. A masked figure stared back at her, smile frozen in place. She walked up to the terminal and sat down.

“Practical. I like that,” came the distorted voice. “Butch, too. You swing both ways?”

“I’ll be swinging at you.”

He laughed, the sound crackling as the distorted audio maxed out the dynamic range of the electronics.

“Feisty! I should’a known that, though. I knew right off that those bugs crawling up my ass weren’t NSA. Not close to their style. Crude, self-taught. More clever. You weren’t raised in some dot gov hacking camp.”

Angel resisted the urge to look at the VMS machine. Everything might depend on whether he had discovered it. It loomed like a presence behind her, some spirit that waited for her attention that she had to ignore. Until this asshole had his gloat and finished the wipe.

“It’s not over, Fawkes.”

“That’s where you’re wrong, Angel Lightfoote, special agent Intel 1. Angel Lightfoote of the scrubbed records.”

She bit her lip and tried to keep her composure.

“What? You thought I wouldn’t do my homework? You got history, girl! Most of it wiped. Somebody wanted you cleaned up and made presentable. Would that be this Savas guy? No? Probably the other one, Kanter, the one blown up a while back?”

“Fuck you,” she hissed.

“Oh, emotions, Angel. Not a girl’s best friend in this game. Don’t get attached. Don’t feel bad for Blown-Up Man. Slows you down. Blinds you.”

“Makes you human. He was a hundred times the man you are.”

“A man who was into other men, huh? Hundreds of times, I bet.”

She flipped him off.

“Well, good old Larry must have gone the extra mile. I was scraping the digital basements. Nothing. But then I found all that stuff on dear old dad.”

Tears welled in her eyes as she ground her teeth.

“That all had to suck, yeah? Tell me, were you really there, in that cage when he bit it? Yeah? I thought so. Fucked you up good, didn’t it? Did dear old dad have to watch what they did to you? Every little thing? I can imagine the next few years. No wonder they had to bleach your record! Is that what they did upstairs in that shiny little head of yours, too?”

The sly face on the mask, the smirk of Guy Fawkes, the tormenting knowledge this sociopath had about her life, it was too much. Angel reached down and picked up a metallic wastebasket from the ground.

“Angel, darling, let’s not fight.”

“It’s not over, you bastard. I promise you. Never make it personal? Well, you just sure as hell did! And I’m coming for you!”

She swung the basket at the monitor. Again and again she pummeled the screen, plastic cracking, pixels shattering. The monitor fell to the ground, a black circle from the impact in the middle of the masked face, blocking it out. Still she smashed it. Over and over on the ground, a fissure opening in the screen, the dark circle expanding like some black hole to swallow the entire image.

All the while, laughter.

Fawkes’ wild laughter spilled like acid from the speakers into her ears. Finally, she turned to the power cord and grabbed it with both hands, yanking it from the socket, releasing a tormented scream.

The sound ceased. What little was still glowing on the screen went black. The room was plunged into near darkness, the glow of the EXIT sign over the side door painting the room dimly in an infernal red.

She wiped sweat and tears from her face and stumbled over to the VMS machine. Her right hand was bloodied. She crouched and touched the surface of the old computer with her left, resting her head against cold metal.

Her head nodded rhythmically as she began to rock back and forth on the ground. She repeated words over and over, her voice much higher, nearly that of a child’s.

“I’m sorry, Dad. I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry.”

She wept.

43

The marine contingency posted around 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue had swelled beyond anything Elaine York had ever experienced. A former army field officer, one of the few women to be deployed into live hostilities in the first Iraq War, she didn’t shrink from conflict, armed or not. But to see the White House nearly obscured by flak jackets and fatigues was to enter into the kind of nightmare reserved for over-the-top Hollywood blockbusters. That it could become real had never truly entered into her imagination.

President York stepped away from the window and turned back to her desk. Her last images of a figure sprinting down the circular roadway in front of the main doors — George Tooze, her Secretary of Homeland Security. She sat down and tried to compose herself. Her head throbbed from two straight days without sleep. Her mind still reeled from continuous updates, each more alarming than the last, from every corner of the globe. And now Tooze racing over like a high school sprinter, his sixty-five year old body likely straining under the duress. This was not going to be good.

And yet, what had been? The latest report from the NSA couldn’t have been worse. The damned worm had begun to disrupt vital elements of the world’s infrastructure. Haphazardly, to be sure, but her advisors, and her own gut, spoke to the possibility that what they had seen so far had only been feints. Tests to optimize the monster running through the cortex of the modern world and yet which had, even on their own, produced planetary chaos.

Food and oil supply chains were disrupted from agribusiness farms to the international shipping systems on which a hungry world depended. Sea and air systems were scrambled, systems that transported the world’s goods, including the ever-critical supply of oil. Hospitals were running out of supplies. Telecoms were unreliable. The world was losing its collective mind.

She half-expected red lights to be flashing around her and sirens wailing. The National Terrorism Advisory System threat assessment was at "IMMINENT." All branches of the military were at DEFCON 2 or higher, the birds in international airspace with different flags buzzing around each other nearly an invitation to a catastrophic mistake. The Force Protection Condition was DELTA nearly everywhere. INFOCON was at 1 and might as well have just put up a white flag and shut down.

And here was Tooze.

The flushed face of her trusted adviser burst into the Oval Office. He held an envelope in one hand that he brandished before him like a radioactive substance.

“A number,” he gasped, resting a hand on the other side of her desk. He held up the letter again. “Limited lifespan. It’s from Bilderberg.”

Time seemed to stop and she felt her mind disengage. She remembered the first time that she had experienced death. Her mother had been braiding her hair one morning, and by afternoon she had been a seven-year-old raised by a single-parent father. The moment had been just as immediate as the rush of Tooze into the room. One minute, she could hear the sounds of her mother talking on the phone in the kitchen while she played in the living room. The next, a crash and house-jolting thud. She had run in to find her mother unconscious on the floor. She would never wake. A brain aneurysm, or a big balloon that popped in her head as one of the doctors had tried to explain it to her. She had feared balloons ever since. It could happen so fast. Pressure. Weakness. Then — pop.

She rose, turned away from Tooze, and walked back to the window to stare at the troops outside. So much firepower. Such an apparatus in the nation’s military. And, in the face of the forces that truly controlled the world, so powerless.

Had it come to this? This new land and new dream of not even three centuries, of miracle cures, trips to the moon, supercomputers in your pocket — had its time come so soon? All because of this terrorist and his devil worm?

Pop.

“Ms. President? Elaine?”

She turned back to Tooze and felt the room sway, barely keeping her balance. “Thank you, George,” she said, pulling the paper from his hand and trying to remove a tear discreetly. “I will need to be alone for this call.”

He nodded, his face telling her all she needed to know, that he too understood the significance of what she was about to do.

“I’ll be outside,” he said. “Don’t lose hope.”

He turned and walked out of the room, closing the door softly behind him.

Sighing, she approached the grand desk and pressed her thumb against a fingerprint-reader on a drawer, then entered a code into a keypad next to it. There was a clear click, and she pulled the drawer open. Inside was what looked to be a bulked up cellular phone from decades past. She knew it to be a special device, engineered to work through a covert collection of satellites, encrypting transmissions through means not even the worm could break. At least some things were beyond its reach. In the realm of monsters, the worm was just another fiend.

Bilderberg. So it had finally come to this. Like ghosts, powers that many felt but never saw, sometimes they became incarnate. Like the beginning of her presidency, they had come and impressed upon her their reality. Sometimes the phantoms moved objects around a haunted home. Or a nation. Sometimes they killed.

She read the number off the paper in the envelope and keyed it in. A series of strange sounds of static and digital processing harshly burbled from the speaker. Then a loud click.

She exhaled slowly.

“This is Elaine York calling from the White House.”

SAVAS Deposition 4