Zero Sum Game

Chapter 31

Rio, with a disapproving turn to his mouth that said he thought a hundred and twenty miles was not nearly far enough to run, volunteered a safe house out near Twentynine Palms. He gave me the address after Arthur was safely out of the apartment. “Take the path from the road to the back door,” he told me. “Do not go in the front.”

“Or what?” I asked curiously.

“I have some minimal security measures in place.”

“Goody,” I said. “Just make sure you don’t forget to tell me about any of them.”

Arthur had taken off first, following my hastily-scrawled directions to retrieve copious amounts of cash from various places in Los Angeles to buy computer equipment with.

“Wait, you remember where you keep your stashes with equations?” he’d demanded incredulously when I started giving him directions.

“It’s easier than memorizing them,” I tried to explain, but he just shook his head at me and departed with the list. The plan was for Rio to meet him and then drive all the equipment out, stopping to collect Checker at a rendezvous point some distance away from the safe house. Rio didn’t trust anyone who wasn’t him or me not to pick up a tail.

Rather than risk accidentally activating a LoJack signal, I retrieved an old clunker from a storage space that I had acquired quasi-legitimately some years ago—along with a few weapons for the trunk—and fought creeping LA traffic to the 405, where I jerked northward through the rain. I figured I’d hit the 14 and cut across, taking a roundabout route via Victorville. If I got made on the first leg, the assumption would be that I was heading towards Vegas, or maybe Mojave. I kept one eye on my mirrors the whole way, but I got out of the city clean, and eventually I left the crush of LA behind to mark mile after mile through the desert.

I reached Yucca Valley and slued east, following Rio’s directions and heading off the highway. I’d left the rain behind with the city, and the wind swirled fogs of dust across the asphalt, the tiny grains of sand pattering against my windshield and obscuring the half-hearted attempts at civilization out this way. I thought it too generous to call them towns.

I finally crawled up a steep, winding dirt track to the address Rio had given me, wheels crunching and thumping over rocks not nearly small enough to be considered gravel. The little car strained up the slope, the tires skidding on the scree, until I reached a small clapboard house clamped to the top of the crumbling plateau, its high ground commanding a view of the desert nothingness for miles.

Twilight was falling over the landscape heavy and purple as I got out of the car, and the rock formations and knobby Joshua trees cast long, stretching shadows across the emptiness of the desert. The last rays of the sun warmed my skin, but the air was already turning cold and biting in the shadows. After retrieving some guns and a stack of legal pads from my trunk, I heeded Rio and went in the back door.

The place was small but well-stocked. Crates of MREs, foil packages labeled as emergency rations, and sealed bags of drinking water dominated most of the storage space and were stacked against the walls of the rooms, with a respectable number of gasoline cans keeping them company. I even saw a cabinet filled with hard liquor, which I frowned at—as far as I knew, Rio didn’t drink. Temperance was one of the Christian values, after all. Maybe alcohol had some survivalist purpose I didn’t know about.

I also found a heavy metal door that was very solidly locked. I figured Rio stored the armaments back there. Or it was a small bunker. Or both.

I flicked on the lights to banish the shadows collecting in the corners and leaned my weapons up against a nearby wall fully loaded—a girl has to feel safe, after all. Then I picked up the first legal pad and pulled out a ballpoint pen. My chest ached, my head ached, and the long drive had drained me, but none of that mattered.

I started writing.

My longhand scribbles expanded over page after page. As I finished each one I tore it off and spread them out in order over every available surface. By the wee hours of the morning, the floor was carpeted in scrawled-on yellow paper, the walls had sheets Scotch-taped up to form an overlapping wallpaper, and the cardboard backs from five dead legal pads lay discarded in a corner while I scribbled on a sixth.

When I heard tires on the dirt road, I dropped my pen, slung a rifle over my back, and picked up the pump-action Mossberg beside it. I was pretty sure it was only Rio and Checker, but better to be safe. I slipped out the back door into the pitch darkness of the desert night, the sky crusted in stars above me.

Headlights cut through the blackness at the top of the drive. It was indeed Rio, helming a large white van with Checker in the front seat. After acknowledging my shadow with a nod—Rio was nothing if not aware of his surroundings—he got out and stepped over to flick an outside switch and bring several floodlights to life, blanching the scene in white light. I lowered the shotgun and stepped out from the wall of the house as Rio went around to the back of the van to start unloading boxes.

Checker slid his chair out from behind the seat, set it up with practiced ease, and swung himself down into it. He wheeled over to meet me, making a face at the gravelly drive and throwing nervous glances over his shoulder. “That was the longest car ride of my life,” he muttered when he got close enough.

I raised my eyebrows, and he flinched at the reminder he was talking to someone in Rio’s corner. I sighed. “I told you, I trust him.”

“Cas Russell, not that I’m scorning your recommendation or anything, but you’ll forgive me if I think you’re frakking insane,” he hissed.

“You probably shouldn’t antagonize me, then,” I said, very mildly.

He blinked twice, opened his mouth, and then closed it again.

“Jesus Christ, I’m only kidding.” I wasn’t sure I liked how genuinely nervous he’d looked at the idea I might hurt him. “Look, why don’t you come inside. I’ll catch you up on what I’ve got.”

I’d been writing out the math on paper specifically so I could walk him through it. He swung back to the van to grab a laptop before we headed into the house, and in minutes his fingers were tap-dancing across the keyboard while I talked.

I kept talking while I helped Rio unpack the computer equipment, and Checker either got over his freakout about Rio or was capable of ignoring everything else when it came to computers—I suspected the latter—because he proved more than equal to multitasking, bossing us around with the authority of someone who knew exactly how he wanted his personal computer cluster to take shape and taking time out from his coding to flash around the cramped rooms and set up the network cables the right way around or slot in the correct hard drives when he deemed we were being too slow or too dull to get it right on his time schedule. He’d brought a huge stack of solid state drives originally pulled from the Hole, along with at least seven laptops—seven I counted, anyway—and in short order, the monitors spread across the table and counters sprang to life to show Checker’s customized operating system.

By the time the sun began baking the little house the next day, Pithica’s revenue sources were unfolding for us layer after layer, banks and locations and names blossoming fast and furious in a text file thanks to my algorithms and Checker’s coding. The skinny hacker also had a frankly surprising level of financial knowledge, which accelerated the process considerably. I could hardly believe how quickly we were aggregating the information.

Of course, nothing was as easy as all that. Rio, who had been moving around the place doing who knew what—probably setting up a Barrett on the roof or something—came back in while we were in the middle of a raging argument.

“I’m telling you, I know how this works! The notification needs to come from the banks, and we’re talking at least fifteen different government agencies in a dozen different countries! I don’t even know half the strings we’d need to pull—”

“So, why can’t you hack them all and find out?”

Checker literally threw up his hands. “I’m not a slot machine! Do you have any idea how secure these systems are? And how much cross-checking happens? I can’t hack human brains!”

“What’s going on?” asked Rio. He reached into one of the stacked crates and tossed a ration bar at me as he spoke.

Right. Food. I tended to forget about that. I tore it open.

“Hey! Not near my machines!” squawked Checker.

I obligingly backed up a few paces. “Checker’s pussying out,” I answered Rio.

“Pussying ou—! First of all, gendered slur, not cool, Cas Russell, and second of all, you’re asking for something patently impossible. Look, tracking’s one thing, but to differentiate ourselves from a thousand different phishing scams you’d need—”

“Explain,” said Rio, leaning up against the doorway and crossing his arms.

Checker swallowed and then answered while shying away from eye contact, concentrating on his monitors instead of on Rio. “Cas’s idea here has two parts to it. Tracking the accounts is turning out to be…well, not easy, but doable. Cas’s math on that is pretty spectacular, and the uniqueness of format in the account information, even though we only have numbers and amounts, is—”

Rio cleared his throat and Checker stopped like an animal in headlights, mouth working. The room wasn’t large enough and was too full of equipment for him to shrink away from Rio effectively, but he certainly looked like he wanted to try.

I took pity on him. “We’ll be able to get a pretty complete account list,” I explained. “It’s a staggering amount of data—we’re tracking the money through layers and layers of banks and front businesses—but by the end of today, we’ll have a huge list of the exact paths of all Pithica’s revenue streams. We’re talking thousands of sources here.”

“But?” said Rio.

I huffed out a frustrated breath. “My thought had been to send massive tip-offs,” I said. “Warn people they’re being stolen from, or that their money isn’t going where they think it is, the idea being that Pithica can’t have more than a couple key people converted to the cause. And we can actually do that, but Checker pointed out—”

“We won’t be taken seriously,” finished Checker. “It’s not a matter of running a scam on a single bank and convincing it we’re sending legit warnings. Our account list—their network comes from all over the world.”

“And the revenue sources are diverse,” I said. “All different banks, all different businesses and organizations. We could send a mass communication, but it would be dismissed in less than zero time. It probably wouldn’t even get past most people’s spam filters.”

“We lack legitimacy,” said Checker. “What about this? What if I sent some sort of Trojan that…I dunno, does something to all of these accounts, so when they’re checked on people see something happening—”

“But if you’re right, nobody will check, even if we tell them to. Not for a while, anyway, and not all at once. We need everyone to jump in fright and move their money simultaneously—if the transition’s slow enough, Pithica will be able to deal with it, get out in front of it—”

Checker’s frustrated words overlapped with mine. “It’s verifying the message, not delivering it. Without some virtual psychic paper that grants us authority—”

“Wait,” I said.

“What is it?”

I could feel a smile starting. “We happen to know a shadowy multinational organization who can pull every string in the book.”

“Wha—bad idea!” Checker cried.

“Do you have a better one? We don’t have time to sit on this. Pithica knows we’re out here, they know we have this information—it’s only a matter of time before they either track us down or change their revenue structure enough to make it not matter.”

“Those guys already said they’d kill you!” Checker sputtered.

“Then they can’t do much worse, can they?” I said.

Checker pressed a hand against his forehead in apparent pain. “Why do I have the feeling you’re going to get your own way on this? No matter how much I object to it?”

“Because I am.” I turned to Rio. “Have a spare cell I can burn?”

He stepped past me into the narrow kitchen, opened a drawer to reveal a jumble of disposable cell phones still in their packaging, and pulled one out.

“Come on! You can’t possibly think this is a good idea!” Checker called from over by his computers.

Rio ignored him. “You think this is a viable plan?” he asked, handing me the phone.

“It’s what we’ve got,” I said.

“These are dangerous people.”

“And since when do you care about that?”

He raised his eyebrows. “I attach somewhat greater value to your well-being than to my own.”

Right. He attached more value to pretty much anyone else’s well-being than he did to his own. We were all works of God, I thought. I wondered if he viewed us like a security guard with no appreciation for art might view the paintings in a museum he’d been charged with safeguarding—bits of paper and wood and canvas mushed together with some oily and plasticky stuff that someone else told him were worth protecting at any cost.

“Are you going to try to stop me, then?”

“No. You are quite capable of looking after yourself.”

I blinked. He did still trust my skills, then—at least against anyone who wasn’t Pithica. The sense of disgruntlement I hadn’t even realized I’d been feeling against Rio faded somewhat.

“At least wait until we’ve finished our end of it,” begged Checker. “Come on, this isn’t the movies; we can’t just hit ‘send all.’ Who knows what other difficulties we might run into.”

“You’re right,” I said. I went over to Checker and tossed the phone back to Rio. “I should stay here and work. You mind taking a ride and making the call?”

Checker groaned.

“What do I ask for?” said Rio.

“A man called Steve,” I answered. “Tell him what we’re doing.”

“We’ll need high-level, verified alerts sent out to a variety of government organizations, both here and overseas,” said Checker, giving up. “Here in the U.S. it’ll be the Secret Service—I can put together a list, but with the whole shadowy multinational organization thing they have going, they might know better than we would. Some support on spoofing our messages to the banks to be authentic would be helpful, too.”

“They’ll want us to turn over the information,” I warned Rio, remembering how thoroughly Steve’s group had dismantled both Courtney’s and Checker’s houses. I thought of Anton and Penny, and wondered how many people would die if we handed over the data. “Whatever you do, don’t agree.”

“Do not worry,” said Rio. “I am not accustomed to allowing anyone to make requirements of me.”

That made me quirk a smile. I wouldn’t have wanted to be on the other end of his phone call. “Checker, do you have a secure email address we can give them to coordinate through? Something they wouldn’t be able to trace?”

He grumbled something unintelligible about signing our own death warrants, but wrote one down. I added Steve’s number from memory and handed Rio the paper; he folded it carefully and tucked it in an inside pocket.

“I shall return in a few hours. Cas, if necessary, I have some armaments on the roof.”

“Good,” I said, and turned back to Checker, whose face was a funny shade of white. “Okay, let’s finish this.”

Five hours later, Rio hadn’t gotten back yet, and Checker and I were almost done with our notification algorithm.

And we were in terrible trouble.