ZerOes Page 5

  “Another hacker sold you out.”

  “I’m not a real hacker. I got no grudges against anyone. No one’s got any grudges against me.” But Hollis can see the kid trying to figure it out.

  “It was a troll type. Just messing with shit to mess with shit.”

  “Oh.”

  “You think you were doing the right thing. And by my standards, maybe you were—even if the reason for what you did was a little complex.”

  There. Now Chance looks really panicked. He’s wondering: How does Hollis know? But Hollis knows. He’s got a pretty good idea why Chance did what he did. Everybody’s got a dark secret, and this one is all Chance’s.

  “Like I said,” says Hollis, “those boys deserve more than they’re going to get and they’re going to get more than most folks around your town think they deserve. But it’s not my standards that matter. I’m just one bee in the whole damn hive. What matters is the law. The laws of this country. And by doing your little computer thing—which honestly I don’t understand and don’t much care to—you broke the law. And I’m here to collect.”

  “This isn’t how it works. You haven’t . . . you haven’t shown me a badge or . . . or . . . produced a warrant. I want a lawyer.”

  Hollis needs to seal this deal. He doesn’t know why they want this kid—Chance Dalton seems like a bit player with middling skills—but they do. So he steps up from across the table, throws the Scream mask down, knits his hands in front of him. “Hey, don’t misunderstand. I’m not here to arrest you. I’m here to offer you a choice.”

  “Choice? What kinda choice?”

  “One year or ten years.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “You do ten years behind bars or you do one year with me. Working for the government. Doing some . . . odd jobs. You still get to do your computer thing, don’t worry.”

  Chance clutches his ribs. “I want a lawyer.”

  “You lawyer up, this deal turns to smoke. Grab it before it’s gone.” When Chance hesitates, Hollis shrugs. “Not like you got much else going on, Shadowman. You go back home, those football players will eat you like a cookie.” Hollis pops an Oreo in his mouth, crunches down hard.

  Chance closes his eyes. Draws a deep breath. “All right,” he says. “. . . All right.”

  Aleena: “I want a lawyer.”

  Hollis: “You lawyer up, this deal turns to—”

  “Where are we?”

  “You can worry about that later.”

  “Hour-and-a-half flight, fifteen-minute drive. I’m guessing D.C. area. Virginia?”

  “Okay, so you get the clever badge.”

  She wrinkles her brow. Looks down at the cookies. “Muslims don’t eat cookies. We’re not allowed to have processed sugar. Islamic dietary laws.”

  He laughs. She’s quick, not like that last joker. “That’s no dietary restriction I’ve ever heard about. Besides, we both know you’re not actually Muslim.”

  “So you know quite a lot about me. Do you also know I’m an American? I know my rights.”

  “Whatever. As I was going to say, your kind doesn’t get a lawyer.”

  “My kind. You mean Arabs.”

  “I mean terrorists.”

  She freezes. “I’m not. I’m not a terrorist.”

  “No, I know that. But that’s how it’ll play. And the laws work easier for us if we just slap that scarlet letter across your chest now instead of later. You’re Syrian. You got family there. Muslims. Doesn’t matter that you’re not religious. Which, I have to say, begs the question why you’re involved at all in the Arab Spring.”

  She blinks. “Those are people who can benefit from my help. As you noted: I have family there. They like freedom. I like freedom. The reasons are not complex.” She stiffens, like she’s got a little more steel back in her backbone. “By the way, begging the question is not that. It’s a logical fallacy. Where a statement attempts to prove itself by including the conclusion within the statement: This girl is a terrorist because the law says so, and I am the law.”

  “Enough with the pedantic nonsense. Let’s cut to the chase, Aleena. I can help you. All you gotta do is come work for us.”

  “Us.” She says that word like a curse.

  “The United States government.”

  “I neither like nor approve of this government.”

  “But as you note, you are American. Which means this is your government as much as it is mine.”

  “This government hasn’t been mine in a long time.”

  One of those types. “You and I are going to have to differ on that point. I say you live here, it’s your government. All the bells and whistles. All the warts and wrinkles. You want the job?”

  She gives a stiff shake of her head. “I want a lawyer.”

  “Answer’s still no.”

  “Please—”

  “I thought you were smarter than this. Top of your class at Emerson. Folder full of recommendations. I guess you’re still a little dumb, too.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “You’re not looking at the long game, Aleena. We got you, so let’s say we file you under T for Terrorist. What happens to your family, you think? You have a big family, Aleena. Mother. Aunt. Little brother. They might pass the smell test. Maybe they won’t. Doesn’t matter. They’re going to be in for it. The accusations. The threats. If you’re a terrorist, then far as the rest of the world is concerned, so are they.”

  She pinches her eyes shut, like she’s trying not to cry. But then she opens her eyes and her stare bores a hole right through his chest and into his heart. Hollis thinks, She wants to leap across this table right now, wrap her hands around my throat, and kill me. He doesn’t blame her. This is dirty pool and he knows it.

  Aleena: “You’re a bully. Your whole country, a bully.”

  “We have work that needs doing, and I’ll say whatever I have to in order to see that work done, Aleena. Last chance. You in?”

  She stares off at an unfixed point. “What choice do I have?” she asks.

  DeAndre: “Man, fuck you.” He pushes the cookies away.

  Hollis: “That’s not very friendly, DeAndre.”

  “Government bitch. You don’t know me.”

  “Oh, but I do, DeAndre Deleon Mitchell. How do I know thee? Let me count the ways. Online handles: Cardshark. Scarface. Darth Dizzy. Mister Freeze. All sound like cartoon names to me. You’re a carder. A spammer. A scammer. A movie pirate. You’re like the Swiss Army knife of hackers. You’ve got card skimmers and backdoors and botnets—and I don’t even know what those things are, that’s just what they tell me.”

  “So who are you?” DeAndre asks.

  “I’m a friend. Here to offer you a deal.”

  “A deal.”

  “Uh-huh. The United States government knows what naughty business you’ve been up to. And they would very much like to bring the hammer down and pound you flat like a crooked nail. Unless you decide to play nice. Come work for the government for one year.”

  “Sounds like prison.”

  “It’ll be much nicer than prison, I promise. It’s a lodge.” DeAndre’s face twists up in confusion, probably imagining he’ll be skiing and drinking hot chocolate by the fire or whatever. Hollis laughs. “That’s what we call it, anyway. It’s in the mountains. Real pretty.”

  DeAndre sniffs. “You want me to turn traitor. Be a white hat all of a sudden.”

  “I’m sorry—white hat?” Hollis suddenly feels old.

  DeAndre laughs, but it’s not a happy sound. “Man, you really don’t know this stuff, do you? White hats: good-guy hackers, hacktivists, SJW social-justice types. Black hats: thieves and pirates and all that scum and villainy shit. No? You’re here to offer me a deal but you don’t know dick about this stuff?”

  “Think of me as a collector.”

  “What I see is a brother who’s really a white dude done up in Grade A, high-quality blackface. A traitor to the skin.”

  Hollis scowls. “Don’t
try that solidarity shit with me, son. Won’t fly.”

  “You didn’t grow up poor?”

  “My father was a dentist. I went to Princeton. You and me, we aren’t alike.”

  “Okay, okay.” DeAndre swallows hard. “You’re telling me you don’t have a moms you want to take care of?”

  “Not one who’d like me paying her in stolen money. If I tried that, my mother would whip my ass till it turned baboon blue.”

  DeAndre sighs. “Yeah. You and me got that in common, at least.”

  “The deal is, you work for us, and your ‘moms’ gets to keep that house. Don’t worry, she doesn’t know anything. Yet. I met her at the house, told her you’re working with us on special contract. She can go on believing that her son is a productive member of society, that she raised you right. And you can avoid prison. Or, well . . . You probably got the money to afford a sweet lawyer, but no matter what happens, your mother will know who you are. She’ll see through your bullshit to the con artist you are.”

  “Fuck you, man.”

  “Take the deal, DeAndre.”

  “Fuck you, man!”

  They sit there in silence for a while. DeAndre looks edgy. Itchy. Like he knows what he’s got to do but doesn’t want to be the one to do it. So Hollis does the work for him. “I’m going to assume by your silence, you’re in,” he says. “If that’s a true statement, then all you got to do is sit there, stay silent, keep staring at me like you want me dead.”

  DeAndre says nothing.

  Hollis nods. “Welcome to the team.”

  Hollis: “So what happened to you, Wade? You’re sixty-three. Been working with computers since they were, what, the size of this room and ran on programs made out of paper punch cards. Promising programmer. Could’ve been a Steve Jobs, Bill Gates type. Now look at you. You look rough, Wade. Like a field gone fallow.”

  Wade: “I think I’m pretty.”

  “Come work for us,” Hollis says.

  “I’ll pass.”

  “You won’t. We know what you’ve been up to. We know about the Doorstop worm. We know about the Globe hack. We know about the Shadowlands, the Liberty Bell, all that. We know about every soldier and spy and government file clerk who comes to you with a classified unredacted memo in hand, and we can plug every leak and burn every one of those traitors. But that’s not what matters. Not to you. They get sacrificed as part of the cause, you’re okay with that because you’ve done it before. But you do care about her. You care about Rebecca.”

  And here he slides that photo across the table.

  Wade flinches.

  Good, Hollis thinks. Wade probably thought he had severed all the threads and tethers to Rebecca. Wade’s daughter. But nothing stays secret, no matter how deep you bury it. Thanks to Typhon.

  Wade tries to lie—“I don’t know anybody named Rebecca”—but Hollis hears the shake in his voice, hears how Wade’s throat tightens with emotion.

  “Rebecca doesn’t know who her father is, Wade. But we’ll tell her. Hell, we’ll show her. Daddy with his crazy online bulletin board systems and his cache of guns and ammo—that’s right, we know how much ammo you’ve been buying up. Daddy with his explosive barrels buried in the desert. Daddy the traitor. The crazy man. She’ll think she’s the daughter of a real Waco wacko, some Tim McVeigh type.”

  “That’s cold.”

  “Life’s hard, Wade. You know that. You were in ’Nam, right? You’ve worked for us before. So come on back. I’m offering you a year’s worth of good clean government work putting your skills to use. And I know you’re going to say yes, because the second you tell me no, I’m going to get on the phone and tell Rebecca just who her daddy really is. It’ll break her heart. She seems nice. Be a real shame.”

  Wade doesn’t have to say anything. All he has to do is nod, and that’s it.

  Hollis: “I’m a little behind on the times, I admit, but everything in your file says you’re a Class A Internet troll, responsible for no end of hacking and surveillance and online bullying and an all-around attitude of mucking about in people’s lives—”

  Reagan: “I’m in.”

  “What?”

  “I said I’m in.”

  Hollis blinks. “If I may be honest, I don’t understand.”

  “You’re here to offer me a deal. And it’s some weird under-the-table, off-the-books thing because you put a hood over my head and flew me here and I haven’t seen a lawyer and your identification doesn’t have any agency listed—which suggests NSA, or some ghost agency nobody’s ever heard of—and so since you haven’t killed me (and, honestly, why would you?), I can say with some certainty you’re going to offer me a deal. Probably a job.”

  She must see the look on his face, because she says, “Oh, what? Think I don’t know you guys like to scoop up black-hat hackers and crackers and scammers and trolls and make them turn tricks for John Q. Law? You’re offering me a job and I’m taking it.”

  He eyes her warily. “I don’t have to convince you?”

  She shrugs, grabs a Fig Newton. “I quit my job a few weeks ago. I hate my apartment. I hate my town. I have a cat somewhere, and I hate that cat. He’s weird. He reminds me of Gollum. Piss on my old life. I’m in.”

  Well, that’s five out of five. Though Reagan is one he needs to watch. She’s too eager. She’s a snake you invite into your house, then wonder why it bit you.

  Golathan—that prick—will be happy.

  CHAPTER 7

  Hollis Copper

  NSA HEADQUARTERS, FORT MEADE, MARYLAND

  Locked and loaded,” Hollis says, throwing down five folders on the desk. Ken Golathan looks up with a cheek bulging with half-eaten PowerBar. He pauses midchew, fans the folders out like he’s about to do a card trick, then keeps chewing.

  “Good, great, yes,” Golathan says, his interest already flagging. That’s how he is. Always sounds like he’s only partly present, only temporarily invested in the conversation at hand. “So we’re solid, then. Another five guests at the Hunting Lodge.”

  “Where’d you find these people, anyway?” Hollis asks. “They’re not exactly high value. I gotta admit, Ken, I’m feeling like my talents were a little bit wasted here. You don’t bring out big guns to shoot pigeons off your mailbox.”

  “You a big gun now? The ego on you.” Golathan sniffs, squints. “Trust me, this was curated at the highest level.”

  “Typhon selected these people. That’s what you’re telling me.”

  Golathan gets a mean look. Vulpine. Vicious. Like he’s about to tear a chicken into wet gobbets and red feathers. “We don’t talk about that, Copper. We don’t just throw that name around. But yes. That’s how it came about. Like I said, this has been curated. They’ve been selected. You’re not important enough to worry about what’s going on here, you feel me?”

  “You’re an asshole,” Hollis says.

  “That I am.” Ken shows off his big white teeth in a celebrity smile.

  “Whatever. Consider our time together done. It’s been fun.”

  “Mmm. Fun ain’t over, Copper.”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “You’re still on the hook.”

  “Listen, I did what you told me to do. I’ve got work back at the Bureau. I’ve got a partner. I don’t work for you.”

  “Oh, but you do.” The NSA administrator stands up, plants both hands on the desk, and leans forward like he’s leering down a teen girl’s shirt. “I got you on loan.”

  “You have your own people for this.”

  “Eh. We’re not real out-amongst-the-people types. Plus, with a Fed on my payroll, even temporarily, everything looks neat and clean and interagency.”

  “I’m part of the CYA.” Cover your ass.

  Golathan picks a bit of granola from a molar. “Mm-hmm.”

  “Last ass I want to cover is yours. I want out.”

  “Door’s thataway, then. Except, let’s remember, I know things about you. So until I say so, you’re on my hook, little Copperfi
sh.”

  Inside, Hollis is picturing a dartboard with Golathan’s face on it. He bites back any further comment and asks, “What other geniuses you want me to wrangle up?”

  “Same five geniuses. You’re going to be their babysitter.”

  Anger spikes like a hot pin through Hollis’s heart. “What?”

  “That’s right. You’re going to the Lodge. You’re going to watch these little turds and make sure they all roll in that same direction. You brought them into this world, and you’re going to stay with them all the way to the end.”

  “Why are you doing me like this, Ken? This about Fellhurst?”

  Golathan sneers, doesn’t answer the question. “I got a job to do, chief. I see a hammer nearby and I need a hammer, I’m going to pick it up. I’m going to use it until I’m done with it or until it breaks. So stop asking me stupid fucking questions and get back on the plane and usher our new ‘hires’ out of their hidey-holes and to the Lodge where they belong.”

  Hollis stiffens. He feels the pressure of Golathan’s boot on his neck. This is about Fellhurst. Has to be. And Golathan will punish him for it. Again and again. Hollis knows he has to find a way to turn the tables. Get one over on Golathan.

  But for now, he does all he can do: he grits his teeth and says, “Done.”

  CHAPTER 8

  The Compiler

  ALEXANDRIA, VIRGINIA

  The house feels empty.

  Gordon Berry paces, and each footstep echoes through the halls of his home, like the clop-clop-clop of a nervous horse. He pops his knuckles, and the pops echo, too.

  He has the sense of being sucked downward—like a misstepping adventurer in an old serial, caught in a pit of quicksand. He remembers his parents, who grew up in Pennsylvania’s “coal cracker” region—the band of coal-mining towns upstate—telling stories about coal silt. Like quicksand, but black as the devil’s heart. Sometimes, they said, it would pull you down like a child popping a gum bubble and sucking it back into his mouth—so fast you’d blink and the person would be gone. Other times it was slow and crushing, like wet concrete. You’d breathe in, then out, and the slurry would tighten like a constricting snake—no way to get another breath. You’d suffocate long before the mire filled your mouth and throat.