Devoted, page 7
Shacket alone escaped, violating protocols by not staying with the ship. To hell with the protocols. He has done the right thing, the right thing for himself. Having fled Utah in a panic, he has had time to recover his composure, to reconsider what the consequences of the Springville meltdown might be.
He feels free for the first time in his life. Free. He senses some awesome power growing in him, and a thrilling new confidence. In fact, leaving Utah, crossing Nevada, and now motoring west by northwest through the mountains of California, he feels as if he is leaving mere humanity behind. What if horizontal gene transfer via archaea is in the process of editing mortality out of his genome? What if the catastrophe at Springville was not a catastrophe at all, but a great if accidental success, with him as the only beneficiary? He feels a most satisfying contempt for everyone whom he once wanted to please. He’s becoming, developing into someone superior, and he is excited by the prospect of proving it, of doing any damn thing he wants with any damn one he wants, to anyone he wants, starting with Megan Bookman, the ice-queen bitch who needs to be humbled. He will rule her.
Or maybe he doesn’t have to wait for Megan. In his becoming, perhaps he has already achieved the power to do what he wants, take what he wants. Ahead, on this lonely state highway, a car is stopped on the wide right-hand shoulder. A man is changing the rear tire on the starboard side. A young woman stands watching him. She’s wearing shorts and a halter top. She is a hottie. All of Shacket’s life, there have been women he wants and can’t have, women who respond to his overtures with disinterest or even scorn. This looks like one of those women. She looks like all of them.
He slows and pulls off the pavement and stops his Dodge Demon behind the car. It’s a black Shelby Super Snake, the quintessential high-performance car, possibly $125,000 off the showroom floor.
He gets out, smiling, being the Good Samaritan. “You need some help with that?”
“Just a flat,” says the man who is squatting by the rear tire well, using a lug wrench. “I’ve almost got it changed.”
“Is this beauty a Shelby?”
“Super Snake, last year’s model,” the asshole proudly confirms.
No traffic is in sight in either direction.
“That’s true power, sir. That’s an epic vehicle. But you can’t open her up proper on this back road.”
“Not if you don’t want to end up in the trees,” the Super Snake guy agrees. “But it’s fun the way it handles the curves.”
“You like handling the curves, do you?” Shacket asks.
The asshole hears the sneer in Shacket’s voice and at once gets to his feet, the lug wrench in hand.
Indicating the woman, Shacket says, “That bitch of yours sure isn’t last year’s model.”
“Something wrong with you?” the Super Snake guy asks.
He’s tall, as solid as a linebacker, with the arms of a powerlifter. He’s never backed down from anyone. He’s the kind who’s used to intimidating the hell out of other men with just a frown.
“No, sir, nothing wrong with me,” Shacket says.
Under the low sky, the day is still. No sound of oncoming traffic. He would hear engine noise perhaps half a minute or more before any vehicle came into sight.
He smiles. “Nothing wrong with me that a fine piece of ass like her wouldn’t cure.”
“Get in the car, Justine,” the guy tells the bitch. He starts toward Shacket, his face as hard as a sledgehammer, confident in his size, holding the lug wrench as though he’ll crack a skull with it.
The woman doesn’t move, as if paralyzed by fear. Or maybe she’s excited, thinks nothing bad can happen here, gets off watching her man beat the crap out of people.
Like an omen of perilous events, three ravens pass high above, issuing no flight calls, their wings slicing the air with sharp silence. Everything means something important now.
From under his sport coat, Shacket draws the Heckler & Koch Compact .38, which is loaded with hollow-point rounds, and he strides toward the linebacker, putting four bullets in him.
Justine breaks her paralysis and screams. She’s the Jamie Lee Curtis of her time, scream queen of the Sierra Nevada. She turns and runs, scissoring her long, smooth legs.
Her strong man collapses, as dead as anyone ever gets, and he rolls down the embankment, limp as rags, all the muscle gone out of him, into the tall grass below.
This is what it’s all about, being in command, being empowered, without fear, untouchable. Shacket is a changed man, a changing man, fast becoming, becoming someone new, something else.
The woman is running down the middle of the highway, heading west, evidently hoping a car or truck will appear.
Instead of sneakers or anything practical, the bitch is wearing sandals with a medium heel. She stumbles once, and then again. One sandal flies loose. She hobbles forward.
Laughing at her frantic, feckless escape attempt, Shacket goes after her.
A black feather floats in front of Shacket, a raven’s shedding from on high. He snatches it out of the air, pockets it, a symbol of death bestowed on him as a sign of his new power, to assure him that he may decide who will live and who will die and with what degree of suffering the condemned will perish. Everything seems like an omen now, means something important.
He holsters the pistol, races after the woman, seizes her by her long hair. He yanks her off her feet. Justine tumbles to the pavement. Shacket punches her once, leaving her dazed and limp.
He feels as strong as her dead boyfriend had looked. He scoops her off the blacktop as if she is weightless and carries her to the shoulder of the highway and drops her, kicks her, sends her rolling to the bottom of the slope.
In a fever of desire and triumph, he descends to the woman where she struggles to get up from the tall grass. He falls upon her, pins her beneath him. Recovering from the punch, she struggles under him. But this contest is settled before it’s begun, for she is the gazelle and he the lion, she the fly and he the spider.
The sound of a truck engine arises, approaching on the highway above. No one can see them here in the grass, at least twenty feet below the roadbed. Although it’s unlikely that anyone in the truck could hear Justine if she screamed, Shacket slams the heel of one hand under her chin and shoves hard, pushing her mouth shut, forcing her head back, her elegant neck arching, trapping her cry in her throat.
Maybe the two cars, one behind the other on the shoulder of this lonely road, will seem curious to the driver of the truck. But with no one in either car, no one flagging passing traffic for help, there isn’t any reason to stop and investigate. In fact, in this often lawless and dangerous age, a wise man would keep moving and avoid the risk of involvement.
Judging by the sound of its engine, the truck seems to slow, and Justine apparently has a moment of renewed hope. She bucks and twists under Shacket, tries to force a scream through clenched teeth as he jams the heel of his right hand harder against the underside of her chin. Her taut and supple body squirming under him, her utter helplessness, his absolute power: Although neither of them is naked, this is the most erotic moment of Shacket’s life, and he is rampant.
Justine’s hope is a false hope. The truck accelerates, and the sound recedes. She stops struggling, stops trying to scream. The quiet of the wilderness descends, deeper than before, without insect buzz or birdsong, as if every creature that lives here is aware that among them has come one unique unto the world, one who is changed and changing still, one who lives by no rules either of man or nature, who fears nothing, and who should be feared.
He removes his hand from Justine’s chin, hoping that she will scream for him, for him alone, now that there’s no one else to hear. She looks up into his face, her blue eyes wide, her nostrils flared, breathing hard, and says only, “Please.”
Shacket likes the sound of that: the word, the pitiable note of entreaty, the recognition that he is her absolute master.
“Say it again.”
“Please. Please don’t hurt me.”
He intends to rape her. Instead, to his surprise and hers, he bites. She screams. He bites again, and the biting is wonderful, exhilarating, the most fulfilling thing that he has ever done.
Her terror is his ecstasy.
18
Woody in his room. At his computer. Seeking justice.
They said Woody’s IQ was 186. His reading comprehension rate was 160 words per minute. Deduct 160 from 186, and you had the number of letters in the alphabet.
He was born at 4:00 a.m., July 26. July was the seventh month. Twenty-six multiplied by seven was 182. Add four, representing the hour he was born, and you had his IQ.
This was a Wednesday. Woody’s dad died on a Wednesday. Exactly 164 weeks had passed since his dad died. Woody began working on “The Son’s Revenge: Faithfully Compiled Evidence of Monstrous Evil” on the second anniversary of his father’s death, sixty weeks earlier, when his hacking skills were refined to the point at which no security system, no digital defense, could stand against him. Deduct sixty from 164, and you had the number of pages that were in the document that would convict his father’s killers.
None of these numbers—from his IQ and reading comprehension rate to the amount of pages in the report—meant anything useful. They were mathematical coincidences, or perhaps they were patterns indicating a series of algorithms underlying the operation of the universe; but even in the latter case, they were so deeply woven into the matrix of reality that they were beyond human understanding.
However, the way Woody’s mind worked, his recognition of such coincidences or mysterious patterns was constant.
This mental quirk, the recognition of obscure patterns, helped him pilot his way through all levels of the internet, from the World Wide Web that everyone used, to the remote archives in the deep web, to the ominous byways of the Dark Web.
To Woody, the internet was a planet of its own, every site a village or a city with its neighborhoods and streets, a planet across which he traveled as if by magic, typing a brief incantation and, with a click, teleporting from one continent to another.
He had opened back doors in numerous computer systems and had implanted rootkits, which made it possible for him to return often and search their archives on such a deep and subtle level that even the best IT-security types were unlikely to detect his presence.
Just in case someone scoped him out as he was cruising through their data, he never went directly from Pinehaven to any back door, but spoofed his way through numerous domestic telecom exchanges and used other tricks, so anyone backtracking him would be flummoxed.
In more than a year of intense effort, he had taken one known fact and Sherlocked his way to more than a hundred pages of evidence that a special counsel, appointed by the attorney general of the United States and given a platoon of investigators, might not have discovered in a decade. When you were a high-functioning autistic genius, your developmental disorder, coming with a singular ability to concentrate intensely for long periods of time on what might seem to be mundane facts, was an advantage of great value.
The one fact he’d begun with was his dad’s disillusionment with his boss, Dorian Purcell, the megabillionaire. Woody overheard his mom and dad talking once about Purcell’s “messiah complex” and about Dad’s desire to give his notice as soon as certain stock options had vested, before “I have to support ambitions of Dorian’s that are just flat-out crazy.”
Once inside the computer system of Parable, Inc.—the parent company of Purcell’s sprawling empire—Woody had found his way into Dorian’s email and phone directories. They had provided him with a network of other people to learn about. Many of those hundreds of individuals were on one another’s directories, a web of elites, but he had noticed that sixteen of them shared a contact with an odd name that intrigued him—Gordius.
When you’re an autodidact who teaches himself to read at the age of four, and when you’re reading at a college level three years later, and when you’re an inward-turned autistic who doesn’t spend hours every day in social interaction or engaged in any of the pursuits that occupy most people, you have a great deal of time to fill. The most pleasant way to fill it is by studying and learning things. One of the things Woody had greatly enjoyed learning was classical mythology.
In Greek mythology, Gordius was a peasant who became king of Phrygia. He tied an extremely complicated knot—the famous Gordian knot—that no one could untie. When Alexander learned that whoever solved the knot was destined to rule all of Asia, he simply sliced it with his sword.
This man on sixteen people’s directories was named Alexander Gordius. To anyone lacking Woody’s unique mind, the name would have looked like just another in a long list. But, to him, it seemed unlikely that someone would be named for both the creator of the Gordian knot and the man who solved it with a sword.
To him it looked like a potential false identity.
Woody had been curious enough to want to know more about this Mr. Gordius. Through a back door in the telecom company that carried the account, he initiated a search and discovered that the billing address for Alexander Gordius was a general partnership based in California, which was owned by a limited liability corporation in Delaware . . . and from there the chase took numerous turns.
He had needed a few days to discover that a bewildering variety of corporate entities, behind which Gordius hid, were all connected in one way or another with Refine, Inc., whose parent company was Parable, Inc. Eventually he had squirreled through the back door of the Refine computer system. Once in there, he’d found and penetrated Alexander Gordius’s email files—and discovered that Gordius was actually Dorian Purcell.
To the very exclusive sixteen elites on his directory, Dorian wrote essays identifying serious problems facing humanity—and then proposing solutions. Often controversial solutions. He covered everything from overpopulation to declining population, global warming to global cooling, nuclear-fusion power to the practicality of million-acre solar farms, likely paths to curing cancer, and the possibility of drastically extending the human life span.
Some of what Purcell wrote was intelligent, thoughtful, maybe even doable. However, much of it was as lame as it was pompous. He knew computers and solid-state technology and much related to those fields, but he imagined himself to be an expert on everything. Although Woody had studied and learned a great deal, he was well aware that there were vast areas of knowledge about which he was ignorant and probably always would be. There was only so much time. He knew what he didn’t know. Dorian Purcell, on the other hand, seemed not to know what he didn’t know.
The Alexander Gordius email directory contained the sixteen names Woody already had, but in addition there were three very long email addresses that weren’t names, that were nothing but series of random letters, numbers, and symbols. He understood that these must be sites on the Dark Web. The primary way to acquire one of these closely guarded addresses was from a like-minded individual. Maybe these were sources for drugs or for child pornography; maybe they were online weapons dealers selling illegal stuff like machine guns and C-4 explosives and shoulder-launched surface-to-air missiles.
Woody had hesitated to check out these sites. He had thought about it for days.
Eventually he had chosen one with forty-six characters in the address and had spoofed to it through the Alexander Gordius email account.
He had been greeted by a black screen with one word in white block letters: Tragedy.
A series of quick clips from various TV news programs, both national and local, followed for three or four minutes. There were photographs of people who had died, video of crashed planes strewn across fields and wrecked cars and burning buildings and racing emergency vehicles with flashing lightbars on their roofs, of hospitals and somber police officials in front of microphones and somber doctors in white coats at other microphones. With the images came snippets of audio, the voices of newsreaders and of the grim-faced officials in the clips: “Died in the flash fire following a violent gas-leak explosion . . . committed suicide by hanging himself from a barn rafter . . . perished in a freak accident . . . was killed by a hit-and-run driver . . . a senseless drive-by shooting thought to have been committed by a member of one of the gangs that plague the city . . . a murder-suicide that rocked this upscale community . . . of a sudden massive stroke at the young age of thirty-eight . . . one of three dead in what police believe is a terrorist event, though no one is yet taking credit . . .”
When a photo of Jason Bookman flashed onto the screen, Woody had been so startled that he heard only the last few words of the audio: “—in the crash of a helicopter owned by the company.”
Then his dad’s face was gone, and more tragedies were cited until the site greeting came to an end. The screen went black, and then three words appeared in white block letters: Enter Your Password.
Of course Woody hadn’t been a user of whatever services were being offered. Therefore, he didn’t have a password.
He had exited the site.
He’d sat staring at his blank computer screen for a long time. Maybe an hour. Maybe two. Thinking.
Eventually, with pen in hand and tablet ready, he had spoofed through the Alexander Gordius account and again entered the forty-six-character email address.
