Zero Day Code, page 13
part #1 of End of Days Series
“Get out of the way, man!” he shouted, before hosing down the engine fire with a few discreet bursts of dry white powder. He moved in quickly, shooting two solid volleys directly into the rupture in the F-100’s hood. The fire inside appeared to be extinguished.
“Thanks man,” Jonas said, still not sure what to do. The guy who had helped him looked to be in his 40s, a little fat, but strong with it. A dude who worked hard every day, rather than working out.
“It’s okay,” the man said. “I got another two bottles if we need them. But we better get your rig off the road, son. It’s not gonna help with this mess.”
The dude gestured at the traffic jam which had seemingly metastasised around them. Jonas could see evidence of gridlock blocks away now. The blaring of horns was an unholy cacophony. Drivers in the vehicles around his dead pickup had abandoned their cars at the first sight of the flames. He could see some of them running, actually running, down the street. Idiots.
The guy with the fire extinguisher was wearing some sort of uniform, a sweat stained grey shirt emblazoned with the logo of a propane gas company and a name tag: SAM. Probably explained why he seemed to be packing so many fire extinguishers. Jonas would’ve left the car there, but this dude was already getting set to push it out of traffic.
A couple of drivers who’d left their cars but not run away, approached warily. Some were filming with their smart phones.
“Come on you guys,” Propane Sam shouted to nobody in particular. “Let’s get this thing off the road.”
Nobody came any closer.
“It’s safe,” he assured them. “But we gotta get it moved, so come on. Everyone pitch in.”
“You want me to steer?” Jonas asked.
“Hell no,” Propane Sam said. “You look like you could pick this thing up and carry it home. You push. Hey you! Lady!”
A young Asian woman tried to pretend she hadn’t heard him, but this propane-powered hero was having none of it.
“Just pop up in the cabin there and steer us over to the pavement,” Sam ordered, and much to Jonas’s surprise she did as she was told. Her obedience seemed to influence the others and within a few seconds half a dozen men and women had surrounded his pickup. A minute later they’d muscled it out of the jam and onto the verge. They even gave themselves a round of applause when it was all done. The woman who’d steered for them handed Jonas his keys.
“Sorry about your car,” she said, but she looked like this had been the highlight of her day. She was gonna be pissed if she couldn’t get on Twitter to tell everyone about it later.
Propane Sam popped the hood and gave the engine block a sceptical once-over. He scowled at whatever he found in there, gave it another taste of the dry powder and nodded as though satisfied at last. His small crowd of ‘volunteers’ was already breaking up, heading back to their own vehicles where they would undoubtedly sit with the windows rolled up and the cold air blasting until the jam cleared itself.
Sam ran a thick callused hand through his thinning blond hair.
“I’d offer you a lift, man, but you know…” he gestured helplessly at the stalled traffic which now appeared to be spreading in all directions.
“Thanks anyway,” Jonas said. “But I live nearby.” He patted the passenger side door of the F-100 ruefully. “And nobody’s gonna be stealing this useless bitch. I can get it towed tomorrow.”
Sam nodded sagely.
“Reckon you’ll be the first one of us home and out of this crap then,” he said. He extended his hand to shake, and Jonas took it. They both gripped firmly and pumped up and down, once, twice, three times.
“Good job, Sam” Jonas said. “Nice working with you.”
Walking home confirmed the extent of the traffic jam. It was a monster snarl. Jonas expected to see traffic lights out everywhere, but instead they all seemed functional. Or dysfunctional. At nearly every major intersection he passed, three or four vehicles, sometimes more, had collided at speed. It was as though the lights had tricked dozens of drivers into accelerating when they should have been slowing down. Some of the pile ups were obviously fatal. Some were burning and Jonas closed his mind to the screams. He heard sirens in the distance, but none of the emergency services could get through to the worst of the accidents. At one point he saw a couple of paramedics running at full tilt with an old-fashioned canvas stretcher held between them. They were both struggling in the heat, sweating torrents, their faces as red as fresh split watermelon.
This shit was starting to look a little more serious than Amazon Web Services crashing and taking down a bunch of stupid Instagram influencers. Jonas felt his gorge rising a little at the chance that he wouldn’t be able to access his funds. He needed money. He needed to get gone.
Traffic had backed up all the way home, but the side street in which he lived was clear except for a couple of cars at the intersection with Algona Boulevard. They were waiting, with seemingly endless patience and demonstrable stupidity to merge into the static river of hot steel clogging up the main stem. Jonas shook his head. People were idiots.
Mikey, his roommate. He was an idiot. A well-intentioned and occasionally useful idiot, but a mouth breather, nonetheless. Mikey’s ambitions in life reached no further than one day owning his own Burger King franchise, and if that happened to be at the Supermall and he didn’t have to change anything about his life besides working harder, that would suit Mikey just fine.
Jonas checked his watch, a Swiss analogue model he’d stolen from the fulfilment centre. It amused him to wear it to work.
2:42 PM.
It seemed like the entire population of the city was trapped in their cars. The blare of horns and warbling sirens was loud enough to follow him through the front door when he got home. It was marginally cooler inside the house thanks to all of the asbestos in the walls and roof. Dark, too, and he stood in the vestibule while his eyes adjusted. When Jonas could see where he was going, he closed the door on the chaos behind him. He could still hear it, slightly muted, in the distance.
Not really expecting success, he tried logging onto the Internet.
Mikey’s PC took up half of the table where they ate the infrequent meals they shared together. The machine was asleep—Mikey was obsessed about never actually turning it off—and it woke up fine, but as Jonas expected he could not get online. He turned the modem off for 30 seconds, sweating in the dark stuffy closeness of the empty house. Turned it back on, and tried again. Nothing.
Looked like he wouldn’t be checking on his website and podcast then.
He checked his phone, but cell reception had always been shit here. He wasn’t surprised to see he had no service.
The import of what he’d done earlier started to creep up on him. Knocking Tamoreau on his ass. Assaulting Yolanda and Omar. And not just in front of witnesses, but on CCTV.
Fuck, what had he been thinking?
Truth was he hadn’t been thinking at all. He’d just let his temper off the leash, same way he had back in Miami.
A thought occurred. A hopeful thought.
Perhaps the security systems were down. Everything else seems to be out.
Following a hunch, he tried the television. Mikey had cable.
It was out, too.
For some reason, that made Jonas feel better. Witnesses he could deal with. But there was no arguing with cold, recorded video. Shit, they’d probably throw his ass in jail for this. And if anybody found out about his podcast, it was a laydown fucking certainty that some asshole prosecutor would try and ramp up his sentence by juicing it with a racial hatred angle.
He had to get out of town.
It was too hot to think. He could feel his thoughts running away from him. He had to move quick, sure, but he had to do so with deliberation. Hasten slowly, as they said. He knew that most felons got picked up as soon as they tried to run. They didn’t think it through. They didn’t plan. They just ran.
He had to do more than just strike out for the horizon. He had to get away clean and somehow plug into his newfound but anonymous fame to make some scratch.
He figured he had at least a few hours. There were cops everywhere at the moment, but like the rest of the city they were stuck in traffic. Nobody was coming for him. Not while everything was locked up like this. Jonas took a bottle of cold tap water from the fridge, poured himself a glass, and drank slowly. No sense in getting a headache now. He had a second glass and started to calm down as he cooled down.
He would need to change clothes.
He showered and he shaved off his beard, and when he dressed he did so in the best disguise he could think of; a pair of Mikey’s bike shorts and a racing top.
His roommate was not just a cyclist. He was a mad fucking cyclist; like, really political about it. It was pretty much the only thing the otherwise mild-mannered idiot ever got worked up over. Jonas had seen him punch cars in traffic. He smiled at the memory. And at the idea that it gave him.
He’d waved Mikey off to work on his racing bike that morning, while he was checking on the pod’s boner-inducing download stats.
But his roomie had a second bike that he kept in his room. A heavier, ruggedised model that he rode on the rough dirt tracks in the remnant forest over the highway to the west. It could go all sorts of places the racer could not.
Jonas collected his go-bag from the cupboard in his bedroom. He didn’t need to check it. He knew what was in there, and only he knew the combination of the two padlocks that secured it. Clothes, weapons, some energy-dense foodstuffs and a few camping items. More than enough to get him out of the city and over the state line. He was annoyed that he couldn’t transfer his PayPal balance to the debit card he’d set up for just such a flight, but he could try that again from an Internet café on the road. He would even take the precaution of peddling half a day out of his way to throw the cops off his heading. But that was all for the future.
He did have a solution to his immediate cash flow problem. Mikey Summers had an unusual life hack. He never carried five-dollar notes. Whenever he came into possession of one, he put it into a small wooden box on the bookshelf by his bed. He told Jonas that over the course of a year he could save enough that way to pay for a two-week road trip. On his bike, of course. He was planning on riding all the way down to Corvallis later this year.
“Sorry, buddy,” Jonas said, taking the locked box and smashing it open. “But Corvallis sucks anyway. All those fucking college students. I’m doing you a favour.”
Mikey did Jonas the favour of $865 in five-dollar notes.
He took his roommate’s money, riding gear, and bike. The spandex was uncomfortably tight on him. But spandex did stretch and if Jonas bulged out of the skin-tight costume, he figured that would serve as a distraction and, in a pinch, even a disguise. Witnesses would be too busy staring at his rock-hard ass and oversized genitalia to give the police a useful description of his actual appearance.
His preparations done; Jonas wheeled the bike out to the footpath less than forty minutes after getting home. The day was still scorching hot, and the later afternoon sun blazed fiercely from the metal and glass of the cars jammed up at the end of his street. Nothing had changed out here. But everything changed for him. Again.
He climbed onto the bike and rode away from the house without a backward glance.
14
You’re Rolling With The Deep State Now
James didn’t wait when the conference broke up. Telling Michelle he’d meet her back at her office he hurried downstairs to the little cafe where they’d bought lattes and a cheese cruller — because Michele’s favourite muffin had been unavailable. The early morning crowd had dispersed and James had only one other customer to wait behind. She grabbed a takeaway coffee with raisin toast and hurried off after paying with her watch.
A transaction that went off without a hitch, he noted.
The server, a young woman, smiled as he approached the counter.
“Back again?”
“Uh, yeah,” he said, surprised to be recognised. “That was good coffee. I’ll have another to go.”
He used his Apple Watch to pay for the purchase and again it went through without a problem.
“Still no muffins?” James asked.
The girl shook her head.
“No, sorry. They just didn’t turn up.”
He nodded.
“Weird question, but could you give me the name of the distributor?”
“Dude, you must really be hurting for a muffin.”
“When are we ever not hurting for a muffin?” James smiled as winningly as he could. “Seriously though, it’s like a matter of national security.” He paused. “I’ve always wanted to say that.”
The serving girl looked at him as if uncertain of his sanity.
“Is it really national security?”
He shrugged. “I don’t know yet, but could you check?”
She disappeared into a supply room that was more of a closet, reappearing a minute later with a Post-it note, which she handed to him. Written on the small yellow square were two words: US Foodservice.
“Thanks,” James said and started to hurry away.
“Hey, you forgot your coffee,” she called after him.
He pulled up just short of the exit. Caught between waiting for the young woman to make up his order, or getting back to Michelle.
“You know what, just pay it forward. Give it to the next person who comes through in need of caffeine. Be the highlight of their day.”
She smiled. “That’s so nice.”
He returned her smile but hurried away without his drink.
Michelle Nguyen was already back in her office and she met him with an inquiring tilt of the head.
“‘Sup, Corn-fed?”
James pulled up a chair in front of her desk. He had trouble stopping his legs from jigging up and down.
“Is there like some spreadsheet or briefing paper or something detailing which companies and government departments got hacked yesterday?”
He knew it was a grossly inappropriate use of the term ‘hacked’ but he didn’t care. He just needed what he needed.
“I imagine so,” Michelle said. “Probably half a dozen of them floating around by now. The NSA’s will be the best though. You want that?”
He looked at her with wide eyes.
“You can get that?”
“Dude, you’re rolling with the deep state now. We can get anything. Just give me a second.”
She pulled a trackpad a little closer, woke up the screen on her computer, and started to type. The computer was a big iMac, but she used a crazy ergonomic keyboard that was so ugly it had to be Microsoft. Within a minute she turned the screen around to face him. It was dense with information.
James shook his head slowly.
“Okay, this’ll go a lot quicker if I just tell you what I’m thinking and you tell me whether I’m crazy or not.”
“Oh, I can totally do that.”
He sat back in the chair, took a breath and composed his thoughts. How best to phrase what he was thinking? What did they need to know, to know what they needed? He decided to plunge in at the deep end of the crazy pool.
“Most of the food in America,” he said, “is distributed by four companies. Did you know that?”
Michelle leaned back in her chair, nodding.
“I write the food security briefings that nobody reads,” she said. “I’d have said six companies, but I know where the number four is coming from. Sysco. US Foodservice. Performance Food Group. And Gordon Food Services.”
“Yeah, okay, you’re right,” James conceded. There are six of them, if you include Food Services of America and Reinhart. Between them they control 280 of the 298 food distribution centres in the continental US. Your missing muffin? It was supposed to come from one of those warehouses this morning. And it didn’t.”
Michelle looked at him as if waiting for the next clue.
“Well, a lot of things got messed up yesterday, James. They’re still sorting out traffic jams in half a dozen cities.”
“Yeah, I know,” he said. “I had the same trouble as everybody else. Couldn’t pay for my gas. Couldn’t pay for my hotel room…”
Michelle interrupted him. “But we’re paying for your hotel room. Including room service.”
“Yeah, but they still hit you with that scammy holding fee, or resort charge or whatever they call it,” he said.
“Ugh, I hate that.”
“The Marriot was only a buck,” James said. “But they still had to use one of the old mechanical slides to get an impression of my personal card.”
Michelle shrugged. “Sorry, dude.”
James mirrored the gesture.
“It’s fine. A buck is fine. But what I’m saying is, yes, I know everything melted down yesterday. What I would like to know…” He pointed at the screen sitting between them. “… Is whether those foodservice companies got hit in a different way to everybody else. Can you look into that data and tell me whether anything stands out?”
Michelle narrowed her eyes at the screen, shaking her head.
“I can’t, or at least I can’t do it off the top of my head,” she admitted. “But we got some data nerds who could. You want me to hit them up?”
“That’d be awesome,” James said.
“Okay,” she said, mostly to herself as her fingers flew over the weird-looking keyboard again. “I’ve sent it to the mavens and flagged it as priority ultra. If there’s anything there, like anything really obvious, they’ll get back to us pretty quickly. Where are you going with this, James? It’s not what Holloway asked you to look at.”
“I know,” he said. “And I’ve already done some work on his brief. I promise I’ll double down on it as soon as I close out this hunch. And it is just a hunch, but I got to thinking in that briefing this morning, that if you really wanted to kick the legs out from under any American response to…”
