Hacker: The Outlaw Chronicles, page 18
* * *
I PUSHED the wheelchair through the parking lot as fast as I could manage. Using the key fob’s controls, I had the van unlocked and the chairlift electronically unfolding from the side door before we reached it. Even so, we had to wait as the lift whirred and hummed, dropping to the ground slowly.
“Come on, come on, come on.”
It settled on the asphalt with a scrape and I wheeled Mom on. I pushed another button and the list slowly raised her. My mind was numb with fear. No one had seen me yet, but they’d surely realized by now that I was gone and so was Mom.
With the chair in the van, I strapped Mom in and climbed behind the wheel. I backed out so fast that I scraped a parked ambulance.
My eyes shot forward as a man came through the Emergency Room exit. The security guard saw me and began running toward the van, yelling. Close on his heels was the FBI agent Jill had told to wait on the first floor. I had expected to see him in the lobby, but he hadn’t been there when I stepped off the elevator.
I shoved the van into drive and yanked the wheel hard as I floored it. The tires barked, and I careened through the parking lot toward the exit. The minivan banged over a speed bump and bounced like a carnival ride when I came out of the parking lot. Engine straining, I turned right into traffic, cutting off a Volvo that blared its horn. The van fishtailed, found its bearing, and shot forward.
The hospital grew smaller in the rearview mirror and I sighed with relief when I saw Mom was okay. Glancing at both outside mirrors, I determined we weren’t being followed. Yet. I had to put as much distance between us as possible. I had to get her to Austin. There, we would be safe.
I jammed the pedal down, accelerated through a red light, and roared up the highway on-ramp.
“Hang on, Mom,” I said, looking in the rearview mirror. Her head lolled forward and side to side in rhythm with the jostling of the van. I took the first exit I came to and picked my way through side streets toward Austin’s. I hoped the FBI would think I had stayed on the highway and crossed the Bay.
Fifteen minutes later I turned into the underground parking garage at Austin’s. He’d told me to never park at the building itself in case I was being tailed, but there was no time to park down the street. I needed to get Mom upstairs as quickly as possible.
The wooden access gate was down, but I had no time for etiquette. I rammed through it, sending the thing flying in an explosion of splinters. I bounced through the dimly lit garage and stopped by a doorway that had to lead inside.
My hands were shaking uncontrollably and my entire body buzzed with adrenaline. I climbed out and stared for a moment at the garage entrance. I didn’t think anyone had followed me here, because if they had I’d be dead.
I pushed the button to open the side door and lower the lift, then got Mom out of the van. How was I going to explain this to Austin? I’d brought up the idea of putting my mom in the hack, but talking about it and doing it were different things.
Mom’s breath was ragged and shallow by the time I got her on the lobby elevator. She was in serious condition. She was dying and no one could change that using medicine. If Mom was going to live, it would take a miracle and she of all people was due one. Just one.
The elevator jarred to a stop on the top floor, and I wheeled the chair to Austin’s door. I threw the door open, circled back around the wheelchair and pushed Mom in. The moment I set foot inside I heard the alarm echoing through the room.
“Austin?” I called and pushed Mom deeper into the room. “Where are you?”
As I moved forward, the alarm grew louder, and I realized it was coming from the console.
“Austin?” I engaged the wheelchair’s brakes and rushed to the control panel.
I saw him first on the monitors. His face stared into the camera with vacant eyes, his mouth open in a silent scream. He was in one of the tanks.
“Oh, dear God . . .” I said, eyes on the biometric data flowing across the screen. “What have you done?”
The erratic tone of the heart rate monitor fed through the speakers and the diagnostic panel. I ran to the controls, which flashed with warnings. His pulse was 200. Now 205 . . . 215 . . . climbing with each second.
He’d hacked without me . . .
His pulse spiked at 224 beats per minute and, as I watched, the erratic beep of his heart rate coming through the monitor’s speaker gave way to a singular tone, long and mournful. It was the loudest, most horrific sound in the world. The numbers on the monitor clicked to zero.
On the screen, his face went slack and he exhaled a hollow breath. Just one.
I was too late.
Austin was dead.
PART FOUR
4.1
DAY 3 - 11:33 pm
“I HAD to kill her,” Stone said into the phone. He sat in his car across the street from the hospital, watching as police and FBI vehicles converged on the building.
“A federal agent,” Bell said.
“A necessary complication. She saw me. I left no evidence at the scene, of course.” His mind spun. “Telling you was a mistake.”
“What?”
“Plausible deniability.”
“If it gets that far—”
“It won’t.”
Stone could hear Bell breathing, thinking. Finally, his boss asked, “And where’s the girl?”
“On the move. She won’t return to her own apartment. It’s too risky. She’s obviously avoiding the FBI, so she’ll go somewhere the authorities don’t know about.”
“The warehouse,” Bell said.
“That’s my assumption. I’m headed there now,” he said, putting the car in drive. Something about the warehouse itself or the adjacent buildings tied her to the area, but what?
“Give me an ETA,” Bell said.
Stone angled into traffic and pointed toward the highway. “Twenty minutes. No more.”
* * *
I RUSHED to the sensory-deprivation room, driven by terror, and threw the door open. It banged hard against the wall.
“Austin!”
The light on the white clamshell tank glowed blue, indicating that it was actively engaged in a hack. Why had Austin jacked into the system alone? He’d talked about going deeper, pushing the system further than either of us had before, but that meant taking significant risks. Unacceptable risks.
The computer’s robotic voice filtered through speakers perched in the corners of the room. In a calm, detached monotone it droned:
“Subject termination confirmed. Recovery protocol initiated. Subject termination confirmed. Recovery protocol initiated . . .”
“What’d you do?” I said, my voice cracking. “What’d you do?”
The recovery protocol was a fail-safe that Austin had programmed for his solo hacking long before I came along. He’d designed it for a worst-case scenario, worst-case meaning death. His death. It triggered automatically in the event his vital signs fell below a redline pulse and respiration threshold. After a sixty-second alarm, the computer would shut down the entire system.
I reached the tank and jabbed the hatch-release button. The lid rose slowly. All the time in the world.
“Come on. Come on. Open!”
I gripped the yawning lid and yanked it up like a car hood. Something broke with a clank, but it stayed open. The tank’s interior lights blinked to life, illuminating the water and his motionless body.
Austin floated with his head at the other end of the tank, feet toward me. His arms drifted palms down at his sides, and thin black cords dangled from the tank’s ceiling to where they connected with his TAPs.
The sight stole my breath. I’d seen him in the tank before, but now he looked frail, barely more than skin and bones, as though the hack had sucked away his muscles.
“Subject termination confirmed . . . Recovery protocol initiated . . .”
The words jarred me away from my frustration at Austin’s stupidity—Why was he hacking by himself? Why hadn’t he waited?—and back into a state of panic: his heart had stopped!
I ducked through the opening and plunged my right foot into the water, splashing it over my legs, against the sides of the tank. “Austin!” I yelled. His eyes were glazed and frozen wide. His jaw gaped open, lips apart, skin pale as paper. I’d seen that hollow stare before and knew too well its terrible meaning.
“Not like this,” I said. “Please . . . not like this.”
The diagnostic systems had to be wrong. Maybe he hadn’t connected something properly. He was exhausted after all. Mistakes happen. He couldn’t be dead—unconscious maybe, but not dead. He was too careful, too calculating to push things to the point of no return. Wasn’t he?
Still, everyone had limits. Even him.
“Wake up!” I screamed and stooped to grab him.
My other foot came over the edge and snagged the side of the tank. It wasn’t much, but it was enough to send me off-balance. I pitched forward. I grasped for the lip of the tank, but my fingers grazed the slick surface and slipped off. With nothing to stop me, I fell on top of Austin, pushing him under before he came up again like a log. The saltwater was denser than both of us. Staying under was impossible, thankfully. I gasped and pushed off of him onto my knees beside him.
“Tank evacuation initiated,” the electronic voice said.
I blinked water from my eyes and looked around. A mechanical hum filled the tank and a swirl broke the water’s surface in front of me. The level began to drop—quickly. The computer was draining the tank—part of the fail-safe protocol to prevent the slim possibility of drowning. Austin had considered every eventuality when programming the fail-safe, including passing out under water, however unlikely that was. The tank was emptying loudly through a wide grate embedded beneath us.
Austin’s body bobbed slightly, undulating on the gentle waves rippling through the tank.
I leaned over him, my eyes searching for any signs of consciousness. Nothing. His lips were pale blue and his pupils where deep pools of black.
“What do I do?” I raised my head and yelled—at the monotonous voice, at God, at myself, I don’t know: “What do I do?”
My hands, gripping Austin’s shoulder and arm, shook and my mind locked tight, shut down by fear. I felt powerless, kneeling there beside my friend, just watching him slip away. Images of Tommy—hanging sideways in his seat, bleeding out and staring at me as though he couldn’t believe I wasn’t doing something to help—raked across my mind like steel fingernails.
It was happening again.
I looked around frantically, pushing two fingers into each eye socket to clear the water.
“Get a grip. Think,” I said. My gaze skimmed over Austin’s still body. “Okay, okay . . .”
I leaned close to his face until my ear grazed his nose. No breath. There was just the lapping of water against the side of his face and into his mouth. Reaching my arm across him, I rolled his body toward me, and water rushed from his nose and mouth.
“You can’t die,” I said. “Not yet.”
I flipped him to his back again and pinched his nose as I tilted his head back to open his airway. I encircled my mouth over his and puffed out a hard breath. His lips were cool, life draining from him faster than the water from the tank, if his life hadn’t already left completely. His chest expanded, then the air escaped with a hollow sound. Again, I pressed my lips to his and blew again—wishing that it was life and not just air that I was breathing into him.
It wasn’t working.
“Please,” I whispered. My vision was bleary, my eyes stinging from the saltwater.
He needed more. His heart needed help. But there was still too much water to do chest compressions in the tank and I couldn’t wait until it drained completely. The water level was barely down by half, well below the lip of the tank—disappearing quickly but not quickly enough.
What do I do?
The system’s alarm—wah-wah-wah—echoed through the apartment, seeming colder and crueler than it had before, when I first heard it. Each tone was like a hammer blow on the nails of Austin’s coffin. I was cut off from all hope and help and nothing I did would change that. I was alone. My mind stuttered, trying to break loose of the fear that clamped it and threatened to crush me.
What would Austin do if the roles were reversed? The answer boiled to the surface. He would reboot me. Reset my body like a computer.
Okay, okay—how?
My thoughts churned furiously.
My heart. He would shock my heart.
The defibrillator. There was a defibrillator in the apartment.
As the water continued to drain, I climbed out of the tank and made my way toward the tall metal shelves on the apartment’s far side. They were crammed with meticulously organized shelves of equipment and medical supplies. Austin had outfitted the loft with better technology than some hospitals—medicines, imaging devices, even experimental equipment that he’d bought directly from the overseas labs that invented next-generation technology.
On my initial tour of the place, he’d pointed out the heart defibrillator and flashed an instructional card at me. I wished now that I had taken a minute to scan the card; my eidetic mind would have remembered every word and illustration. Too late now.
I looked quickly for the card and when I didn’t immediately see it, decided to wing it. I’d seen medical shows; what more did I need? The defibrillator was part of a cardiac “crash cart” a medical-equipment company had given him as a thank you for purchasing an expensive imaging machine. “Spend a million dollars,” he’d said, “and a personalized fountain pen just won’t do.” I found it atop a metal cart, which I wheeled toward the tank room at Olympian speed.
There was a problem, though: Austin was still lying in several inches of water. Using the defibrillator in the tank wasn’t a wise idea. Even if the equipment could fit through the opening, using it was far too risky. The high voltage from the shock paddles could possibly conduct through the water and into me, and then we’d both be down for the count.
I had to get him out of the water.
With the two pods, a table and all the cables, there wasn’t enough space in the tank room to put him on the floor. I would have to drag him out to the main room if this was going to work.
I slid the cart to a stop beside the door and jammed its power cord into an outlet. The machine came to life with a high-pitched tone as I rushed back to Austin and ducked inside the tank.
He outweighed me by at least seventy pounds and the gap between the water level and the tank lid was more than two feet. I’d have to lift him over it by myself, and I wasn’t exactly what anyone would call athletic.
I stepped over his body, squatted to my haunches just above his head, and hooked my hands under his arms. Bracing one foot on the tank wall behind me and another on the tank floor, I heaved upward, turned and hauled him to the tank’s edge. I didn’t think about it, I just did it.
Straining to keep balanced, I stepped over the lip and leaned back to keep his weight against me. With a loud grunt, I backpedaled, tugging again and again, dragging his limp body over the lip and out of the tank. Getting Mom out of the hospital bed had been like fluffing a pillow compared to this. His heels snagged on the lip, but one good yank pulled them over. One step at a time, I hauled him into the apartment. I eased his body to the floor, his eyes staring straight at me, void of life.
Go! Go! Go! Hurry!
The defibrillator hummed a high-pitched tone and red lights blinked on the narrow display, indicating its readiness. I reached for the black dial that set the energy level, but my mind froze.
How much? The television shows I’d seen hadn’t gone into that kind of detail. The voltage settings were in joules, from 100 to 400. Too little voltage and it wouldn’t do much of anything; too much could jolt him right into the Grim Reaper’s grasp.
I twisted the knob clockwise until it pointed halfway, 200, and the machine made a long, long tone while it charged. I picked up the paddles and positioned them near his chest.
A memory of the doctors using a defib on my mother in the hack made me think: Gel. I dropped one of the paddles and grabbed a green tube of electro-conductive gel from the cart. Without it, the electricity wouldn’t conduct. I squeezed too hard and the goo squirted onto and over the flat part of the one pad I had in hand. I picked up the other paddle and rubbed them together, smearing the gel. With the machine blaring its full-charge warning, I pressed the paddles to Austin’s chest and thumbed down a button on a handle.
There was a loud thump and his body heaved up in a muscle-constricted arch, then settled back onto the floor.
I waited. Nothing.
Charged again, I pressed the paddles to his pale skin.
Thump!
He heaved up as electricity arced through his chest.
No sign of movement. Nothing.
“Austin! Come on, man! Come tell me what I’m doing wrong! Come—”
I thought of the kiss we’d shared on Mt. Everest. So warm in the cold air. So . . . perfect.
Don’t leave me.
I pressed my fingers against his neck, feeling for a pulse, but could have been pushing my fingers to a statue. I leaned close to his mouth. Not even a trickle of air escaped.
“Please . . .” I said through clenched teeth. “Please.”
It wasn’t enough voltage. That had to be the problem.
I cranked the dial to the maximum setting and shocked his body. Then again and again and again. Each time, his body twisted in involuntary spasms before falling slack again to the floor. Each time, I pressed the buttons with hope, and each time, that hope was met with crushing defeat.
He wasn’t moving. He wasn’t breathing.
He’s not coming back. You’re too late.
I screamed and slammed my fist into the center of his chest.
The computer system’s warnings continued to echo in the apartment. It was the loneliest sound I could have imagined. It wasn’t supposed to be like this. He was supposed to live. We were supposed to save him.
